Make a Difference Day

All over the United States today people will meet up for various activities to try and make a difference in their communities. They will clean roadways and parks. Sponsor and volunteer at events for senior citizens or underprivileged children to bring joy or hope or just a little bit of a good time into the lives of these people. My aunt is helping out with bingo and lunch at the local high school for the seniors in her area. Never mind that she is, at 76, as senior herself. She was telling me about it when we were back in Iowa visiting last week. The do this once a year and provide transportation for people who can’t drive any more or they go to the nearby nursing homes and bring over anyone who is able to make the trip. It’s a much anticipated and appreciated event which begs the question of what do these seniors do the rest of the year? And what are the volunteers doing the other 364 days that would qualify as making a difference? Or is one only expected to put oneself out just this one day a year?

To my aunt’s credit, she makes a difference every week. Her community sponsors lunch for the senior citizens once a week at the same school and my aunt volunteers to help serve before sitting down to lunch with her friends. My aunt is not someone who volunteers to make a difference as much as she does this for herself. It makes her feel good to help those of her peers who aren’t as fortunate in their health and circumstances as she is. She doesn’t view it as making a difference as much as it just being the right thing to do.

I wouldn’t want anyone to think I am opposed to Make a Difference Day. I’m not. It’s a good idea, but it is also a short-sighted one. One day of volunteering might instill the “volunteering” spirit in the odd person here and there but more likely these volunteers simply pat themselves on the back for a deed well done and then try to salvage what is left of their weekend. Longer projects like those sponsored by the Jaycees or Habitat for Humanity and Meals on Wheels Programs or local food banks/pantries are probably better ways to make differences than one time events. Still, if just a few people pick up and run with the ideas they get today then it’s a worthwhile endeavor.

Get out and make a difference America. Today is your day.

Expectations

Got an email from my oldest friend today. Not old in the chronological sense, but from the years we have known each other sense. She and I go all the way back to the fifth grade and The Church of the Resurrection Grade School. That’s thirty plus years now. Aside from family, I don’t think I go back farther with anyone else. Despite a few breaks in contact here and there over the decades, she could probably tell anyone who was interested in just how much, or not, I have changed over time. She was inquiring about our recent 25th high school reunion, which she missed, and to fill me in on her mother’s recent surgery. It seems her mother needed knee replacement and was under the impression that replacing a major joint was on par with most day surgeries. In, out and home to be all comfy snug as a drugged up bug for a day or two and then back to one’s normal routine. Alas, it was not the case. Apparently one cannot receive a new knee and go to the gym the next day and begin abusing it in spin class or on the treadmill. There is the whole pesky recuperation thing to deal with first. For my friend’s mother this means purchasing a walker, acquiring a toilet seat heightener and being eligible for a short term handicap parking sticker. I knew without her having to tell me that her mother would be horrified at the prospect of any one of those things, but all at once probably sent her over the edge. I know this because even though I haven’t seen either of her parents in many years, I have parents of my own who reject anything that hints at the fact that they might not be as young as say, my friend and I are. Which is not that young by the way.

She marveled at the differences in expectations patients can have about procedures like knee replacement. Being a doctor, she has seen these expectations run the gamut from Monty Python crowd of “It’s just a flesh wound” to those who believe there is never a good reason not to be put completely under. Expectations. And pity the poor doctor, or teacher or barista at the nearest Starbucks who can’t live up to them.

One of the reasons I was glad that immigration forced me to prematurely retire from teaching was the unrealistic expectations that were being forced on me by superiors and lawmakers and the media. A job that once beckoned me through the school days an hour or more before my students, and most of my colleagues, arrived every morning has been sucked dry of its joy the ridiculous notion that schools should be run like businesses and that educating children was no different from putting together appliances. I am sure the same could be said of medicine and the damage that has been done there by insurance companies who feel their true purpose is to enrich shareholders. Expectations. One of those eye of the beholder things, eh?

As a widowed women I found a veritable rule book of expectations I was expected to adhere to with the conviction of the newly reborn. One of my favorites was the one year rule. The widowed are expected to put off any major decisions until the first anniversary of their spouse’s death has been duly mourned for all to see. and maybe hand them certificate suitable for framing afterwards. Who knows. It sounded a bit iffy to me. Put off? What does that mean exactly? I had a master’s degree to finish. I was actually in the middle of my thesis when Will died and was preparing for my final seminar class that coming July. Selling my house perhaps? I wasn’t in dire need of that but if I had been, would it have been better to wait a year and hope a foreclosure wasn’t the result? I did reach the conclusion it was time to start looking at other career possibilities, but I was going to stick with teaching until I had things lined up. Would waiting a year to start planning my move have given me more clarity or simply thrown cold water on my momentum?

Expectations are about reality but sometimes reality bites a bit too hard to be given all that much credence. If my father hadn’t the lofty expectations he did after his strokes and being diagnosed with plumonary fibrois, he would be dead already. Expectations might inconvenience and cause us to shake are heads a bit in wonder, but in the end they are subjective thing. Better to be a square peg than one of the numerous round holes.

