Slow

“My grandmother started walking five miles a day when she was sixty. She's ninety-seven now, and we don't know where the heck she is.”
― Ellen DeGeneres

Lying in my bed, I shift my left knee this way, then that. There doesn’t seem to be a position my leg is willing to consider for longer than a few minutes. My knee has every right, after all, to be resentful after everything I’ve put it through in the pursuit of a more healthful lifestyle. At any rate, the torn meniscus should be easy enough to fix, but until then I find myself relegated to going against my very nature. Slowing down is anathema to me. The faster I can do something, the better. I tend to be impatient in lines, driving behind people going the speed limit, waiting of any kind. Moving about in a pokey way holds no charm for me, but I have had to learn to stubbornly go along with it, because my knee seems to want me to, and at the moment, it’s the boss of me.

This injury has put me on a slower, more equal footing with my son, Cliff.  I mean this in the sense of our “mph” rating. He’s not a fast mover, generally speaking. The word I might use to describe the way in which he does most things, is languidly. This morning, for instance, when his van arrived in the driveway and beeped once at 8: 10, Cliff sat in front of his unfinished breakfast, lifting the fruit cup in slow motion to his mouth. The van driver beeped again at 8:14. I fidget and pace; he eats with a tortoise's sense. The fruit cup finished, he has to digest for a minute before he finishes his orange juice. I hover, sing-songing my pleas to hurry, hurry, hurry up. When he is finally out of the chair, he stays true to his nature—in the time it takes him to get from the breakfast table to the van, I could have run up and down the street twice (That is, I could have before the injury). It’s a rare morning to find Cliff ready on time, despite all my pleading, which doesn’t seem to have any effect.  It’s like trying to push the positive and negative poles of a magnet together.

After completing physical therapy for my knee, I was admittedly impatient about getting back to running. I love to run; I feel strong, powerful, as if I could live forever. I’m a sometime believer in the Greek motto, “Nothing to excess”, but not when it comes to running.  When I last left the house alone for some exercise about three weeks ago, my knee hurt but I assured my husband I would just walk. “I’m just going to walk, see how it feels”, I told him as he looked at me skeptically. My promise lasted about a thousand feet. A quarter mile later, it felt as if some small being, a teeny-tiny knife-wielding troll perhaps, stabbed me in the right side of my left knee, thereby causing such pain as to force me to turn back and sheepishly hobble home, to admit what I had done.

If Cliff is the tortoise then I am the hare in this relationship. The hare is humbled and the tortoise is grateful for a mother who is as slow-moving as he is. Our walks have been more pleasant of late, because I’m not urging him along to work off a few calories. To someone driving past, we must look adorable, strolling arm in arm as I point out something or someone interesting around the corner. We stop occasionally to watch the roofers on the house nearby, and admire their skill. “Oh boy, Cliff, do you suppose they’ll fall off?” and “Shall we ask if we can come up there?”
 He replies with a giggle, “Silly mother!”

Here is what I would have missed today if I had run past it all: the perfectly imperfect spider web extending out from my little maple tree; my neighbor’s new hopeful white arbor in her side yard, the first sign she’s moving past her husband’s unexpected death of two years ago; the brindle-colored terrier standing so still I mistook her for a statue; a little boy stepping off the yellow school bus in his pine green, fall jacket, backpack bouncing, as he ran towards his mother, waving the artwork he’d been waiting to show her. And 13-year-old Maddie across the street, singing out on her walkway, uninhibited and joyfully swaying with the music in her head.

I’ve often heard, from others who parent someone with an intellectual or physical challenge, that they have learned patience from their children. Cliff has been a good teacher, but I have no more learned patience from him than he has learned to be in a constant mad rush from me. I must say, however, watching how Cliff walks and moves about in the world, I’ve at least developed an appreciation for the joy of a pace that isn’t all bad. I have had to adapt, just as he’s had to adapt his whole life to a world that doesn’t always wait for him to catch up. He seems okay with that, very happy even.

Thoreau said, “If a man loses pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured, or far away.”

I’m inclined to agree. Of course, as soon as my knee has forgiven me my transgressions against it, it’s a safe bet I will get back into my running. For now, though, I have no choice but to walk in Cliff’s shoes awhile longer, languidly making my way to wherever it is I’m going. Can’t promise I’ll completely embrace the walking life, but I will certainly endeavor to try.

