Pushing 70 (around)

Pushing 70 (around)

Like most artists, I am constantly composing, in my case word after word swimming in my head, like small minnows  gliding through the shallows.   You've seen them: they dart in a pack, shifting directions quickly, going nowhere.   I have a perpetual keyboard tapping away, all day.  This magnus corpus is now too large to contain, and I have some crazy fear that if I don't start sharing it, the words and scenes  I write constantly  will go rogue on me.  I'll lose my hair.  Small little novels will appear as nodules (novules?) around my closed up throat.  You'll read about me babbling incessantly on a soapbox at a city park.

You don't want to hear ALL my thoughts.  I grew up in an era when children were meant to be seen and not heard, and that kind of suppression produces all kinds of nefarious thoughts and wild fantasies.    I just want to write simply and honestly about women's lives, for both women AND men who, like me, set out each day to be our best selves, to puzzle and blunder through a wondrous and difficult life and be happy and satisfied.  

Join me!  Comment!  Argue!  Celebrate our specie's special gift of talking and sharing?   What else is there?

Brooklyn, the lap of my ancestors

My son Adam and I sit in his windowless Brooklyn living room, the night nearly over. I mention I've done my ritual walk-by on Degraw Street, past the handsome brick four-story brownstone Number 366, where Catherine Atlakson, my widowed great-great-grandmother lived in 1888 and 1889, according to the City Directory, with her son Theodore, my own father's namesake. There's even a photo of the place, passed from hand to hand down through the generations. A little boy and girl are in front, perhaps Catherine's first grandchildren, Andrew, and his sister Madeline. Not far from Degraw is 12 President's St, near the north border of Red Hook, where Catherine and Aanen Atlakson lived as Norwegian immigrants after they arrived in 1848. Their house, or flat, would have had the view of the East River and Governor's Island, and just to the north, the inlet out to the sea. It's now a playground.

Walking Brooklyn, trodding around upon this spot of the earth where my ancestors lived, brings me some strange, specific comfort, like sitting on your grandparent's lap where you know you're safe, and about to be spoiled and made over. Today, walking back to Union Street, where Adam lives, I ran my hand over the black rod-iron grillwork in front of the brownstone, just a little, to say 'hi.'

Adam is perplexed by my intense genealogical leanings, which have leached into the psyche of his father. In a couple of days, some second cousins on his father's side are arriving in Michigan from California. "Just because we have some miniscule genetic overlap doesn't draw me feel connected to relatives," says Adam. "As humans, we have more in common with the nematode earthworm."

He's right. All life on earth, from bacteria to human beings, have at last 25% of DNA in common. The DNA of a nematode worm is 75% similar to that of humans.

I have an argument for that. True, it's not the pulsations of DNA calling to me from that past that connect me to my ancestors in Brooklyn. Instead, they are part of the story I am continually creating about who I am, where I come from, and the legacies I am consciously or unwittingly playing out in my own life.

Partly, I owe my sense of adventure from Catherine and Aanen who left the impoverishment of Norway, for America, crossing the North Atlantic with their four children. Catherine would bury six out of seven children born in the US, the last a seven year old little girl named Caroline. Those are the facts, culled from a Family Bible.

This is what I have invented. This sad, anguishing set of losses would convert to an overabundance of attachment to her remaining children, my great-grandfather especially. You can see this in a photo of Catherine. It might have been taken on her 50th birthday. She looks, thin, and worn out, widowed four years earlier, her last child in the grave for three years. Theodore sits protectively at her side, their hands entwined.

Theodore, as the oldest son in New York would continue to care for his mother until her death in 1899. His occupation is listed as 'beltmaker.' He would marry Amelia Jung, a German-American, and live on DeGraw where eight children would be born, my grandmother Florence among them.

Life would go downhill for Theodore and Amelia. My grandmother passed on stories of poverty, the family falling on the graces of the Salvation Army then a Filipino son-in-law tugboat worker, working in Hoboken silk factories as a young adolescent, her father's love for beer, his institutionalization in a State Mental Hospital before his death. Amelia would come to live with Florence after her marriage to another Filipino in 1916. My great-grandmother would die suddenly of a heart attack in Philadelphia, in 1925, at age 68, and that point forward in time would mark the end an era, one that still calls out to me.

Will I ever stop yearning to live in New York City? Maybe I should deconstruct these longings into a single strand of psychopathology: I'm displacing my urge to create-- which is often at odds with my need to care for others--with an obsession for a city full of creators. I believe erroneously that being in the right place, will bring out my creativity, and free me to write. On the other hand, wouldn't living in New York unbridle the shame and alienation I developed living in Grand Rapids, as the daughter of a Filipino-American. But would I be free of feelings that by now are internalized? No, I would face the same struggle Philip Roth ascribes to the writing process: frustration, humiliation, even torture. (I can relate to all of that, having just had a third book proposal go down, even as yet another book agent took the proposal up enthusiastically.) I once dared to write a short story, even dared to submit it to a contest, and was chosen to have a fiction editor critique it. He was shocked this was my first piece of fiction, remarking that I had a lyrical gift, and should keep going. I didn't. I went to Rwanda instead, a place that was way, way more certain to accept my other talents, as a psychologist, and project manager. As I retract from Rwanda now, to write more fiction and non-fiction, I am willing myself to enter a deeply uncertain, frightening place occupied by artists. At age 65, it's the water's edge, all over again; forcing myself onto a great ocean, staying convinced I have the courage to, as Andre Gide put it, 'lose sight of the shore.'

