Jul15

Happy Trails…

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Happy Trails…

My husband Jeff and I have driven south on I-77 to various parts of North Carolina about a kazillion times over the past 20 years. That’s the kind of math I do. Mostly together, although we’ve each made our solo trips as well. Back in the day when I was working a more traditional office job, we’d leave at the end of workday and arrive late in the dark of night. In more recent years of self-employment for us both (if one would want to refer to me as “employed,”) we’ve been able to leave whenever we want, since technology now allows almost a normal workday for his consulting business. It’s a route we know well (I only know it well because it’s one interstate, idiot-proof right up until the end) and have done in the darkness, the rain and snow, in old cars, new cars, and rental cars.

Depending on which relatives we are visiting, the drive can be anywhere from 7-9-ish hours. Sometimes people balk at that, especially knowing the serpentine West Virginia turnpike is included, but we love our hours in the car. That turnpike is my favorite part, and I’m the one who usually gets to drive it. The best trips are those taken in Red Snapper, the name of my 2015 Volkswagen GLI 6-speed. She’s not a youngster anymore, and neither am I, but we are bonded. There’s nothing like a road trip in the car you love. Jeff enjoys the drive, but he’s also a fan of flying anywhere. Me, I’d rather drive 8 hours than fly for one. The packing, the people, the pressure…to me, that’s an annoying way to travel.

Snapper and I took that very trip the day before yesterday, returning our granddaughter to her home after a week-long visit in Ohio. It was just the two of us in the car, my 7-year old grandgirl and me, and while we did leave fairly early upon awakening that morning, we had one stop about an hour from our house to see some extended family in their newly purchased home. From there, Kennedy and I had a fun, uneventful ride which involved plenty of car snacks (the key to any road trip) and a book series about fairies on Audible. Kennedy didn’t even take a nap the entire drive, and I assured her that I would not, either!

I prayed for safe travel, always have. Sometimes on these drives, I notice dozens of police patrol cars, waiting to pick off anyone speeding. My cruise control is always set for a particular number not too terribly far past the speed limit, so I’m not usually too worried about them. On this trip, I noticed very few speed traps. It was, however, the day after the fourth of July extended holiday, so I’m sure it was now a slower day to get back to a normal weekday presence. What I did notice, however, was the plentiful number of cars, from Ohio to West Virginia to Virginia and now North Carolina, pulled over and changing a flat tire on the shoulder.

About 30 years ago when I worked for the local franchise of Cox Cable, I worked with a woman whose husband was a police officer. One day on patrol on the nearby interstate, he pulled over to help a stranded motorist, and a distracted driver plowed into him with sufficient force to knock him right out of his footwear. I didn’t know the man, and I barely knew his wife, but that image has always stuck with me. I have considerable anxiety whenever I see people loitering near the side of the road, especially on the highways. Nowadays, people are standing around using their phones, not even thinking about keeping safe distance from the traffic whizzing by. I’ve been a broken record cautioning all the kids in our family as they obtained their driver’s licenses over the years to get far away from the vehicle and call for help. Some fervent prayers are said when I pass a person crouched and changing their own tire, without the benefit of flashing caution lights or much help.

We enjoyed the drive, popping gummy bears and sharing a Pop-Tart. We stopped to gas up and refill our snack tank as well with yogurt and granola, cheese and crackers near Tamarack, West Virginia. Kennedy was excited as ever about getting to both of the upcoming tunnels cut right through the mountains. As we neared the big hill (as my husband calls it) aimed to pass Mt. Airy, North Carolina, I said to myself (silently), “after all these years of uneventful trips, please don’t let us get a flat tire like all of these people! The last thing I want is to strand a 7-year old on the side of a mountainous road.”

Truly, rain or shine—and at least one time it was fully 8 hours of pouring rain—we had never had a problem on this drive south, nor the return trips north. Well, sure, there was the one time about 15 years ago when Jeff went alone, using my mom’s green minivan, and discovered he had no brakes as he slid down the interstate hill, but that was the only exception. He’s fine. He had to get to a service station and find a way to get his brakes fixed or replaced to continue. I remember being at a workday lunch, seated outdoors with my friend, when he called to tell me what was going on, but I quickly blocked out what might have happened.

My present-day internal prayer was answered, in a way. We did not end up with a flat tire. Instead, a semi-truck a few vehicles in front of us had shed his tire treads, or however that works, and that created a big problem for several vehicles. I saw the big black impediment flying first as it approached the car in front of me. With two full lanes of high-speed traffic and a narrow shoulder with a big valley drop beyond it, there was nothing to do but ease off acceleration and hold the wheel in both hands as the giant black rubber demon was spit from the rear of that vehicle, through the air and into the smiling grill of Red Snapper.

It felt like playing leap-frog with a car, as we heard (and felt!) the loud roll of an object beneath us giving us an ungraceful lift. I had been in the left lane, passing, so I kept both hands on the wheel until I could change lanes right. Kennedy just said, “what was THAT?!” but seemed unperturbed, and that’s the reaction I gave her right back, explaining what we had just hit. There was a sign for a rest area up ahead, and I planned to stop there and take a look. My tires felt fine, the steering wasn’t pulling to one side or the other, and no gauges were setting off alarms. As we approached the rest area, however, I could see that the exit ramp leading towards it was closed and blocked off. As we kept going, I knew we had some damage underneath, or were perhaps dragging a piece of the actual shredded tread, because I felt as well as heard a rhythmic dragging from the underbelly of Red Snapper.

We exited the interstate and headed towards a Marathon gas station, promised less than a mile ahead. The slower the vehicle went, the louder it was, and I gratefully pulled into the parking lot and told Kennedy to stay in the car while I looked at the damage. Poor Snapper’s jaw was fallen open, and the dragging I had heard was the shield, like a turtle’s thin under armor, ripped apart and dangling at various places. It had been riding along the road, and parts of it had been resting on the moving tires like they were sanding stones.

I was easily able to snap my little red car’s mouth shut again, but as for the thick, smelly, road-rash burned plastic shield, it was too big for me to handle. It was still too secure to pull completely off, but it couldn’t be left dangling. I opened Kennedy’s door and invited her inside the gas station with me. She unbuckled her seat belt from around the booster seat, reached for my hand, and I said,  “we’re gonna fix this with girl power.”

Inside, I found a narrow store, smaller than most, but adrenaline told me we would make something work. I had been looking for bungee cords, but in their absence, found some good old sturdy duct tape. I’m from Parma, Ohio, and my dad was NOT talented in the household arts. I grew up in a culture of duct tape. I remarked to the young woman behind the cash register what our situation was, and she said that she had a special clearance table with zip-ties and bungee cords. “Oh! Then I will take both of those too, please!” When I asked her to cut the packages open for me, she reached into the right front pocket of her threadbare jeans and pulled out her own knife to do so. Girl power, indeed.

Back at the curb, with Kennedy standing beside me to supervise, I used a combination of my newly purchased tools to shore up the dragging parts of my car. It all felt pretty secure, but we still had a couple of hours to go. We hopped back in the car, shared a few good sprays of what she calls “handzitizer,” and were on our way back to Interstate 77 South—this time, staying in the slower lane. I called Kennedy’s dad and told him what had happened, just so that he could call some local body shop or dealership while it was still the workday. I wanted to have the car looked at before I pointed it back up north for 500 miles the next day.

We stopped one more time along the route, after hearing the drag return, and recommitted my support strategy. By the time we pulled in to see Kennedy’s parents and little brother Jackson waiting for our arrival, we were again dragging a bit. But we had made it, safe and sound.

“Better than a flat tire,” I thought to myself. More expensive, maybe, but if it kept us from being sitting ducks on the side of the road, still my preference.

I could have opted to try and have the car fixed while I was there, but Hurricane Elsa was promising that adding another day to my planned date of departure was probably adding two days or more unless I wanted to drive in constant rainstorms and high winds. Early the next morning, I showed up at the local VW dealer and asked for mercy. I told them what had happened and requested that they’d hoist Snapper up and make sure whatever was going on under there was safe and secure enough to drive her all the way to Ohio safely.

Without hesitation, they were ready to help. A small-framed young man with dark hair came around from behind the counter and walked out to look at the car with me. He asked for my keys and took the car right back to put her on the lift. While he did that, I chatted with the two other guys in the service check-in department. One hailed from Michigan, a word that many Ohio State University football fans won’t even say out loud (he told me Michigan claims Toledo, and in an earlier life I would’ve told him he could have it, but now I’ve got a nephew who lives there). The other jovial bearded dude was about to take a motorcycle trip to Willowick, Ohio, in a couple of weeks to meet his wife’s father for the first time. We joked, we compared notes on places we knew or had in common, and then I retreated to the waiting area so that I could text my progress to my family.

The waiting area was a small but colorfully appointed alcove with murals of various VW models painted on the walls. My eye was drawn to the image of a red car with a street sign painted above it: Happy Ave.

Ah, so my prayer had not only been answered, but with a little extra wink from my dad.

Instantly, my mind went back to another trip to North Carolina that I had taken, long before I was married at all, around 1990, to visit my best friend who was stationed there with her Marine Corps husband. That trip was taken in a white diesel VW golf hatchback, the one my dad had procured for me to drive in high school. It was becoming overheated in the mountains, smoke under the hood and red lights on the dash, when the small-town mechanic we managed to coast towards suggested only that it be towed to the Volkswagen Dealership in Winston-Salem. Still a kid in most ways, around 20 years old, I remember calling my dad, sobbing. “What should I do?” “I have to rent a car!” “It’s going to be expensive!”

Hap laughed. Chuckled, more aptly. I could picture his smile, and I knew he was actually somewhat delighted by my predicament, once he knew I was safe. When I mimicked the accent of the mechanic, and lamented at the time lost both on the way to the destination, and then on the way back to pick up the car, he simply said, “but look at all the interesting people you wouldn’t have met otherwise.”

Two and a half decades later, I would recycle that message as I delivered my dad’s eulogy.

Yep, Hap’s fingerprints were all over this.

Rather quickly, the tidy young man who had first taken care of me came back to hand me my keys. Everything looked in order, and they had been able to simply remove much of that plastic protector that had run the entire length of the car like a ribcage to protect the organs of Red Snapper.

“You’ll want to get that replaced as soon as you get home,” he cautioned. “And don’t drive too crazy on the way.” As I handed him my credit card, he waved my hand away.

There was a time I used to appreciate when a man would be so deferential to a young lady, making sure I was well taken care of in a situation like this. I realized now, I appreciated a young man being deferential to an older woman in that same way.

I drove myself home, a little slower than usual and with the music not quite as loud so that I could hear the subtle complaints of my car. Being restrained a bit reminded me by contrast of how much I enjoy the relative freedom of the open road, a sunny day, a scenic route, loud music, open sunroof, and a fast car. For all of his sacrifices for us, I know now that my dad had this same enjoyment; that’s why he drove as he did, and as much as he did. That’s where I get it from, I guess. I feel so close to him on those drives, finding myself grinning or becoming aware of a tear in my eye, depending on the song on the radio and the current view.

Toby Keith and Chris LeDoux sang, “Now our windshield’s a painting that hangs in our room…it changes with each mile like the radio tune…”

A careful 9 or so hours later, I was home safe and sound and cutting into a rotisserie chicken with my hubby. (Unrelated, Jeff has told me that if someday I don’t make it back home to him, he will probably eat rotisserie chicken about three nights a week.)

And just this morning, one of my sisters told me that back when we were kids, riding in a yellow Suburban we had nicknamed “the Looney Bin,” she had asked Hap about the thick black curls of rubber on the freeway as we headed to a beach vacation. Heck, we may have even been heading to the Carolinas! She said that he explained to her how perilous they could be when they flew off of the 18-wheelers into traffic. Something he was worried about on those trips, maybe.

I don’t pretend my dad has special powers up there, now.

But “Our Father” does.

Apr2

Touch.

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Touch.

When a baby is born and you pass her around, you wonder what she is thinking as she lies in your arms. Living in another state from our grandchildren, we spent the newborn visits hogging the first baby, trying to absorb her and letting her absorb us…hearing our voices, feeling our sway, sensing our scents. On her tummy, and eventually on her back, once she was stronger, her dinosaur bones, I would slowly spell out the letters of her lengthy name with my index finger. “K…e…n…n…e…d…y…”and finish with a big tickle up the neck, “KENNEDY!”

