The Saving Grace of Wishes Not Granted

I live in the middle of a cul-de-sac. The end of the street that opens up to another street is lower than the other end which gives me a good view of six or seven houses downhill. From a distance I can watch kids playing in the snow, parents going off to work and people walking their dogs on the icy sidewalks. It’s like they’re all living in a snow globe, in a world I’m not part of and can never be again. That’s a false declaration but no one said logic was going to be a part of this post. I’m old and I’m allowed to take liberties with the truth. The fact is no one has me chained to my bed. I could go outside in the winter. I could walk my dog. I could even start a snowball fight with kids a fraction of my age. Sure, I’d have to ignore my osteoporosis, chance falling down and breaking a hip. But old doesn’t translate to stupid, so I stay inside in my safe little cocoon, protected from life… or rather protecting me from a life ending up in a nursing home which usually happens after an elderly woman breaks a hip.

It must be nice to have grandchildren you can use as an excuse to go outside and play. I’m quite sure if snow sculpturing had been as popular when I was young as it is now I’d have been building dragons in my front yard. If I had grandkids I could park a lawn chair in the snow and direct them on how to pack the stuff, carve out a mythical figure, dye the scales and fiery tongue and then soak it all with water to freeze the creature hard so it could greet anyone who ventured up my cul-de-sac until springs comes along. Sometimes when I look out the window and the yard is full of snow I have an overwhelming impulse to go outside and at the very least, build a snowman. I used to love winter---building snow forts with my brother, ice fishing with my dad, ice skating at our cottage, sledding with my nieces and nephew and then after I met Don, snowmobiling on the wooded trails that go on for miles here in Michigan. 

And how could I forget those two years when I was in college and I tried to like snow skiing because I had the worst crush on and was dating a guy who had a passion for the sport. Why couldn’t he have liked cross-country skiing instead? I could have stuck with that sport after we broke up. He never got married, by the way. Turns out he was an in-the-closet gay guy who was trying as hard to like girls as I was trying to like downhill skiing, a fact I didn't learn until a decade later. He’s one of the reasons why I’m so happy that gay people are freer, now, to come out of the closet and be accepted. I think about the unhappy life I could have had if I had married him, been his cover for a secret life that didn’t get exposed until half our lives were over and I’m grateful for the saving grace of wishes not granted. How many women did that happen to, Dr. Phil, back when I was young? How much did that kind of marriage destroy a woman’s self-esteem before the truth finally came out? One could view those years we dated as wasted time but in hindsight they gave me more empathy for a segment of society that could use all the empathy it can get. It’s not easy bein’ green, as Kermit the Frog likes to sing. Although the lyrics of Kermit’s song doesn’t make sense in this context but, like I wrote earlier, no one promised logic and this post would marry and live happily ever after.

I got straight A’s in logic and math classes I took in college. Who would have ever guessed that based on my high school grades? Certainly not me, the “stupid one” who couldn’t tie her shoes or tell time until I was well into grammar school. Certainly not me, the dyslexic girl who couldn’t consistently tell her right hand from left until she was old enough to get hot flashes. Certainly not me, the girl who couldn’t sound out words or spell until---well, I still can’t do those things and I’m on the dawn side of my seventies. If it wasn’t for my thirty year old Franklin Language Master 3000 I couldn’t write unless I got one of those voice recognition programs. I’d come to a word I can’t spell and it would be two days before I could figure it out without good old Franklin. He outshines Spell-Check ten times over. 

Jeez, I’ve got to end this ode to Franklin before I start plastering his plastic casing with kisses. I’ve been known to do that and he doesn’t like it. He’s a serious dude who doesn’t believe in inter-materials dating. I’m flesh and blood, he’s plastic and precision electronics and I have no logical way to end this weird (?) post, so I’ll just quit typing here.... I take that back. I could end it by promising never to take Franklin for a winter walk around my cul-de-sac, wrapping this ending back to the beginning. That’s how I was taught to write essays back in the same time frame that I learned about the saving grace of wishes not granted. And that reminds me I still have to give closure to my post's hook so here's that literary nugget: It's not always what we do in life that gives us our defining moments, sometimes it's what we don't do---the roads not traveled. ©