 

To move in spirit to and fro;

To mind the good we see;

To taste the sweet;

Observing all the things we meet

How choice and rich they be. To walk is by a thought to go;

To move in spirit to and fro;

To mind the good we see;

To taste the sweet;

Observing all the things we meet

How choice and rich they be.

 

To walk is by a thought to go; To move in spirit to and fro; To mind the good we see; To taste the sweet; Observing all the things we meet How choice and rich they be.    

 

Subconscious

Dreaming permits each and every one of us to be quietly and safely insane every night of the week.

WILLIAM DEMENT, Newsweek, Nov. 30, 1959

We are on the roof of a tall city building, white sky all around us. There is no barrier on this nightmare roof, no parapet to keep us from falling over the edge to certain death. There are two of us in that odd lonely space. I am one. Cliff is the other. I can sense the presence of others on the rough gravel surface but they are like ghosts, white, unformed, almost invisible, as if an artist, in rendering the scene, had run out of paint. I am far, too far from him as he closes the gap between himself and the brink, and so I scream, “NO!” He doesn’t seem to hear me, or at any rate he won’t acknowledge my existence except to glance at me as he backs up. I continue to scream and implore those others, the faceless beings floating in place like useless sentries, to help. Cliff is oblivious to the danger he is in, doesn’t understand that this space between us means I can’t help him in time. They say most dreams last only seconds, but my screaming and fright feels endless, because even though I try to run to save him I know I cannot. Just as I get close, holding both arms out towards him, he falls backwards and is gone.

I wake, shaken, frightened, disturbed, horrified. I think, “Oh, God, God.”  There is no sleep for me until I get up to check on him, because I worry that my sixth sense is telling me he may be in some sort of distress and I need to help him. When I reach his bedroom, standing and staring, waiting to observe the rise and fall of his chest as he breathes, I see reflected in his mirrored wall, the depths of my own worst fears.

I used to see a therapist who asked me if I tended to "catastrophize" everything. I thought about the time Max didn’t come home all night. I kept waiting for the police to call to tell me he was thrown from his car or had been robbed and beaten. In 1974, in Buffalo, New York where I went to college, my roommate Mary wanted to have a Halloween party. Reluctantly I went along with it, all the time having serious doubts that more than maybe a couple of people would come. She was a witch; I was Malcolm McDowell’s character from “A Clockwork Orange”. We sat on the couch, waiting for the people to show up. I kept looking at the heaping plates of chicken wings and celery with blue cheese we had carefully placed on the vinyl-covered table and felt sorry for her because we had gone to all that trouble for nothing. Two years ago, I felt a lump in my left breast and began to think about what I would say in the farewell video I would record for Olivia, Max and Cliff, telling them how honored I was to be their mother; in a fantasy where I am not actually a jealous wife, I rehearsed a speech in which I would tell Ken he should try to fall in love again.

I told the therapist that, yes, I certainly did have a propensity towards unwarranted worrying. I refused the pills she offered to me, arriving at the conclusion that there is a part of me that feels if I worry less, something bad will happen. Possibly, the fight or flight thing won’t kick in when it’s supposed to, and then where would that leave me?

It would seem that wide awake or in the surrender of REM sleep, I have a constellation of fears probably not all that different from the rest of the human race. At times I let it take over, leaving me open to an imagination bent on scaring the hell out of me. But I always, always get a hold of myself. (I am reminded of the scene in the movie “Moonstruck” where Loretta slaps Ronny twice, saying, “Snap out of it!”.)

However, there is still the question of Cliff and my recurring nightmare and the reasons behind it. I suppose one doesn’t have to be a student of Freud to understand that deep down, I don’t believe I can protect him from hurt, from disappointment, from sadness, from leukemia, from Alzheimer’s, from missing his old job.

 What I don’t understand is how everyone else seems to be walking around singing “Que Sera Sera”. I’m looking at them, wondering, “How do you DO that?”

