My Ticker

When I was in 2nd grade at St. Ita’s school, I had a lay instructor. Among her many teaching tasks was imparting the doctrine of Roman Catholicism to 30-plus seven-year-olds. From her instruction I’m certain I learned many good tidbits that helped to properly mold and permanently shape my character, although I do not recall them at the given moment. The one and only thing that remains in my memory is the day she explained to us the concept of the word “eternity.” I can picture myself sitting at my desk somewhere in the middle row, about half way back, as she explained eternity this way:

“...imagine a huge sphere of granite, which by the way is considered to be one of the hardest stones in the world, and imagine that sphere of granite to be much, much larger than our planet earth,”

“Okay, got it" I thought as I sat with that image.

“…now imagine a dove, just a regular-sized dove, (I think at this point she pointed to a picture of a dove that was posted above the blackboard and which represented the Holy Spirit to us, young budding Catholics) and now imagine if that dove flew by just once every one thousand years and gently brushed the huge granite sphere with its wing...”

“Yeah, Teach, got that image, too,” I thought smugly.

“now, think about how long it would take that dove to completely erode or wear away that granite with only one gentle brush of a wing every 1,000 years, and you have just the teensiest, itsy-bitsiest fraction of an idea of what eternity means.”

I slumped down into my seat. I felt minuscule. I wanted to crawl inside my desk cavity. I felt tired, just completely exhausted. I rested my head on my desktop and closed my eyes. I saw myself as a tiny speck of dust floating somewhere in the middle of an expansive universe that surrounded the colossal granite sphere my teacher had just described. I recognized not only my insignificance, but the insignificance of any human being in the grand scheme of a universe that had absolutely no end. I knew then that I had no wish to exist forever.

I felt the teacher gently touch my shoulder. She asked if I was okay. I lifted my head, looked up at her and smiled, “Yes, yes I’m fine.” “Well, it’s time for recess, Ranell, so go outside and join your classmates.”

***

After Cherished Husband and I celebrated Christmas with family on the east coast, we made a trip to visit Virginia’s historic Jamestown. Jamestown was the first permanent English settlement in North America. When the first colonists arrived, the local native people (the Paspahegh tribe of the Powhatan Confederacy) welcomed the new visitors with open arms, furnishing the colonists with much needed provisions and support. However anything resembling the bond of friendship dissipated as quickly as the morning dew in Death Valley. The tribal natives were quickly annihilated and the colonists were left sick and starving. No one kept records on the natives, but the mortality rate for colonists in Jamestown between 1609 and 1610 was 80 percent. They called it the “starving time” and some colonists found it necessary to resort to cannibalism to survive.

The employee who greeted us at the archeology museum in Historic Jamestowne said we could photograph anything in the exhibits except the human skeletons, so I snapped a photo of a display that contained a gold signet ring. The ring bore the latin inscription “ Memento Mori” (Remember Thy Death.) The ring also had the initials C.L., and it was surmised to belong to Christopher Lawne, a English Puritan. He wore it to remind himself of the shortness of life. C.L. transported 15 people to “the new land" in April of 1619. He was deceased by November of that same year.

The ring reminds me of a wristwatch I saw recently. The watch is called the Tikker Watch. The Tikker System will, upon your inputting the correct information, give you an estimate as to your remaining life expectancy and then count down every second until you die. Are you with me on this?: the watch will keep time in reverse of one's expected life. So, let’s say I'm a healthy newborn baby -my life expectancy might be (depending on where I am born) about 99 years, and my watch would read something like: 98 years, 9 months, 22 days, 11 hours, 52 minutes and 44 seconds, then one second later it would read: 98 years, 9 months, 22 days, 11 hours, 52 minutes and 43 seconds, and then: 98 years, 9 months, 22 days, 11 hours, 52 minutes and 42 seconds...

Some people call it the “death watch” -kind of morbid. But the Tikker folks say its product serves as a reminder of the precious pricelessness of time itself and, that only by being constantly aware of the ephemeral fleetingness of life can we make informed decisions on how to make the most of our time.

I found this on their site:

The Tikker Watch was designed to provide you with a constant reminder that life is truly short and we should take advantage of the time we have on this planet… Buy one now and you will see how it immediately and positively affects you and those around you. Start a new way of looking at life today! 

I don’t need the Tikker Watch, nor a gold signet ring with a latin inscription, because I had a teacher who, when I was 7 years old, taught me about “eternity.”

***

For auld lang syne, my jo,

For auld lang syne,

We'll tak a cup o' kindness yet,

For auld lang syne,

And surely ye'll be your pint-stowp!

And surely I'll be mine!

And we'll tak a cup o' kindness yet

For auld lang syne,

We two have run about the braes

And pu'd the gowns fine;

But we've wander'd many a weary foot

Sin auld lang syne.

And there's a hand, my trusty fiere!
And gie's a hand o' thine
And we'll tak a right guid willy naught,
For auld lang syne

Should old acquaintance be forgot
And never brought to mind?
Should old acquaintance be forgot
And long, long ago

Saw this in Jamestown, Virginia

Tikker Watch

I sincerely wish each and every reader of my blog (yes, all five or six of you!) the most well-contented 2017 you can muster. 

