Abby

Ok, I can't believe I have really fallen for a dog. Her name is Abby and she is a dog from the shelter in Bend Oregon. Amazing actually that she knows so well how to mind, how to heel, to come, to sit, to stay. The best part is that she is playful and fun without being a pain. She loves to play with her toys, and somehow manages to completely destroy them in a matter of minutes. She especially loves anything soft like a stuffed toy. The most amazing thing, however, is that she only tears up HER toys. I have stuffed santas and snowmen lying around on the floor for Christmas, pillow everywhere, socks, shoes, slippers lying around sometimes and she doesn't touch them. Amazing. If we show her that it is hers, it will be shredded in minutes. She even managed to shred a 'Kong" for those of you who are dog people and know what that is.

Ahh well, count my blessings. Mo was determined to have another dog so I am at least lucky that I really like this one! She walks with me every morning on my little 3.5 mile jaunt in the dark around the mobile home park. Loves it. Nice thing here is that there isn't any dirt around so she doesn't track stuff into the house and is basically a house dog unless we take her out. Couldn't have been any luckier with this, I am sure.

Yeah, it's a hard life

Gee, too bad I have to take off work again tomorrow to drive to Reno for out of state delivery of Mo's car since she is not about to pay California sales tax when she lives in Oregon! Like riding on glass surrounded by cream colored butter leather. I am such a pushover for luxury, I am embarrassed to admit. My back hurts today. Too many hours in a GM car which somehow doesn't seem to fit my body. Any surprise that Lexus fits my body just fine??

Christmas

So, Christmas was fine. I didn't even get weird until the very last part of the day. I missed being with my family, but wasn't depressed and made the best of it. I knew all my kids were happy and in a good space. Even Deanna, who is having a time of it trying to deal with sharing her kids and grandkids and not being with family on the day. She and I kindof in the same space. No kids, no family, but she had Keith, I had Mo and we both had basically a good time.

It was 66 degrees in Jamestown yesterday, a little bit cloudy, some sun showing up now and then. We drove up to Calaveras Big Trees for a hike in the Sequoias. Took lots of photos and walked a few miles with the dog. There is often snow there in the winter, but not this time, so we drove higher on Highway 4, all the way up to Bear Valley Resort. Ebbets Pass is closed over the Sierra's not far from where we turned around, but just before you get to the valley is this great overlook. I felt like a stupic californian, tottering over the snow in my tennis shoes from the highway overlook to get a snow photo. "Going to the Snow". I used to do that when I was a kid growing up in Southern California. We would drive up to Big Bear for a day with coats and mittens and shoes that were basically worthless. Lots of sledding and yelling and getting very very cold and wet before we drove back down the hill. Maybe 2 hours from 60 degree days and sunshine on Christmas Day.

The Sierra Crest was beautiful, however, even in the overcast, and every once in awhile the sun would light up the distant mountains with gold. Speaking of lights, I have to go take a photo of the house in Jamestown. Melody and Kevin stopped at Halloween to see it with the kids and now at Christmas those people have outdone themselves again. I don't think I ever saw so many lights on one little house. All lit up it reminded me of a Thailand temple in the sun. Still working on the Thailand photos. I may never get them done. I keep wishing that somehow I could have captured that sparkling moving sunlight over all those mirrors, but photos just can't quite get it.

And speaking of photos, Deanna made a great collage of my great grandkids for me all done up and framed in black. Wonderful. Funny. we both did photos for each other this year.

Back to work today and trying to stay focused. But it's lunch time so I thought I would drop a note to myself.

midnight and can't sleep

It's midnight on a Friday night and I can't sleep. Went to bed at 830 and now I'm awake with a mind spinning full of thoughts. "Monkey mind". Choices. Do I take an Ambien? Do I lie awake just letting the thoughts come? Do I work on the Thailand photos? Instead I write.

It's amazing to me what kinds of thoughts come in the dark alone. Slippers. I am wearing some slippers that Lance bought for me back sometime in the mid 80's. More than 20 year old slippers. Bright warm wool mukluks with leather bottoms. Still perfect. Lance was so sweet that way. He loved to buy special things for me that he knew I would love. He always had the best of taste as well. Lance. Talking with Melody the other day, I reminded her that I had been divorced from Lance as long as I was married to him, that our marriage, that seemed such a huge part of my life, was becoming more of a blip on the screen. Just a chapter in a very complex story that doesn't seem to really have much of a pattern to it, just separate and yet very interesting but unrelated chapters.