I could soon enough see that she came to expect it from me. Which was, of course, the point.
Eventually the child could walk and talk…funny how that happens, and quickly…and her mama turned the spelling of her name into a rhyme, “K-e-n-n-e-d-y, that’s my name, I’m sweet as pie!”
And, as kids will do with every parent’s perfect plan, Kennedy twisted that rhyme into her own ridiculous singsong, apropos of nothing, “K-e-n-n-e-d-y, that’s my name, football pie!” Then the laughter, the glee.

I’m sure I did the same thing thirty years ago on the back of the baby girl who named me Mamie, albeit with a much shorter name, K-a-t-i-e. I have done it using the few letters in Noah. “Again, Mamie!” The unique arrangement of letters in Loftyn. I have barely begun to do it on the quickly broadening back of Jackson, whom we haven’t seen since late December, as he grows and forgets while we all quarantine in our respective states. I may have done it only once to the new Myles.

My calendar tells me it’s almost time for what would have been my monthly hair color appointment at my friend Mary’s salon, and I remember a wonderful woman who retired from there named Penny, whose gentle, capable hands at the shampoo bowl reminded clients of a loving grandmother. Penny always made sure there were no suds in your ears and that the water was never cold.

Beyond even that date will come Easter, when sometimes my sisters and I would crash our hard-boiled eggs into each other, “egg fight!” Someone wins, someone loses, but then everyone wins because two of us like yolks, while one of us likes only the whites. It is often a holiday that my brother-in-law has had to miss because of work, likewise his son, the chef, cooking for families who prefer a restaurant for their fancy ham, maybe pork belly and farm-to-table eggs.
My mind wanders to their other son, all six foot four of him…did he let me draw his name on his back for comfort as I “rode” the MRI machine with him as a toddler? He’s married now, and his wife gives the longest, most heartfelt hugs of anyone I have ever known.

Just outside both my back and front doors, birds are building nests. Spring is dawning, which would usually be yet another excuse for a pedicure with my mom. Last time we went together, before her winter vacation in Florida, the young women massaging our calves with lavender sugar scrub were discussing an Instagram post in which some unknown harlot tagged our girl’s boyfriend. Should she text him? Ask him to explain? Or become Nancy Drew first and confront him with evidence?

As the weather warms, I yearn to climb onto my stand-up paddleboard, hibernating in the basement, and to lunch with my friend afterwards. And to reach my fork to sample from her plate, or share some fries, maybe a sip of each other’s beer.

Zoom and Facetime prevent the grandkids from forgetting our faces, as does an old-fashioned letter written to help bridge the chasm. Distance isn’t the problem; my best friend and her husband drive across town to stand six feet from their grandsons. My sister does the same to see the babies she moved residences this past year just to be closer to. Her daughter had ice cream delivered. Proximity is not the problem.

Today, the sun shines and more than 50 degrees Fahrenheit are promised, so I will take my mom for a ride in the car since we’ve been shuttered at home together-ish. Side by side. Last week when we did the joyride, we stopped in the driveway of her best friend who came outside to chat from a distance, bundled in an over-sized Cleveland Indians jacket. The boys of summer, benched for now. If we do the same visit again this week, we may have to call that our Easter since it is a holiday usually shared with her family…our family.

Months ago, as regular flu season kicked up, I stopped ending my yoga classes by giving everyone a gentle neck massage. Some folks say that’s their favorite part of class. Others, like my friend Joolz, only tolerates it. She doesn’t want to reject my touch, but she is one who has trouble relaxing, finding peace at the end of practice. Which makes her appearance there even more valuable to me.

Mass on Sunday is on TV for now, and while I may have balked at the exchange of so many handshakes at St. Bridget’s and often surreptitiously squeezed sanitizer into my hand and my husband’s (or once, the open handbag of the woman in the pew in front of us!) I do miss the waves, winks, and thumbs-up of those friends, each of us easy to find in the same pew week after week. The big ones and the little ones. Some of us grabbing breakfast afterwards. I miss the Eucharist. It is called Communion.

My original yoga guru ends class by saying “unity in diversity; all are one.” I miss meeting her for coffee after class. I miss the group of faces I would see at noon on a Wednesday, and even more the several with whom I shared tiaras and mimosas one year ago today for a 50th birthday celebration. Thanks, Timehop.

Before this all happened, we had Thanksgiving and an 80th birthday party for our mom. We had a Christmas with the kids. Before this happened, we rang in the new year on a mountaintop from a hot tub while fireworks exploded in the valley below. Before this all happened, we made it to the in-laws in Florida for a golf visit. Before this happened, we had a weekend in Quebec with our friends. Before this happened, we celebrated our bestie Ken’s birthday.

Before this happened. And now this has happened. And everything from this point on will be “after.”

I just miss touch.

touch3

(Photo from Mother’s Day 2019)

 

Mar21

Love Lifted Me

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The weeks leading up to my parents’ 35th wedding anniversary in 1994 were tense.

After so many years of bowing to the desires and demands of his wife and three daughters…my dad had ceased shaving.

My tan, athletic little fireball dad who had gone salt & pepper before my birth in 1969, who by this anniversary was definitely heavy on the salt, had decided for the first time in his life he would let his facial hair grow.

To be fair, this was the closest thing to a mid-life crisis Hap ever had.  This and a very inexpensive, very yellow old Porsche convertible which would come a few years later. 

But Dolores, our mother, was NOT having it.

Why?

“Because you look like Kenny Rogers!” she’d say, with a grimace.

And while Kenny was a very nice looking man, that was not the look she wanted to see on the face of her husband. And she was not playin’…she was not pleased, she was not kind about it. She was punishing him in ways small and large, I’m sure. We were scared–if Hap didn’t shave, if the cold war continued, what would happen when they showed up to the fake event that would actually be their surprise anniversary party and were barely speaking?

Luckily, through whatever marital manipulations will remain unknown to we three sisters, as the date neared Boots somehow prevailed and Hap shaved. They showed up to the party and were greeted by the two grandchildren they had by that time, along with the best friends, coworkers, and extended family they had cultivated during that long marriage. They cried tears of joy, and as the saying goes, a great time was had by all.

They were treated to a slide show of memories, and part of the soundtrack to that slide show was “Through the Years” by Kenny Rogers. It was their song, their family song–not their song as a young dating couple, but their adult, grown-up life song:

“Through the years, through all the good and bad…I know how much we’ve had, I’ve always been so glad to be with you…through the years, I’ve never been afraid, I’ve loved the life we’ve made, and I”m so glad I stayed right here with you…through the years.”

It was just a song, but an emotional one. My dad was a huge fan of country music, the country music before it would have a surge in popularity with younger people after that time. Before artists from Kenny forward would sway it towards pop. His country music was Ronnie Milsap and Lynne Anderson. I remember watching the Barbara Mandrell show with him as a kid and arguing that I preferred her sister, Louise Mandrell. He shook his head, “no way.” He liked Barbara. He liked that she could play so many instruments, a petite scrappy blonde who took on that steel guitar like other women took on baking. As her own song says, Hap was “country when country wasn’t cool.” Oh, sorry, he listened to country when it wasn’t cool. He may have owned a plaid shirt and a straw cowboy hat to wear to a convention of other financial planners and insurance salesmen, but he was not “country” the way Mandrell meant it. Not in the real ways, but I’m fairly certain he lived vicariously through Little Joe Cartwright and the Big Valley Barkleys.

Back at the anniversary party in 1994, Kenny Rogers’ voice took us all on an emotional photographic journey of our longtime neighbors and friends “through the years,” which included a third generation of children playing in the same two backyards. And while no more Kenny Rogers songs were included in that day, as I awakened this day in 2020 to the news of Kenny’s death, my mind’s eye shows me quite a few other snapshots that Kenny Rogers’ songs frame:

A cassette tape of his greatest hits played over and over…and over…on a driving trip to Nashville, when my parents allowed me to bring my best friend and next-door neighbor Kristine. It is only as an adult that I realize they wanted me to bring her to keep me occupied so that I didn’t annoy all the joy out of the vacation for my older sisters. There were several of those trips, so I cannot recall if that was the same one that also included the family/neighbors on the other side, which would have included Sandy and Karen, my elders as well.

My days in Tennessee were eclipsed by thoughts of a boy named Mike who worked at the stables of Loretta Lynn’s Dude Ranch, who gave me a peacock feather. It was obvious he was in love with me. I was a pre-teen. I assume he was old enough to have a work permit.

I wrote a few postcards on that trip, one to yet another neighbor and friend, Lisa, to whom I had written something like “the trip is fun, MOST of the time,” which was a dig at Kristine getting on my nerves, and me on hers, and a lesson learned when my mother (who was about to mail said postcard) handed it back to me with a “shame on you, that’s unnecessary.”

I wasn’t yet at the age where I bought much music for myself. I had listened to (and ruined) many 45’s and albums of my sisters in the early 70’s, fought through a few of Hap’s 8-tracks, and then when cassettes came out, I just listened to whatever was in my parents car. So, some Kenny Rogers. I loved the song Ruben James, “you still walk the fertile fields of my mind…faded shirt, withered brow, calloused hands upon the plow…loved ya then, and I love you now, Ruben James.”

Over the years Kristine and I shared many choruses of “Coward of the County” and “The Gambler,” and I privately swooned over “She Believes in Me.”  “Lucille” took on a new shine when in my adulthood, my coworker/friend Maureen told me a story about an automotive breakdown using the lyrics, “ya picked a fine time to leave me, loose wheel…”

But after childhood, I didn’t really follow Kenny Rogers, and his signature low growl in songs like “Lady” annoyed me. Years later I joined in the mocking when he had plastic surgery and those eyes were wound up a little too tightly. I never really sought his music again. I felt like he was making an aging attempt at being a sex-symbol.

But his song, my parents’ song, “Through the Years,” was the closest thing to an anthem our family had, and it was revisited on many anniversaries after that. My parents would go on to celebrate their 50th anniversary. By their 52nd, my dad was in a nursing home. By their 54th, he was gone. Sirius satellite radio continues to bring songs like that into my car, and when that happens I laugh, or cry, take a snap with my cell phone and text it to my sisters and my mom. Same thing happens with John Denver’s “Sunshine on my shoulders,” Sunshine being the name of our childhood dog. Thank God for music.

Now, it’s March 21, 2020. One of my sisters texted me this morning about Kenny Rogers’ death and how it made her cry, for all the reasons illustrated above. Kenny’s death might be getting more airplay today if we were not in the midst of a global pandemic of Covid-19, Corona virus. My husband keeps telling me to write about the worldwide crisis, to document the days we are all quarantined so we can read it and remember the details years from now. I haven’t done that yet, because what can I have to say about it–what we ate that day? What time we Face-timed the grandkids? Who of us still have jobs?

Instead, here’s my offering today. Kenny Rogers has died, and his music is part of the soundtrack of our lives. Hearing the clips of his songs again makes me smile. Nostalgia is strong, and I still know every word to those songs. Thank God for music, have I said that already? During this terrible health crisis when countless will be sick, many will be lost, and more will be devastated financially, I will go online and hopefully find one of those Kenny songs I sang after playing it over (and over, and over) on that trip to Tennessee, and I hope the sentiment rings true to us all:

“Love lifted me, love lifted me. When nothing else would do, you know love lifted me.”

Love Lifted Me

 

Jun17

Every day is Fathers Day…

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Not long ago, I found a letter that my dad wrote to me in April, 1987. The reason for the letter was my high school senior retreat day at Padua High School. It was a beautiful surprise to see my dad’s handwriting again, all confident, cheerful and scrawly, and to “hear” his voice again in those words. When I saved this letter and put it away, I’m sure I never gave his words another thought. The thing is, though, I didn’t have to remember his words, because every single day, he told me the same things in his actions. It amazes me how much his own words mirror the words I used later in his eulogy to describe him and his life. This is vintage Hap, solid advice! And it reminds me that while we may think the most important thing we can say to someone while they’re here is “I love you,” the greater gift may be to say, “I know that you love me.” The letter is pictured here, but difficult to read, so I will transcribe his words: (spoiler alert!! He spills the “secret of life.”)