***

When you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive - to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love. 

-Marcus Aurelius

“How can the past and future be, when the past no longer is, and the future is not yet? As for the present, if it were always present and never moved on to become the past, it would not be time, but eternity.”

         -St. Augustine of Hippo

Dear Santa,

This year finds me, as I assume you already know, still residing in Privatopia. And unlike last year, I won’t claim to speak for everyone here, but as you pass over northwestern Illinois, you have my permission to skip my home. I want for nothing. 

And I don’t mean to be disrespectful or anything, but I can’t help but wonder if your good intentions may or may not be misinterpreted by some.  Sure all those toys, games, books and gadgets are fun, and I mean it sincerely when I say “children need toys,” as play is an important part of a child’s development. Heck, even I revel in the distraction of an occasional puzzle or game, what with the U.S. election results and the president-elect’s post-election cabinet picks. But have you looked at those children in..., oh I don’t know, let me close my eyes and put my finger on a world map…,  Aleppo? Have you seen the look in the eyes of those kids? Surely no one with a beating heart…

Wait, wait, let me try that again, but this time just in the U.S. …, hmmm, my finger takes me to North Dakota and a young native American child holding a sign, “I can live without oil. I cannot live without water.”
Again…, this time it stops in Flint, Michigan.

Hold on, Santa, I’m just going to keep it local, right here in Privatopia. Shouldn’t be any problems with children here, right?

But, Santa, did you know that, according to Psychology Today, children raised in more "affluent households show a significant increase in health issues, like depression, anxiety and substance abuse,” like almost 2-to-1? It turns out that some children of privilege are afflicted with an illness, called “affluenza,” which retards their psychological, emotional and social development. Now I don’t know if it’s true, but a common story making the gossip circuit in Privatopia is that there is a father here who hands a blank check to our Privatopia association at the beginning of each year with the statement: “This is for any fines my children incur. Just fill in the amount at the end of the year and let me know the total.”

Santa, can you see where I’m going with this? It can’t just be about money and possessions. There are more important things in life. Right? 

Aw, I’m sorry, Santa. I don’t mean to rag on you. You’re probably just like me, hoping to do things that make the world a better place for all. Hey, keep up the good work!

And by the way, you know that tip you sent me this past summer about keeping my locks as “glistening white” as yours with the use of Ajax? Well, that may have worked for you, pal, but I’m telling you it took a solid week of coconut oil conditioning to get anything that remotely resembled softness back to my hair. But, like I said, “keep up the good work.” I appreciate your effort.

your pal,


Rae

courtesy of the New York Times

courtesy of me (notice part of my blue & white "Privatopia" sticker in the lower right corner)

If you want to see last year's Santa letter:

http://topeacenquiet.blogspot.com/2015/12/christmas-in-privatopia.html

“To perceive the world differently, we must be willing to change our belief system, let the past slip away, expand our sense of now, and dissolve the fear in our minds” ― William James

From an Ailing Alien

It’s been just over a week since I awoke in a parallel universe. Apparently at some point, while I was sleeping, I dematerialized and then rematerialized on a new planet. The physical makeup of my alien world seems almost identical to my home planet, almost…

So how did I detect, discern, or perceive this change?

Well, first of all this planet is warmer. Here it is mid-November and it’s 71 degrees Fahrenheit. It’s been about that warm all month. It wouldn’t be that way back home. No, it would be much, much cooler.

Then there is that foul odor when I step outside. At first I thought it was the hog farm, which like the one on my home planet, is about 3-4 miles due east. But then, I smelled that same manure-like odor when I was in the large metropolitan area 120 miles away, and then again, on another day when I drove west and out-of-state - no hog farms in those two places.

And there is the problem with gravity. Although I am the same height and weight, I feel heavier, you know weighted down, as if the gravitational force is greater on this planet, and it seems to render me physically weaker. In fact just yesterday, as I was giving a thorough cleaning to the bedroom, I lifted the king-size mattress in order to prop it against a wall, so that I could then remove and launder the bed skirt, lift out the box springs and vacuum under the large bed area. This is something I could easily manage in the former world, but here on Planet Two, as I’ve come to call this place, I found  myself struggling and battling to lift the mattress, until at some point I lost control and became wedged between the mattress and box springs, unable to extract myself. I called out to my Planet Two-assigned husband, who by the way seems identical in every way to Beloved Husband from my previous world.

Assigned Husband was in the attached garage, attempting to strip rusted bolts from an aging snowblower. Being just barely within my voice range, he eventually heard my pleas for assistance, opened the door and called out, “Are you talking to me? I’ll be done out here in a minute or two” and promptly closed the door between us.

And it seems as if my sense of humor seems to have abated. I laughed about the situation, but it was a hollow sound. I tell you it scares me.

Finally, it was the palpable, physical illness that began upon wakening last Wednesday morning. It must be some sort of indigestion, I thought as the first wave of nausea hit. I reassured myself, this will pass, but it continued, in frequent enough waves to disrupt my appetite, thus further weakening me. It’s sort of reminds me of the Kryptonite that challenged Superman. Perhaps it’s related to that foul odor in the atmosphere. Or perhaps it’s radioactivity from computer and cell phone contact, or maybe it’s a toxin related to wireless internet and television exposure. I turn all off, but the waves of discomfort continue.