The answer at which I have arrived has something to do with faith and hope. I have faith that everything will be okay, and I hope I’m not wrong.  Also, even with all my insecurities, my fears, and wild assumptions, I would argue that I am both rational and sane. That is, can I really expect to have that much control over what happens? Sometimes, I  have to consider that those other people (the ones who are singing) are probably struggling too from time to time, waking up in the middle of the night with a feeling something is terribly, terribly wrong.

Max was neither thrown from his car nor beaten and robbed. He fell asleep (i.e. passed out) at someone’s house where he’d been partying. Halloween, 1974 in Buffalo turned out to be a success; there were so many people we ran out of chicken wings. The lump in my breast turned out to be a cyst.

In my recurrent dream concerning a city roof high above the unforgiving ground, I waken with a pounding heart. Unable to go back to sleep, I quietly leave my room and enter my son’s. I remember to be quiet because he wakes up at a pin drop. It’s the middle of the night and he’s still breathing. As I leave, I pass Max’s closed door, then Olivia’s, touching each with a flat hand like some sort of bizarre blessing. I do this without forethought, but afterwards, all is peaceful and right. And bad dreams are stalled for a good long while. These are not the actions of a crazy woman, just one who loves deeply and worries too much for her own good.

Shhhhh....

He nods, as if to acknowledge that endings are almost always a little sad, even when there is something to look forward to on the other side.”
― Emily Giffin, Love the One You're With

“It’s ok not to be ok.” —from Jessie J, “Who You Are”

The ride back from my daughter Olivia’s college orientation was quiet. This is notable because conversation is one of our best events. While neither of us ever forgets who’s in charge, we’re pretty good friends. In fact, on the way to LIU Post from our home in Massachusetts three days before, we talked for the first two hours of the trip.

Did I say “we”? I did most of the talking, as I had a captive audience, and I hadn’t seen her much lately. She is 18, after all, the age at which one should be anywhere but home as often as possible.

On Sunday morning, with a three-hour trip ahead of us the quiet made me feel jittery, odd. It’s uncomfortable for me to be sitting next to her in a silence this loud. It’s a feeling analogous to the gloomy dark curtain that swoops across the window just before a storm, entering my house like a ghost, when just moments before the sun was warming the sill.

  At first I thought she was annoyed because I refused to drive back as soon as orientation was finished the prior evening. Instead, we had driven to my parents’ house less than an hour away to avoid having to do part of the trip home in the dark. I don’t like driving in the dark which, in Olivia’s opinion means I’ve lost my sense of adventure. I prefer to think of it as self-preservation. I happen to like getting to where I’m going alive and in one piece.

At issue was her need to hurry back because she’d already been away from her friends for three nights in a row. It was a ridiculous reason to be sore at me, from where I was sitting anyway, considering that all summer she’d been spending five out of seven nights not sleeping in her own bed. She shows up at home to shower, grab a snack, catch up on Facebook and request a few bucks for gas.

Finally, the reveal: “I’m the only one of my friends who is going to school so far away”, she said. “ I won’t be able to come home that much. I’ll  hardly ever see them.” My cranky traveling companion was not angry with me. At least,not directly.  In a matter of weeks, everything was going to change. Uncertainty is Change’s companion, and there is no crystal ball to consult. I remember leaving home and being scared too, wondering how it would all pan out.

I don’t know how to allay this fear, this newest wrinkle in her life. Change has some very sharp edges, and I’m unsure whether or not it’s within my power to soften them.  There are just some things you have to discover for yourself. Everyone knows change isn’t something you can run from, thinking you can outpace it if you’re clever enough. You can’t hide under the covers, and peek out at the world hoping for a static landscape despite the change of seasons.

Maybe I’ll assure her that if her friends are true friends, they will be here when she returns. If they’re anything like my best friend from high school (I had just the one, but she was worth ten), they can pick up where they left off; time does not diminish the connections the heart has made.

Maybe I’ll impress upon her the idea of change as being the thing you should strive for! If nothing ever changed, nothing would grow or learn or stand taller or age gracefully. I want to tell her that not only will her faithful friends still love her, but she’ll be adding new ones.  She’ll fall in love (more than once), make her own decisions, and figure out what’s around the corner. She probably won’t listen but maybe I’ll remind her that everyone and everything changes, daily, hourly, minute-by-minute, and you just have to see the beauty in that, in the amazing, albeit occasionally sad, parts of being alive.

