Dreams and Mystery Trips

 

It’s been awhile since I’ve dreamed about Don but last night I woke up many times with vivid details of dreams still hanging on. One dream fragment was about visiting him once a week and I’d be in our old Blazer driving to another town where he was staying and when I got there, I could only watch him from a distance. Another time I was with others who were in the town watching their loved ones and we were all sitting in a circle passing around a worm-like thing with fish hooks attached and chanting as we held it. As the 'thing' went around the circle it grew bigger and more teddy-bear-like with each person that held it. At one point in my night of dreams I remember thinking I was seeing the bright light that many people who’ve come back from a near-death experience describe and I woke up in a panic and thinking, Ohmygod, it’s real! Closely followed by: Maybe the light was the alarm clock face. God, no, that’s red! The dream that finally woke me up fully so I couldn’t fall back to sleep was of me trying to find my Blazer after a visit to watch Don and as I looked for it the tiny town kept growing, adding more streets to search as it the light faded from the sky. What a night! I hate not getting the sleep I need, especially when the dreams involve searching. I have a lot of searching dreams.

Of course, it’s easy to see that searching in dreams means you have something important lacking in your life or that you need an answer to a dilemma or problem. The bright light can mean a need to pay closer attention to something going on in your life but in my case I think it symbolizes a straight forward fear of death. I do a lot of day-time worrying about dying without finding a meaning to my life and not finding something truly satisfying to do with the rest of my time on earth. All this business about it being about the journey, not the destination is getting increasingly harder for this goal-orientated person to buy into. Well, that's what I say today. Stay tuned, tomorrow I might be singing a different song.

The circle was the most interesting dream fragment This was something I haven’t dreamed about in the past and this is what dreamforth.com has to say about circles: “A dream of a circle represents your life quest for excellence, unity, and fulfillment. On the other hand, it may also signify that you are having difficulties resolving a certain issue. You cannot seem to come to a satisfactory answer. You may feel as if you are at a stagnant period in your life; you aren't moving forward as planned.”  Boy, they nailed it for me! And my guess is the others in the circle are like-wise widows and the thing we passed around while chanting represents the grief stories that we swap online, which grow less and less painful as time and the telling goes around our widowhood community.

It was a busy night of dreaming and sometimes I wish I didn't remember my dreams because they can haunt me until I figure out their meaning...or what I think they mean. Science says they don't mean much at all and they are just a by-product of the events of our day being transferred to a different part of our brains to be recalled later as memories. Still, if you don’t remember the details of your dreams and you want to, there are things you can do to help you transfer your night dreams from your sub-conscious mind to your conscious mind. You’ll need to keep a notebook and a light-up ink pen by your bedside so you can jot notes---even just a single word to act as a queue later on---without turning your light on. The more you do it, the more you’ll recall with time and practice.

Changing topics: This week I have a by-annual appointment with my internist---always lots of fun <picture a rolling eyes icon here> and a lecture at the museum where I will take myself off the snowbird list and sign up for some docent volunteer days. I’m also going to the culinary college for lunch with a bus load of people from the senior hall and on a mystery trip, also a day trip sponsored by the senior hall. We can’t be going very far since we’re due back in town by three o’clock. I’m being pickier about the trips I sign up for this summer. I skipped the Chicago gangster tour, for example, and the “Les Miserables” tour at Drury Lane outside of Chicago, and the Detroit Tigers/Chicago White Sox game because those 12 and 14 hour day trips are hard on my body and the dog. I mention them, though, to inspire other widows to look into their local senior hall activities. It might surprise you that the old stereotypes of sitting around playing bingo for soup cans no longer apply. One of the schools near-by also sponsor community enrichment trips. They are going to Amish Country this summer which is really tempting for me. I’m more the pastoral views than cityscapes kind of traveler. But right now I'm going to travel out to the dog pen and pick up a winter's worth of poop that the melting snow is revealing. ©

Widows and Weight Watchers

 

All week I’ve been weighing the pros and cons of going back to Weight Watchers to rid myself of the pounds I put on during my Winter of Boredom. The niece-in-law I walked the nature trail with all last summer signed up and she wanted to know if I’d be interested in going on Saturdays. One of the pros of going is that Weight Watchers has worked for me in the past. And if I want to live to be 100 I need to turn my diet around. Again. Why does healthy eating have to be so hard for some of us to maintain long term? The winter before last I spent a lot of months losing the weight I put on during my New Widow eating binges and now I’m right back where I started.

One of cons of going to Weight Watchers is the King Arthur Flour catalog for April just came in the mail to tempt me. Strawberry stuffed scones for breakfast? What a great idea! And have I mentioned that my social calendar for April and May is getting close to being overbooked? Losing weight is time consuming. Another con is I just signed up to use one of the gift certificates I won at an auction last year for cooking classes at an upscale restaurant in town. They are teaching Thai cooking the night of my class. How am I going to fit eating five Thai dishes and drinking wine into Weight Watchers’ Simple Start program? Lie, of course. All fatty-fatty-two-by-fours are good at that. No, I didn’t eat all that cake. The dog did it! I also hate all the measuring, counting and homework that comes with losing weight which probably explains a lot about why I have to do it in the first place. Now, they have all the online tools I’ll have to learn! Weight Watchers comes with too much homework and I am one, undisciplined widow who can’t be good for long. Jeez, if I left the food part out of that last sentence about being “an undisciplined widow who can’t be good for long” it would make a great line to use in an online dating profile.