I make a quick trip to the city to check on my closest relatives, my Planet Two-assigned immediate family. They, too are feeling very queasy, but they are concerned about me, and thus try to reassure me that perhaps it’s just a common “bug” we all share and "we should give it time before we really react," you know, like call the physician.

I run into an acquaintance, or someone who looks exactly like someone I knew on my home planet. He asks, “So, what do you think about the election?” But, I’m wary of the beings on this new planet and choose to make only a general comment, “It'll surely be interesting.” I’m not ready to reveal to Planet Two beings that, alas, I am an alien.

The very next evening I talk, at length with someone claiming to be my long-time trusted friend, and finally I confess my situation with her. “Oh my gosh!” she says, “I thought I was the only one.” She also has been transported to Planet Two. And by now, I’ve confirmed that Planet Two-Assigned Husband and Beloved Husband are indeed one in the same. He’s made the transport with me. Well, at least I’m not alone. I make a note to check with my Planet Two family. I'll just bet they, too, have made the trip.

I toil diligently in the garden the following day, as it is one of the few places that makes any sense to me, where somehow the atmosphere is not as toxic.

Beloved Husband encourages me to take a long drive with him, “It’ll do us good.” We drive to an out-of-state town on a large muddy river. Outside the car, again I smell the foul odor of "crap." But, being in need of supplies to prep for our family’s upcoming Thanksgiving dinner, as we pass a large grocery store I say, “Let’s stop here."

The clerk in the checkout lane we choose has a very pale, light skin tone, as if she’d stood in that very lane, day after day, without any exposure to Planet Two’s sunlight. She is near to my age. Her hair is dyed a fiery ginger-red and it reminds me of the star actress from my home planet’s 1950s sitcom, I Love Lucy. The clerk’s rouge and lipstick are a bit garish for my tastes, however she does possess the prettiest baby-blue eyes I’ve ever seen, on either planet.

A young man is in line ahead of us and has placed two or three items on the counter. I don’t recall exactly, but I know one of them is a package of birthday candles. His complexion is almost the polar opposite of the clerk’s, his skin being very dark - over-exposure to Planet Two’s sunlight, I’m guessing. His hair is jet-black and finely braided into tight rows of plaits that fall just past his collar.

She looks directly at him, smiles and greets him in a bright lilt as she rings up his purchases. In his hand he has a twenty dollar bill, at the ready. She announces that the total is ten dollars and 50 cents. He says quietly, “Uh, wait a sec, I think I have exact change.” “Take all the time you want, Sweetheart,” she replies agreeably as he fishes smaller bills and coins from his pants pocket. They conclude their transaction with her sincere wish for him to have a nice day and him beaming back at her and thanking her for her patience.

She immediately turns to me, looks me in the eye, smiles a genuine, baby-blue eye-crinkling grin, and lilts, “And how are you doing today, Sweetheart?” At the end of our transaction she wishes me well and winks at me. It was that wink, it was then I that I knew…

My illness seems to be abating and I think I’m adjusting to the atmosphere. And I’ve been exercising regularly to regain some of the strength I’ve lost due to the new gravitational surge. Oh, and my sense of humor seems to be improving, but still has a way to go. But most of all I’m getting much better at spotting the other people who, like me and that ginger-redheaded checkout clerk at the muddy river town in the Heartland and the young man buying birthday candles and Beloved Husband and my longtime best friend, who, everyone of us, one day awoke to a near-venomous world they didn’t recognize.

And now I know that we’ll all bide our time, and we’ll support each other and slowly, but surely, we will once again strengthen and grow healthy.

“If you believe that feeling bad or worrying long enough will change a past or future event, then you are residing on another planet with a different reality system.” ― William James

found online - hope artist doesn't mind me borrowing it

superman & lucy

I Haven't Got a Prayer

Dream, September 2016: I am strolling through the woods, when I happen upon a man who is fiddling with equipment, equipment that looks like it might be used to take scientific measurements of some kind. He has headphones over his ears and he is bent over, fine tuning one of the dials. I can’t help but pass near him as he has placed his equipment adjacent to the path I am following. He looks up and smiles, then quickly motions with his hand for me to approach. 

I take a better look at him as I cautiously near. He isn’t very tall for an adult man, about my height which is 5 foot 4 inches, and he's a bit on the lean side. He is wearing a pressed tan collared shirt, neatly tucked into army green slacks, giving him the look of a forest ranger or such. He closes his eyes for a moment as he presses the headset to his ears, and his face beams a beatific smile. I pause and watch him in his rapture. After a time he seems to remember my presence and even more earnestly motions for me to come closer. 

I take a hesitant step or two, he takes off the headset, carefully puts it away and turns off the equipment. He pulls out a notepad and jots something, then he begins to excitedly explain that he’s been recording the sounds of birds and small animals at ultrasonic and infrasonic frequencies and that while playing back and deciphering the sounds he’s discovered that insects have been meaningfully adding sounds to his animal recordings. So he takes some more recordings, and finds that the trees and plants are adding sound as well. Then he tells me that his findings indicate that if one were to filter out some of the “noise” that doesn’t belong, the remainder is actually all in harmony, "musically in harmony."  