The birth of an obsession

Over three days, I have plundered purses, closets, couches, pockets, trunks, drawers, coffee shops, and cars for my huge wad of keys and plastic discount coupon cards, jammed onto my red climbing clip adorned with a Vera Bradley plaster-covered fabric swatch. And now, my 4th Kindle has disappeared as well, chock full of novels. It doesn't help a rip, but I have vivid images of my keys and Kindle, and I can even feel them in my hand. My latest search, in a local coffee shop where I was SURE they were in a lost and found box, has failed, and now comes the steady drip of anxiety. If I don't turn it off, I will begin an even more thorough search back in time and space. This will take up time I don't have, and begin to feel ridiculous. Everything can be replaced, and not even expensively. Why am I letting these lost items drive my day? The answer lies buried deep in the winter of 1959, in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and the story begins with the United States Treasury's School Stamp Savings Program, a hold-over from War Bonds. Parents got little booklets with blank squares to be covered over with purchased ten-cent stamps, usually in a strip of four stamps. Once the book was filled, a patriotic mother like mine, who well remembered War Bonds, and her brother fighting Over There, would turn the booklet in for money. I was 11, in the sixth grade, wore mittens, and loved playing in the snow on the way home. Who wouldn't? There was so much of it. The snow was so deep, and the snow piles from shoveling sidewalks so huge, that children cavorting home from school on icy, snowy sidewalks could barely be seen by mothers peering out of living room windows. Only their little wool caps, which moved mysteriously along as if disembodied from little heads. I had the stamps in my hand, having scooped them off the table manned by the Stamp Lady who showed up on Friday afternoons. When I reached the side door, all frosty-breathless,the stamps were gone. My mother immediately frisked me for the Saving Stamps, plundering my pockets, and my navy cloth gym bag. My wan must-have-dropped-them comment sent her into a rage, and she ordered me back to school, to trace my steps. She closed the side door with a bang, leaving me shocked and speechless on a late afternoon, the dusk unspooling quickly, the snow turning a dusky blue-grey. I half ran back toward school, my head down like a dog looking for food. School was at least 12 long blocks away. I'm sure I was crying, and sniffling. The sidewalks were icing over. I dreaded running into schoolmates like snowball heaving boys. When I reached the school, the door to my wing was locked, and the hall was darkened. A light was on in the principal's office, at the front of the building, but I dared not face another authority. Instead I ran back home, my head down once again, blood-hounding the sidewalk with my eyes, stepping around fresh dog poop and pee left by early evening walkers, finding only a ball-point pen, and candy wrappers. My memory ends there. I don't know what happened when I got home, only that I assumed MY WHOLE LIFE that my mother had been trying to teach me a lesson about the importance of money. It didn't work. Probably because she went too far shaming me, I am not good with money, nor with minding my stuff. I do though churn up mounds of misery when I lose something. I retrace my steps meticulously, with about as much success as quarters in a slot machine. Stuff, but not shame, just disappears.

Chances are good

Striding onto the gym floor this morning-- the only way I can stay fired up-- a too too thin man in a white tee shirt and navy pants, half-smiled at me. I kept going; who is this? When I looked back from my rowing machine, I saw it was someone I know. His wife I had heard, has serious colon cancer, and so I left my station to talk to him, add my concern, offer some support. 'Well, she's better now that pre-op chemo and radiation are done. All of us will probably get cancer, you know, and at least she's very fit. Still, chemo and radiation really did a job on her.' Despite it being a Friday, I worked out hard today, partly because this story stuck, partly because someone our family is very close to, a 34 year-old young woman is struggling with brain cancer. It felt right to get into the pool for laps, where I could suspend myself away from reality, get into a womb state. But in the shower I cried. When I got home, I felt compelled to check out my gym friend's gloomy pronouncement. looked up the odds of getting cancer in one's lifetime. According to the American Cancer Association, based on 2009 statistics, the odds of developing or dying from cancer of any kind are one in two for men (44.81%) one in three for women (%38.1). Those are high odds. No one really talks about this. Instead, we choose to focus on the odds for particular cancers where the odds are much, much, lower. Like 1 in 182 are the odds for women developing brain cancer, 1 in 21 for colon cancer. My mother had colon cancer, and outlived it. Everyone without cancer thinks they can escape it, or beat it, and people who've had cancer would prefer not to talk about it. What can anybody do, beside give up smoking, stay active, and get cancer screens? Genes figure big. When I moved onto the gym area this morning, I think I knew who smiled at me. But facing him meant facing cancer, and I needed a a couple of seconds. I'm still in great denial about the real possibility that I'll get cancer, or Rob will, or someone I'm really close to. But why focus on it now? It feels entirely inadequate and embarrassingly out of scale, but I'm going to send encouragement cards today. One of them, all sparkling and silver is about the beauty of a snowflake, and inside it reads, 'if only time could stand still.' For these two women, I'm sure they would agree.

