Reflecting on 2012, It’s Blessings & Sorrows, Friendships & Fun

Blessings

·  Teaching Memoir classes lets me hear the treasures class members write.

·  Daughter’s Styled and Organized Living business is taking off.

·  Dad’s daily multi-mile walks shame my pitiful exercise routine. He turns a vigorous 92 this month.

·  Daughter #1 and favorite son-in-law juggle a middle-schooler plus 2 girls with drivers’ licenses, and make their home Teen Central to friends.

·  My writing group inspires, encourages, and guides my writing efforts.

·  For the 10^th year, my widow(er) group shared my church Christmas concert before gathering at my home to celebrate the season.

·  My Sunday School class members race comfort to whichever one of us needs to be surrounded by love and prayers.

Granddaughter #1 with Medals

Proud Moments (or bragging rights)

·    Three granddaughters are turning out to be runners (like their grandpa and great grandfather). Two made it to State in the fall; the third was 1st in her middle school.

·    Between track and basketball, Granddaughter #1 squeezed in the Iowa State Choir, her 3rd year to be selected. This proud grandma was in Ames (see Just Plain Fun below) to hear the 1000 top Iowa voices and instrumentalists in concert.

·    Daughter #2 turns out a weekly blog and daily Facebook/Twitter tips (see Blessing #3) while her writer mom struggles for one blog per month—at best.

·    On Our Own: Widowhood for Smarties, a Silver Boomers book published in October, included my story.

Refreshed Friendships

·    Pfeiffer sis-in-law visited US from her residence in Germany.

·    Dear friends in Delaware housed me while we remembered good times.

Sorrows Laced with Joy

·    Dad shared a 72nd Valentine’s Day with Mother before she slipped away from us late that night.

·    While a chorus of our younger generation sang Mother’s hymns at her funeral, I discovered that Granddaughter #1 has her great grandmother’s natural alto voice (see Proud Moments #2).

·    In January and February, friend Kathy buried both parents, the parents who made room for me at their family table more times than I can count. Our Thanksgiving table shared both our Mothers’ best recipes.

Just Plain Fun

·    50th Class Reunion consensus: if we can still recognize one another, we can’t be that old.

Van-Far Class of '62 Reunion

·    On flight to Iowa (see Proud Moment #2), I missed 2 planes, lost my driver’s license, discovered that I had daughter’s driver’s license and credit/ATM cards in my purse (leaving her broke and ID-less),  . . . and knew it would be a funny story—much later.

Wishing you blessings, proud moments, renewals, and fun in 2013.

Won't you share your list of blessings, proud moments renewals or fun with readers here?

When Does a Parent’s Worry End?

Or How Long Can I Hold My Breath?

There’s a question I’ve been meaning to ask my dad. It’s been on my mind since the I now pronounce you… part of each daughter’s wedding. That moment when I let out my breath, whispered in a new son-in-law’s ear, “She hates tomatoes and kicks in her sleep,” and bequeathed my glue gun and leftover sequins to a new drill team mother.

It started as a catch breath while they delivered their first speaking part, “Lo, a star,” in the Christmas pageant. Then every difficult fingering passage at piano recitals found me waiting, breathless. By the time #1 auditioned for a scholarship, one lungful made it all the way through a sonata. When their father answered that who gives her in marriage question, I looked forward to never needing a deep breath again.

Three grandchildren later, I’m still doing it. Last week, Daughter #2 met Hurricane Sandy head on during a business trip to NYC. I alternated between texting hourly weather reports—as though she couldn’t look out the window to see water, wind, and the crane dangling on the next block—and calling to see if she was keeping her cell phone charged.

Being stranded by a hurricane wasn’t the first time she put herself into events parents can’t control. Last year, volcanic ash grounded her in Paris and then London. Her text messages reassured me that she had a hotel room. I needed to hear that the shopping those cities offered wouldn’t cause disaster to her bank account before skies cleared for air traffic.

Before that, when 9/11 stopped all flying, she managed to be waiting for a return flight from a Caribbean resort. I was more concerned about her passport, clearly marked born in the Mideast, than I was about how soon planes would take off. My fear was well founded. Through the next four years, officials stamped her every boarding pass for a thorough security search. She eased my worry. She told me that batting her baby blues got her through pat downs quickly.