“Do you realize what this means!?” he asks and before I can even fathom a response, he excitedly continues, “The whole universe is a symphonic composition! If we can temporarily highlight the anti-noise and, you know, filter out the noise, what remains is all a heavenly symphony!”

***

Beloved Husband and I were golfing with a couple. At some point the four of us were on the green. All four balls seemed about 10 feet from the pin in four different directions. The usual banter in this situation begins with “Well we’ve got it surrounded.” Golf etiquette dictates that the player farthest from the cup will putt first, but we were all about the same distance away. The other woman in our foursome asked if I was ready to putt. “No,” I smiled, “I need to pray over this a bit more.” It’s an expression I lifted from a favorite Jesuit professor. When grading papers he claimed, "The A’s and the failures are easy to discern. It's the pile in the middle that I have to pray over.” She countered, “Tsk tsk now, God isn’t to be bothered with prayers for golf.” 

She couldn’t, surely not after watching me golf all summer, think that I was serious? That in the midst of a round of casual golf, I would suddenly be praying for heavenly intervention? Or perhaps, she was implying that she had such a relationship with God that she knew for certain which human maladies, conditions, disorders, desires, wishes, requests were prayer-worthy? Is such a list available for sharing, you know, for those of us less informed?  

***

Raised and schooled a Roman Catholic in the mid-50s to late-60s, I was taught that one should never even think about listening to or attending a service in any religion other than Catholicism, because to think about such a sin would be as sinful as actually doing it. If you allowed the thought to even flit briefly across your mind, well you might as well…

In the mid-1980s I attended a talk at a Episcopalian, or maybe a Presbyterian church in Glenview, Illinois. At the behest of a friend, I came to hear a prominent rabbi in  Conservative Judaism give a talk. At the time Rabbi Harold Kushner had written a book entitled, “When Bad Things Happen to Good People.” 

Having lost a young son to a rare genetic disorder, Rabbi Kushner had dared to question the G*d about whom he’d been taught, (and I paraphrase here as it was 30 years ago) “How could an all-powerful, benevolent, all-knowing God allow such to happen to an innocent child?” He went through the attribute list and he decided that God could be all-knowing and he could be benevolent, but he couldn’t be all-powerful, because an “all-powerful” God would not allow such suffering. 

Smack! His words hit me. I, too, had wondered the same thing. Maybe, perhaps, possibly, suggested Rabbi Kushner, there were parameters, formulae, criterion or matter with which even God’s power was limited.

Which brings to mind a recent article about CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats). It is a fascinating subject chock-full of moral consequences, but complicated and I won’t get into it here, but you may google it on your own. Basically CRISPR is a tool to speed up gene editing, mostly for the purpose of making “advances” in eliminating disease. However, often something else immediately “pops up” to take its place. So like, if you remove or block the DNA that causes Sickle Cell Anemia you now have made the person vulnerable to some other, possibly worse, malady or weakness.

Anyway, Rabbi Kushner feels that God is with us during suffering, but not able to prevent it.

(Nota Bene: This next portion contains my thought solely, not Rabbi Kushner’s) Maybe, perhaps, possibly God had set our universe in motion, and being a benevolent and all-knowing God, knew that it would be imperfect. Maybe, perhaps, possibly God’s gift is simply the gift of life. Be it one second or be it one hundred-plus years. It is up to us to make the best of it, while God delights with us in our joys and comforts us in our sorrows.

***

Beloved Husband and I visited an out-of-state friend in late October. She works for an American multi-national conglomerate. She travels the world, and her job title actually includes the word “global.” She has been on business trips to numerous countries. Someone gave her a large world map that allows her to “scratch-off” the many portions of the world she’s visited. She asked us to scratch off the portion that related to us meeting her for the first time. We gratefully obliged. As I scratched it off a tiny portion of the all-gold map it revealed a brighter, different color for the corresponding city metropolis in the midwest of the U.S.A. Looking at the large map I commented that the U.S. represented such a small portion of the world. We stood there silently, looking at the map and thinking… 

***

It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn't feel like a giant. I felt very, very small.— Neil Armstrong, Gemini 8 and Apollo 11 astronaut

Oddly enough the overriding sensation I got looking at the earth was, my god that little thing is so fragile out there.— Mike Collins, Apollo 11 astronaut

This planet is not terra firma. It is a delicate flower and it must be cared for. It's lonely. It's small. It's isolated, and there is no resupply. And we are mistreating it. Clearly, the highest loyalty we should have is not to our own country or our own religion or our hometown or even to ourselves. It should be to, number two, the family of man, and number one, the planet at large. This is our home, and this is all we've got.— Scott Carpenter, Mecury 7 astronaut

I really believe that if the political leaders of the world could see their planet from a distance of 100,000 miles their outlook could be fundamentally changed. That all-important border would be invisible, that noisy argument silenced. The tiny globe would continue to turn, serenely ignoring its subdivisions, presenting a unified facade that would cry out for unified understanding, for homogeneous treatment. The earth must become as it appears: blue and white, not capitalist or Communist; blue and white, not rich or poor; blue and white, not envious or envied.— Michael Collins, Gemini 10 & Apollo 11 astronaut

You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, ‘Look at that, you son of a bitch’.  -Edgar Mitchell, Apollo 14 astronaut

***

God(s)/Creator(s), 

Please comfort me. I am disappointed, but I will hope for the optimal success of our new President-Elect in January of 2017. May he benevolently use his intelligence and the talents inherent in his genetic composition for the good of all, not only in our country but in the whole of our tiny pea of a planet, we call Earth. If he does well for the greater good, I will applaud his effort.