Things like aging, happiness , wealth are relative notions. “I’m leaving MedFit and going upstairs to the regular gym,” my mother told me recently on Facetime, “because there are too many old, very disabled people where I work out, and they take too long at the machines.” My mother just turned 90. A friend broke in on a conversation several of us were having about new adventures. “Striving? You know at this point in my life, I have no more aspirations. I’ll be perfectly happy if I could just do more of what I like: reading and writing the occasional poem.” This friend is 64. I am driving up-country in Rwanda with a local friend, to deliver his extended family potatoes, rice, and money to pay for their single electric bulb. He’s a project manager for a Swedish telecom firm, rents a modern four-room house on a severe slope reached by a heavily riveted road. “I am lucky to have means, because I can share more,” he confided. He provides tuitions for seven young family members, in addition to his two kids.

My Dad's Quarrel with Dying

I have taken to reading poetry everyday. The hope is that I will rekindle my capacity to invent metaphors. It’s a needed skill for fiction writing, one of my goals this year. And so I chose Wild Metaphors by Edward Hirsch, a book bought in an earlier decade. So far, each poem is about night, and death, too too dark for me right now, as the anniversary of my father’s death looms. But maybe it’s a good thing to read these poems, since the images go straight to my grief, and him. This morning I had a silent weep in the early hours of the morning, as the sun rose, shrugging off its persimmmon coat, then a tangerine one, and now, in its full naked glory, is standing on the horizon saying, ‘Move! Be!’ I cried because of these lines from “Poor Angels:” While the body sits glumly by the window Listening to the clear summons of the dead Transparent as glass, clairvoyant as crystal… Some night it is almost ready to join them. Oh, this is a strained, unlikely tethering, A furious grafting of the quick and the slow: When the soul flies up, the body sinks down And all night-locked in the same cramped room- They go on quarreling, stubborningly threatening To leave each other. I cried because my father, so quick on his mind and so graceful in his body, became trapped by the crippling diseases of the very old, and suffered so. He never gave up the quarrel between life and death, and clung to life, gently scolding us for asking him to sign a living will, a week before he eventually died: “Well, if there’s a chance I’ll make it, I don’t want them to not help me.” We were crowded around him in a wheelchair in his new room at the rehab facility, with the Hospice five-point document on a bedside tray in front of him, trying desperately to give him back the control he desperately wanted. We wanted to save him from being readmitted to the hospital, hoping he could die elsewhere. Who among us would tell him that his life was just about to end?

I ran this morning, for the first time in months, though 'hauled' is more apt. My muscles remember what to do but they are burdened by a layer of fat I seem to have donned since turning 60. I'm not sure if I will ever give up my dream of being thin again, but I am sure that if I do, my body will begin to approximate my mother's. And that won't be good for any aspect of my health, including the mental part. How strange: after a stress-free weekend with my mother all to myself--the first time since 2002 when we traveled to London together--I am reading Alison Bechdel's graphic memoir called Are You My Mother? Stranger still, there is a reference in her book to Anne Bradstreet, America's first female poet, and I've just finished Caleb's Crossing by Geraldine Moore where Anne Bradstreet turns up again. Does this mean I should find Anne Bradstreet's work, or that by age 64, everything relates to everything else?

Pain Prophets

Samples of so-called palliative care designed to improve the quality of an older patient's life: "You're never going to be without pain, " says the pain specialist to my father. This verbal jab is delivered after several epidural injections into his spine, to relieve the pain from vertebrae fractures. The website advertising the practice has a poem from Emily Dickinson, intended to emphasize how empathic the doctor is:

Pain has an element of blank/It cannot recollect/When it began, or if there was/A time when it was not.


From another medical professional, several days later: "Because you have osteoporosis, you will keep breaking your back," said the physician's assistant to my father after an examination. This practice's website has lovely photos of Italy's Cinqueterra mountains as a backdrop, and plays classical music when you click, anywhere.



Seven hundred miles north, listening to the story of how my father was up all night with back pain, I make semi-frantic calls to any physician who has made the mistake of calling me on his personal cell phone. I sweet-talk receptionists who have names like 'Ginger' and 'Dottie' and schedule appointments for my 88 year-old mother to take my nearly 91 year-old father for more medical treatment.

Today, my Dad will see his cardiologist, a hail-and-hearty German doctor who tends to be more positive-minded with my father, and, later, an internist who took care of him--twice--in the hospital. We hope he has more sense than the classical musician doctors.

I sit down and eat a bowl of left-over risotto, with no thought of the calories there-in, and play Joni Mitchell on the piano, the song 'Willy' (he is my son, he is my father).

THERE

It’s March 1, snow depth looking to be four inches on our backyard bench. As if to signal that spring is coming, the sun has appeared out the kitchen window, and a grin begins to thaw my frozen winter face.

Why do I smile more when the sun is out? Easy: it’s very nearly Pavlovian. My brain goes to languid, clueless lay-outs on the asphalt roof over our back-home screened-in porch, turning ever so slowly on the chaise, a human on the spit, my skin hastening into a first-degree burn with iodine and baby oil. Now THERE was a time of life: summer, no jobs except to make my bed, babysit my brothers, and make-out with boys.