Maybe I’ll just tell her it will all be ok. And when she’s not okay, to sit with it for awhile until the feeling passes. Don’t worry so much. Yes, that’s it.

I can try to get used to the quiet of a car ride if it’s required, and from the perspective of a mother, appreciate it for the peace it can bring . It’s inside the quiet that we listen best, and learn something we didn’t know before. The future will teach Olivia what she's supposed to know. But this is my little instruction for all my children: In the hush of the space in which we find ourselves is the persistence of memory, and what came before exists through each shift of time—friendships, love, losses and gains, and the certainty that what we once had, we will have again.

Flux

“To make a 5 slide it down/then send it curving round/almost there please don’t stop/until you’ve put a hat on top.”—learningplace.com

We are a family of five. When the children were little, we would set the table with five dinner plates. Five napkins. Five forks. Five glasses. We five sat together at supper time, with a dog named Sammi at our feet.  We were “Taylor, party of five” at restaurants. In the space provided on an invitation, it was the number I would put down. Five, always five—the number which forms the simplest star, the points of which represent spirit, earth, air, fire, water.

After giving birth to Olivia, a wave of certainty came to me as I lay in recovery. I was done having children. It was as final a feeling as a door closing shut and locking afterward. Imagining my future life, it was with three children, no more. The desire I once had for a bigger family had disappeared like the smooth stone Max once excitedly showed to me, before he skipped it across a lake, where it skimmed the water’s surface before sinking to the bottom. I tried the word out in my head a few times before giving voice to it, saying it aloud to Ken. “Done.”

When they were younger Max and Olivia wistfully dreamed of having more brothers and sisters. One day we were walking along the boardwalk at the Jersey Shore, stopping to talk to a rather large family whose youngest member was a little girl with Down syndrome. Max was especially intrigued by the fact that the couple had seven kids. As we walked away, he said, “Mom, I wish we had a big family like that. It would be fun. Why can’t we have more kids?”

At eight, Olivia began to ask about adoption because I told her I was too old to have more children. She thought we should adopt a baby girl from China, where daughters were perhaps not valued as highly as were sons, so there were certainly more than enough of them to go around. She could have a sister with whom she might share clothes and toys. It was so simple in her mind, a jot of magical thinking; we could go get a baby and add her like we had added the fish we named Algebra and the hamster we kept in the upstairs hallway.

The subject came up time and again over the years, but I would gently reply with what I believe to be true: “God gave us the family we are supposed to have. We are a family of five.”

Most nights, now that Max and Olivia are older, I set the table for three. Ken, Cliff and I sit down to eat our meal--three plates, three napkins, three forks, three glasses, three occupied chairs at the kitchen table. When we go to the movies we purchase three tickets. If we go to a concert, take a walk around the neighborhood, climb into the car to explore places we haven’t yet seen, it’s just the three of us.

At restaurants we are “Taylor, party of three”, unless we’re celebrating someone’s birthday or other special occasion.

I remind myself that this is supposed to happen. Kids grow up, go to work, have friends to visit, places to go. I miss them, those other two, when they are absent. I believe Cliff misses them too. Sometimes I need to remind them how essential they are to their big brother. He needs them in the same way he needs all the things that sustain us--food, drink, shelter, love, breath. Taking him out for ice cream or for a walk or maybe reading him a book isn’t usually the first thing they think of to do with their day, though they love him deeply, because they are young and a little selfish, as all young people are.  

 A family is an entity in perpetual flux; the Greek philosopher Heraclitus asserted that flux is the state of constant change in which all things exist. “All things are flowing.”  There is ebb and flow as in a river, continuous change steering us into and away from each other’s daily lives. I believe God gave me the family I am supposed to have and that the universe will supply everything we need. This family of five will always stay together despite time and circumstance and physical distance. I have no doubt of that.

The constancy of change demands that the smooth rock resting at the lake  bottom is transported to some shore eventually, where a little boy or girl picks it up, carries it to some other supper table at which children and parents join in an excited chorus, imagining where else it has been.