I will do my best to continue to avoid adding unnecessary “noise” and may, one day, the beauty of the universe’s heavenly symphony be heard by all...

photo courtesy of NASA

On a visit to Chicago I passed an elementary school that had painted both a
U.S. and a world map on its blacktop play lot  :)

They Moved Like Angels with Fluid Motion

When Li’l Rae was 'bout 4-5 years, her mother abandoned her in rural Wisconsin, just up and left her… poor little child. 

Well, okay maybe it didn’t really go down exactly that way, but it’s sure how it seemed to Li’l Rae at the time. Closer to the truth was that Li’l Rae and her mother had been visiting relatives in rural Wisconsin, and when it came time to return to the city, Li’l Rae’s mother brokered herself a deal with her older brother, Li’l Rae’s uncle. He would keep the child for an additional week. “This will give me a little break,” reasoned Li’l Rae’s mother, “Plus, the country air will be good for her.” 

“Hutch" is what they called Li’l Rae’s uncle, his real name being Malcom. Hutch had two sons, Alastair and Bartholomew. The boys were older than Li’l Rae, Alastair being 11 and Bartholomew almost 13. Folks said that ol’ Hutch never quite got over the loss of his wife, who died when the boys were young. Anyway, it must’ve been true, because Hutch never remarried.

Back then Li’l Rae thought that of all her numerous cousins, Alastair and Bartholomew were clearly the best looking, their faces being as fine as the handsomest boys she’d ever seen on television. Their mother must have been beautiful, Li'l Rae thought, yet nowhere in the home was a photograph of the now-dead woman. 

“That Al and Bart sure are good athletes," people would say, as they shook their heads, "just like their old man.” Now, the boys were good at swimming, running, football and basketball, but baseball was the sport at which the boys really excelled. And sure enough, Uncle Hutch had been a minor league baseball player. At some point he got the call to go to the big league. He declined. Hutch, being a man of few words, never gave an explanation. But you know how townsfolk are, they had many an opinion. Some said it was because of his young wife, maybe she didn’t want him to go, or maybe he didn’t want to leave her. 

When Li’l Rae’s mother left her at Uncle Hutch’s house, she didn't trouble herself to leave any dolls or toys for Li’l Rae’s amusement, just a satchel with clean clothes and pajamas. And her cousins didn’t seem to own any toys, or puzzles or books for that matter; just some sports equipment, kept in a small utility room near the back door. In fact, to Li’l Rae the house seemed empty and cheerless, as if no one had laughed or smiled in it for a long time.

The boys were out the door soon after breakfast and Li'l Rae often didn’t see them again until dinner. So she would sit in a chair looking out of the big window in the dining room. From there she could see the large empty baseball lot next door. She sat and wondered why her cousins never played at the ball field right next door and instead rode their bikes all the way to the Catholic school’s field way over on the other side of town. The groomed lot outside looked like a regular ball field, with bleachers and everything, but there it sat empty, unused and kind of forlorn, just like the house.

The cousins were kind to Li’l Rae and she wished that they would be around more often, like they were after dinner, after helping their father to clean the kitchen, when sometimes one or the other would spend a few minutes showing her how to catch a ball, or somehow complementing her when she, once again, missed hitting the huge oak tree with one of their slingshots. As she sat deep in thought, Li’l Rae didn’t hear Uncle Hutch enter the room, so she flinched when she heard his sudden  bark from behind, “You'd best go outside and get some fresh air now.” 

Alone outside, she sat on the bottom row of the bleachers, swinging feet that barely reached the ground. She picked up a stick and drew some lines in the dry, dusty dirt. When she looked back at the house, she wasn’t sure if that dark shadow from upstairs was Uncle Hutch watching her, so she quickly dropped the stick. 

Li'l Rae was usually an obedient child, but one lonely afternoon, knowing it was wrong to snoop or to take without permission, she opened a drawer in the kitchen. She’d seen Uncle Hutch put a spiral notepad in the drawer the night before. It won’t be so bad, she reasoned, if I just take a page from the notebook and then maybe borrow that pencil on the kitchen counter. I can draw and practice my letters and numbers. That will be fun. And I’ll put the pencil right back where I found it. And I’ll just take one single sheet of paper, that’s all. The notepad looked pretty full and I don’t think anyone will notice one missing sheet. She carefully picked up the spiral notepad and slowly lifted back the cover to find an empty sheet… Her heart seemed to stop as she heard Uncle Hutch’s booming voice behind her, “What are you doing?” How does he enter the room so quietly, she thought. I never even heard a sound. Her face was burning with shame, as she felt the blood pulse in her cheeks. Her head hung down, afraid to look up at her uncle, she handed over the notepad. He said not another word, just stood there silently looming over the small girl, like a giant right out of a fairy tale. She could feel his eyes follow her as she walked into the dining room and sat on a chair to once again stare out the window at the ever-empty ball field. 

