Adventure

On the heels of making (and breaking) my 2013 new year’s resolutions comes examining the life I lived in 2012. The mean taskmaster side of me is horrified by the lack of accomplishment. The nice-fun-loving-hippie-earth-mother side of me says, “Chill out dude, don’t worry about last year.” (Yes, she says “dude.”) My husband reminds me of the progress I did make during 2012. Of the three opinions, I’m going with his.

As much as I want to believe my husband and the earth-mother it is hard to make the taskmaster bitch shut up. All I seem to think about are the missed opportunities and the time wasted. I began 2013 with a sense of urgency to do something to atone for slacking in 2012. But what?

A phone call from a dear friend set in motion my 2013 adventure. We are going to Machu Picchu. We are going to hike and camp for seven days. We are on the downward slope towards sixty, slightly overweight, more than slightly out of shape, and desperate to do something BIG this year.

We have spent our lives raising children, volunteering, working, taking care of others. Now what? That is the question we find ourselves asking. We are used to working in rewarding careers and have found ourselves without jobs to give us our identities. Who are we? Apparently we are women who hike Machu Picchu.

The day after I agreed to the trip I saw the movie The Hobbit. Bilbo Baggins confirmed my decision to venture out of my comfort zone and go on an adventure. Like Bilbo, I must leave the safety and comfort of my living room and go out into the world.

2013 is going to be awesome!

Resolutions

On the eve of another new year I am thinking about resolutions, the many I want to make for 2013 and the many I have made in the past.

I love New Year’s Day. It is possibly my favorite holiday. Of course I really meant to say Christmas is my favorite holiday. I love spending time with my family, giving and receiving gifts that were specially chosen, decorating (well, maybe not so much anymore), and just the general anticipation and love associated with December 25. Now that I have given Christmas its “props” let me be honest. I find New Year’s Day to be a very personal holiday. It is a time for introspection and new beginnings or, what they call in golf, a Mulligan or a do-over. I love a do-over.

I love making and breaking New Year’s resolutions. I typically make and break the same resolutions every year. Lose weight, exercise, eat healthier, take control of my finances, remodel the house, become more spiritual, read more, write more, become more creative, live in the moment, be a nicer person, appreciate what I have, etc., yada, yada, yada.

Even though I have broken every New Year’s resolution I have ever made it horrifies me to imagine where I would be without at least making those resolutions. Resolutions force me think about the person I want to be, and maybe, just maybe, I get a little closer to becoming that person every year.

Will this year’s resolutions be much different? I doubt it. However, I am adding a new one – be more savvy about technology. That means I will finally up-grade from my hand-me-down I-phone (thanks Melinda) to a new one, I will switch to a Mac from a PC, I will learn how to use Google Docs, I will use an electronic calendar (but keep my trusty Day Runner as backup), I will learn how to utilize the scary television options, and if my luck holds I might even figure out how to set the correct time on my I-pad.

Here’s to a new year and to resolutions.

River Walk

September 19, 2012 – What a glorious morning in San Angelo, Texas. I skipped my yoga class and opted to go to the river for my morning exercise. After a summer of triple digit heat the 64 degree temperature was a treat. Even the sun seemed kinder, sort of like a child’s drawing complete with a smiling face.

The Concho River is one of my favorite things about my new hometown. I have lived in San Angelo for just over a year but I still say I’m new here. It is my understanding that unless you were born here you are still a newcomer. When I arrived last summer the river had been recently drained and dredged, yet I still found it a treasure. I was so smitten that I even ventured out to explore on hot summer days. This summer I wasn’t so brave, or perhaps I was more wary of heat stroke. Today’s expedition was like finding an old friend.

I parked at the Beauregard Bridge and headed east. I nodded to a woman walking her dachshunds and then realized she is my neighborhood association president. What a treat for me to see someone I know. Having lived in my former town for over thirty years I would rarely leave the house without seeing a friend. Here I don’t often see a familiar face. We chatted a bit about dogs, the drought and water restrictions and how to save our trees and then we moved on in opposite directions.

My next encounter was with a large heron. I’m saying it was a Great Blue Heron until someone tells me differently. Bird identification is not my strong suit, but according to my Google search that’s what it was. I stood and stared at it for a few minutes until I felt I was encroaching on its territory. What a beautiful bird. I wondered if it was from the nests I have been observing all year in the old tree that reaches out over the river.

Chastising myself for dawdling during my morning exercise I picked up speed and arrived at the Abe Street Bridge to find two separate crews of workers; a construction crew building forms for walkway repair and a cadre of white-clad inmates under the direction of a correctional officer stringing lights for the Christmas extravaganza. I missed this San Angelo tradition last year and I am looking forward to it like a kid going to Disneyland. What a production it must be to begin setup this early.