Sunday Morning: Third Christmas Without my Husband

Days before my first Christmas without Don I wrote a post titled Where Have you Gone, Christmas? and it started like this: “In a year of firsts for widows, probably the hardest first is not the same one across the board. Some might say their wedding anniversary; others might say the birthday that can no longer add a number to an age, still others would name Thanksgiving, Christmas or New Year’s Eve. For all widows the holiday season, as a whole, is full of painful reminders of long standing family traditions that can never be the same again. Each holiday song heard in a store, each light on a neighbor’s house, each card in the mail screams, 'He’s gone, he’s gone!' Happiness is all around us and even the friendliest festivities only magnifies our loneliness. We are alone even in a crowd. But in the wake of what happened recently in Newtown, Connecticut, my loneliness at Christmas time pales and it almost makes me ashamed to even be writing about it. But I write when I have things on my mind. I can’t help myself.”

So here I am, two years later knowing that I’d be less dramatic should I be asked to describe widowhood grief at this point in my journey. Christmas cards don’t screaming at me anymore. The neighbor’s holiday lights don’t annoying me. I can sing along with Christmas carols coming from the car radio. And even though I got blindsided with tears at the senior hall Spirit celebration, it’s been a pretty good holiday season so far. But---and this is a BIG but---the Newtown parents of the shooting victims at Sandy Hook Elementary are weighing heavy on my mind once again. Why? I keep wondering how much of a setback in their healing process they’re enduring because of the school shootings in Pakistan last week where 132 kids and ten teachers died in a horrific massacre. 

And in despair I bowed my head:

“There is no peace on earth,” I said,

“For hate is strong and mocks the song

Of peace on earth, good will to men.”

Everything is relative, isn’t it, when talking about the human condition. We all differ in our feelings, with no universal truth or validity to back them up. My mom was good at drilling that concept into me at an early age. “You think you have it bad,” she might have said if I complained about doing a chore, “kids on the other side of world carry water for their families from wells a mile away.” “Eat your carrots! Children in China are starving to death.” As an adult I can say to myself: You think your widow’s grief is bad, try being a parent of a child killed in a mass shooting. Everything IS relative when we allow ourselves to see own circumstances compared to those less fortunate than we are. There are always people who are lower down on the chain of human suffering and I am grateful I am able to see that. Thanks, Mom. Thanks Oprah. Gratitude. Jeez, do all roads lead back to those two? That’s a joke only fans of Motherhood Guilt and Oprah will likely get. 

I ended the 2012 post quoted above like this: “And how will I survive my first Christmas alone in the shadow of what happened in Newtown? I will watch Miracle on 34th Street, bake myself some bacon wrapped chicken and be profoundly grateful I got 42 years with my husband. I will also shed a few tears for the parents in Connecticut and everywhere else on earth who will never get to see their precious children grow up.” This year all I’d have to do is change the words ‘bacon wrapped chicken’ to ‘turkey legs’ and I could almost write the same ending word for word for this post. Christmas isn’t for mourning Don (or anyone else like my dad who died on Christmas day). Christmas, for me, is about appreciating how truly lucky I was to have had Don and Dad in my life for so long. I can’t be sad about that. I can’t moan and groan about how snow will likely keep me from going to my family’s Christmas Eve party. Well, I could but it would be a terrible waste of time and energy that could be put to better use. A better use like rekindling the belief that goodness will one day triumph over evil, then we will truly have peace on earth, good will towards men. Amen. Can you tell it’s Sunday morning here at the Church of Jean? ©

 

NOTE: Most people will recognize the stanza above as part of a Christmas carol named I Hear the Bells on Christmas Morning but how many know the song was originally a poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow? Written during the American Civil War, he was inspired to write the poem after his son, who had joined the Union army without his blessing, was wounded in battle and Longfellow’s wife had just died in a fire. One might rightly say that grief created a carol that people have enjoyed in varying forms since 1872 when it was first set to music. If you know the carol you'll know that even in his grief, Longfellow found hope for the future which is why the carol has endured.

An old friend shared this with me. It's truly beautiful.