Yes, Alastair and Bartholomew were good athletes and they were the handsomest boys Li’l Rae had ever seen, and they were unfailingly nice to Li’l Rae, and they always smiled whenever they saw her, big genuine smiles. And after dinner, when the kitchen was cleaned, and when one or the other would spend a few minutes in the evening teaching her to hit a pitch, or such, she couldn’t help but notice, really no one on earth who heard them speak, could help but notice, the way they talked, “P-p-pp-put the b-b-ba-b-bat up m-mm-m-mmm-more.” 

Even at her young age, no one had to explain to Li’l Rae the whys of stuttering. She knew exactly why both of the boys stuttered. 

therapy

I kneel down, and using a “landscape” knife (actually a repurposed, heavy steak knife), I begin to cut into a section of my well manicured lawn. I make a rectangular cut, a bit larger than 1 square foot. My steak knife looks just like a real “landscape” knife, similar in size and weight and having a serrated cutting edge, but my knife is missing the proper curved beak at the tip of the blade. What care I? It works just fine for my purposes.

After cutting 3 or 4 blocks, I rise from my kneeling pad, pick up my trusty four-tined spading fork and begin to loosen the sod at each of the four the seams I’ve cut on each block. (My spading fork, bought in 2010, is the real deal, not a cheap knock-off.) After loosening the sod, I make a more earnest go-round again on each block, this time placing the fork on an angle and using my boot-covered foot to drive the spade up under the grass. Then I pry the sod away from the ground, where it is held fast with an abundance of tiny roots. If there has not been a recent drought and the clay-like soil, upon which I live, is a bit damp, this process can move along at a pace that makes one feel as if one is making progress.

A couple of other factors come into play as to how long I can toil at such a task and still feel a sense of accomplishment, such as the “heat index,” whether or not the gnats and mosquitos are biting, and if the golf course is open. Weekend golfers necessitate my keeping one eye constantly on their approach. I bought a pith helmet to use when gardening-while-golfers-are-amok. It’s designed to protect forestry workers from falling objects.

Now, I only know this from “word of mouth” but, supposedly one of my neighbors, Dave, was struck on the head by a golf ball and was knocked-out for a bit. In a 9 year period of living here, I’ve had only one golf ball whiz by my head while I was outside working. The woman who hit the ball came over and apologized profusely, “I’m so sorry, I swear I’ve never hit the ball that far before! I don’t know how that happened! Please forgive me!"

I am in the first steps of a months-long project, which will be completed early next summer. I will do most of the work myself. And that is just the way I like it. Reliable Husband has offered to hire someone to do the work, but as I explained to him, I find some kind of fulfillment in envisioning, planning and carrying-out a project such as this. “Think of it as my therapy,” I tell him.

***
Years back I played cards in a women’s contract bridge group. A few times per year we would have group birthday celebrations. One summer a bunch of us met at a newly opened gastropub that featured barbecued food. As I recall there was a fat, pink porcine on the sign outside eatery/bar. It was in the heart of the northside of Chicago, like Roscoe Village. Okay, maybe Roscoe Village is more like the gut of the northside, but I’m getting off track here...  I don’t remember what I ate. I’m guessing the food was decent because I dragged brought Reliable Husband there at a later date. But, the thing that I’ll never forget was the beautiful garden outside of the eatery. It ran the length of the building, was a full city lot in size, and that was where our ladies group was seated. There was at least one mature tree, a couple of dwarf ornamental trees, some privacy shrubs, and numerous perennials and annuals in full bloom. The layout was pleasing to view, with enough repetition of plants to give a sense of symmetry and cohesiveness, and enough variety to make it eye-catching and engaging.

At some point the host/owner came around to greet our group. I asked about the garden. He’d a friend, he explained, who as an attorney had become completely “burnt-out” in his work, overtaxed to the point of debilitation, until at some point he'd sought help for his affliction. The lawyer’s therapist recommended that he, at least temporarily, seek out an entirely new occupation. So he turned to his restaurant entrepreneur friend and pleaded for an opportunity to allow him to “do something” with that horrible empty lot that adjoined the bar/eatery he was working on developing. Although the owner’s now weakened and depleted friend had never so much as watered a houseplant in his life, let alone planted a single plant in a garden, he gave him the go-ahead. “What you see,” the host explained, “is the finished result of what my lawyer buddy accomplished in a 9 month period. He did all of the work himself. It was like watching a sculptor, you know. He removed what didn’t belong with his knife and spade, then he added flourishes here and there, until you have what you see now.” “Did he go back to his job as an attorney?” I asked. “No, actually, interestingly enough he-," at this point the host was called away by one of his employees and I never found out what became of the lawyer/gardener.