But when the sun is gone, why does a veil of thin blue sadness drop over me? I think it’s a problem in object permanence. Today, gazing at the morning sun, which by all accounts will be fleeting, I remembered the toy under the cup test we gave infants in the development lab, during graduate school, to check their Piaget stage.

Here’s the test: At a certain cognitive point, babies will pursue a toy whisked under a cup, because they know, with great, gleeful certainty, even when covered up, IT’S STILL THERE. Before that magical turning point, they just look puzzled when it disappears, some more mildly distressed than others. No doubt, I was in that latter group.

At age 62, something has messed with my object permanence, and it’s not just about the sun. I seem to be in need for constantly being in touch with my adult kids on the Internet. Even to see them listed on my Contacts, there entire grown beings reduced to thin blue letters, makes me happy.

I’m not alone, according my friends in the empty nest. We have trouble trusting that the kids are THERE, even when they’re out of sight. Obsessively, we have to lift the cup, multiple times each day, for reassurance. How many of us walk around the house, still, and ask, where did time (the kids) go? Is this an early warning sign we're losing cognitive ground, and returning to pre-object permanence infancy?

Hey, I think, the sun's rays (like the kids) are still THERE, not gone. Maybe I should whip on my sunglasses when the sun (son) disappears behind the clouds (cup), and try to nudge my neurochemistries to deliver the instant happy I so desperately need on March 1.

Sunday. Jerry. Servants.

Comb the universe, as I do daily by reading the New York Times, and walking in the woods, and surprising what you'll find. Here's Jerry Seinfeld, in the Sunday Arts Section, promoting his new series the Marriage Ref, waxing eloquent about the creative process:

Ideas are a terrible obligation.

If it's a good idea, you become its servant.

A good idea has draft suction.

Of course, recognition of the powerlessness one feels in the grip of an idea, doesn't keep Jerry from going forward.

I identify, Jerry. I could be spending this Sunday at the gym, or the movies, and instead I'm churning out an argument for USAID, that they should give me $390,000 to run Stories For Hope in Africa for the next two years. Total long shot, but I'm there.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/28/arts/television/28marriage.html?scp=2&sq=Seinfeld&st=cse

http://storiesforhope.org (under construction, but almost there).

Denying self-denial

A description of a writer, a few weeks ago, has stuck. The author—was he a novelist, or a poet?—went through his self-denial phase as a truck driver, before he turned to writing, which he does now every night for hours on end, in a little cabin behind his home.

I scoured Google looking for this piece about him, like finding it would unlock some door. Do all writers go through a phase of denying the kind of rising, surging desire I have almost daily, to express myself through the written word?

If so, it’s a strange comfort to me. Why, in my own life, do I deny great, teaming pleasures? Not because I fear rejection as a writer anymore than the next person. Because the impulses to create are checked early on. I simply switch them off, or deny them through any number of rationalizations (a favorite: people need me).

(Of course, then these impulses pile up behind the locked door, like so many poor souls trying to escape annihilation by fire, and I get very depressed, but that’s an old story. )


Someone has likened this self-denial to a kind of anorexia; it’s like cutting yourself off from the stuff you love. I can understand the connection, since I’m a food addict. Self-denial kinda runs in my family, and I fear I've passed on this trait to my children, the way it was passed to me.

What is the price of unlocking this heavy old door, and keeping it ajar? I think, looking back, it's a dread that I will be punished, or, in some primeval way, that something--or someone--critical to my survival will be overlooked.

What’s the reward? Playing in the wash of waves at the shoreline, where the sea ebbs and flows, mixing up sticks and rocks and mud and acorns, to make a homemade stew while playing house, racing around the block on my two-wheeler, making piles of paper airplanes, telling untold stories in Rwanda, writing a short story about a young girl whose mother abandons her to a great-aunt and uncle,or a poem about hearing that your first teenage boyfriend died at age 63.