Mary Beth,

Time for our Father Daughter talk! (Equal billing)

Mary, the whole world is yours if you shut out the negatives. Don’t think the bad of anything. Enjoy your work–your school, now or ever. Please try & be happy with any situation you’re in. I know it sounds stupid but you can make or train yourself to accept & enjoy all challenges. It’s never too hot, too cold, too far, too anything. Don’t be afraid to reach out. I enjoy you & I love you & I want you to be a doer. Mary, honest, the secret of life is to love man and God, don’t dislike, nothing is worth the emotion of hate. I tease you about your loving me. I know you do. I get a lot of mileage out of teasing you about it. It’s really more important to me to know that I love you. You & your sisters have always thought of me & are nice to me, you all know I loved you. What I really want you to realize is how special Dolores Mae is. None of us can comprehend how much she loves. The nicest thing you can ever do for me is to treat mom as the special person she is. Then treat yourself as the special person you are. Reach out & enjoy. Please care enough about the people you know & live with to be a positive influence on their lives. I truly believe you are special. Take whatever school or job you may & love it & enjoy it until the next one. Try to enjoy everything & every one. I wish I had realized much earlier in life how special the gifts of God are. End of lecture. I love you. I will never not love you. -Hap

 

Mar6

The Road Home

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(written October, 2013)
In an educational exercise one October morning, I had been instructed to describe the day’s color. The word which immediately surfaced was lucid. That afternoon was no different: the individual leaves on the arms of autumn trees viewable in high-definition against the clearest blue sky, still dry air, and a sun nearly painful in its brightness, closer to white than yellow. With my mother in the passenger seat next to me, I turned left into the ten-car parking lot of the monument showroom. While our task of picking out the headstone for my recently-deceased father’s grave was…well, a grave one, our moods were as light as the Indian-summer day. I rolled my eyes sardonically, noting that instead of a concrete curb barrier at the head of each parking spot, there was a sample granite grave marker, complete with engraved names and dates. “That’s creepy. I feel like I’m parked on a body,” I said. She laughed good-naturedly: we had suffered enough, and our family was an irreverent lot, even in mourning. “Shall we take our coffee in with us, or leave it in the car?” She asked. We decided to carry our eco-friendly travel mugs inside; I had made it at home, strong and subtly hazel-nutty, and this chore could undoubtedly take a while.
We strolled casually towards the showroom door, taking in our surroundings: this would not be anywhere we’d visit often. Life-sized, bone-white statues of the Holy Family flanked the glass doors, while off to the left a grassy patch incongruously boasted a rough wagon, a slatted-wood cart on wheels, full of cascading flowers. The prairie meets Jerusalem meets the 21st century, where nearby a mega-watt digital sign runs a silent, solemn commercial of sober but satisfied faces. A highly-polished marker on the ground near the door revealed that the business was opened in 1969, the year I was born. The still-living founder’s face was etched onto the stone, and I imagined that this must be an eerie sight for his family. I reached for the heavy door and ushered my mother inside.
We stepped into a wind-chiming, welcoming store, devoid of any discernible scent, hushed but not cold in atmosphere. High-ceilings and full walls of windows made the space seem whitewashed on such a sunny day, almost cheerful. The first visible items were tchotchkes: “God Bless the USA” bumper stickers, Swarovski-crystal one-decade rosaries: “great for travel!” Pewter car-visor clips saying “Bless this trucker” or “Drive safely, someone loves you!” A bowling angel attached to a lapel pin came with a poem about getting closer to a 300 game. Further in, larger and heavier items began to appear: garden statues of St. Francis of Assisi, in his humble robe, gently regarding the birds and animals around him, and small fiberglass benches, designed to look like stone, just big enough for one seat and the diminutive angel perched on the armrest. Here, we were approached by a tall, handsome woman about my mother’s age with a gentle smile and a decidedly tentative “are you ready for any help?”
Since we were ready for help, having no idea how to begin the process of choosing our headstone, we introduced ourselves to Marie, who happened to be the wife of the founder. I decided against asking her if it was unsettling to see her husband’s face on what amounted to a grave-marker when she walked in to work each day. Marie led us with her outstretched arm across the store to an interior wall on which hung dozens of heavy granite rectangles, fully engraved with names, dates, etchings of photographic quality, hearts and flowers. The samples ranged from the size of a large book to the size of a small bed. Some had rough, geography-class-rock borders with quartz-like sparkles, while others were polished like a kitchen countertop with salt and pepper just beneath the glossy surface. Colors ranged from wet putty to the amber of rich Oktoberfest ale, to azure with milky, translucent chips, to the blackest black night, with or without the accompanying stars. Here, by some silent mutual agreement, we became solemn. Somewhere between the veteran’s insignias and the teenaged girl’s senior picture, scratched artfully into her eternal social-media profile picture, we adopted the hushed manner appropriate for those in the presence of the tenderest of souls: the too-soon departed. And isn’t anyone who is loved and missed taken away too soon?
Marie, in her conservatively leopard-printed cardigan and fashionable metallic flats (right up my mother’s alley!) expertly and quietly described our particular options: we couldn’t have a raised stone because my dad’s grave was in the first row near the road at the cemetery. That was fine with me – I had always associated raised headstones with horror movies and Halloween lawn decorations. I was in favor of a low-key, flush-to-the-grass marker. I made a joke about the word “flush,” because my dad’s gravesite happens to be near the restrooms at Holy Cross Cemetery. Marie threw her head back and laughed. We did, however, have size and color options. When my mom asked me for my opinion, I suggested that she choose what she thought Dad would like. Then, I remembered that this one four-inch thick slab of granite would mark the grave which eventually would hold both of my parents. “You’ll be under it too, one day, so pick whatever you think is pretty,” I said. My mom chuckled in acknowledgment as she sipped her coffee, surveying the sample wall, and she and Marie, being contemporaries, opined conspiratorially about stone colors, fonts, and graphics. I deliberately retreated, catching only fragments: Marie, her polished, square fingertips grazing my mom’s elbow and her nose wrinkled, “I hope you don’t like the gold lettering on the Norwegian blue, it just doesn’t look as nice,” and my mom graciously acknowledging that “you sure get lots of ideas by looking at these!”
Half an hour later, in an office with a sage-hued desktop constructed of the same highly-polished granite as the gravestones, we faced Marie as she stood over the left shoulder of a lanky young man in Ray-Ban glasses whose thin fingers raced across the computer keyboard, projecting a mock-up of our headstone onto the wall behind them. After we nodded and murmured our assent, Zack plinked the print button like an ebony piano key and left the room wordlessly. My mom had chosen all the specifics: color, font, a wedding ring with the date of their marriage to be etched in between the names Hap and Dolores, the sentiment “Together Forever with God” at the foot. After signing approval on the invoice, we spent at least twenty minutes chatting further with Marie as if we were long-time family friends.
We all agreed that we enjoyed drip coffee from the pot better than the now-popular K-cups. She and my mom showed each other photos of their grandchildren, a new generation of grandmothers pulling out their iPhones instead of school-photographs. Marie was elated to learn a Nordstrom Rack store had just opened nearby. We could have chatted for hours; we had fun. As she walked us out, back through the store which somehow struck the perfect balance between dignified and cheerful, we agreed to come back soon and shop for less weighty items. There were ornaments and freshly cut flowers for sale, memorial cards for pets and decorative blankets to be tossed casually over the back of a sofa. Racks of cards, religious and secular, stood sentry near seasonally scented candles in pumpkin-shaped glass jars. As we climbed back into my SUV, our empty coffee cups standing upright in my ample handbag, my mom thanked me, remarking in an echo to my own thoughts about what a positive experience it had been. “We’re doing really well,” I thought to myself.
Hours later, driving home alone from a group tennis lesson which had produced equal parts sweat and laughter, an inexplicable and immediate grief welled up inside me and burst forth into the approaching dusk as I sobbed, suddenly and wetly, at sixty-five miles an hour. I still felt that the day, the task completed with my mom, had been fun. But a practical voice in my brain reminded me that I had just picked out my parents’ headstone, and what an obscene chore that was. I missed my dad viscerally; more than that, I realized that at some point in my future, I would walk back inside that showroom’s heavy glass doors, alone or maybe with one of my sisters, to inform them that the final year of the second-deceased could now be engraved onto the Norwegian blue granite she had chosen herself on a lovely October day. I wondered if Marie would still be there, and I thought of good, strong coffee and my mom’s smile, and as I gripped the steering wheel, my knuckles white at ten and two, I wept in fat tears and keening sounds like a child; a child who has lost her parents somewhere.

Sep25

Beam Me Up

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Beam Me Up

“Beam me up…

Gimme a minute

I don’t know what I’d say in it…

I’d probably just stare, happy just to be there

Holding your face.

Beam me up…

Let me be lighter, I’m tired of being a fighter

I think…

A minute’s enough

 

Just beam me up.”

She fell in love with the song from Pink’s “The Truth About Love” album as soon as she heard it. The dramatic instrumentation, the tender, heartfelt vocal, the melody soft but strong with those minor keys of angst, building the feeling. She shared Pink’s song and the lyrics with plenty of people, because the song reminded her of profound losses: her sister’s baby, eventually her own father (…in my head I see your baby blues.)

The only detail that didn’t sit well in a song so perfect it always drew a tear and required a replay was the part about a minute being enough. What is that about? How could a minute be enough when you long for and miss someone so desperately, and then you get to be “beamed up” to see them again? A minute could never be enough.

Her dad is in her dreams, sometimes. Fairly regularly, in fact, but never the focus. His presence there is purely incidental: it is a holiday at home, so of course he is in the family room in his chair, or outside with the grandkids. She hears his voice in reply to someone’s question, catches a glimpse of him from the corner of her eye smoothing back his shock of white hair the way he always did. He’s there, as he should be, but in the dreams she is always conscious of the looming dementia. In the dramatic irony of a dream, she knows about the dementia because it has come and gone. She knows everything about it, about what’s coming, but he does not. She awakens troubled and anxious, vestiges of her sleep-self worrying that he is still driving but losing his sense of direction, still talking but sometimes seeing things. She’s afraid he will mention a puppy under the table or a bug skittering in the corner. In the dreams, she’s stressed, holding it all together and not sure what to do. But some part of her consciousness always knows it is a dream, because she knows how all of this ends. She simply can’t stop it this time, any more than she could in real life. The dream isn’t about him, so it doesn’t matter. She’s just dreaming, and he is there. Just like the pets and the kids and the occasional former co-worker or high-school classmate. Like intricate puzzles put together with a few of the wrong pieces, forced in awkwardly, dreams are.

One September night, still warm enough to sleep with the bedroom window open for the sleek purring body of her black cat to somehow relax into the tracks of the frame, she understood what it meant to be beamed up.

She dreamed, and this time it was just her and her dad. There was no context, no preface. They stood outside in the darkness facing each other, as suddenly as if they had both been dropped there like a slide from an old projector. Outside of what or where, she didn’t know, couldn’t tell. A place, a building maybe? They were a mere few strides apart, facing each other in the almost-blackness. In a fraction of a second she understood that this dream was different: he had already died, and he knew it. The dementia had come and gone again, and he knew it. And he knew that she knew it all. Revelation was instantaneous. They rushed to approach each other with arms open, no time to waste. He wore a shirt she didn’t recognize, the only thing that wasn’t familiar to her. They hugged, and her dad was once again the right size; the right height, a bit shorter than his youngest daughter in adulthood (he had introduced her around the dementia ward as “the tall one”) so her face was over his shoulder at the crook of his neck, the right density. His back and shoulders were smooth and strong and bullish, the way their dad had always been. Robust, immovable in a hug. He smelled like dad, the cloud of soap and toothpaste and shaving cream that had always breezed behind him as he rushed down the stairs, the last one to shower in a houseful of females. Somehow she could even see his tan in the darkness, sense rather than see the glossy blue-against-white of his mischievous eyes. They hugged strongly—tightly, but not hard, he was so staunch and she gripped the muscles of his back for emphasis. She knew this would be brief, and she rushed her tearful, joyful words, “oh, we love you and miss you so much!” And because she had always joked with him, added, “we don’t want to, but we do!”

He chuckled, still in the hug, unable to see each other’s faces except in mind’s eye, and said, “I know.”

Then they pulled back, still linking forearms but facing each other in this unnamed night-place. His smile was perfect, lighting up his face in its familiar jocularity, and he said to her, with just a trace of disbelief and humility, “I really love it here.”

Her heart spilled over to hear those words. She had already believed he was in a better place, THE better place, and it was what he had believed too. But to see him, feel him, smell him, and recognize the same wonder in his voice that she had heard him use in the past to describe a mountain, or a golf shot, or a talented child, or a great meal, convinced her down to her soul. She grabbed him again, sliding her arms around his shoulders and squeezing his meaty clavicles with her fingertips.