***
I tug at the turf until it is free. I feel a bead of perspiration run down from my brow and I resist the urge to wipe it. I turn the turf over and gently pull out any entangled tree roots. I am working above a field that contains the precious roots of my two clumps of river birch trees. At the age of 10 the birch are entering the 2nd decade of their 75 year lifespan, thus they are just youngsters. I place the bare root back in the soil and temporarily cover them as best I can with a handful or two of loose dirt. My nose itches, but if I ignore it the sensation it will eventually go away. Sometimes it doesn’t and I rub it. A neighbor drifts by to chat and ask what I’m doing and I’m certain my face is smattered with smudges of dirt. But, I welcome the break and use the opportunity to drink some cool water.

After the tree roots are patted back down, I claw and beat as much of the ground soil, as I can, off of the grass' roots. I will need this good soil later for another part of my yard project. Every bit of dirt is valuable and not to be wasted. I lay each piece of sod upside down, exposed grassroots up. Here they will dry for a day or two, then a final shake will remove some more soil before they are bagged and taken to the compost field where they are dumped, with other yard waste for eventual burning.

It’s physically taxing work, but it feels good to use my muscles, and for whatever reason I much prefer it to, oh I don’t know, - let’s say, like sitting around and watching, “Dancing with the Stars."

***
I start cutting the next row of blocks of sod. The image of our waiter at the Chinese restaurant in Iowa pops into my head. Reliable Husband and I stopped there last week. Although we’ve been going there for some years now and this same man has waited on us many times, he has never spoken to us beyond the usual customer/waitstaff banter, “Would you like Egg Drop or, Hot and Sour soup with that?” Or, “How is your meal?” This day, however, he pauses at our table and, awkwardly at first, begins a conversation that starts with, “So you two look like you’re going out to play golf or something. Are you?” He has probably noticed Reliable Husband’s Cog Hill pull-over. We chat about golf for a bit. Our waiter has never played the game. He asks if we live here in town. “No, we’re from across the river (Mississippi), from Illinois,” I explain. He and his family do reside here in town. He asks if we are retired, which begins a discussion on the topic. I ask him how far is he from considering retirement. “A long way off,” he laughs. “I’ve got 3 sons to take care of right now. They are my focus.” “How old are they?” I inquire. “The older boy is fourteen and the younger boys are 6-year-old twins.” The conversation continues, and RH and I discover that the boys, seem to enjoy school and are “not the smartest, but not the dumbest” as far as academics. His big hope is for them to be good, law abiding and happy citizens, “with a job” he adds. We go on to discuss the importance of physical health. He says that he was a cigarette smoker in his 20s, but quit many years ago. We talk about the importance of remaining physically active, eating healthy foods, etc. He is, by the way, quite lean, probably well within the current BMI recommendations. We end the conversation by wishing each other well. He has an accent that suggests he's not a native-born citizen. He looks Asian, but I do not know yet if he is from China or some other country. How do people choose to move to a whole new country, with whole new customs, and a whole new language?  And why Iowa? I ponder as I pull and tug at roots, as pulling up “roots” is something not often done lightly; and once done cannot easily be “undone.” I don’t know the waiter’s name, nor the names of his 3 sons, but I silently send my most positive energy their way as I rise to grab my spading fork.

As I loosen the sod, I think of Herr Mauritz, as I call him. He is my daughter’s next door neighbor, who appears to be in his 80s. He told me one day that he’d come to America when he was nineteen years of age with twelve dollars in his pocket. He’d an older cousin who lived here and Mauritz figured it would be “fun” to visit him. "Have you been back to Germany?” I asked. "Once, about 10 years ago," he said. “But, it wasn’t the same. Everything had changed and everyone I knew was dead or gone. Sometimes you cannot go back." I ask him the name of his hometown, “Aach,” he tells me.

The clouds darken and the wind picks up. I clean up my worksite, wipe off my tools and put everything away.

They say that an introvert needs time alone to process and ponder. If you say something to me in a one-on-one conversation, it may remain with me for hours, or days, or months, or years, or until I write it down.

I walk inside the house to shower off the dirt and I think of the poster I viewed as Reliable Husband paid the tab at the Chinese restaurant in the little Iowa town we visited. The town had advertised a “Peace Walk” to “stop the hate.” At the end of the walk, the group would release live butterflies, perhaps to symbolize the release of any hatred, a sort of transfiguration, like a butterfly's metamorphosis. That’s really all you have to do, you know, take away the net that holds hatred in and let it fly away. I look out of the window and notice the nice, steady rain.

Pleasant Dreams

O sleep, O gentle sleep,

Nature’s soft nurse, how have I frightened thee,

That thou no more will weight me eyelids down,

And steep my senses in forgetfulness… 

-Wm. Shakespeare

***

I am not the world’s most sound sleeper. Reliable Husband, on the other hand, fascinates me with his ability to sleep under almost any circumstance. He makes the occasional snore or snort, but I simply touch my hand to his face or gently nudge him and he quietly rolls over and continues his slumber.

Actually my sleep habits have much improved with age and retirement. No work deadlines, no early morning meetings, no teenagers living at home to fret over, plenty of time to exercise - as physical exercise seems to be, at least in my case, the best aid to assist me in getting a good night of sleep.