This series of being in the wrong place during travel crises started when she became snowbound on the way home from a visit to her fiancé. All roads along the route closed, food in the over full hotel ran low, and her college professors threatened failing grades when she alerted them to her “extended spring break.” I fretted about whether three days sharing a single hotel room with her future in-laws would help or hinder the marriage.

I understand that all parents suffer through our offsprings’ rites of passage. 

Apparently, my mother worried through the two years my young husband and I lived in Africa. She told me several years after we returned [safely] home that she had been afraid something dire would happen to us and she would have to fly to the Dark Continent to claim two babies who didn’t know their grandmother. (The flying was as problematic as being a stranger to grand babies.)

While they didn't have to rescue grandbabies, they did rush to Texas to help me following my husband’s sudden death. They were sure they would be taking me “home” with them—until they met the twenty-five years of friends I have here. They returned home alone, but I noticed their visits became more frequent, I supposed to satisfy themselves that I was OK.

That question I have been meaning to ask my dad is about when he and my mother quit holding their breath. Maybe I can remember to do that the next time he makes a visit to check on me.

Everybody Has a Story; Once Written It Can’t Be Erased

Headline is a written page of his life

TV talked in the background—Armstrong Stripped of Wins; Big Tex Ends StateFair in Fiery Demise—as we settled onto comfy chairs at our writing group’s favorite restaurant. We shared dismay over both front-page situations, but those stories were finished pieces. We met to work on stories in progress.

Near the bottom of my second cup of coffee, a stranger passing by asked if we were writers. Yes, even published writers. The stranger said he had written a book and added that he was the famous (infamous?) Lance’s adopted dad.

I claim my own connections to that celebrity: one time English teacher and neighbor. Since my father raised doubting, but not gullible, daughters, I vetted this man.

“Where did Lance go to middle school? What street did he live on?”

Correct answers to both.

The conversation was on. Or rather his story, the other side of the story we’ve all heard and read in the half dozen books about America’s cyclist—from Lance's own autobiography, to his mother’s version, to one written for 2^nd graders for a “CharacterBuilders Series.“

A new telling, written by this father, the father the cyclist claims is “deceitful,” could be the next big read. Every skirmish has two sides. This one is no different. 

To hear Dad Armstrong’s version, he pounded the pavement as a salesman to afford his wife and son every expensive, and desired, toy—including membership to a country club with an ambitious swim team. By the time Lance reached a double-digit age, he and friends were butterflying and lightning-stroking their team to victories. The dad confessed that writing revealed to himself the ah-ha truths that we all wish we had known when younger. It’s a story of a parent’s “what if's.” What if the family had continued church attendance? What if the dad had seen the danger in too young celebrity? In hearing Monday’s death knell, we thought of “what if’s.” What if he had come in 7th or 17th in France? Would his cancer survival have been less inspiring?

Even with new insight, this dad’s book won’t change the outcome. It might be met with disinterested shrugs, or his story might let us recognize pivotal choices that could have changed a future.

Cycling’s governing body has chosen to say that the Armstrong Era never officially happened. Their edict will erase him from the record books, but it won’t erase his life—good or bad. Thousands of stories in multiple languages have permanently preserved it.

We must write down
our stories to keep them.

The rest of us, whose lives are not the stuff of newspaper stories, haven’t such tangible sources to leave behind. We have to depend on our own photos in albums. (Photos that sometimes raise more questions than they answer. Where was this taken? Who are those people? What was happening?) Or oral recountings. (that are forgotten or changed in the retellings). Unless someone—ourselves—writes them down, our stories remain “I wonder if’s.”

Sometime ago, I committed to paper my family’s saga of burying our cat—the favorite story that is recited to every captive newcomer to the family. A sister challenged my story’s accuracy. Her version would have paid our brother a dime for the burying deed while I recorded the payment as a quarter. She’s probably right.

Without details written on the timeline of your life, the question of a dime or a quarter can’t be asked. Because no one will know the story, that a little brother was paid once by big sisters to bury the cat three times.

Consider what you wish you knew about your grandfather. About Great aunt Gertrude or your pioneer relative born during the 1800’s.  Think about the tales slipping away today as your parents grow older. What stories do your children not know about the early days of your marriage—stories you need to get down quickly before they are forgotten as though they never happened? For a start, try simply listing the topics of those stories. Share them with us here.