Following pathways

What would life be like without surprise? Encountering something new, moving toward it, then allowing yourself to be swallowed by the encounter, is this not what creativity, and adaptation is all about?
This was my take-away from a bike trip yesterday to a Central Michigan county, with Rob, and here’s what happened. We had tried to mount enthusiasm for a long, rural bike ride starting from Jackson, a medium sized town just West from Ann Arbor, but it was difficult.
Jackson: Jackson State Prison. Jackson: Republicans. Jackson: where small minds are made smaller. We even tried to circumvent the actual town by starting our ride about 3 miles out, and parking in the empty lot of a Greek Orthodox Church, to unload our bikes and so begin a 25 mile loop taking us back toward Ann Arbor, and past some pretty lakes.
My front tire was soft; we didn’t have a pump along. Oh well, I thought, if it goes flat, THAT will be our adventure.
We rode on miles of rural/residential road, past schools, washed out country stories, the occasional mega-home with an algaed pond, a trailer park, small ranches built on 4-5 acres, homes where pick-up trucks, sheds, dogs, and riding mowers were de riguer. It was pleasant, the occasional hill was a riding challenge, and the weather was knock-dead gorgeous. There were enough turns to make navigating a necessity.
A man in a pickup truck pulled astride us to request that we be on the lookout for a lost Yorkshire terrier. Passing an old frame house, we were blasted by rock music, and for a brief instant I fantasized the place as a summer hideaway for Eminem (not).
Another mile, and we encountered a very old farm house, next to a field being plowed by a very old man on a tractor. We waved; he waved back. The house with its old, covered swimming pool and ancient basketball hoop suggested a family had been raised here, in the 50’s. It was sad somehow, this enduring image of a rural family whose children may have run off for Las Vegas, or Orlando. The lack of a flowers garden seemed to signal the loss of the man’s wife too.
As we turned north, there were fewer houses, and more trees, signaling the lake district ahead. I felt lulled into a kind of vague longing for summer icons: a lake, ice cream, picnic tables, a resting spot.
And then we happened upon an odd, weather-beaten sign. Then another one: ‘Parking ahead for viewing area.’ Viewing what? A tree in the shape of Mary Magdelene? A hill-top vista long ago overrun by trees and houses? I braced for the honky-tonk that the Midwest is famous for: “THE WORLD’S LARGEST CROSS.” Or “YOU HAVE NOW CROSSED THE 49TH PARALLEL.”
Sure enough, on our right appeared a dirt parking lot. We steered toward it, my soft front tire sinking into construction sand, and gravel. A bright blue sedan was parked, the only car. There was a wide grass path directly to the left and we eased down it, toward some odd, open space.
What we encountered still boggles my mind, 24 hours later. An enormous bird sanctuary is nestled among 900 acres of forest, marshland, and open prairie. Each year hundreds, sometimes thousands of sand crane stop here. We heard a few in the distance. The sky was flooded with birds flying in and out of hundreds of well-placed bird houses. Purple lupine dotted the landscape. Viewing benches were everywhere, and trails upon trails. And this: no one save ourselves and the owner of the bright blue car, who stood stark still gazing at a tree wherein presumably was a rare bird.
We rode our bikes on the trails, past a lake, into another open area, through some forest, and looped back to our beginnings. Apparently the area is home to many rare birds, including a bald eagle. We were agape in wonderment, to discover such a place, hidden from the road, maintained by the Audubon Society, donated by a man who lost his only daughter, in 1935.
Follow an uncharted pathway, and this is what can happen.

A slave named Bob to have, hold & enjoy

When I'm really busy, I am known to punch family names into Ancestry.com in the oddest hours of the night or morning. It settles me down.

So one jittery night I type 'Edney,'a name from my mother's maternal line in Tennessee. No one knows much about the Edneys; we have relatives named Rainey and Dunnagan. The Edney's, and the Jones's have all but disappeared.

Several hours later, I come across a series of online conversations in a genealogy site, about the Edneys of North Carolina.

I leap into the conversation, which has been going on for about 7 years, and try to reach a couple of people, many of whom may be dead, because genealogy is an old person's hobby. For the record, I'm not old, but I'm obsessed with where I come from, like I'm the silky threads of a blown dandelion, trying to find my way back.

A 76 year-old man named Earl Peeler who lives in Tampa gets right back to me online. We exchange emails. We're like two knights in armour approaching each other on horseback, our lances drawn. Protecting a family line goes way back in evolution, and first we must establish our credentials.

I cite my direct descendants; he cites his. "I am Patricia of Samuel Edney, son Robert Edney and Ann Rensher." He comes right back: "And I am Earl of Asa Edney, son of Robert Edney and Ann Rensher."

Okay, that's over. So we're related. We are something like first cousins, ten times removed. That means our common ancestors were brothers, a long, long, long time ago. And their father was our direct descendant. This tight bond established, he agrees to send me pieces of the Edney genealogy, a 47 year-old project he says will 'probably get dumped in the trash when I'm gone.'

For the record, Robert Edney was born between 1690 and 1710 in England, and settled his family in Pasquotank, North Carolina, buying up land, and slaves.

These are my people. I know this from a two-page typed family history someone passed to me decades ago. Whoever it was found it in a family bible I think. And I have this bible. It's wrapped in blue-and-white-hopsacking material, in a white garbage bag, and lain in a plastic storage bin on the floor of a spare room closet.

It's three days later. I'm nearly finished with my ancestry orgy. What have I got to show for it?

1. Secure knowledge that I have the Edney family bible, written in by Newton Edney, Robert's grandson, born before the Revolutionary War, January 1, 1763 to be exactly. My Uncle Ammon got it for me, from my mother's first cousin, Christine.

2. Reasonable speculation that Newton had a mistress named Parmelia, possibly an African-American woman who bore two children with Newton, named Eliza and Mary. They are listed as Negro births by a man who had quite a few slaves (13). Why else are they listed in the family bible? And why else is Parmelia's marriage to William Bray recorded there? And why else is she listed in Newton's will?

3. Confirmation that my early Edney line is comprised of land-owners who had slaves at every generation up to the Civil War, including 'Bob' who shows up in a will, a piece of property for the bequeathee 'to have, hold and enjoy.'

4. Three locks of hair, carefully bound, one wrapped in a tiny piece of paper labeled 'Eccleses.'

5. Many pressed flowers.

6. A post card from my great great grandfather John Wesley Jones, to his son-in-law, John Dunnagan, asking to be picked up at a train station Christmas Eve in Bon Aqua, Tennessee.