Yesterday, I spent part of the evening reading about recent research from the world’s scientific experts in the studies of neurocognitive functions, neuroplasticity, oneirology, and such sciences involved in the study of sleep in humans. Despite a myriad of theories, sleep scientists/experts, to date, do not know the how's, why's or when's of the evolution of sleep, only that it’s as necessary to life as taking nourishment and breathing.

Their research (which it turns out is completely sleep-inducing) is filled with sentences like this:

This creates a transmembrane gradient, which drives the import of Na+ across the basolateral membrane possibly via the Na+ -dependent HCO3- co-transporter, NCBE and/or the Na+/H+ exchanger NHE1.

or 

From the cortical subarachnoid space it penetrates the brain parenchyma perivascularly and bathes the brain before it exits the CNS and drains into the lymphatic system.

What does it mean? The most recent breakthrough (and this can change by the time I post this) seems to be the discovery of the “glymphatic" system. Here’s how it works: When we are awake, our activities lead to a build-up of waste material in our brains. When we sleep, channels in our brains expand to allow cerebrospinal fluid to flow in and clear away all that debris; like a nighttime cleaning lady who comes through and tidies things up in our brain as we slumber. She washes or dusts the counters, mops and vacuums the floors, replaces the filter on the hvac, empties the trash cans, sanitizes the drains and toilet, etc. Heck, I don’t know, maybe she even throws a load of dirty clothing in the washer for you.

These latest findings have led to a hypothesis that sleep originated because it was so vital to flush out the nervous system, that the body originally opted for it over the vulnerability or defenselessness that comes with the semi-consciousness state of sleep. However another researcher poses that perhaps we awoke from an original state of sleep, kind of like, which came first the chicken or the egg? Which came first, a state of sleep or wakefulness?

Bottom line: The experts say you have to sleep just the right amount, and not too much mind you. The correct amount of sleep varies a bit from person to person, and heaven help you if you get it wrong! Now how does that information help a troubled sleeper? It doesn’t of course. It presents a person who spends their nights worrying with yet another thing to keep them up worrying, one more way to fail again at the seemingly simple act of sleeping.

Enter my new pal, Scooter.

“Like beads of digression on a string of irrelevance” is a favorite phrase of mine. Rarely do I have a chance to use it, but let me tell you, whoever originally coined the phase must have known someone like Scooter.

Scooter runs a podcast that I recently started listening to when I have trouble sleeping. It’s one of those things you run across in life that makes you say, “Why didn’t anyone think of this before?” The format of his podcast is ingenious. And it has the clever title, “Sleep With Me.”

As it says on the iTunes description, it is:

...a bedtime story for grownups, just interesting enough for you to forget your problems, but boring enough to put you to sleep.

Drew Ackerman (Scooter’s real name) produces 12 episodes per month, which are about an hour long each, give or take. I usually fall asleep during his mostly repetitive 15-20 minute intro. He speaks in a calm tone, yet in a somewhat erratic manner. And I’m guessing, purposely keeps his voice in a lower raspy kind of range than he might normally use when speaking. He’s somewhat mildly amusing and I often softly chuckle once or twice before I doze off. What could be wrong with that?

I don’t know but I’m certain the sleep experts would find some fault with it. It wouldn’t fall under their directives for "good sleep hygiene," like (hear my whiny, didactic voice in this quote) “Only use the bedroom for intimacy and sleep.” They’d gasp in horror at the large screen tv hanging on my bedroom wall. They’d be mortified that I occasionally read a chapter or two in a book before I nod off, or that I took a quick nap in the afternoon. And forget about that glass of wine I had with dinner! "Egad, what are you thinking, lady? No wonder you can’t sleep! You know it’s all your fault, right?”

But, not Scooter. Scooter understands. He occasionally mentions the problems he had as a youngster falling asleep on a school night. He sympathizes, empathizes with his listeners. Scooter does not judge. “There is no right or wrong way to listen,” says he.

I have a sense that he is a kind person with whom it would be fun to spend an hour or two, like at an art museum or an indoor mall. In fact, I think he recently did a podcast on a visit he made to the mall. I’m not sure because I fell asleep before he got to it.

On one episode, he asked the listeners to picture him as a reliable friend. One you'd not be hesitant to phone if you were in a jamb, one willing to come to your home and tell you a bedtime story. He first describes that he’d probably arrive wearing shorts and flip-flops and that he may have forgotten to comb his hair. He asks you to think of him as a person you could call  whenever you felt a need for help sleeping. And he’d appear, with a key that you’d given him beforehand, so he wouldn’t have to ring the door bell or knock, just let himself in, “I wouldn’t actually be in the bedroom, um, which might, you know, actually be kind of creepy, but I’d be out in the hall. And I wouldn’t touch the walls or anything, so you don’t have to, you know, worry about that kind of stuff. You could just nestle down in your soft, comfortable bed. And I’d tell you a story until you fell asleep. And then I’d let myself out quietly.” Who wouldn’t like a friend like that?

Scooter has a genius for rambling, meandering stories of which you might not really give a hoot that you may never hear the ending.

So, do I care what the sleep experts say, anyway? No. I know what works for me.

Thank you, Dearest Scooter, and good night.

I found this graphic on the New York Times site, I think? Or wait, was it the New Yorker?

the graphic speaks for itself