Movies, Feminists and Books to Keep You up at Night

There are plenty of jokes around about people who watch the Hallmark and Lifetime movie channels. Heck, I’ve made them myself. But not anymore. Not since this holiday season when I realized that since Don died those sappy holiday movies have become my Christmas tradition. I’ve pigged out on them three years in a row. They play in the background while I do other things and when I do glance at the TV I’m not lost, I know the plots because I’ve seen the endless loop of movies more times than I can count. And they’re so predictable that if I didn’t know better I’d think I wrote the screen plays myself. No holiday movie ever has an unexpected plot twist or a surprise ending. The lonely bachelors nursing a hurt and widows who were just going through life on auto-pilot always find happiness at the end. The kids wanting their families back together or a new dad or mom get their wishes come true and small, dreary towns always start pulling together to get their Christmas spirit off life support, fully revived and amped up to full throttle by the end of the film. I’m just a romantic at heart. Happy endings during the holidays seem to be what I need as an antidote for whatever it is that ails me---the underlying sadness of being alone? The scary state of the world? I don’t know what ‘it’ is exactly, but it’s there.

But I must say I actually watched the 1994 version of Miracle of 34^th Street recently---well, I was knitting too but that’s not much of a distraction---and I didn’t like it as well as the 1947 version. They cut out one of my favorite parts, the one where they bring the mail bags containing letters written to Santa Claus into court. Instead, they brought in a reindeer to make Santa look foolish by asking him to make it fly as proof that’s he’s the real deal. Mc Dreamboat (Dylan McDermott) did a standout job playing Bryan the lawyer/love interest and little Mara Wilson taking the Natalie Wood part as Susan was adorable. Even Santa was great but the other parts all seem cartoonish to me. And you’d think as a Feminist I’d like how they changed the ending when they made a point of saying that Susan’s mother’s Christmas bonus would make the down payment on the house, but I didn’t. I think because Susan’s mom was already looking to buy a house---that house---before Susan asked Santa for it spoiled it for me because eventually the little girl would have gotten a house even without the Christmas miracle/myth of Santa. I guess that was the point, single moms don’t need a man or a miracle to make that happen.

I hope they never remake It’s a Wonderful Life with Jimmy Stewart. They’d probably have Mary as a working mom who can come up with enough cash to replace the bank’s money that George’s Uncle lost and that would be the end of the movie a half hour after it begins. Whitewashing our collective social history out of classic films does nothing to educate those who didn’t live through those times. Of course, we all know movies are about making money and if they can do a remake, updating for a new audience, it’s cheaper than starting from scratch. But I'm old and I don't have to like them.

Speaking of Feminists, it drives me crazy when young women today think if a guy in the workplace says they look nice that’s sexual harassment. No, ladies, sexual harassment is when a guy pushes you into a corner, sticks his tongue down your cleavage while groping your butt and driving his man part up against your body. Been there, done that and we older women know what it was like in the workplace before the second wave of Feminists changed all that.  A young lady asked me recently if the TV series Mad Men was an accurate portray of the times. “Yes, Virginia, it’s more fact than fiction,” I told her, "but I really don’t know if that’s true," I added, "having only watched the show one time. I wanted to barf the whole time it was on." Boy, didn’t I go off on a tangent here jumping from It’s a Wonderful Life to Man Men.

I bought a book yesterday and stayed up late reading it. It’s an action-thriller that one reviewer promised would give readers whiplash from all the plot twists and cliff hangers. I’m only 100 pages into Runner by Patrick Lee and I think I have the ‘mystery’ solved but since the main character is an ex-special forces guy I’m sure they’ll be some adrenaline pumping parts to read before I finish the nearly 400 page book. It’s the perfect counterpoint to all the fluffy, sugary Christmas movies I’ve been stuffing my head with since Thanksgiving. I’ve never read or heard of this author before but when I learned he lives in West Michigan, where I do, it makes me want to like his work. I sure hope it turns out that way because already the Hallmark channel is advertising the coming of their Valentine’s Day marathons and it would be nice if I have a series of engrossing novels with a few sickos and underbellies of society to mix in with the hearts and flowers movies I’ll no doubt get sucked into having running in the background throughout my January and February. ©