Archive for December, 2008

Ho, ho, ho

Friday, December 19th, 2008

The other afternoon I’m unloading the dishwasher to make room for the stack in the sink when Ali rolls into the kitchen. “Guess what band is playing in Boulder in January?! Guess!” She thinks I’m not paying attention. Tess, home sick, hears activity and comes upstairs looking suspiciously healthy. I hear a key in the front door. It’s finals week at East and Pierce is home early. Ali is squealing, madly typing her plans for the concert. Tess rummages through a cabinet in search of something sweet. Pierce roughhouses the now barking, jumping dogs, the microwave buzzer goes off (did I mention I was ravenous?) and, like clockwork, the phone rings. The shrill of that ring and I’m over the top. Out comes a primal three-second, blood-curdling howl. The impact of sudden and unexpected noise from the mouth of a generally grounded female is amazing. You’d have thought I’d turned on the light in a pantry full of cockroaches. The room clears in an instant.

Christmas is a week away and I’m in a face-off with the seasonal roaring giant. Trust me, he’s no Santa Claus. This year’s brand of holiday frenzy hovers in the air, on the streets, in the collective consciousness. Add the strain of economic collapse, rampant job loss and the closer-than-usual proximity of the moon and the overrated holiday spirit starts to smell like the compost bin in our garage. Something’s gotta give.

Still cranky when I crawl out of bed the next morning, I remember Anne Lamott talking about being militaristically on our own side, or something along those lines. Lamott came through Denver a year ago. I locate the small black book in the bottom of my bag and there they are, the notes I’d taken the night of her talk.

Anne Lamott has had a big life. She’s wrestled with drug and alcohol addiction. She knows winning and losing. She’s raised a child as a single parent. And she’s a great writer, the kind who makes you want to write better. Her tools are self-deprecating humor, brutal honesty, a wit sharp as your best kitchen knife, and faith. Standing at the lectern in the sanctuary of Montview Presbyterian, she shared what she’s learning about taking care of herself now that she’s in her fifties. Like I said, I took notes:

  • Stop doing so much.
  • Take one or two things off your list—every day.
  • Stop abandoning yourself.
  • Be less available to others.
  • Give to others what you want from them.
  • Foster a willingness to do things badly.

Buried in the middle of the second page is the kernel I remembered while making the bed: become militantly and maternally on your side. Militantly, not militaristically. Protective rather than bearing arms.Vigorously active in support of a cause, says Random House. In this convoluted season of joy and giving, that cause would be me and, recalling the conversations I’ve had this week, probably you. 

Too many of us are saying yes when we want to say no. We’re scrapping Lamott’s advice and doing too much, abandoning ourselves like discarded wrapping paper on Christmas morning. We do what’s expected because we feel we have to. Not wanting to disappoint the people we love, we begrudgingly tolerate the busyness when what we’d like to do is stomp every shopping trip and holiday-necessitated errand under a pair of massively heavy black engineer boots. Trim the fat off this holiday of excess and it’s still too rich for my taste. I feel about as jubilant as the pair of melancholy elves sitting at the bar in this week’s New Yorker. Did you see the cartoon? “What a Christmas! First the North Pole melts, then all the elves get laid off.”

As antidote to the craziness, my friend Margie is traveling to New Zealand in January. She’s visiting a friend she’s known since the 70’s. “I am no longer putting anything off,” Margie declares in an email, exhibiting the resolve of the recently converted. Determined, confidently on course, she’s going despite the motion migraines and general discomfort that travel brings to her body. Eager to escape the madness, I ask if there’s room in her suitcase for one more. “I will be put into temporary coma and shipped in a coffin in the cargo area. If I order a large, you can join me.”

Now there’s a solution I can live with. Until January, I’ll bump up the yoga and use screaming as the release of last resort. Even the dogs ran for cover.

Posted in family life, holidays | 5 Comments »

Second anniversary

Thursday, December 4th, 2008

When I went looking for the wedding picture of my parents a month ago, I found this snapshot among a stack I had collected when we moved Dad to Johnson Village. I was a freshman in college, 1968, back for the weekend to help with the leaves. My parents lived on a piece of property that was home to roughly a hundred oak trees. The gathering and burning of the leaves was an annual ritual that signaled the imminent return of the Minnesota winter. 

Raised on a farm, Dad owned every piece of equipment required for proper leaf removal: a signature yellow International Harvester lawn tractor, three sweepers, a variety of rakes, two large heavy-duty tarps and two John Deere power mowers. Obsessive by nature and compulsive in habit, Dad kept the place immaculate every season of the year.

My father was a tax accountant and an abstractor who wore a tie and went to an office five days a week for close to fifty years. But the dad I connected with was a man who loved nothing more than putting on a cap, grabbing a pair of sturdy gloves and working outside, especially when he had a partner. “I’d hate to be doing this alone,” he would say every time we filled another tarp. “I sure am glad you came home to help.”

Harvesting the leaves satisfied our shared propensity for orderliness, something we understood about one another. For those hours or possibly few days before the wind, so common to that part of the country, kicked up more leaves, we took great satisfaction in the uncluttered lawn we left in our wake. We loved being outside, in nature, doing work that brought immediate results: rake the leaves away from the base of the trees, collect them with sweepers, dump the contents of the bins onto a thick canvas tarp, haul each load to the front of the property and roll the dusty heap into the ditch, forming pile after pile alongside the road. 

At dusk—provided the adjacent woods and the house were downwind—we’d light the piles on fire. Acorns popped in the flames. Leaves of assorted size and color succumbed to the heat. In a dry year, you could hear the crunch and crumble of disintegration. We stood silent and stared at the fire, prodding it along, poking at the embers, hair and clothes smelling of smoke, bodies tired to the bone, spirits content.

My parents sold their home and property in 1994, and moved to Denver. Some years ago, serious flooding throughout the Red River Valley scared the new owners into transporting the home to higher ground a few miles away. Abandoned and untended, the acreage has grown wild and disheveled, looking nothing like it did under Dad’s care. “I’m glad your dad didn’t have to see that happen,” Uncle Howard wrote in an email this fall. “It would have really been hard on him.”

My father died at Porter Hospice on December 4, 2006, in the same room Mom had occupied four years earlier. The day prior, I sat with my husband and our children at Dad’s bedside and talked about doing the leaves together, about camping on South Pike Bay, about limping into his office one June morning after tripping on the railroad tracks and sliding hands-first through a patch of gravel. I talked about him being with Mom again, and I told him what a great dad he had been. His eyes were closed. He hadn’t spoken for two days. With every story, he squeezed my hand tighter. When it came time to leave, he would not let go. The kids were hungry. Darkness had settled outside the window with the bird feeder at its ledge. I promised to return in a few hours, and did, but in that short interim Dad had moved that much closer to the other side. I don’t believe he knew I was in the room. His breathing had become more shallow. He didn’t move, not so much as a twitch. A nurse called just before noon the following morning to tell me he had passed.

This fall I stepped into our tiny backyard, the grass covered in aspen and locust leaves, and remembered the October weekend forty years ago. I raked rhythmically, wearing gloves and a cap, taking meticulous care to gather every leaf, twig and pod. I had no need for a riding tractor, a sweeper or a tarp. There was no fire. The dry, dusty piles went into a compost bin for their subsequent return to the earth next spring. 

During our family’s exchange of gratitude that evening, I shared that I was thankful for my dad, for the kind of man he was and for all the things I had learned from him. The kids looked up from their plates, afraid they might see tears, and nodded.

Posted in father | 4 Comments »