Other thoughts. Do any of the chapters really matter? For so long I have thought that I needed to write the stories. Not only my own, but my mother's and my grandmother's stories. But in the dark alone, I wonder what is the point of the stories. My children will care, but what about those that come after. Do the stories matter at all to Hillary and Elric, Matthew and Steven, Jeremy, the great grandbabies? In the whole scheme of things, the stories are all just blips in the lives of people who are blips in the hugeness of the universe. All with our stories, so many of them.

Shera, a life now past, Dorothy, a huge story, and yet now almost irrelevant it seems. Goggie, who will remember her, who that is still alive will remember her? The people that I have loved and all those stories. I am not my story.

Memoirs are all the rage now, classes exist in teaching the proper way to write a memoir. Not a sequential story, but a part of your life that somehow affected you and has a theme and a conclusion. I don't have a clue how to do that. Autobiographies. There are classes in those as well, teaching how to find the theme and make it interesting, not just a litany of happenings. Learning how to find the parts that matter and letting the detail slip away. So things like slippers. Are they the detail or are they part of something that matters, part of the memories, and symbols of a good marriage that once was.

Families. In Thailand it was such an eye opener to see how close families remained. No one moved across the country, they didn't even move across the town. They lived in big family compounds. We visited one such family, and the rest of our group visited several others, in small groups of 6 or 7 people. The story was all the same. Mother was a public relations specialist for a big company, Father brokered coffee beans. Their home was spotless, lighted with flourescent bulbs that are bright and dim at the same time. Two children, 20 months and three. Little girls that were the apple of their eye. Mother's mother had a pumpkin farm nearby but stayed with the kids while mom worked and Fathers mother stayed when grandma one was away at the farm. Auntie and Nephew were there for dinner as well, and lived upstairs. Various grandparents lived in the houses next door, and other assorted relatives. All sharing common values and common lives, picking the papayas and bananas from their compound trees, eating fresh vegetables, taking food to the monks at 6am.

We sat on her floor and made pyramid cakes, special food that the monks loved. Father had been a monk for several years. It is expected in Thailand that men will serve as monks for at least some time in the lives, from months to years. As monks, they learn the proper way to live. They learn the 8 precepts of Buddhism, and how to live in peace and equanimity. We asked how the women learn these values since they can't be monks, and were told that all people are taught from childhood the peaceful, calm, gentle way of the middle path.

The pyramid cakes are made from a paste that is kind of grayish purple, a bit like poi, but made from sticky rice flour and palm sugar, about half as sweet as american sugar. You brush oil on a perfectly cut banana leaf, form a patty of the paste, put in a spoonful of shredded deep fried coconut that has some kind of other stuff in it, and then wrap it perfectly with specific folds that end up in a perfectly folded little package. Amazing. They are then steamed for 15 minutes and served up warm for dessert or saved for the next mornings offerings to the monks.

I thought about my family, and how scattered we are, and this very different way of living and how good it felt, how close they are, how strongly they support their families. If I were Thai, I would have taken my grandmother and dorothy into my home, I would have cared for them no matter what it took. I couldn't do that, and I don't expect my kids to do that. And yet I wondered at what we have given yp with all our independence. That kind of family and community.

The back side of the lack of conflict is the lack of self expression. It is considered uncouth and totally unacceptable to speak poorly of your family, or to raise your voice. Conflict is avoided at all costs. What is lost in this is really having any idea what anyone really thinks. Can these people be any different than all the rest of us, with anger and frustration, and grupmy thoughts about all the expectations? Probably not, but you would never know it. Sitting in a huge gridlock traffic jam that Bangkok is well known for, I saw that calm and peaceful demeanor of the Thai people. Bikes and trucks and even a cement truck pushing in for space, people not exactly getting cut off, but gently pushed as the gridlock got tighter and tighter. No horns honking, except that little toot to let someone know you may be a quarter inch from their bumper.

Lessons and experiences I won't forget, thoughts that flow past my monkey mind at midnight on a winter night of Christmas Eve Eve.