“I’m so glad,” she choked out near his ear. And she meant it. And she wanted him to know that she meant it. She was so happy for him, and she was desperate to impart the whole remaining family’s love and joy to him in what she inherently knew was a very brief opportunity. She squeezed him tighter, burying her face in him. He squeezed too.

She woke up.

Just like that, she was back in her bed at around three in the morning, her husband asleep next to her, her cat curled up and humming, the sounds of the night falling softly through the screen. The whole thing had taken no time at all. A hug, a few words. But now she could feel her dad in her arms. His voice and scent and warm, living skin lingered. She hadn’t hugged her dad that often when he was alive; she would be more inclined to chuck him on the shoulder, while he would have yanked a piece of her long hair from behind and then dodged her retaliation. She felt, for a moment, what she supposed could be called bliss.

The vestigial flavor of that dream lingers, and she deliberately goes inside her thoughts to enjoy it from time to time. She had her dad back, her real dad, tangible in her arms. And then one day, a couple of weeks later, her earbuds delivered that beloved Pink song while she was walking to one of her sister’s houses, to collect the mail or let out the dog, on a sunny, end-of-summer day. Now, it all made sense, and the lyrics didn’t leave her frustrated any more. A minute was all it took.

A minute was enough.

Apr23

“Walking on Water” Published in “The Mill” 2014 (Baldwin Wallace University)

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“Walking on Water” Published in “The Mill” 2014 (Baldwin Wallace University)

Walking On Water

           In the summer of 2013, I was 44 years old. I feel like myself only in summer, the kind of person who is miserable for the long Cleveland months when the temperature is below, say, 64 degrees. Obviously, I live in an inhospitable climate. But during the summer months, I am alive. I carry spare shoes everywhere with me in my car to walk outside, I practice yoga in parks on tree stumps or bridges, and I don’t begrudge the ugly humidity that makes everyone look shiny and slimy, with dirty hair. I love and embrace it all. It’s easier for me, no doubt, because I am currently taking a break from employment to finally go to college full-time, so I don’t need to put on layers of spackle and hairspray, dress in a suit or Spanx, or worry about armpit stains on my blouse. I gladly parade my sweat as I walk with my ear-buds tightly placed, eating as many meals outside as possible and refusing to come indoors. These summer days, as hot and oppressive to some as the whoosh of air which accosts your face when you open an oven on Thanksgiving, are what I spend the rest of the year waiting for.

            This past summer, however, my Polish/Irish/Lebanese fair-in-winter, olive-in-summer skin had barely seen the outdoors. It was the summer of Hap—that’s my dad’s name—again. Two years prior, it was also a summer of Hap, when my dad took a final rapid slide down into a well of a dementia marked by hallucinations, violence, and delusions. Since then, my mom and sisters, along with our husbands and children, had visited him daily in his residential nursing home—a nursing home made necessary by his physical strength and that of the aggressive delusions which plagued him; hallucinations of people harming us, his family, which left him no choice but to try to take down the aggressors. Our dad, our defender.

            Over time, Hap grew weaker, physically and mentally, and then, the summer of Hap 2013 became about his final days. He had been hospitalized for a while with digestive issues which seem unresolvable at that point in his illness, and then he had been sent to hospice-care to transition through to death. My family members and I had seen nothing but the inside of his medical bedrooms for the better part of two months. In the end, we were grateful that his final time occurred in the summer, because his grandkids were home from school and around to visit him, and to spend time within the cocoon of the very last days we would all be together as a complete family, the finals weeks, days, hours, minutes with our beloved mentor and patriarch, our team captain.

            The time was rich; irreverent, fruitful, angry, dark, food-filled, and emotional. We ate fistfuls of Honey-baked ham and packaged cookies to pass the time. We talked, recalling old memories…we sang (John Denver, poorly), we mocked each other. We chastised my dad, who was mostly unconscious and certainly unaware by this point, for keeping us cooped up all summer. We made funeral arrangements. One day in July, I slipped out into the sunshine to a waiting bench near a statue of Jesus, and I wrote out my dad’s eulogy in longhand, a speech I had been giving in my head for years, knowing always that it was incumbent upon me to try to do this remarkable man justice in words. A nun saw me from the window of my dad’s room and assumed I was sunbathing. I did not correct her. There was something perversely funny to me about tanning in the back of a Catholic institution meant for the dying.

            After more than a week in hospice, I looked at my calendar one day at my dad’s bedside, and realized I had signed up for a stand-up paddleboard yoga experience on Lake Erie for the next day. I’m sure it had seemed like a grand idea at the time, a group decision with a couple of yoga friends. The daughter my dad had known would never have attempted this—I was not an athlete by any means, spending much of my life a little overweight and a lot under-exercised. I was not a strong swimmer, if you could call me a swimmer at all, and I don’t know if you could. I may or may not be able to keep my head above water and make some progress in a time of trouble on water, but I’m not certain the resulting action could accurately be labeled “swimming.” Yoga was the only exercise I did, and even that was the result of my recent search for peace during my dad’s illness, not any physical prowess. I also have a healthy fear of large bodies of water, and no confidence in my ability to perform this scheduled outing. It was decidedly out of my comfort zone.

            I texted my yoga-friend Jenny, because the excursion had already been paid for, and I hoped that she could find someone to take my place and enjoy the experience. But as the day went on, I felt a nagging pull at my consciousness to consider leaving my dying father’s bedside for a few hours to do something completely out of the ordinary. I was scared, not only of being able to navigate the actual physical activity, but that after all of these days and nights spent in this room, my dad might slip away during the one time I was absent. To be truthful, I also feared the impression it would leave with others: my family, the nurses, the general “people” who would undoubtedly ask, “what kind of daughter would leave her dying father’s bedside to go play watersports on a summer evening?”

            I think it was that final bit, though, that actually convinced me. My dad, a man of many unique and wonderful characteristics, was most known for walking his own path, no matter what anyone thought. He sold investments to wealthy clients wearing a Cleveland Indians tee-shirt (he was about to be buried in one, too). He drove goofy vehicles which had personality (most recently a cobalt-blue turbo-charged Subaru) no matter how luxurious a car he could actually afford, and he took his wife (our mother) on all of his business trips because he wanted her to see the world with him. If he knew that I was bailing out on something I’d committed to simply because I was afraid of how I would look to other people, he would shake his head at me. It began to occur to me that this activity could actually be a tribute to my dad, that he would get me through it and inspire me to appreciate the beauty and accomplishment and camaraderie of what I was about to undertake.

            I had a talk first with Paula, the wonderful hospice nurse who had been taking care of my dad every weekday of his hospice stay. She was a friend by then, it being such an intense time for sharing family stories and feelings with intimate strangers. She also knew my dad, his physical condition, very well. It had started to deteriorate more rapidly, and we knew the end was nearer than it had been. I asked, “Paula, what should I do? If I have a thing to do tonight, do you think it’s okay for me to leave to do it? Or is he close?”

            Paula (who by the way, my dad would have absolutely loved and would have probably nicknamed something like “Scrappy” because she was small but fierce), looked towards my dad’s bed, looked back at me, and repeated both actions. Then she said, “You know him. What would he tell you to do?” Well played, Paula. And right on. So, with the confidence born from the knowledge that nothing else can possibly even matter when you’re about to lose someone forever, I walked out of my dad’s room that evening, not knowing if I would see him again alive. Of course, as I grasped his hand and kissed him goodbye, I said (as I always did), “See ya tomorrow!” But I felt like something had changed. Something bigger was happening, and it almost felt as if my dad had already left that body.

            Incidentally, one of the most valuable things about hospice for us was the way that it gave us our dad back, restored to his old self in a way. The dementia had been so grueling, and his perceptions and statements so out of character, that once he was debilitated enough that he could no longer speak, we were left with his beautiful blue eyes (for the first day or two, until he became semi-conscious at best) and the feeling that he had been delivered from dementia, and instead lay dying here as his former self, in his right mind. The hospice caregivers changed his bedding every day before we even arrived, shaved him, brushed his teeth, washed his hair, made him look like he was in his own bed at home, no longer hooked up to IV’s or tubes. So when I leaned over him that day, he smelled of shaving cream, toothpaste, and soap, just the way I remembered him. I carried that smell with me as I drove away, recalling how it would come down the stairs ahead of him on Sundays, when he was the last one ready as the rest of us waited to leave for church. A man with a wife and three daughters is last in line for a shower.

            The day was one of the hottest that July, maybe in the nineties. Despite that, I drove to the lake with my windows and sunroof open, drinking in the moist heat and the dangerous feeling that I was somewhere I was not supposed to be. I felt fragile, and grateful that the friends I was about to meet for this excursion were not close friends yet. They were women around my age, with similar interests and problems, compassionate and supportive, but I knew they would not ask me questions, hug me too tightly or lingeringly, or ask if I was okay. They knew, probably better than I, what I was there for that day and the restorative power it might have over me. They had each already buried a parent. Their support was silent, but loud. The remaining participants were strangers. It was a welcome feeling to just be an anonymous body as we all schlepped the cumbersome paddleboards off of a trailer and toward the Great-Lake Erie. Only my two yoga friends knew that I was in a liminal space, “the one whose father is actively dying.” But we couldn’t concentrate on that: we had to worry about getting up, and then staying up, on the boards bobbing under us on the water inside the break wall of the lake.

            Once we were all assembled and following the leader, I noticed bystanders watching from shore. Looking through their eyes, I realized that we looked fierce, like models on a women’s magazine, unaware of our ages and instead feeling like lithe, strong teenagers. We had on an assortment of swimsuits, board shorts, yoga clothes. No cell phones, no watches, just sweaty hair up in ponytails because all of us still wear it long (I heard somewhere that if a woman can remember Gerald Ford being President, she is too old to wear a ponytail). We attentively listened to Deanna, our instructor, who seemed to embody light: blonde hair, bronzed skin, with a strong and casual manner, competent. We were in good hands. We had already developed some confidence in our strength through yoga, these friends and I, but we were all shy about our abilities on this giant, often angry lake. There was little conversation, only concentration, bodies held at attention, and deliberate motion.

            As we traveled up the shoreline, past indescribably unique and lovely homes and a bit away from the safety of the shore, Deanna led us through yoga poses. Yoga inherently employs “pratyahara,” the act of suspending the senses, of coming inside…so while there was a handful of us sprawled out some yards from each other, going through the same motions, we each practiced in isolation. I could feel my friends Jenny and Beth near me, all of us supporting each other with our presence, with our intention, and our breath, sending waves of friendship out from our hearts even as we were fighting hard to maintain various balances on a floating board. We generated immediate and copious sweat, which ran down not just our faces but our entire bodies, pooling in our bellies when we lay on our backs, making our hands slippery when we stood inverted in downward dog. We were ruddy, our ribcages heaving with exertion, slow, steady exertion. It was like being squeezed out, a sponge from a pail of water. Loose hairs frizzed around our faces or stuck to our temples. Any remnants of old mascara had long since smeared away.

            I opened my eyes and squinted around me, the glare of the fiery evening sun slapping the dark glassy water, the sky so bright my friends were rendered just silhouettes to me. My eyes burned from the salty brine of sweat, wind, and emotion. It occurred to me that my dad was just such a silhouette now, too. I suddenly felt positively impervious to any attack, ten feet tall and bulletproof. I was aware of my upper arms and shoulders rippling in smooth strength as my paddle dipped into the water, pushing my hips forward, potent. I was as strong as I had ever been, as beautiful as I would ever be, and as capable as any other person on the planet. Without warning, I sensed my dad’s presence so strongly around me that I said aloud to my friends, “I know now that there is absolutely no place else on earth that I should be at this moment then here on this lake with you.”

            I wondered if this sudden peace and feeling of connection with my dad meant that he was slipping away, even as I was gliding along in this moment of bliss. I contemplated what I would feel like if my dad took his last breath while I was on this lake, while my mom and sisters sat close and held his hands and spoke soft words to him. I knew in that moment that it would be perfectly correct if that’s the way it happened. My inner voice reminded me that I was the one who lived next door to my parents, I was the one who worked with them for fifteen years. Maybe it would be a wonderful gift to my sisters for them to finally have as much of a portion of my dad as I had always been so spoiled to have. If he passed away in my absence, I would not regret my decision to choose this spiritual experience of my dad on this lake.