Continuing on I crossed Chadbourne and notice the water in front of the Museum of Fine Arts was rather still and full of trash. Styrofoam cups and plastic bottles littered the area. How sad. This is one of the prettiest places on the trail and it looked like it hadn't been cleaned up since the Fourth of July. I wondered who was responsible for picking up the trash. Whoever it is, they have fallen down on the job.

I continued on to Concho Avenue where I doubled back and retraced my steps to my starting point. At South Irving I saw an elderly woman being pushed in her wheelchair by a young girl. It made me smile to think of them enjoying the Riverwalk as much as I do, until I realized they were having difficulty accessing the path. I wondered if there was a section of the trail that is handicap friendly. Is there a smooth trail for wheelchairs? I have no idea. I left them behind and moved on.

I’m always on the lookout for wildlife on the river. I like watching the turtles basking in the sun and the squirrels chasing each other in circles around the trees. Today I saw what at first I thought was a nutria, but it was a black squirrel slinking through the underbrush. I had to leave the trail to catch a glimpse of its tail to make certain it wasn’t the rat-like tail of a nutria. It was the furry bottle brush tail of a squirrel. I had never seen nutria until last summer. I was standing on a pedestrian bridge over the river and saw them swimming beneath me. Gross. The semi-aquatic rodent is a pest and I find myself curious about what is being done to control this invasive species. It seems to me that it would have been a good idea to employ a nutria eradication offensive while the river was semi-empty during the dredging stage.

When I arrived at my car I saw that someone had fed the gaggle of geese that were so interested in me upon my arrival, but are now too busy gorging themselves on day-old bread to pay me any mind. I’m feeling a little guilty about cutting my yoga class, but it has been a good morning. I’ve missed the river. I’m looking forward to more cool mornings and more musings as I take in the beauty of my favorite spot in my new town. Namaste.

The Queen of Pep

Arriving at my grandmother’s 1950s pink brick, ranch-style house, I find her in her usual spot. She is sitting in her lift chair, one that would assist her in getting up, if she had the patience to wait for the slow mechanism to raise her. This chair has become her island in the sea of the 2500 square foot home where she raised ten children. I yell loudly to be heard over the blaring big screen television, purchased one Christmas by her children, in hopes that she might be able to make out the larger-than-life images. Macular degeneration has not been kind.

“It’s me,” I yell louder. “How are you?”

She finds the enormous-numbered remote control, feels for the volume button and turns down the TV. “What do you know?” she asks, mostly out of habit, but desperate for information from the outside world.

I make a quick, mental tally of my day, attempting to glean something of interest to offer as the diversion she so desires. “I had lunch with a professor from the university,” I say.

This works, and she peppers me with questions. “What does he teach? Where did you eat? Why did you go?”

After exhausting all of the details of my lunch meeting, I ask her about her day. “Did you have any company?”

“I don’t think so.”

I know my Aunt Gail and Uncle Bob have been by several times, to make breakfast, to read aloud the newspaper and the crossword puzzle. Gail leaves the scrambled letters of the Jumble word puzzle written in five-inch tall black Magic Marker letters on a clipboard for grandmother to decipher. They return at noon to finalize the Jumble answer and to fix her mid-day meal. Uncle Steve usually eats with them as well. “What did you have for lunch?” I ask.

“I don’t remember,” she says, looking a little confused.

I know she has eaten well. When I lived with her in my early twenties she was fond of quoting, “Eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince and dinner like a pauper.” She usually said this as we sat down to a large evening meal, but now she is unintentionally living the advice. Her appetite is best in the morning, but wanes by late afternoon. If I can get her to eat a little something and drink a glass of milk in the evening before she goes to bed, I have succeeded. “What would you like tonight?” I ask. “Sweet or salty?” If the answer is sweet I know there is a peach cobbler in the refrigerator. But tonight she chooses salty.

“I’ll just have a few Fritos.” She loves chips, it must be the salt her worn-out taste buds crave. I hate it when she requests them as she has a hiatal hernia and they cause her to cough and choke. Some nights she coughs up more than she ingests. In the kitchen with its original green linoleum tile floor I spread Fritos on a plate, grate some sharp cheddar cheese on top, melt it for a few seconds in the microwave and pour a glass of milk. “I have a glass of milk in the ice-box,” she shouts from the living room.

She thinks she does. Any morsel of food or drink she doesn’t finish, she requests we save. She lived through the depression and raised ten children, she doesn’t believe in waste. But her caretakers don’t believe in serving her old food, so we pretend we put her leftovers in the refrigerator.