Speaking of dating, if you read the Time Goes By blog linked in my sidebar this week Ronnie had an interesting post about statistics for the 65-plus population. One line really showcases the reason why so many senior halls are filled with mostly women. Quoting TGB: “In 2012 there were 43,145,356 people age 65 and older – about 5.5 million more women than men.” So, if you are a woman 65 or older who wants to date, feel free to use my undisciplined widow line. It might give you an edge. And if you are over 65 and still have a guy of your life, keep it in the back of your mind that if you ever need to supplement your income you could take him down to the senior hall and sell his hugs for a $1.00 each. Think of it like the old kissing booths of our youth only you’d be doing a good service for your senior sisters. Guy hugs are hard to come by the older you get!

Speaking of yarn---oh, I wasn’t it? Well, pretend I did and now I’m going to explain the photos below. They are baby sweaters I made for my nieces. They are both going to be first-time grandmothers soon and I knitted the sweaters to start their ‘sweater drawers.’ When they were growing up my mother always had a ‘sweater drawer’ where she kept extra clothing. It came in handy when my brother would send his kids (my nieces and nephew) over to the family cottage without a change of clothing and the weather would turn unexpectedly the way it often does around a round a lake. Both of my nieces have homes on lakes and I’m sure they’ll need to accumulate some extra stuff to have on hand for when the grand-babies visit. I knitted car seat blankets for the mothers of the babies so the sweaters are just something extra to acknowledge how special it is to be newly minted grandmothers.

From what I wrote above about joining Weight Watchers, one would think the cons outweigh the pros and I didn’t even mention that I’ve already signed up and paid for a restaurant crawl along Lake Michigan,  a fancy meal at a culinary college and a chocolate crawl in my adopted hometown. I have so many fatty-fatty-two-by-four 'holidays' coming up on my spring schedule! Plus I’ll need one glorious week to eat all the junk food in the house before starting Weight Watchers, But it’s time to pay the piper so I told my niece-in-law I’ll join after I have my bi-annual appointment with my internist coming up very soon. I’ll let him think my efforts to lose weight were inspired by him because I just know he’s going to give me The Lecture. ©

  
 








 

My Week of Missing Airplanes and Other Things

 

Monday I woke up to an inch of snow covering everything within my view. Again! Will winter never end? By the time I had to run the dog to the groomers the new snow was gone but the old snow is still covering everything but roads, sidewalks and parking lots and it’s as hard as concrete. I know this because I tried to move a pile of snow yesterday after my dog discovered he can climb the snow pile in his pen as good as any mountain goat could do. If you want to see an old lady freaking out, come by the next time Levi tries out his new climbing skills. They could easily lead him to a Great Escape to the other side of the fence where his nemesis, the neighborhood tabby cat, runs free and tries to tempt Levi into a steeplechase.

Tuesday I woke up to an inch and a half of new snow covering everything. Yet again! But this time it stuck around all day. Not to fear. It didn’t keep me at home. I had a lecture to attend on the mystery of NWA Flight 2501, a brand new DC-4 airplane that disappeared over Lake Michigan in 1950 and to this day has not been found. The author of the book Fatal Crossing, Valerie Van Heest, presented the program. She’s an underwater shipwreck explorer and researcher who has spent over a decade every spring teaming up with world reknown author and marine archaeologist Cleve Cussler to find the DC-4 using sonar equipment on loan from an agency that Cussler founded.

The film that was part of the lecture had a lot of vintage and recent videotaped interviews of people who’d help clean up the beaches after the crash, along with men who were in the coast guard who’d gone out to look for survivors in vain, and of family members who were left behind. It was a sobering fact that none of the debris that washed up on shore two days after the plane disappeared was bigger than a suitcase and that none of the many body parts that washed up were larger than part of a torso. They knew it was a torso only because it had a belly button.

They’ve searched three-fourths of the target area where Flight 2501 supposedly went down during a storm, factoring in the current patterns just like they are doing now to find the missing Malaysia plane debris. As I said, they haven’t found the DC-4 in this area known as Michigan’s Bermuda Triangle---yet---but they did find and document seven shipwrecks and they are going to start looking again when the ice is off the lake. While researching the lost plane Valarie found a one line notion in a coast guard log that said they had buried all the cremated body parts in a local cemetery. With more research, she found the unmarked burial site and the fact that none of relatives were told about this final resting place. At the end of the film it showed a memorial stone that finally marks where the remains of the victims are buried and the large stone lists the names of all 58 passengers and crew aboard. A well-attended memorial service was held 62 years too late but it did bring closure for the family members that attended. As Valarie put it, they went looking for an airplane but they found something far more valuable. It was a fascinating lecture---hearing the details of the detective work that is used to find old ships and planes under water. If my Michigan friends ever get a chance to see one of her lectures, don’t miss it.

After the shock and awe of that lecture it was a surreal experience to be running errands as if nothing I’d just seen had affected me, but that’s what I did and at one point I nearly caused an accident. It didn’t help that it was one of those days where I had to repeat stuff I’d already done which always puts me in a bad mood. Old people like me don’t have time for déjà vu days! For example, I bought a new set of sheets and had to return them because the pillow case was missing and I wasn’t about to pay $29.00 for a twin set and not get everything included. I also had bought a steamer pot for the microwave, unpacked it and found it was chipped. If I wanted to buy chipped I’d go to a flea market. Then I had to go back to JoAnn’s, a huge fabric and craft store, because I misread the dye lot on some yarn I bought and what I thought matched, didn’t. Note to self: time to make an appointment with the eye doctor.

And so it goes here on Widowhood Lane. Another half week gone, another half week and maybe Weight Watchers waiting for me tomorrow. Yes, fatty-fatty-two-by-four is thinking about going to the land of group support to lose the pounds her Winter of Boredom helped put on. ©