            At the end of our practice, as we drifted, lying on our backs on the paddleboards with the cinnamon-hot July sun setting behind us, I closed my eyes and felt buoyant in mind and spirit. This body of mine, this body of water, and this body of friends and family was stable and certain. This mighty lake may as well have been the very palm of my dad’s hand, and the deep, wide well of his heart. I relaxed. I thought of my dad’s broad, brown hands and how they had held me up on countless summer vacations, held me by my ribs in oceans and hotel pools, tossing and playing with his kids like toys. We were never afraid. He always caught us, held us aloft. He always would. The palm of my dad’s hand, the palm of our Father’s hand. More gargantuan and mighty than this lake, but tender, both.

            Swirling, floating, feeling more accomplished than the accomplishment merited, I sensed rather than saw the sun melt low and hot into the horizon, and wondered without fear or anxiety if my dad’s light had just dipped below the surface of this life. I celebrated Savasana, the yoga pose of relaxation, drifting on a trembling sunset, feeling and tasting hot, wet salt on my face, sweat mixing with healing tears, as welcome as they were valuable, flowing unchecked. I never felt closer to my dad than at that moment; I’d never loved or appreciated him more.

Image

           

 

 

Jul29

Hap Harral Eulogy: “People Are More Important Than Things”

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hapcodeHap Harral
Our dad’s name is Hap, and what a wonderful place that is to start. He was nicknamed as a child for being happy…what better one-word description could there be for a person or his life? It makes you consider what you would be called if you were restricted to only one word.
Even as an adult, Hap refused to be anything but happy. He was happy with what God gave him. He was happy to share what God gave him.
He had and made a happy marriage with our mom, Dolores, starting with a blind date for the new year 1959. From nothing, these two created one fabulous-looking family (If I do say so myself!)
They began very deliberately with Coleen, for whom they had prayed so fervently for so many years. Then came Judy, named in gratitude for the intercession of St. Jude with achieving this growing family. And then there was me…and for some reason they stopped praying for more children.
This family grew up at St. Bartholomew Parish and school. We took $2 bets from the nuns to the Kentucky Derby each year, and once when Dolores couldn’t fulfill her playground duty, she sent Hap instead. As I recall, he broke up a fight on the boys’ side of the playground by telling the participants that they fought like girls.
This family, alongside our neighbors, laughed and cried and argued and loved through holidays, vacations, good times and bad…generic beer, CB radios, nicknames (he even nicknamed our Suburban the “yellow looney bin,” and I know one girl who will forever miss hearing herself called “Bag O’Lions.”)
Once we were grown, Hap really enjoyed his sons-in-law and finally having more male companionship. Some of us were generous in that regard, and provided more than one…
But he loved nothing and no one like he loved his grandkids:
Coleen and Neal started us off with Katie. I can still hear my dad’s voice calling out, “it’s a girl!!” at 4:30 that morning. He nicknamed her “Bird,” and carried her around on his shoulders, singing a painful rendition of “Here We Go Loop de Loo.” He taught her to say “Pooooor Happy” and “Albuquerque” and “Carlos Baerrrrrga!”
And Hap was Happy.
And speaking of baseball, Judy and Brian gave us Zack…and he, somehow, came out a whole lot like Hap. He talked incessantly about baseball: statistics, players, scores, and re-enacted exciting plays in the backyard. We pitched so many balls to that child that we put a lawn chair on the imaginary pitcher’s mound. The two of them had more intellectual conversations than the rest of us were equipped to participate in.
And Hap was Happy.
And then, Rachel Lemon was born. Our family was shocked and devastated to learn that she was terribly sick, and God took her back a few days later. And all Hap could say was “it should’ve been me. I would have taken her place.” And the thing is, he really would have. Now, he can see her again, and she can call him Happy. And yes, they will know each other.
So when we most needed to be picked up, Judy and Brian gave us Matthew. If Zack had come out thinking like Hap, Matthew certainly came out looking like him! No one who knows Hap can see Matt – his feet, his hands, his chest, his bulldog strength – and not see Hap. Our dad claimed Matthew as his baby, and was so pleased with this sweet, smiley child that he always said, “I just hope I live long enough to see how that kid turns out.”
And Hap was Happy.
But already he could see and was so proud of how each of you three kids has turned out. You all treat people the way he always did.
Which brings me to a story:
When I was about 14 or so, our dad had a Winnebago camper. And he LOVED it. Not unusual – many people have a Winnebago for summer vacations… Not our dad: he also drove his Winnebago to the office every day.
A friend of our family asked my dad if he could borrow the Winnebago for a day trip. They had company in from out of the country and wanted to visit a water park for the day. I was invited to go along, because it was my good friend’s family. We had a wonderful day.
Until the ride home when, stopping for gas, my friend’s dad plowed into the gas pump, ripping the side panel of the Winnebago.
I was distraught. My dad had very few possessions that mattered to him at all, but this weird vehicle was his baby. I was so scared about what his reaction would be. We rode the rest of the way home in total silence.
When we arrived, my friend’s dad went in first to break the news to Hap. Before I knew it, they were both coming outside to sit and open a beer together.
Later, alone with Hap, I said: “Dad, aren’t you mad”?
He answered, “listen, I knew something like this would happen. I had a feeling about it this morning, and I know how difficult an adjustment it can be to drive that vehicle.”
That irritated me, so I looked at him like he was an idiot, and said, “if you KNEW it would get damaged, WHY would you let anyone borrow it?”
He looked at ME like I was the idiot – and he said:
“Because people
are more important
than things.”
That was my dad’s philosophy of life in a nutshell.
And so, with that in mind, we have spent these past two weeks, and indeed these past two years realizing we have nothing to regret, thanks to our dad, who didn’t ever wait for the money, the time, or the weather to do the important things in life. He made us (and himself) a great life:
He loved our mother
He gave us our faith
He served his country
He traveled the world
He made a hole in one
He prayed at the Vatican
He bowled a 300 game
He golfed St. Andrews in Scotland
He saw his granddaughter graduate from college
How can we be anything but grateful?
I want to applaud our strong, beautiful mother who has literally not left Hap’s side, and my big sisters who have taken care of me, and each other, and their children throughout this challenging time.
My husband Jeff who has done everything my dad could have wanted him to, and more, to step in and be the man of the commune: I know my dad didn’t worry about me because of you.
And Brian…the original. You’ve always been here in our family, since we were the ages that your kids are now. The greatest dad in the world thought you were about the greatest dad in the world.
All of you have raised these kids as gifts to the world, and made dad so proud of you. They are his legacy.
Katie, Zack and Matt – May you someday know the same joy that you gave this man. He was simply never happier than when he was marveling at you.

It would be presumptuous to speak for my dad.

Luckily, I’m not above being presumptuous!
He would tell you all that he really enjoyed you: childhood friends like Al, clients, bowlers, Holy Name society guys, the old office gang, the Florida friends…
He’d tell us all, of course, to “Be Happy” –

To go on vacation; to take the dog with you.
To drive a trailer up the side of a mountain–and take the neighbors with you.
To get the electric blue Subaru or the old yellow Porsche 2-seater, not the beige Buick.
(My apologies to all of you beige Buick owners.)
To take your wife on your business convention trips if you want to, even if no one else does;
When you get there, wear shorts to the meetings!
Drive a gaggle of Catholic school cheerleaders to Florida in that same famous Winnebago, and manage to be passing a church just as Mass is starting.
Go ahead and tip the developmentally disabled girl who picks up your tray at Wendy’s. It will make her day.
Take the “country road,” as John Denver would say. You can get almost anywhere from Pearl Road or the Parkway, right?
Once, our dad was driving us home from somewhere in his used Chrysler LeBaron convertible, with the top down of course, through a REALLY bad neighborhood. We said, “dad, can’t we take the highway like normal people?”
He said, “You think these people who live here don’t love their kids too!?”
He loved veering off the beaten path.
He’d tell you:
To take care of each other
To say your prayers
To remember that God is a baseball fan, so if you want to get to Heaven, you better pay homage to the right sport!
And today, he wouldn’t say goodbye, would he? He never used that word.
He’d say,
“So long! Have fun!”
He approached every new experience with joyful expectation and wonder. If your car broke down, or you had to go to the ER, or your flight was diverted, he’d say something like “but LOOK at the people you got to meet!”
I know that’s how he’d approach this new experience as well. Because as the hymn says, from first Corinthians,

Eye has not seen
Ear has not heard
No human mind has conceived
What God has ready
For those who love him.

So long, dad…
Have fun.

**************************************************************************

Mary Beth Harral
July 26, 2013, St. Bartholomew Church

Sep25

Grown Up

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Yesterday provided an opportunity for a long drive on my own, listening to music and enjoying the Ohio autumn scenery. Walking and driving are where ideas pop up for me, probably for you too, I imagine. Here’s what floated up yesterday: the mundane things that made me feel like a grown up. I can’t say why, but one of those things was ordering a Caesar salad for the first time. I was about 20, having been invited to lunch by a boss, actually the boss’ boss, when I worked for the local branch of the cable tv company. His name was Kevin, and now that I think about it, he was probably only in his early 30’s. He had a wife and two toddler boys, whom I would later have the opportunity to babysit (relax, it was never presented as being expected or tied to my job; instead it made me feel like a trusted–albeit paid–friend) and I felt very important and intimidated to be asked to a lunch meeting. There was definitely an agenda, and we went to the Ground Round restaurant not far from our offices. And that’s where I decided that a grown-up order would be the Caesar salad. I may or may not have eaten that type of salad before that day, but it became my official adult, professional, corporate lunch order. Innocuous, but still stylish, I thought. Those croutons and fancy shaved parmesan. The knowledge that the dressing was “supposed” to be made with raw egg and anchovies. How mature. Perhaps not the case at the Ground Round restaurants, but the salad remains a favorite to this day and I do make homemade Caesar dressing the authentic way.

Another order that smacked of adulthood was a fresh bagel with cream cheese. Growing up, bagels came out of the freezer and went into the toaster, then were buttered. Crunchy, delicious carbs. It wasn’t until I became aware of adult things like New York City, Jewish delis, and lox, that I considered the very different yet equally satisfying breakfast order. In fact, there weren’t actually places to get what could be called a fresh bagel on my side of Cleveland when I was a kid, and definitely not in suburbia. I still like bagels both ways, but in my mind they are as different as donuts and muffins are from one another. If you crave one, the other won’t quite scratch the itch completely.

What sort of things made you feel like an adult for the first time?

Sep18

A melting ice cube…

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I remain in love with a road trip. Not just the destination, no, the road trip. Yesterday was a rare opportunity for me to have a solo one; Jeff and I had been in North Carolina for two weeks, and he flew from there to Philly on business while I had the luggage and the Fruck (the Fake-Truck, as we call the white Honda Ridgeline we recently leased) to bring home to Ohio. I had visions of loud music and an open sunroof, but alas, Mother Nature had other plans. I had cool temps, dense fog, and full-on rain through much of North Carolina, Virginia, and West Virginia. For once, it was Ohio weather boasting the sun and warmth, so my last two hours were the breezy and loud ones. The front end of the trip, though, was spent catching up on podcasts.

First, I listened to an episode of The Modern Yoga Podcast, of which I am a co-star (you’re laughing, right?) or more accurately, regular co-host…this was the episode I missed because I had four inches of water in my old basement on the morning of the recording. Next in line was Jesus Calling, an episode in which Dr. Esau McCaulley passionately reminded that every single life, the life of every criminal and addict and idiot, as long as it’s still going on, has the chance to be something beautiful AND more importantly, that’s how we need to look at each other. To not see someone as a lost cause, ever. And to know that our own successes are not simply the result of our own talents and work, but of Providence. My favorite quote was “we owe each other ATTENTION.” Before you can help someone, you have to SEE them. Not the thousand mile stare we give the homeless (all paraphrased). Every single human life matters, but we only listen to the stories that end with our definition of success. Those are all his words, not mine, and they’re simple ones. Platitudes we all know by heart, but for me, that’s what’s good about a road trip. Listening. A lone drive, the solitude of experiencing the weather, knowing what the fog is shrouding on the winding West Virginia turnpike, but having no agenda besides listening. Fertile soil for the seeds to grow.