I serve her salty snack on a tray, carefully positioning her fresh glass of milk and guiding her hand to it. If I can distract her, she may forget she isn’t hungry and eat all of her food. She is no longer the slightly overweight woman who futilely attended Weight Watcher’s meetings every week. Now, when I walk behind her as she slowly maneuvers to her bedroom behind her walker, her hips are so narrow, I wonder how her pants manage to stay on.

I opt for the distraction ploy, knowing she needs the calories, but running the risk of a choking spell, usually set in motion when she talks while eating. “Tell me about the Queen of Pep,” I ask.

She closes her blind eyes and travels the roads of her memory, the roads more familiar to her than what she had for lunch today. In a voice stronger than a few minutes earlier, she begins. “I used to play cards with Mr. and Mrs. Murphy at the teacherage in Pep. Mildred was her name. They invited Oliver Fredenberger, what a name, from the gin to be my partner. I hate to play cards, I told him, makes me want to kick the table in the air.”

I can imagine this. As my grandmother tells the story, I can see her in her early twenties, used to the freedom of growing up on a west Texas ranch, her long red braids cut into a bob, trying desperately to be a proper small town school teacher.

“Oliver asked me what I liked to do. I told him I liked to dance. He said he didn’t dance, but there was a dance at Lehman he’d take me to if I’d like to go. So that Saturday night we went to the dance at Lehman. They had a real fine band from Lubbock, the Buffalo Rhythm Stompers. They played real good music.”

“What kind of music did they play?” I ask, interrupting her memories from 1929.

“I don’t know what kind of music, just good dancing music.” She opens her eyes and I’m afraid I’ve broken the spell. “That’s the night I met Lewis and Prof and the Widder,” she says.

I know Lewis ends up being my grandfather, and I’ve heard about Prof and the Widder my whole life. “How’d they come to be called Prof and the Widder?” I wonder aloud.

“Prof taught school earlier in his life, just for one year. That’s what they sometimes called school teachers back then, Prof, short for professor I guess.”

“And the Widder?” I ask. “Had she been married before?”

“No,” my grandmother replies, her eyes close again and her smile reaches all the way to them. “Prof named her that, said she’d just as well be a widder as married to him.”

I watch as her smile fades and her brow wrinkles in thought.

“When he was in the war, the Widder was pregnant. He wrote home and told her to name the baby Buckley Lane; I guess after his best friend who died in the war. You couldn’t just pick up the phone and call back then, people wrote letters. The baby was a girl and the Widder named her Buckley Lane. Lots of little girls got bad names back then because of that. Buckley Lane married and had two children, but I don’t know what became of her.”

I can see she’s gone down a side street in her mind, trying to remember Prof’s progeny. I want to hear about my grandfather. “What about Lewis?” I ask. “Did you dance with Lewis that night?”

The smile is back. “Yes, we danced. Lewis didn’t know my name. All he knew was I taught school in Pep. He and Prof drove to Pep a few days later. Said they were ‘buying corn.’ They weren’t really, maybe corn liquor. They called me the Queen of Pep. They talked mother into letting me go to Lehman to stay with the Prof and the Widder so I could go to the next dance. Can you imagine?”

She stops here, her eyes still closed. I can only hope she is in 1929, dancing with my grandfather to the ‘real good music’ of the Buffalo Rhythm Stompers.

“He called me the Queen of Pep,” she says one more time.

Promises of Rain

I just finished watering the lawn. We have an automatic sprinkler system, but it is old so I have to manually operate it, turning on each section and then checking to make sure the sprinkler heads all popped up and aren’t spraying into the street.

We are under water restrictions due to drought and can only water once a week. I wish I had a xeric lawn, but I don’t. The landscaping at my house probably dates back to 1934 when water was not the issue it is today. When we bought this house we took on large trees, shrubbery, and lots of grass. I am trying to be a good steward of the limited water resources, but I don’t want everything in my yard to die.

Yesterday was my day to water but I felt optimistic about the thirty percent chance of rain so I waited. The blue sky clouded over, my storm phobic Border Collie hid in her kennel, and the temperature dropped into the double digits. Hurrah, maybe the weather forecast was right this time.

I made a cup of tea and sat under the awning on the patio to watch the storm roll in. Weather watching is one of my favorite activities, one I don’t get to participate in much in west Texas. As the sky grew darker and the distant thunder grew louder and closer I could hear raindrops on my canvas shelter, but found it odd that the cement patio remained dry. It was raining, just not enough to “stick.”

After my second cup of tea I gave up on the rain. The weatherman on the five o’clock news said there was still a chance, but I think he is a big fat liar. Today he is reporting a twenty percent chance but I’m not feeling very optimistic. I saw it as an eighty percent chance of no rain and turned on the sprinkler.