Crapshoot

The quality of a marriage is proven by its ability to tolerate an occasional "exception."-- Friedrich NietzscheLESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

 Getting married is a total crapshoot. There’s just no telling at the outset which marriages are going to work, and which ones will circle the drain awhile and go down finally, sucked up by the muck and mire of incompatibility and irreconcilable differences, mid-life crises and communication breakdowns. I think we all start out with the best intentions and a feeling of optimism about the future.

I’ve often wondered if it’s true that we all have one soul mate, and that if you find him or her you’re guaranteed to have a happy marriage. Hmmm…I’m not in the mood for that much philosophical thought. Besides, I prefer to wonder about more interesting things, like if you keep pushing the elevator button, does it really arrive faster?

Ken and I celebrated our thirtieth anniversary this year. Do you know how long thirty years is? It’s a freaking long time. Ken likes to tell people we were babies when we got married. Age-wise we really weren’t babies, but in terms of life experience, I’d have to agree. We were in love and had excellent chemistry, so one sweltering summer day in his attic apartment, when he told me he wanted to marry me, after spending the afternoon in his ridiculously small twin bed, I said yes. We had been dating for a whopping four months.

I figured he must really, truly love me; for one thing, I was dating another guy for some of that whopping four months. I still can’t believe he put up with that situation for as long as he did. Also, the day I brought him around to meet my parents, my then thirteen-year-old brother Michael made the mistake of being a smart-aleck at the dinner table. In response, my very strict father growled menacingly and smacked Michael in the head. Right in front of my new boyfriend. If I recall correctly, Michael sat right next to Ken that night. Naturally I was horrified and mortified, and the aftermath of finishing our meal in silence was beyond awkward.  But it didn’t scare him away. Go figure.

We got all dressed up one day in the month of May, invited a couple hundred people, and said our vows.  When we returned from our Bermuda honeymoon, people would snicker because neither of us was tan. They joked that we probably never left the room. I wish. As it turns out, Bermuda isn’t tropical, something we didn’t know, and it rained the ENTIRE time we were there. You could say that was the first test of our married life. We spent a lot of money just so we could ride around for a week on mopeds in raingear.

But the true tests of marriage vows are inevitable, and we are no different than anyone else in that regard.  There was the reality of raising a child with a disability, a long and difficult bout with infertility, the credit card bills that I racked up, Max and Olivia’s teenage years.  He even stuck with me through my hideous assymetrical hair style in 1991, which didn’t grow completely out until at least the end of 1992.

We’ve taken only one vacation alone since Cliff was born. It was an entire weekend near Cape Cod, when we celebrated our 25^th anniversary. People are always surprised when I reveal this fact. It isn’t because we can’t afford it.If you really want to know, I'm afraid to leave Cliff. It’s just something I have a hard time with. Ken has grown accustomed to my anxieties by now, and doesn’t force the issue. Would he like to like to sit at a Paris bistro with me eating a mille-feuille? Sure! Have a picnic of bread and Chianti on a blanket under the Tuscan sun? Sip a Grey Goose martini poolside in Aruba? Gaze out of our tree house on the African savannah? Oh yeah. So would I. Someday. It’s a concession he’s made, one of many concessions and compromises, matched only by the ones I have made as well.  That’s how marriage works. Luckily, according to Redbook Magazine, the first rule of marriage is to not spend all your time together. “Constant togetherness is unhealthy for any relationship,” says one expert from the Redbook Marriage Institute. How far away could we get from each other on the African savannah?

After thirty years, we still love each other. The chemistry is still wicked good too. Once, a long time ago, when I asked Ken why he thought we had a good marriage, he said, “Mutual respect”. I’d have to agree. Love, chemistry, respect. And knowing when to tell the truth and when to just shut up. It was years before I knew how much he really hated that haircut.

I highly recommend marriage, if you really want to know. I mean, what is life after all, if not one enormous gamble?  It’s a beautiful thing. If you have doubts, just remember that the nice thing about a crapshoot is sometimes you do get lucky.

Est. 1962

My sister asked me to write about our childhood home as a way to celebrate the official fifty-year anniversary of our occupancy there. I didn't want to at first because it seemed too daunting a task. Then a writer friend of mine challenged me to write a poem or prayer using the word "let" as the very first word. I decided to join these two challenges and I came up with what I guess I'd call a prose poem. I am publishing it on my blog even though it has nothing to do with what I normally write about, but mom asked me to so...