On our Modern Yoga Podcast, Joyce Fijalkovich Atherton and I often remark how a teacher’s cue in a yoga class can be repeated dozens of times in a hundred ways, in different classes by varied instructors. But then suddenly, something lands differently and the experience, the pose, the breath, becomes a puzzle piece that fits for the first time. A light bulb moment, an epiphany, an A-Ha…we call it many things. That’s how I felt about the next podcast in my traveling lineup. Looking at the episode list for the Mel Robbins Podcast, my eye was caught by “If You Only Listen to One Podcast Today…” — okay, sold! Here was the golden nugget (referring to how we–certainly I!–often move the same goal to the NEXT year’s resolution list over and over again): “your life is a melting ice cube.” Yeah, we know all of those platitudes too, but this time? To visualize a melting ice cube, and there ain’t no ice cube tray or ice dispenser…just the melting ice cube, ’til its a puddle of water. Quotes like “No one gives a shit about what you do” and “you’re the one in your way” supported the visual.

It’s really not my intention here to advertise podcasts. But yesterday’s lessons were this morning’s breakfast, so yes I will spend a very few minutes (which is all it takes to turn the figurative steering wheel) writing.

And also, the actual physical exercising/muscle building that appears on each year’s resolution list. Because, despite never having achieved my best body, it’s now melting literally and figuratively and this old lady’s concern has shifted to health and mobility.

Looks like maybe the drive brought the drive. For this one day, anyway.

See ya!

Jul27

Elaine

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Last week, we had not one, but two memorials to attend. Not just to “attend,” but to participate in because they celebrated the lives of such significant and beloved humans. My age, which is not so advanced at 54, allows an ever-increasing number of these losses. Which makes perfect sense, of course, but that doesn’t make a single thing about letting go of people you love easier. Tim and Elaine. As far as I know, mostly unbeknownst to each other, even though we all know we’ve got a Kevin Bacon thing going on with almost everyone. Elaine passed away just three days after Tim, so this latter post will be about her.

It was ten years ago this month that we lost Hap, my dad, a loss that I have written about numerous times, but it was at exactly that time when Elaine reentered our lives. On purpose. A lot of people showed up for us when we lost Hap. Most didn’t know what to say or do, and of course–there was nothing to say or do. But Elaine found something to do.

She’s not “mine” to talk about, which is why I haven’t written or posted anything yet about her passing. I don’t know her children well enough to share any news on their behalf about their mother. But this is what I do, write/talk/share to process, and no one has to read it anyway. But I have an ever-present fear that I will forget things, or that others will. And I don’t ever want to forget–or to be unable to conjure the memories.

I first met Elaine when I was only about five or six years old. Even from that long ago, my impression of her is strong because she was so pretty. Sounds shallow, maybe, but to a young child, all moms look like moms. Elaine had a unique, attractive energy about her. Her daughter Lisa and my sister Judy were classmates and friends, and that’s the context of my exposure to Elaine. I remember her pretty smile, the way she spoke to me as if I was just another person worthy of conversation rather than the incidental Kindergartener. I remember her dog, Raindrop. She was social, I got that about her before I knew what the word meant. And as a child, I felt singularly unintimidated by her adulthood. She was a tall woman, not unlike the woman I would grow up to be. Stylish hair and clothes, broad hands and tan feet. Wearing jewelry. These are the details I recall as I see her in our driveway in the 1970’s in my mind’s eye.

At some point during our childhoods, Elaine’s family moved a suburb over, and I know that my parents socialized or saw her at various locales and events over the years. However long it had been, greeting cards would still come in the mailbox for big occasions from Elaine, and she was always on the invite list for our family showers, weddings, anniversary parties…

Ten years ago when Hap died, Elaine was a single woman still living just minutes away from us, still in touch as much or as little as anyone else was with my mom. I’m sure, although I have no recollection, that she showed up at the visitation and/or funeral for my dad. I’m certain she sent cards…plural. And clearly she called or otherwise “checked in” with my mom, Dolores.

When my dad passed away, he had been in a nursing home and we had really lost him in the two years leading up to his death to the harrowing Lewy Body dementia. So although we grieved, our grief had already been in process and his death was a release from an earthly body and mind that he had well outgrown. We were sad, but not in shock or traumatized by his passing. But because of his disease, each of us had spent a great deal of our time with him; his death left quite a literal void in the daily schedule, mostly for our mom.

It wasn’t long after Hap died that my mom came to my sisters and me saying, “Elaine has invited me to go to Florida for a month or two this winter.”

I think Coleen, Judy and I all thought it was a grand idea, but my mom had never gone anywhere without our dad. They were not the couple who had separate trips of any kind, and they loved their travel together or with the rest of us as a family. I was truly surprised to hear Dolores finish the conversation by saying, “…and I think I’d like to say yes.”

Thus began a renewal of friendship that has helped sustain my mom through her widowhood this past decade. Elaine was not widowed; she didn’t pretend to know what my mom might be going through. She just knew that they both liked each other, and shopping, and cute shoes, and eating lunch, among many other things. Turns out, they were completely compatible winter travelers despite one being an early bird (Elaine) and one being a sleeper-inner (Dolores.) That first winter and every one after that (with the exception of the global pandemic travel interruption) they rented condos in various Florida locations for four or six weeks. They made vodka and tonics in the evenings and they drove their rental car onto the beaches where they set up a chair and talked. They bought groceries and had their breakfasts and coffee at home, and they hung out at the pool. They rented movies and went out to dinners sometimes. I wish they’d gone out even more, and not worried about the cost! My mom was the driver and Elaine, the navigator and copilot. They found flea markets and fish fries and sometimes bought so much that another bag was needed on the return trip home in March. They complemented each other well on those trips. I must admit that I came to enjoy picking Elaine and her suitcases up on an icy January morning before dawn to deliver the two of them to the airport, and likewise for the March airport pickup, when the weather wasn’t any better yet than when they departed.

But it didn’t end there, with the winters away. Elaine became the friend who would invite Dolores to the local outdoor pavilion band concert, to the senior club lunch, to the free dinner that came with a community center talk on finances. It is Elaine who suggested that they pick up lunch or pack snacks and open their portable chairs to sit and watch people like me kayak or paddleboard on Coe Lake. I didn’t realize until it was already happening how valuable Elaine’s invitations were. What would my mom have done with so much extra time on her hands if not for these invitations?

My mom’s best friend of over 55 years, Ellie, was always in the picture, and since they were widowed within a year of each other, they leaned heavily on each other. We’ve always done holidays together with Ellie’s family, our family, and they did weekend Mass and dinner or breakfast together, so it seemed a natural progression to put all of these “golden girls” together. At some point I started referring to them that way, along with Ellie’s son in law’s mom Lois (it sounds reductive to me to even explain these relationships because they are simply all “family.”)

It’s no secret that I have not worked a “real” job more than a decade now, so it felt incumbent upon me to plan the occasional fun outing with my Golden Girls. We started with annual Dyngus Day, the day after Easter, a street festival celebration in Cleveland with Polish food and beer, pierogies, and plenty of polka music. Eventually, the ladies sported matching shirts for this yearly event. We’ve driven to look at Christmas lights, a farmer’s market for fall cider, even an afternoon on a rented pontoon boat. During all these times, the most enjoyable part of the date was hearing the ladies talk about old times…old Cleveland buildings where they had worked, danced, shopped. Where they lived, how they met their husbands, the kind of food their mothers made for dinner. After each outing, I would receive an email from Elaine, or a thank you card, a box of chocolates or even a wrapped gift. More often that not, all of the above. She shared a birthday with my husband and never forgot to wish him a happy one.

These outings won’t stop now in Elaine’s absence; in fact, they began before she was part of them. Even though she was the second eldest of the crew, I didn’t expect she’d be the first we’d lose. She was not frail and didn’t act old. She may have had struggles like knee pain and diminishing eyesight, but she remained enthusiastic and charming in her pursuit of her days’ endeavors. She lit up talking about her grandchildren and great-grandchildren, one or two of which were brand new at the time of her death.

A couple of weeks ago, she and my mom attended their usual chair yoga class together. Later that day, Elaine took herself to the doctor, where it was discovered that she was experiencing heart arrhythmia. She was transferred to the hospital where she had a suspected mild stroke, but was doing well enough to not only visit with family, but to compliment and make friends with the staff. A couple of days later, still in the hospital, she experienced a more catastrophic event that she could not recover from. Thankfully, hospice was her next stop. My mom and I were able to visit her there, as she slumbered peacefully with her beloved family around her, filling her ears and heart with the love she had passed around for years.

As I type this, my mom is out “bopping,” as she calls it, after her hair appointment. Last night, she went to an ice cream social at her church. I know there’s an Elaine-shaped hole in her heart and in her days, but she’s trying, and I’m proud of her for it. If not for Elaine’s intervention a decade ago, Dolores might be a much older version of the woman she is today. Maybe less independent, maybe less fun. A guest on The Modern Yoga Podcast recently spoke about “watering your friends, rather than watering your friends’ plants,” and I can’t think of a better description of Elaine’s friendship. When my mom needed nurturing, “watering,” Elaine didn’t just ask if we needed anything. She showed up, without expectation or pressure.

I’m so grateful she was still independently living the fullness of life right up until the day of her hospitalization. One of God’s angels on earth, and I know she will keep watering her loved ones from a higher ground now. As the saying goes, we are all just walking each other home. What a blessing Elaine has been as a companion.

https://obits.cleveland.com/us/obituaries/cleveland/name/elaine-gommel-obituary?id=52423333

Jul27

Tim

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This month, we had not one, but two memorials to attend. Not just to “attend,” but to participate in because they celebrated the lives of such significant and beloved humans. My age, which is not so advanced at 54, allows an ever-increasing number of these losses. Which makes perfect sense, of course, but that doesn’t make a single thing about letting go of people you love easier. Tim and Elaine. As far as I know, mostly unbeknownst to each other, even though we all know we’ve got a Kevin Bacon thing going on with almost everyone. Tim passed away just three days before Elaine, so this first post will be about him.

It was ten years ago this month that we lost Hap, my dad, a loss that I have written about numerous times, but what strikes me now on the upcoming big milestone anniversary of his death is the memory of what Tim said. A lot of people said a lot of stuff; the fact that something stuck means something.

Tim, my mother-in-law’s baby brother, exclaimed to me about my dad, “Now he sees! And is SEEN!” with a huge smile on his face. He made me realize how exciting and welcome my dad’s passing really was, viewed through the lens of our shared beliefs and considering the demolishing dementia that was his end to this life on earth.

Tim was quintessentially Irish, with a constant sparkle in his eye (sometimes a devious one) and a wry humor. He was an unbelievably interesting and eloquent extemporaneous speaker and teacher, and I’ve had conversations with him about everything from recorder music to granola. He loved to read and to share or gift books. He was incredibly intelligent, but also innocent as a wide-eyed child about some of the pursuits of our modern world. His thoughts were so profound, his insights so remarkable, yet he still had the best sense of humor. One that ran the spectrum between a Kindergartener and the most highbrow imaginable. He met a Pope. He put a spoonful of his hot coffee on his vanilla ice cream. He never flew without a sport coat, even if it was paired with his ancient wide-wale corduroys. Even so, he looked scholarly with his haircut and fashionable glasses. He didn’t understand the need for hummus (we disagreed on that, as we did on his high regard for Dave Matthews’ music) but he liked Fritos, when I saved him any. Just last January, he and the usual annual Flamingo Open foursome golfed their 36 holes a day, despite what was already raging inside Tim’s physical body and his age, 75.

It seems ridiculous to even note his age, because he didn’t even seem to be much over 60 at best. He was clever and fun, a humble and self-effacing jokester. A complete gentleman at heart, on the golf course or at the dinner table. He knew so many important and even esoteric things, yet was always truly curious about what the person next to him was into. He loved his hometown, but even more so the place that became his hometown as an adult. He probably wasn’t the perfect brother to his two sisters, although I think if you asked them that today they would say that he was. He had lifelong friendships, and the most sacred of those with his beloved bestie Ray, who delivered just the right remarks at his Memorial. It’s not very long, and while it’s available you can check it out here: (fast forward to 1:49:00) https://livestream.com/accounts/18862485/events/5598269/videos/236828741

Maybe he wasn’t perfect. I’ve seen Tim with a cigarette, and with a Scotch. I may have even heard him utter a profanity. He (barely) tolerated the chatter of our granddaughter or the spinning and barking of the family pets. Most would rarely detect any of that underlying impatience or annoyance though, even as he blessed babies and pets from the altar.