Andy Wilkinson, a wonderful singer/songwriter from my hometown, wrote a song called “Promises of Rain.” The chorus goes:

Storms, they build up over me,
They clatter all around,
But the rain falls east of me
When crops are in the ground.
There is no balm in Gilead,
But on the Staked Plains
God anoints this farmer’s head
With promises of rain.

This song has been on my mind these past two days. Promises of rain are about all we get lately. Another thing that’s on my mind is – it’s only my lawn I’m worrying about, not crops.

I pity the farmers who are irrigating or trying to raise a dry-land crop. I pity the consumer who will pay the increased cost somewhere down the line. I just downright pity the lack of rain. Keep those promises coming, sooner or later the weather forecast has to be right.

(You can find Andy Wilkinson’s song, “Promises of Rain” on his Radio Free America c.d. You should check it out. http://itunes.apple.com/us/artist/andy-wilkinson/id674410)

Common Sense

I have sworn off of political commentary on my Facebook page, but not on my blog. I question if what I am writing about today is political commentary. I prefer to think of it as common sense and since I have not sworn off of that I will continue writing.

Gun Control.

Now that I have your attention, now that I have riled you up, I’ll promise right off the bat that I do not, I repeat, do not want to deprive you of your right to own a gun. What I’m writing about today is James Holmes and why he had an AR-15 semi-automatic assault weapon with 100 rounds of ammunition. If you own an assault weapon then I retract my earlier promise, I do want to take away your gun.

I am not an expert on Constitutional Law, but I did Google the Second Amendment and noted that it was adopted in 1791 and reads: A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed. Okay, here comes the common sense thing – in 1791 who could have fathomed our current-day semi-automatic assault weapon?

What I’m trying to say is that the citizens of the United States of America do not need to keep and bear assault weapons. We do not need them to deer hunt. We do not need them for competitive shooting. We do not need them to protect our lives and our property. Who does need an assault weapon? Someone like James Holmes. Someone who wants to kill a lot of people as quickly as possible.

Another reason I’m writing this goes back to Facebook. After the shooting there were many posts asking for prayers for the victims and the good people of Aurora, Colorado. I think prayers are fine, but not one single Facebook post on my page said anything about the gun laws that allowed this person to buy an AR-15 semi-automatic assault weapon in the first place.

Keep your guns for sport and protection, but please let’s find a way to keep assault weapons out of the hands of people who would use them in a manner our Second Amendment writers could not have imagined.

I am certain I have sparked controversy. I am certain many of my readers are against gun control. I am certain many will see this as Democrat vs. Republican, liberal vs. conservative, left vs. right. I am certain that if changes are not made there will be more massacres. It is common sense.

Apple

I’ve been thinking a lot about my mother this week. She died in 1991 at the age of fifty-seven, but before she left us she was a wonderful grandmother to my daughters. My oldest daughter Courtney, the oldest grandchild, had the pleasure of knowing her the best. Courtney visited me these past two weeks with her daughter, the first and so far the only grandchild. We reminisced about my mother, about how much she loved Courtney and about how much Courtney loved her.

Courtney recalled making a childhood announcement that when she grew up she wanted to marry MaMaw. No amount of reasoning could dissuade her from this idea. It wasn’t until my mother asked, “But who would fix PaPaw’s dinner?” that Courtney finally realized she could not marry the person she loved most in the world. Fortunately, she later found someone she loved as much.

I reminded Courtney of an incident that occurred at the airport when she was about five years old. As we boarded the plane for home after visiting my parents Courtney was bereft about leaving. She sobbed and wailed in a most melodramatic fashion during our goodbyes and the entire flight. I’m sure the other airline passengers were happy when we were no longer sharing cabin space. I was excruciatingly embarrassed, but now I find myself secretly hoping that my granddaughter will have similar feelings upon leaving me one day.

The two weeks I spent with my grandbaby were priceless. At seven months old I doubt she remembers me from previous visits so we had to go through the getting to know each other process again. On the second day, when she gave me an ear to ear grin as I got her out of her crib, my heart filled so that I truly did feel my chest expand. We got along just fine, she and I, while her mother sequestered herself to study for the New York bar exam. Every day I learned a little more about this precious child. She laughs at the pat-a-cake song (or my singing), she doesn’t like to nap unless we are strolling through my neighborhood, and she enjoys a frequent change of scenery. I will see her again in September and I can’t wait to discover more about her.

The love between a grandmother and a granddaughter is a special thing. I had my Big Red and my daughters had their MaMaw. I have learned from the best. My grandmother name is Apple (because I am a Granny Smith); I hope I’m a good one.