7. Leaflets advertising the new town of Rochester, New York, and Denton County Texas, the new frontiers.

8. A pencil scratched will signed by W. Nelson, my great-grandmother Dolly's brother-in-law.

9. A love poem by Viola Dunnagan, saying 'i love you but thats no youse.'

Fixed points

Now that Spring is just ahead, I linger outside as the edges of day smudge from burnt scarlet to soft purple. I'm awaiting the nighttime sky. With a great, familiar intention, I look for the few childhood constellations I still know. More than once--I remember a dock New Hampshire, and an Hawaii hot tub-- I have laid back against my arms to bask in the vastness of the black universe.

As a young teenager, my private universe was often asunder. Parents fighting, boyfriends coming and going, brothers to help raise, living from my roots, lots of home chores, schoolwork and piano practice always beckoning. It was way too much for one girl.

But. Many summer nights, long after the family was sleep, I propped my chin on a pillow nested in an upstairs bedroom windowsill, and searched for the comfort of constellations. Majestic, confident Orion. The happy, cocky, Big and Little Dippers. The huddled pack of Seven Sisters. The stars, seemingly immovable, were my family, fixed points of reference in a turbulent time. Watching them, charting them, remembering them--them usually eased me to sleep

They still are. And now that I've traveled all around the earth, and searched for roots ancient and ancestral, the stars have new meanings. Imagine the first people on earth migrating out of Africa and looking up: they saw these very same powerful, bright dots that I see tonight. Imagine: in a few hours, my friends in the Philippines, or Rwanda, will see nearly the same star-studded sky.

Younger, blessed and cursed with the gift of imagination, I used to ask the stars how I would survive if my parents got divorced, if my boyfriend stopped liking me, or I couldn't ever find my lost library books.

I still wonder. Standing in the driveway, peering up through our front tree, I ask myself the big, impossible questions of midlife. What will growing old be like? What does it feel like to be without parents? Will I, or my husband, die first? Will I live to see grandchildren? What legacies will I leave behind?

The sky still answers. The stars will always be there, it says. Count on it. Many havee, before you.

This settles me, and sleep comes.

...to ever recover from 9/11.

The 9 AM anniversary of 9/11 has just passed, the point of the first plane to hit the North Tower. Memories jerk me backward. The second plane has already hit the South, and both buildings are ablaze in the top-most floors. Some people trapped there are using the last drop of will they have, and jumping to their deaths. Emergency vehicles are swarming to the spot; crowds are gathering, drawn to the dying buildings. A flight from Boston to California has been hijacked. Another is headed for Washington DC.

Across the United States millions are breathlessly watching, their minds scrolling through the list of people they know in New York City, fingers frantically punching in phone numbers, or email addresses. Parents with grown children in the city are getting in their cars, from as far away as California. Clergy are preparing for vigils. The military and police services are cancelling leaves.

In countries with media access, the news that America has taken a hit sends shockwaves through capitals, newsrooms, and financial markets. A sudden global insecurity grips the guts of government officials.

I am not yet reacting on a clear blue day in Michigan, setting up to do some writing, noting that the house painter has begun to tackle the front, and is up on hisladder. My friend next door calls urgently. "Have you heard from Adam? Is he working on Wall Street? Put on your television right away!"

I do. And I see. After 10 seconds, I rush to the phone to call Adam and Kelly. They are supposed to be on a plane to California! They do not answer, and I leave a message on phone and email: ARE YOU OKAY? I rush to the computer, and type an email to Alexis, Adam's mother-in-law in New Jersey: "Have you heard from them. Are they OKAY?"

I call Rob: 'COME HOME.' I awake Dan in Madison: 'Put on the television right away. There has been an attack on the World Trade Center in NYC. We haven't yet heard from them.' The painter checks in, then leaves.

Adam. Kelly. I feel a rising panic, just as Alexis returns my email: They are ALL RIGHT. Tremendous relief. One by one, we get the all clear from friends and family with children in New York and Washington. We are the lucky ones; many are not.

Something stirs within me. I've just spent 10 days in New York City. I cannot desert this beloved city, my birthplace. I want to help, I want to feel the warm cheeks of Adam and Kelly, and I want to go. Colleagues do not respond to my idea that, as mental health workers, we should rent a van and head for New York. Rob does after a call from Reuters, driving himself there, and helping out a company he just finished training in Ann Arbor. Six weeks later, I join the Red Cross and spend 12 intense days helping families.

It was an unforgettable, transformative experience.

Today, for some reason on this particular anniversary, I am drawn backward, to the families I met, and tried-- in vain--to help.

What do I find on the Internet?

That John Burnside's remains were found 10 days after I finished my work as a Red Cross worker, and visited his widow Sandra on the upper East Side.

That Lucia Crifasi, whose Italian mother could not face me when I came to the house, now has a street named after her in Queens, at 69th Street and Myrtle Avenue

That the parents of Yelena Melnichenko from Lithuania have been denied access to Yelena's young son, Erik, whom I met with his young widowed father.

That only partial remains of Jeanette Menichino were found, but her mother volunteers at the Tribute Museum I visited last year at Ground Zero, and her husband Anthony, so desperately suicidal when I met him, is probably still alive.