Let me recall the grace of this house,

the beauty in every arch, crack, and creaky stair.

Let me close my eyes and see all the gathering times

of aunts, uncles, cousins, strangers, and angels we have entertained unawares,

and feel the spirits of those loved and cherished, even in their absence.

Let me look around each shadowy, jumbled closet in which I have hidden,

at the staircase where so many babies learned to ascend and descend in their need to conquer,

and behind each door where children’s voices still echo from fifty years of playing in hushed tones,

or counting in the night when we couldn’t sleep, from fights over clothes and pilfered albums,

and endless games where we each were winners in the end.

Let me stop and listen for the music of my mother, and the laughter of my father,

but also, the remonstrations and the soft crying and the apologies and finally,

the enveloping hugs which have made us who we are.

Let me carry in my heart the light that emanates from this house’s walls, windows, leaky faucets,

the small tables crowded with photographs, and the doors that never did close properly.

Let me gaze outside from windows propped open by fat books, at the trees we climbed,

and at the weeping willow under which old women once sat, watching over us and smiling,

with folded hands over ample stomachs.

And at the concrete steps from which I have observed each season, and shook my fist at too-fast cars,

and orchestrated my sisters’ sidewalk games; those same steps where

my brothers posed for pretty girls, and neighbors stood to pass the time.

Let me recall every sorrow and joy when, in some future time,

I am lonely for what was.

Fixer

“This my shit.”—Gwen Stefani, “Hollaback Girl”

In the impossible pursuit of perfection, I am like King Sisyphus, compelled to keep rolling a boulder up a hill, only to watch it roll down time and time again.  Even in the face of the proverbial losing battle, after I’ve picked myself up and patched the bruises, I have to keep trying to fix things I believe to be either wrong or at least in need of renovation. My motivation is a general attitude about wanting to balance out the world, my family, my friends, and my home. As with anything one does to excess, my tendency towards perfectionism is problematic, (just ask my husband!) leaving me at times disillusioned and ineluctably disappointed in the outcomes. But isn’t that the very definition of optimism? To continue to try to make things right despite poor odds?

Still, there are days where I am painfully reminded that there are just some things that are beyond my ability to fix. There are people, I am finally coming to accept, whose minds I can’t change and whose beliefs are too ingrained for me to reform. Perhaps it was arrogant of me to think I could do that in the first place.

After Cliff was born, I began to see people in a different light, to scrutinize and evaluate.  I learned to be perceptive, to cull from a person’s words and actions the answers I needed to find. Some of the friends I had didn’t make the cut. I shed them from my life because I would not compromise the happiness of my son and my own peaceable spirit by holding on to anyone who was not accepting and open to the idea that everyone belongs.  Their ignorance made me sad and angry, and I chose to walk away. Nor did I have patience for pity, because I was happy to have Cliff as my son and I needed, needed, them to be happy too.

In the years since, I’ve developed radar which assists me in surrounding myself and my family with the type of people who possess a like-minded philosophy. It always makes me smile to see them make an effort to talk to Cliff or to engage him in some meaningful way. I love them for their persistence even when Cliff doesn’t answer right away or he decides he doesn’t feel sociable at that moment.

It is sometimes a cruel world clearly in need of repair. I won’t stop trying to fix the things which do not support an inclusive, accepting society, or stop trying to enlighten the people who insist it doesn’t matter if they utter the word “retard” if they weren’t actually referring to my child. I will not listen to or support comedians who equate intellectually challenged individuals with dogs, even if that particular horror occurred eleven years ago (he’s not sorry, as there are other examples of his hate speech since that time). I guess my mistake is in expecting too much, and in hoping the fundamental differences between us are not irreparable. It gets to be exhausting, trying to fix things, but “this my shit”, this is who I am. My love for my son and my strong belief in the value and sanctity of each life compels me to roll that boulder up the mountain over and over, despite its immensity and the challenge of bracing against it in the hope that from time to time it will stay put.

Talking isn't doing. It is a kind of good deed to say well; and yet words are not deeds.   –William Shakespeare