Dorothy Lucille Schultz October 2006

Dorothy at her home in 1975

Dorothy Lucille Schultz 1919 to 2006

Dorothy Schultz, "mom" to me since 1952, wnen my own mother died, has passed away. She went to a care home because her Parkinson's suddenly advanced and her husband David could no longer care for her. They brought her back home after 5 days with help from hospice nurses. She passed away Thursday morning, at home, in the same house I left in 1962, with David and her 50 year old child like adopted son David with her. She actually died Thursday and her husband didn't call me because he thought I said "I didn't want to be bothered". For pete's sake. All I said to him was that I wouldn't be able to cancel my trip so I hoped she didn't die while I was gone. I only found out because I was calling and checking in. If I had returned from Thailand and discovered she had been dead a month I would have been furious.

I won't be at the funeral. Maybe that's why he didn't call. He knew I wouldn't come. He is doing some of the guilting thing for sure, but to be expected since he is hurting. I will be sending flowers for "mom" and a written something that David will have read for me.

At the moment I feel completely out of touch with any feelings I may have about this, but they do come in here and there. I learned over the years that many women have relationships with their mothers similar to the relationship that I had with Dorothy, it often has nothing to do with the genetic thing as I used to think. I know what it is to love my children, I know how that feels for me. I know Dorothy thought she loved me and mine as much as she would have loved us had we all been her blood. I believe that, it was just her own way of loving that I never understood. So many people of that era were so damaged. I did forgive her a long time ago, and she said she forgave me. I know I hurt her horribly, and disappointed her over and over again. She never really had a clue why. I had the benefit of therapy, she only had the benefit of her church and her religeon. I was the lucky one there.

Well, enough of all that. At least I am beginning to see that I might actually have some feelings here and that is a good thing. I will be leaving for San Francisco in the morning, and then for Thailand Monday morning. Mo is here and I am glad. Life just does what it is going to do and people come and people go. I guess what I feel most is the deep awareness that stories happen and those stories have a beginning and an end. But maybe not really. I know Melody and her story with Donna certainly hasn't ended. Our family story with Goggie will live as long as any of us who knew her will live. The Dorothy story is such a huge part of the bigger saga, the whole Connie, Evelyn, Bob, and "the Bentz's". In any life there are so many layers of overlapping stories that I wonder at the relevance of any of them. We are not our story, and yet....who in the hell would we be, really, without out story.

Dorothy is a huge part of my story.

Even later on a Friday Night

warning. this post is completely irrelevant so just ignore it if you are anyone but me. I'm rambling and trying to find the writer that used to live in here somewhere. She's out to lunch for the moment.

So I keep wondering if I should move all this blog stuff over to Melody's Live Journal where I go all the time. Maybe she can tell me whatever reasons people use to do different blogs. I haven't written anything of substance in a very long time, in spite of the ever changing season. Winter has already come to Klamath. Here in Jamestown, winter is just a breath of cold air on the morning walk, some frost on the pavement, 32 degrees on the car thermometer. Still sun coming in the office windows in the afternoon.

Today I actually felt cold enough to wear a sweater. Poor Stacy, my new soil scientist is from Southern California. She works in the office in a huge sweater, a long scarf doubled around her neck and down her back, a hat that looks like something out of a Russian fairytale and gloves. Yes, gloves. Fingerless ones that let her still type. I am still in sandals most of the time, and usually forget socks. But today I remembered, socks AND a sweater.

I am supposed to be packing for my trip to Thailand. My grandson is home from Iraq at last, amazingly safe back on US soil after a scary sojourn. Relatively safe at least, as safe as anyone is living in a city and driving in traffic. We are so lucky sometimes to live this life with so few really bad things going on for our family. Little troubles, emotional emergencies that are really so small considering the state of the world. I am grateful.

I wonder if my life really started turning around back a few years ago when I was doing my gratitude journals all the time. I found one today, with day after day of lovely things, sometimes 2, sometimes a dozen, things I was grateful for in a time when I was broke and living in a house with no plumbing. Amazingly, that was also a very long time ago.

Bel is still living in that world of doing without. Now and then I send her money, try to help her a bit. She so deserves so much more. Another lost person going down the tubes, between the cracks of life. Her money is pretty much gone, she is now making a meager living selling "stuff" at her daily garage sale. Good thing she has spent so much of her life collecting stuff, I guess.

So, my house is going to be vacant, and I feel like I am broke, but it's all so relative. I'm not really broke at all. I have more than enough of every little thing, everything. I'm even going to Thailand.

Ahh well.

winter fun

So, Friday night, and I finally finished the project. Just a small piece of the project, actually, but enough that Deanna will get a nice surprise for Christmas. It will come early, and I will already be gone, but she will know I am thinking of her. And hopefully she is waaay toooo busy to read this blog in the next week or so! HA!