Yes, from the altar. I guess I didn’t mention that Tim decided as a grown man to become a Catholic priest. I’ve known countless priests–Catholic school since Kindergarten, first job was at the rectory, my grandmother was our parish cook and housekeeper–and yet even the most talented and kind of them could not translate the love of Jesus to other humans like Tim Horan could. I want to print and bottle and share almost everything he ever said. During the early pandemic, when Mass was an online-only event, my mom, Dolores, got into the habit of watching Fr. Tim broadcast from Holy Trinity Parish in Webster, New York. What an unexpected Covid silver lining, that we spent even more “time” with him than we would have otherwise. Time ended up being too short. We want more, more laughs, more words and wisdom, more golf. More of those fancy Christmas ornaments he used to give us, and more eyerolls. It is an impossible task to attempt to do him justice in words. I can’t even think of Tim’s face without it bringing me a smile, as I almost never saw him without one. I can only imagine his delight now; he sees, and is seen!

Fr. Timothy Horan; 75; former Holy Trinity pastor

Jun18

The Best Worst Hour

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(2012?)

The best, worst hour of every day is the hour (or two, but that just doesn’t sound as catchy, now does it?) that I visit my dad, especially now.  Initially, it was many hours at a time, unless it was a hospital behavior ward which limited the visits to one or two hours.  But back in those days, whether it was one hour or several, things were more “worst” than “best” for sure.  There was nothing to be grateful for at that time, other than the fact that my dad was safe.  It was too soon to smile about memories and be grateful for all that he had been.  We were still in the thick of it, losing him while he fought us and was angry with us for letting him be sick.  I don’t know when he let go, I don’t know when he knew how much and what was drug-induced and what wasn’t.  

My mom still has a telephone message on her voicemail from him from three months in, around September, when he was maybe in one of the hospitals or else early on at Manor Care North Olmsted.  She played it for me yesterday, and in it he sounded so sweet.  He asked how she was feeling, noting that he hadn’t been feeling great, and that he didn’t have his phone (he would ask the nurse’s station to call my mom for him in the early days) but that she should try to get ahold of him whenever she could.  It’s a mystery to me when he might have left this, because she was simply there almost all of the time.  I had a message saved on my voicemail too, from October.  I received it while Jeff and Mom and I were in Florida, packing up their now sold retirement home – another emotional story for a different chapter.  In the message to me, he was agitated because he somehow had the idea (he would wake up with these ideas, probably from dreams but then didn’t make the distinction between dream and reality – either that or he just flat out hallucinated it) that my mom was angry with him, accusing him of seeing another woman. He wanted to impress upon me that of course that was absolutely not true, there was no other woman, and would I please convince her of that?  When I switched from a Blackberry to my IPhone, I was told the message could not be saved.  I was initially very upset, but I know that it already wasn’t my dad, and while I would love to have his voice with me always, it really IS in my head. I’m sure I won’t always be able to hear it, but that’s the nature of things.  

It is so hard to describe his early illness and nursing home “incarceration” because he was still very much Hap, and yes fought us on things.  But at the same time, his fight wasn’t convincing because while he knew who all of us were and that he was mad at us, he also thought concurrently that he was on a cruise ship or at the office.  So you see, we really did have to do what we were doing, and never know who/what you’d get when you went to visit.  

I’m going to go back to the past later, but for a different perspective, let’s talk about today since it is fresh in my mind.  It was a completely uneventful visit, but still pertinent to the subject of “the best hour, the worst hour” of my day.  Parking your car at the nursing home is never a fun thing – what’s next, you know, is to walk into a place that is familiar, too familiar, but unfamiliar as well.  You don’t want it to be familiar, it’s for other people.  The anxiety grips you as you walk towards the door, because you  know what kind of smells are going to hit you when you enter, and that there will probably be at least one person hanging out in a wheelchair, looking like nothing you’ve ever wanted to allow into your life. Maybe they are just literally hanging there, belted in.  Their head is probably lolling to one side, perhaps they are drooling.  Perhaps they can say hello to you, but many times they cannot.  Now that you’re “a regular,” the sight of such a person no longer disturbs you and you smile and greet them by name.  That’s part of the paradox of the best/worst.  It never gets less gross, disgusting, inhumane, or horrifying.  Yet you embrace all of those things, and the people to whom they are happening, with compassion.  You don’t notice that Bob’s hair is always greasy and never combed and that he spits when he talks.  You don’t care that the food is all over the faces and down the fronts when you are in the dining room with the others.  You don’t balk at seeing the top of the diaper out of someone’s pants, or people without their teeth.  You stop noticing the damaged toenails of the diabetics or the nose-picking of the guy with the really long fingernails that no one ever seems to cut.  They are beautiful and you come to love them for what you know they must have been once.  You see your own mortality, frailty, and probable future, and you have compassion.

But before that, let’s be honest, it sucks.  Today, I went at lunch time, and my dad was already seated at “his spot” in the dining room, by the window.  He had been shaved, which is always a plus – because he looks like my daddy again, clean-shaven, beautiful skin.  To see him look disheveled, although it is common now, is nothing like the dad I knew (unless we’re talking early morning before the shower – then that white hair was wild!).  Now, though, showers are about every three days in the nursing home.  That part is done by the aides, so we get to ignore or forget what exactly that process looks like.  Does my dad just sit there on the shower chair?  Does he participate, or let them do all of the work?  Is he ever “with it” enough to be embarrassed  any  more?  He made a comment to my mom once at the Manor, pointing out a giant FEMALE aide, and telling my mom “she gives such a good shower!”  If that’s not proof my dad was ‘gone’, I don’t know what was.  The man was ridiculously modest, especially around women.  I can’t say that enough times or with enough emphasis.  So, today, my dad was clean shaven, hair combed back, and that made him look good. He was also sitting up straight, which helps the illusion of health also;  some days, he is leaning over to the left, drooling and with one arm draped over the wheelchair.  He matched today, thanks to whomever took care of him.  His sweatpants and sweatshirt matched or complemented each other, which is always a toss up.  

You may think that we are uninvolved, that we could demand he be put in a particular outfit every day, that he doesn’t like this, doesn’t like that – but we found out fairly early on that most of those type of demands aren’t for the patient, if we’re being honest.  They are for the family, so it doesn’t hurt so bad.  Dad has no idea if he matches, and no one there does, either.  Earlier at the Manor, if his shirt was inside out or something didn’t match well, we might mention it or try to fix it for him.  All this did was to confuse my dad.  It was to make US feel better, not him.  Because he felt just fine with it backwards or whatever.  That’s part of the learning process for us – the prettier nursing home (which couldn’t keep him locked in), the demands on what he wears and eats (which he no longer has a clue about) and things like phones and television remotes (which he loses, or adds to his hallucinations, or throws), and even the photos and calendars and mementos we have placed all around him in his room, are for US.  He lives in a very particular world, and those things do not matter.  In fact, they interfere.  

Today, his appearance made me say “hey, good lookin’!”  And I leaned over him to give him a hug.  He hugged back, which he doesn’t often do, and he smiled.  He seemed strong today, awake and aware.  Not aware he has dementia and is in a nursing home, but more aware that it is daytime, I am sitting with him, and that he should pick up his fork and eat lunch.  Other days he looks vacant, hazy, or has his eyes closed even as he mumbles as if we are speaking .  Still other days he “answers” someone calling to him a few feet away, a hallucination.  Some days, he needs help eating, having no idea or no desire to engage with the food, or because in his mind, he is in a different reality.  He will treat his napkin like a form and his finger like a pen and begin working, despite the plate of food in his way.  But today, he was pretty good.  He burped, and then laughed.  A return to being a baby, is how I look at it.  He looked at me sheepishly, and I told him he was just cracking himself up, that all men were seventh grade boys at heart.  He liked that, and he laughed and looked at me.  

Nowadays, those are the days that make me cry.  When my dad smiles, not a polite smile for someone else but a smile because he is chuckling at something, there is nothing in the world that is more beautiful for me to see.  He was always such a good looking man, and smiling was such a part of him.  When he smiles at me, with those blue eyes and beautiful face, I miss my dad.  Those few times are glimpses into the happy, Happy man that he was.  And happy for Happy was a deliberate choice.  He was filled with natural optimism and glee, but he just refused to be anything but happy, no matter what the situation.  And I love him for that, and I embrace that lesson from him, but oh, how fast the tears come, though I’m smiling through them, when he smiles at me.  Then I hug him, and kiss him.  

The meal is always a variable, too.  Today, he was drinking okay by himself from a normal cup.  I keep meaning to take a milkshake to ascertain whether or not he can still drink out of a straw, in case it comes to that.  Because more and more he is having trouble with the mechanics, and the brain command to DO the mechanics, of eating and drinking.  Sometimes, he forgets in mid meal after he was just doing decently.  Often while drinking, once the glass is half empty (yes, yes I know Hap would say half-full) he holds it to his lips but can’t get any.  I have to remind him, tip your head back, dad… and so far, that helps and he is able to get the rest out.  As for the solids, well, it’s a mess.  He probably can’t really use both hands with a knife and fork, so he uses one hand or the other and a fork or spoon to feed himself.  Today, he began with his jello (that’s another thing I refuse to correct – I am gonna let that man eat dessert first!) and yes, it is messy.  They usually put a giant sized bib on all the residents, which early on seemed so wrong for my dad and he often didn’t use it, but his skills have deteriorated so it IS useful – but I don’t think he is any more aware of what it is or that someone placed it on him than he knows what day today is.  Since he had used his spoon with the jello, he dug in to the green beans with it next. That didn’t work as well, so I suggested the fork.  But until I replaced the spoon with the fork in his hand myself, he did not make the change.  And so, it is messy, but I don’t help him unless he physically will not feed himself.  I figure, the longer he can do something, we should encourage him to do it, if for no other reason than to give him something to do in a long, long day of sameness.  But again – that’s me talking.  His day may seem full and exhausting to him, and in fact I don’t think his day is a day at all.  I think he cycles in about three hour increments.  There are days he is fabulous at lunch and terrible at dinner, and days that mom comes home saddened because he seemed so bad at lunch, but when I go for dinner he is a new man.  Such is this disease – whatever it is.    

Now that my dad is more ill, and he is safe and cared for, and my mom is doing decently and is healthy, I have the luxury of feeling like these are not the worst of times. That enables me to have the best hour of the day with my dad, too.  While he may be concentrating on his green beans, I can be nostalgic and remember who he was.  And while, of course, I didn’t love him enough or thank him enough when I should have, I can now sing to him, songs I know he used to like, like Donna Wells “Happiest Girl in the Whole USA” or “I Never Promised You a Rose Garden” by Lynn Anderson, or old country classics or folk songs.  He liked “Green Green Grass of Home” and “Honey,”  and Kenny Rogers songs.  I can rub his shoulders while I talk to him, and if I have time for a real treat, I massage his arms and legs with moisturizer.  Listen, I’m no saint – I put gloves on first, for his protection as well as mine.  We don’t need to exchange germs and bacteria any more than we are anyway, and okay I admit it…I still get grossed out by bodies.  But that is okay… because I know, no matter what level of sanity someone is at, it just feels damn good to have someone massage your arms, leg muscles, neck.  I know why I love manicures and pedicures, and it’s not just because of the pretty polish. 

I recently saw Amy Grant on tv, discussing caring for her elderly parents.  Her mother had recently died after having dementia, and her father has it now.  She was distraught that this was what the final chapter was like for two faithful servants like her parents, but she said that she was very moved by what a friend told her:  this is the last great lesson your parents will teach you.  Amy decided that if this was what her parents were teaching her, she damned well better be all in and learn it.  While the choice is not a conscious one of my dad’s, God works in mysterious ways and I know that I am learning about myself, my husband, my family, and every individual I come across during this experience.  Part of the best hour of the day is being forced to sit there and really not think of or care about anything but reflecting on my dad, on the life he gave us, on the relationship that we had… of all that he gave up, joys he experienced, how he has suffered.  How much I owe to him.  How unique and wonderful he is.  How blessed I am that this hurts so bad, that I have nothing but good memories and that’s why this is so devastating.  What a gift to be 43 and just now to have lost my dad, and what a gift to be so torn up about it.  Some people don’t talk to their parents.  Some people live far away from them. Some people are always fighting.  I am devastated to lose my dad this particular way, but I am so blessed and grateful that it IS this painful, simply because of what that says about all that came before.  Sometimes I wonder if my dad’s prayers are being answered.  If he prayed his whole life for my mom to be healthy and live a long life, for his children to be healthy and prosperous, and for God to give him the suffering instead.  I would not doubt it.  