That the common-law husband of Ruth Ketler, the poet Robert Dow, seems never to have published again.

That Anthony Luparello's daughter attended the trial of Moussaoui, 2006. I helped her daughter make a trip to Ground Zero to see where her grandfather was killed.

No spaces exist between one moment in time, and the next. For all of these families, 9/11/2001 is right next to 9/11/2008.

...to say good- bye to Ruby

Today, our little Jack Russell Ruby will spend her full last day on earth. I say earth, because when a living thing dies, it's not too clear what happens.

Ruby may live on in some other way, in our memory. Her spirit may blow in on a cloud, or a sudden gust of wind. Or she could reincarnate into another black and white animal, like the zebra I saw in Africa last month.



Ruby doesn't know that we plan to say a final good-bye to her tomorrow at the vets, unless a miracle happens and her boundless, independent spirit returns in the next 24 hours, AND she becomes continent again.

Does she guess this is why yesterday, I pulled a precious t-bone out of the freezer for her to gnaw on, and why last night we took her to the Dairy Queen with our young neighbor girls, and gave Ruby the true love of her life, ice cream? Has she figured out why we are taking her to her beloved park every day, even though she has stopped leading us around, and, like lots of older beings, doesn't want to get too far from the car?

These little treats are part of our good-bye to her. I try to carry her around a lot, nuzzle my nose until her neck, just memorize her woodsy smell, and the feel of her scratchy fur on my cheek. When she ambles into the kitchen I bend down to smooth her back and tickle her behind the ears. She is following me around, like a small puppy, like my elder parents who like to keep track of me, nearly every day.



Memories of Ruby as a puppy are crowding in: the way she slowly walked up to us at the kennel in Tecumseh, not wanting to look too eager, or not trusting that we would love her. See, she was the last to adopted in her litter, because her head was all black. I don't know why people found that unattractive. We loved it, just like we loved her combination of affection-seeking, and independence. We didn't love her fur though. It was unruly and wirey, and she looked like a small, squat sheep if we didn't have her groomed like the runt terrier she was.

Some runt: she ran on three legs when chasing a squirrel, and killed her share of little furry animals. One day she got a squirrel, killed it quick, and when Rob went to the garage for a shovel to bury the victim, Ruby got busy. Rob searched high and low for the dead animal, Ruby following him around all innocent-like. It wasn't until the squirrel's tail gave it away, sticking straight up from the shallow grave Ruby dug in under 30 seconds.

There were more endearing traits: She loved to sleep on the top of bed pillows,



and laid still for nearly an hour if Rob stroked her stomach.

Dan was her favorite: she hoisted herself up on two legs for him when he greeted her, and licked his face when he bent down. She was front and center at Adam and Kelly's wedding, not to be forgotten, depositing a turd right in front of the wedding arch, minutes before the ceremony

When Ruby is scared, she puts one paw on my foot, for security, or tries to climb up my legs. Once she jumped on her high bed as a call for help, her head swollen with a bad sore. This spring, she howled if I went outside and left her indoors, and camped under the computer table while I worked.

These was her only signs of vulnerability. Introduced into a household that already held a large blond Lab, Ruby decided to be top dog.
She dominated Lucy, and our neighbor's Lab Remington, until Lucy herself grew old, and lame. Larger dogs in the park came to avoid her; she had a way of grabbing them by the jowls and hanging on.

People seemed to love her, though. Some begged for a chance to housesit, like our wacky painter and his family who drove her to Grand Rapids and let her swim in a friend's swimming pool. She was cute, like a little toddler.

Some toddler. Ruby was always on the kill, and alert for bushy-tailed animals like the fox. We once had one in the neighborhood; it walked down our road in broad daylight, daring Ruby to find him.

I'm sorry she never chased a fox, and had to settle for squirrels. Now she's very old, she's ill with kidney disease, and the pleasure parts of her life, like a faux-fox chase, are over. It's time we helped her along to wherever she'll land in the universe. I'd like to believe in reincarnation, or heaven, during times like these. I'd like to believe that Ruby will join Lucy, and Al, who loved dogs.


We were never such dog lovers, Rob and I, people being too interesting and compelling and rewarding. But we liked tending, we loved our animals, and I don't know what we'll do about that.

Today I begin to pack away some of our dog things: coat brushes, beds, trimmers, carrying cases. They will go in the attic next to the flattened crib, and broken wagon, and high chair, for the next generation of children, and dogs, if there is one. I don't have a replacement strategy, not yet.

But it won't be a new dog. Maybe when we're in our 80's, and moving around less, and not wanting to think about our inevitable future, we'll need the challenge of a pet. But not now, not yet.

DUMBO

What's it gonna take to spend more time in New York City? I have to, on three counts: Adam and Kelly, my obsession with returning to my ancestors' past, and the sheer excitement of new ideas (like a media company wants a piece of the Rwanda project).

On Reason Number Two: I did not walk to Hudson Avenue yesterday, when Adam and I visited DUMBO. So much of the surrounding area has chi-chi-ed. Amber-lit bars stuffed with vintage chairs and hardware. Sleek, spare storefronts teasing young couples with carefully placed, just-cool-enough furniture and clothes. These are the nouveaux rich, needing pet bakeries, chocolateries, pris fixes restaurants with white tablecloths set inside tall brick warehouses, carefully preserved.