Bursting into Song

One of my favorite episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer is a musical with all the characters bursting into song and dance like Singing in the Rain or West Side Story. I got to thinking about this when I came across a group on Faceback called “Why yes, I do just burst into song”. It reminded me too of when I was young and I would string together popular songs to tell stories in much the same way they do in the movie Moulin Rogue. I would imagine my characters singing songs to tell their stories alone or in duets. I was a very odd child. When I was older, and even now, I used songs to cheer myself up or onward, narrating my own life through tunes. If my life were a musical today the musical narrative would be comprised mainly of love songs. I caught the end of Faith Hill’s Breathe on the way to deep water aerobics tonight and it captured perfectly the way I feel about Rob. Sometimes these days, I am so happy that I almost feel guilty. However, it’s not as though I have forgotten. You never forget, but I am done letting those moments that crop up on occasion dominate or interfere with my life. There will always be memories and anniversaries and times of the year that prick at the underside of consciousness in an attempt to awaken the past.

I awoke the other morning shortly before the alarm from a dream about Will. I have gone from never dreaming about him to dreams where he is part of the white noise to the current state of affairs with him turning up on occasion and interrupting dreams already in progress. He is never who he was though. Not the man I fell in love with or married. He is the sick and demented version of Will. What he became after the disease took hold and had eaten away significant portions of the white matter that covered his brain. In these dreams he is like a child or a little old man. I can’t communicate with him in any meaningful way and I spend a great deal of time comforting and caring for him. In the latest dream, he begged me to just hold him as though he were a small child and I woke up from the dream in tears. Though there is something to the theory that dreams are your unconscious mind trying to tell you something important or the way your mind problem solves while you sleep, there isn’t much to this dream that needs deep analysis on my part. I have always wished that we could have known what was wrong sooner so that he and I could have had a chance to talk about his wishes and say goodbye, and I wish I could have been able to care for him instead of putting him in the nursing home. I also wish I had been able to take time off work to be with him those last months he spent in hospice. But I couldn’t and I can’t fix that now. And I also know that it’s October. The month that Will went into hospice; where he died two years ago this coming January.

Last year around this time, I began living most of the “firsts” that lay grieving people so low during that first year. Nearly everything important was packed into those last few months of the first year and it was very hard to cope with these events when I was also dealing with personal illness, raising a small child and working a full-time job. I did it though. Not well, and I would never counsel people to do what I was told to do, which was to wallow in my misery. I was fortunate that my innate tendency to question “authority” and my inner musical buoyed me up enough that I didn’t get stuck in that mode. I know there will be moments in the coming months that will bring up memories, good and bad, but isn’t that just part of life?

The trip we took back to my folks recently provided me with a chance to visit places from my childhood. The farm where my uncle and grandmother lived for instance. By chance the call of nature (yeah, I pee outdoors now like a Canadian) put me behind the car-shed, and as I walked back to the homestead from around the barn I paused for a moment to look up at the door to the loft. It was closed and the ground beneath was covered with ankle deep grass. It was just a over and month and 35 years ago that my uncle fell to his death from that loft after having a seizure. Later that same afternoon, we stopped at the cemetery where he is buried. The first person I was close to and really loved who died and left me. And it’s been thirty-five years. I can still feel that pain. Remember with clarity the last time I saw him. Regret that I never got the chance to say goodbye. People might argue - widows would argue vehemently - that it’s not the same as losing a spouse, but they are full of shit. Loss is loss. And who is anyone to say that one type is worse or more painful? It took years to get to a point where Jimmy’s death wasn’t part of me every day. It will take as much time or more to incorporate Will’s passing into my psyche as well. And there will be more dreams. And they are just dreams. But the musical that is my life is what I hear when I am awake and living and loving and laughing, and that is what counts.

From Here to Eternity

There was a commentary piece in the Globe and Mail yesterday stemming from the recent death of Deborah Kerr. The author talked about scrutinizing a recent photo of the eighty-something actress trying to find traces of the beautiful woman she had been so long ago. She went on to wonder why it is that male actors are allowed to basically decay in the public eye via their film work while women are considered used up commodities when they reach their forties. As an example she used compared actors like Jack Nicholson being a leading man still despite the fact that he is physically an old man whereas Ms. Kerr “retired” from acting essentially when she turned forty. It gets back to, naturally, the double-standard when it comes to men and women and aging. A standard that exists, I think, for two reasons. One being that it is a man’s world. They have always made the rules and the rules have always favored them. The second reason is that we women go along with this by willingly buying into the notion that as we lose our youth to the years and the mileage, we become less beautiful. The latter, and the former really as well, is crap.

If I could, I would show you a picture of myself at eighteen and one now and you would have to admit I am much better looking now. I am the proverbial ugly duckling that age and wisdom have transformed into, if I must so say myself, a damn fine swan. I can’t pretend that I am happy with wrinkles or gray hairs or the fact that I must work longer to get into a healthy physical state, but I am much better looking than many of male peers. The article I read talked about how advances in cosmetic surgery have helped women stay at par with their same age brethren, and though I am grateful for the advances in medicine that help those people who have been ill or badly injured avoid some of the physical stigma, I am not so sure that cosmetic surgery has been a good thing overall for my gender or that without it we wouldn’t be “at par”. There are exceptions, of course, but I don’t think that the majority of men fare any better against the ravages of time time than women do. They get just as fat. flabby, gray and wizened as we do when we don’t take the time ti eat properly and take care of ourselves. Having just been at my 25th high school reunion I can say that by and large the mid-forties is not what it was a half-century ago when people that age seemed to look so much older than we do now. Hair coloring has something to do with this as does the advent of birth control which allowed women to control to some extent the ravages of childbearing on their bodies. Mainly though, we live less physically demanding lives.

Still, it hasn’t changed the perception that forty is old for a woman and prime for a man. Not fair but we women don’t do ourselves favors by buying into such nonsense.