I know that the angels who take care of my dad (well first of all, I do know that they are not all, and not always, angels) do not know him at all.  They don’t know that he was much more fun, kinder, more generous and loving than the person they take care of in the bed next to his or the room across the hall.  All I’ve got is our example to show these people how remarkable he was.  Do I love that every single nursing home and hospital so far has brought us people who sought us out, saying things like “wow, you girls and your mom sure do love your dad!” Hell yes.  I’m proud that people notice, and I am sure that is part of my sisters’ motivation too.  Not as in we want people to see us visiting so we get ‘credit’ – no, not that at all.  Rather, it is what he truly deserves, and he also deserves to have people see it and know it – THIS is what love looks like when you have been such a wonderful father.  Learn from him, people.  This is a man we will never leave, never forget, never cease to thank and love and blanket with affection to show the world how special and superior he was.  Everyone thinks this of their loved one, or most, I am sure.  But, sorry – we are here to show you different, more.  Hap Harral was in a league of his own.  

Feb27

*Coming back to an oldie from 2016. Many yoga mats later…and having inherited my beloved late yoga teacher’s shared mats… What is Your Yoga Mat Made Of?

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Nov 7, 2016 

What Is Your Yoga Mat Made Of?  

When I first started taking yoga, I borrowed a mat from the studio. Why invest in a mat if I wasn’t sure I was going to stick with it? It was one of those extra thick, Pilates-style mats which I now know made the balancing postures even more difficult than the thinner sticky mats. That Christmas, my husband bought me a yoga mat – basic industrial blue, the last one I would have ever chosen. But on that ugly mat, I began to fall in love with practicing yoga. Eventually, I bought my own mat, chosen solely for color and a cool hippie design stenciled on it. It was a dark beautiful eggplant color. As it wore with use, I kept it rolled in my car “just in case” I’d need it after I bought my new, lighter, spongy lavender mat. Then I began to see physical results from my months of regular yoga, and I realized it might be time to spend a little more money and buy a more serious mat that wouldn’t show wear and tear, wouldn’t send little foam flecks like sparks from under my toes when I rolled over them between urdhva mukha and adho mukha. About a hundred bucks later, I had my current salmon-colored mat with a microfiber mat-sized towel for those hot, sweaty practices. I keep my “newer old” lavender mat rolled up in the trunk, too! And now, I even have a super thin travel weight yoga mat to whip out at any hotel, beach, or home visit.  

But none of this is what I mean. Yoga can be done with or without a mat, on almost any surface. But many of us hold onto our yoga mats like a lifeline. Why? Because of what our yoga mats are really made of.  

My yoga mat is made of the tentative trepidation with which I first stepped onto it that day when the only other two ladies in class were tan, taut, and physically perfect. It holds the quivers of my first weak chaturangas and the hot breath of what I didn’t even know yet was ujjayi pranayama. It held me up when child’s pose brought me to tears, buckling under the weight of my dad’s dementia. It bears the crescent grips of my fingernails as I fought to raise myself up into wheel and free myself from the heavy anxiety of knowing the cell phone in my car might be buzzing with bad news again. It has silently observed the friends I have made simply by their silent nearness in practice. It has absorbed every single intention I have offered up during a practice, which means it has been a silent witness to my first yoga teacher’s dying Greyhound, another teacher’s emotional abuse by business associates, another’s grad student angst, another’s lost dog the week before her wedding. My mat has been under my arm and under my feet when my mind was full of my sisters sending their children to college, my neighbor’s entire family being stricken with cancer, the lump I felt on my rib.  

My yoga mat has soaked up the gratitude I have poured out in my yoga practice, for a life so abundantly blessed. For a husband who works so hard so that I can play this instrument called yoga, among other things. For the continued endurance of the sick twins of one of my yoga-mates, and the Rottweiller at our practice who will only move in for a hug after she hears the word “Namaste.” For the teacher who reminded me that we are all just beginners. It has stayed rolled in its bag but was still present when three of us decided to share a cup of tea and tears instead of Asanas one day. It is the vessel which contains so many of my prayers, my hopes, my goals, my pain. I have relaxed in bliss on my yoga mat. I have banged my head in frustration on it – wiped my brow, fallen on my knees. Curled into a fetal ball on it, as we all do sometimes whether by design or out of necessity. It pushes me; I push back. My sweat, spit, pulled hair and chipped nail polish are all part of my yoga mat.    

Sure, I can wash it…and I do, from time to time. But thankfully, my yoga mat will always be made of the fabric that it helps create: the drinking in, the letting go, the reaching out and holding on. It feels my weight, heavy some days, light as air others, steady at times, slippery and shaky. I have made a fool of it, and I have glorified it. It is my magic carpet and my oxygen tank, my magic mirror and my security blanket. It’s like those old Levi’s…the more I beat up on it, the better we work together. All of me, poured out and broken, rolled up and carried away: that’s what my yoga mat is made of.  

Sep13

What can I use that I already have?

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What can I use that I already have?

“What can I use that I already have?”

Here’s an unsolicited peek into my somewhat odd routine: what goes on in my bathtub. Don’t be scared, it’s not what you think. I take long baths in all seasons, sometimes more than one a day, even in addition to a shower. Other than my car, the bathtub is the closest thing to an office I have. Since the advent of the smartphone (and to be honest, it was before that too, just more cumbersome) I use my time in the tub to reply to correspondence, make my class playlist, read, set my schedule, order things that I need online. Like vitamins. Or a one-inch necklace extender for my niece. Or next month’s book for book club.

Online list fulfillment, for goods or information (can I use my stand-up paddleboard on Medina Lake?) is so immediate that it’s easy to overlook all that is right in front of us. Like many, I’ve been thinking-trying-hoping-planning to downsize, to purge, to live more simply and save more money. So, this morning with that in mind as I noticed I was near the end of the tub of my favorite moisturizer, wondering if there’s a backup in the hallway linen closet… it hit me: “what might I use that I already have?” Two birds, one stone?

I’m not suggesting skipping the Cerave and using coconut oil, (although, let’s be honest, we already know I’ve DONE that for everything from moisturizer to mouth-pulling and hair-taming), but I do have drawers and closets full of things that I either need to use, donate, or pass on to someone else. The gift bag I saved last week when friends brought me gourmet chocolates (which didn’t last 48 hours), the reader glasses I inherited from Jane, a pricey hair product that my sister passed on to me because she didn’t love it, the complimentary promotional notebook from my husband’s software conference (I could open a notebook store at this point.)

These things are taking up space, waiting for “someday,” I guess? Even if each of them wouldn’t be my first and best choice, I believe they’re worthy of being used, and why can’t I compromise on the ideal for certain things? I can’t imagine a friend would object to receiving a gift in a re-purposed gift bag bearing the name of a chocolatier. Or that I (or anyone else) would notice a temporary change in product on my rarely-styled hair. Usually, old hairspray and sweat are keeping it atop my head in a scraggly bunch with some small help from something containing elastic. And for all the notebooks I fill with ideas, essays, and lists, why would I need to buy one with a cartoon cat demonstrating yoga poses on the front cover?

My friend has given me her extra high-end cosmetics, and still an internet ad for a cool eye-brightening stick has reeled me in. Candles are in almost every room of my house, and I don’t light them very often. And does anyone really need designated “travel pajamas?”

It might be fun, or so I told myself this morning, to work my way through these things taking up space: my mom gives me the conditioner packet from her hair-color box, and our heating and cooling annual checkup included a free cooler-bag. Stuff is junk, yes. But I mean, I DO travel around with homemade peanut butter and often fruit in my car, so at some point that bag might not be a bad idea!

It won’t go perfectly, but imagining myself creating space, downsizing, having less clutter, and donating or repurposing more of these things to have calmer closets and emptier surfaces is appealing. I know I won’t be awesome at this, but I’m going to try.

And, then,

What I AM a little better at, what is less practical, is turning the sentiment (“what can I use that I already have?”) into a more figurative question.

Part of my job, if my job(s) include yoga instructor/student or a wannabe writer, is thinking that way: off the mat, outside the box.

As we strive for personal improvement by reading another self-help book, continuing our education, learning a new skill, making ourselves busier by doing ALLLL the things…adding to our schedule and resumé and activities list and that of our family members as well…

What if we each take a moment each morning and ask ourselves, “what can I use that I already have?”

If you’re a stellar soup-maker like my sister, and now have an emptier nest, you can share your gift with someone lonely, ill, or elderly. Most single people might be more inclined to open a can than go through the work of making homemade soup for themselves, so there’s nothing more appreciated! If you have tons of old books, you could write messages in them before donating to a local bookstore (there still are a few!) or make the message and the book choice even more personal and use it as an ACTUAL GIFT in a REUSED gift bag for a friend’s birthday with the promise of a picnic together. Last week a friend told me that when her daughter moved into a new home, the next-door neighbor gifted her a cutting from a plant. It had been given to that neighbor years ago by the previous owner of the home she had just moved into. What a precious connection! Could you take your dog to visit a nursing home? In the past year and a half, we’ve all seen people who sew make and share masks, a perfect example of this idea. A Facebook friend across the country, a real go-getter whom I only know once-removed through my husband, invited me to an accountability group of people trying to support and motivate each other. And don’t even get me started on the friend who came over to shovel a few tons of gravel for our firepit while we weren’t even home helping!

So, we are doing it already, right? But next time you’re tempted to overextend yourself, to stress yourself out trying to think of what you can do or give or be to someone…ask yourself that question:

“What can I use that I already have?”

I don’t mean just when it comes to giving gifts or sharing things. Let’s be honest, we’re not all going to do this instead of buying gifts (or at least I hope not!) But to add richness and purpose to each of our lives, instead of constantly asking yourself what MORE you can add to accomplish more, to contribute, what about what’s sitting in the crowded closet of your personality, the jumbled shelves of your talents and skills? Why add more to the pantry when its already so well-stocked?

If I could draw, I’d want to make the best custom cards. With clever sayings in them! You’re funny? Make someone laugh today. A stranger, even. You’re an awesome mom and your kid just went to college? Reach out to a young mom who may be struggling and remind her in your wisdom how these long days come up painfully short. Remind her of one of your favorite parenting hacks. If you used to be a bartender, don’t just serve wine at the next gathering, make a signature drink! If you’re direct, let that serve someone well by not skirting around an issue. (Thanks, Kim W.)

Your advice is invaluable. Your experience is needed. Your special talent can fill a gap like spackle today. There’s that quote about judging a fish by its ability to climb a tree, or something. Why do we try to climb the trees if we are so beautifully suited to the water, and vice versa?

Amy Grant sang, “Do you protect what you already own?”

My yoga teacher used to quietly say, “everything you need is right here.”

Ask yourself: “What can I use that I already have?”

Sep7

Twentieth.

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Twenty years married,

We are

Dreaming new dreams at midnight

Suspended over the valley

Under constellations

And stardust like freckles

In the moon-face

Of the Carolina night sky.

And in the morning,

We are

Tall, white weeds

In a garden of humble, cheerful dahlias

As we kneel on the cold, unyielding floor

No padded kneeler or gilded anything,

Just unselfconscious voices in hymns we know.

On the same day

When an inescapable hurricane rages

And willing soldiers have been slaughtered,

We are somehow given everything:

Awash in friendship, new and old

Bound to our families, here

Or gone ahead, waiting and winking.

Feb22

Loobies.

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Just found this in an old file of my own. A school assignment, maybe a prose poem. Wow. Takes me back.

Mary Beth Tweardy

February 21, 2013

Lewy Bodies

He sure does like his coffee, the blacker the better.  A fresh pot in the afternoons at his office, adding more dark grounds to the damp mound in the filter. There goes that bug, shirking behind the file cabinet. So many files. He knows that page is here, but not what folder it’s in. Paper cuts burn every time he washes his hands. He washes often because occasionally he can see a tiny mouse skittering away when he snaps the light-switch in the morning. Lunch is always out: Alfonso’s, where the waitress knows his favorites. Lately, the pasta is sticky.  He never preferred thinner noodles and this is why. The ends become gummy, clumps of sauce and cheese but who can tell what he’s eating anymore or what file it is in. He can’t wash his hands when it feels like his gloves are on, but at least he can shift the stick in the Subaru which sits, stalled. Since the pasta isn’t as good anymore, he eats cauliflower, the steamed head yielding to the fork’s tremors.  They pour a non-dairy creamer pod in his coffee, and he shoots it like Drambuie. Someone asks about pudding? Or marshmallows? So he gropes for a file – found it! “Pillow,” he answers.