I did not want to see what had happened to Hudson Avenue, our son's grandfather's birthplace, a cobble-stoned street sliding down to the East River. I want to remember it like I saw it in 2006 before the explosion of high-end housing and shops: a simple, nearly dilapidated three-story frame dwelling, next to a row of others looking just like it. Last I checked, they cost $500,000 each. Adam tells me that this area, Vinegar Hill and DUMBO is the priciest part of Brooklyn.

What do the stock analysts and surgeons make of this: On Front Street, a local rich developer has built a large room for a large restored carousel, his wife's pet project. I stood there transfixed. It retains all it its old-world grandeur: the carved seats and horses, painted in pale pastels, even the music playing in the background.

Except, it's a diorama. One stands behind red ropes and the only the play button is fitted inside your imagination. Pale-faced Irish and German-American women in long skirts covering the hind ends of the horses, their straw hats with ribbons whipping about, stout old women with brooches and white handkerchiefs sprouting from their bosoms, sitting in the fixed carriages, their smiles taking them back, back, to when they jumped on and jumped off carousels as children.

I want it to be true that my grandparents take Petra and Theodore and Fred to whirl on this carousel, only blocks from home. Why? What am I hoping for? Everlasting life?

‘Family, ’ as it is known in the United States, is going down. Maybe we were never destined to be a nation where family members stayed connected with one another. The United States is almost completely comprised of immigrants, most of us come from people who picked up and abandoned their native shores and families. We have no real feel for the people they left behind. They’re some names on a line on a family trees, the people between a birth and death date.

But one day, some mother or father said an anguished good-bye to a young man, woman, or family. The next generation completely and forever disappeared from view, driving down the lane in a horse-drawn cart, or pulling away from a dock.

I certainly don’t know these people from the four sides of my family. I can’t say I have relationships with hardly anyone who pre-dates my grandparents or great-grandparents, and I know little about what moved them, stirred them, or drove their survival.

I do know I have stood on a vacant lot in Brooklyn that once held a Lutheran church where my paternal great-great grandparents baptized my grandmother’s mother.
I have stood in a hushed, nearly hidden cemetery in Tennessee where my maternal great-great-grandfather is buried with his wife and infant.

I have sat in a marbled cathedral with swooping bats and swallows where my Filipino grandfather was baptized.

I have been driven across the fields where my maternal great grandparents raised vegetables, cows, chickens, and children.

I recently uncovered a faint line of writing in an old family bible, newly given to my original Norwegian ancestors in 1860. If I hadn’t been curious about a page that seemed stuck to another one, I would have never known that my great-great-grandfather Aanen Atlakson died of stomach cancer on Christmas Eve, 1869, quickly followed by his eldest son, who died of pneumonia.

This is the only story I have. I suspect that a string of tragic deaths in Aanen's family--he and his wife Caterina lost their last five children as infants --silenced the stories of coming to America.

Without stories, I cling to facts, dig up facts, or make up stories of my own. What else can I do?

I've just read a very cynical, but somehow comforting article in the April 7th New Yorker about babyboomers and aging. At least someone is tackling this huge elephant in the Health Club.

The starting point for Michael Kinsley's essay is age 60, which I am, newly. He makes the point that our generation will no doubt work on competitively aging (The title is something like: Mine is Longer Than Yours: The last boomer game.) This irks him no end, especially since he has Parkinson's disease, a condition which will not foreshorten his life, but does put him in a category of someone unlucky enough to have already been written off.

Kinsley speaks of in invisible dividing line between those babyboomers who are still on the ascendency, and those who know they have already peaked and are THOUGHT to be on the decline, either physically, occupationally, or financially. A depressing thought this , especially for someone like me who is hoping to have a really brand new career or two before I kick the bucket.

What Kinsley doesn't mention is that we babyboomers are, in part, following in the large footsteps of our parents, some of whom do not consider themselves old, even in their eighties, despite bad disease.

My mother mentions this morning that she and my father saw a 'very depressing' show on PBS last night called, 'Caring For Your Parents.' This was brave on their part, since my father nearly succumbed from cancer treatment, and I spent many weeks in Florida caring for them while he was in the ICU.

(Note: I was more cowardly, preferring to tape it than watch something I knew would be depressing from the reviews in the paper. The main protagonists in this little documentary were mainly devoted daughters, of various means, and the parents were frail elderly.)

"It was depressing because I don't want to get that way." What the solution, I asked her. "These old people should move to places like where your Dad and I live, in The Villages. That's the only solution." I might mention right here that my father will be 88 in a few weeks, and my mother is 85.

So, I gently ask her, what should happen when these Villages people get really old and need care. This is a better question than, 'What the hell is going to happen when you or Dad are really feeble?'

My parents have their own game. Each is convinced he/she will outlive the other. "Just put me on a float," my mother said from their home in land-locked Central Florida.

Then she chuckled, and I laughed, and we both giggled at the thought of daily funeral pyres on the water hazards of each of their many golf courses. "Right," I said. " You get two penalty shots if you go into the water. One for the water, the other for disturbing the body."