Happily Married

Maybe I was lucky. Maybe I had no idea what I was doing. Maybe it just happened. Maybe we worked at it hard enough or not enough to mess things up. In any case, I am…..happily married. As a child of divorce of the most searing kind, a family with enough dysfunction to fill up every closet in the state of Texas (or perhaps Alaska), and hailing from New Jersey, where we tend not to expect too much (state motto: Oy!, state song lyrics: “it’s a death trap/ it’s a suicide rap” from Springsteen’s “Born to Run”), being happily married was not what I expected.

But life is not about our expectations. I met Ken in ‘82, we turned into a couple in ‘83, and married in ‘85. By the time we met, I felt far more older than I do now (although now I’m twice as old as I was then) . We were each other’s rebound relations, so it wasn’t supposed to work, and that may be what took enough of the pressure off that it did work. For months, years actually, into the relationship, I expected him to up and leave one day because what we had seemed too good to last. But that was just my past, low-esteem and confusion talking. 25 years, three kids, about 17 different cars, two houses, several home improvement projects that turned into a reality show’s kind of survivorship, several health crises, the loss of our three dads, my cancer, a big car accident, and a few dozen political campaigns and organizational crises later, here we are.

Why? I don’t really know aside from several things I learn and have to keep learning — much of it advice people gave me over the years that proved all too true.

* Talk everyday, even if just for three minutes, and make sure it’s not just about who picks who up when. This has been our saving grace.

* Marriage is when you commit to be with another person no matter how old and demented they become. I don’t know why I find this comforting, but I do.

* Date nights! Especially when life is so impossible due to work, kids, family, etc. that having time together to simply split some fajitas seems an outrageous luxury.

* Therapy when necessary without doubt or shame, and particularly when big changes roll through.

* Forget everything you ever heard, saw, read or dreamed about romance. Yeah, rose petals on the bed might be nice, but sometimes just having someone leave you some cold coffee in the morning is enough.

* Fight, but fight fair.

* If one of you isn’t into thoughtful gift-giving and the other is, that other should go out and buy her own thoughtful gifts.

* Another person can do wonders for one’s sanity. Ken has talked me off the walls and ceiling hundreds of times and visa versa.

* Don’t forget to refill the bird feeders in winter.

* Nothing is better than sinking between flannel sheets piled high with quilts and fleece with your beloved on a cold night (although if you’re both wearing flannel too, there is the static factor).

* Few things are as much fun as sharing a common passion, such as fighting the highway department, burning a prairie each spring, watching Leonard Cohen in concert, or watching the cat’s circus tricks with a hair tie.

* It’s impossible and silly to change another person but that doesn’t mean we don’t keep trying. At least we can be aware that what we’re trying to do is impossible and silly.

*In the end, the middle and beginning too, kindness trumps all.

Please feel free to add your advice from your own life.

Pictures of us over the years, from the top, when I was 7 month’s pregnant with Daniel, our house we designed and helped build without driving each other too crazy, us at Passover a few years ago, and there we are back in the early 80s.

“Land of Milk & Honey” with Kelley Hunt

I just found this wonderful clip of Kelley Hunt performing one of the songs we jointly wrote, “The Land of Milk and Honey.” It’s one of our newest songs, and it was written with all the thrill we had in us of the last election. Please enjoy.

Writing In a New Decade: January Write From Your Life

Listen to a podcast of this column by clicking here!

Ten years ago, I had a four-year-old instead of a household of teens, all the original appliances we bought with our house, and my father, step-father and father-in-law were still alive. I didn’t know the new decade would bring a cancer diagnosis, a writing project about the Holocaust, an ability to fill out a FAFSA form in a flash, and a profound love for yoga. Life is like that. Or as one of my friends put it — after adopting one child, and a year later getting a phone message that simply said, “Would you like the brother?” (she would, in turn, and now has 12 and 13-year-old siblings) — “life has more imagination than we do.”

As we enter a new year and a new decade, I invite you to inventory your life. Begin by making a list of all that has changed for you in the last decade. Maybe you moved, got a couch, got therapy, got fed up with one job and found another. Maybe you went back to school or finished school. Feel free to list the big things (your mother passing on) and the little things (singing in the shower more). Keep adding to the list over several days. You might find it useful to divide up changes into categories, such as work, family, finances, passions, losses, community, marriage, art.

When you’re done, look it over, and see if you can name this decade. I named my last 10 years, “Sorting: The Decade of Prioritizing” although I realized I could call the decade before the last one, “Exhaustion: The Decade of Too Much to Do.” Find a name that fits for you and allows you to see more of where you’ve been.

Now make a list of all you want to invite into your life in the next decade in terms of family, marriage or partnership, work, art, finances, community, etc. Be lavish but precise, and consider if all on this list is what you truly want (remember also the old standby: if you ask for it, you might just get it). This can be your wish list for the next decade, and because you’re the boss of you, you can revise this whenever needed.

From here, you can do any/all of the following:

• Write about what difference it will make in your life to have something on your wish list. How might this change you seek give you greater freedom, strength, creativity, time, or whatever else it could bring?
• Write a letter from yourself ten years ago to yourself now, and then write back to your younger self. In doing so, you’ll see what shining coins of wisdom you’ve found.
• Correspond with yourself ten years older than you now. You could also write this as a dialogue.
• Pluck anything off your list from the last ten years, and write the story of this change in your life.

The Road to Hell is Paved with Snow

At least that’s what it feels like at moments lately. Our driveway is almost 1/2 mile up and down hills and around curves, and having not had a real winter in ages, we haven’t had too much trouble with snowy weather…..until now. The Christmas Blizzard left 10 inches of the white stuff, and our good neighbor, on his way to plow the drive for us, slipped and broke his collarbone and fractured his skull. He’s okay now, recovering well at home, and our heart goes out to him. We ended up, upon returning from Christmas in Missouri, ferrying armloads of groceries, gifts and luggage through three-foot high drifts along with all of us and Ken’s more-adventurous-than-she-was-planning mother. From then on, I’ve been driving her 4-wheel-drive, making the daily kamakaze bobsled run up and down the drive. Half the time, I slide a little, so there’s a lot of prayer and desperation involved, but what the hell.

Then there was still the unplowed drive, so I called Ozzie, who graciously agreed to visit with his have-truck-will-travel plow. Walking out the door to greet him, I slipped and sprained my wrist (almost better). After he did a great job on our drive, he was swinging around my mother-in-law’s house and encountered human-sized drifts. Luckily, he kept from sliding into the house, and thanks to his humor, the kids helping, and a lot of shovels, he got out.

Last night, charm #3 in snow struggles. I was simply driving the kids home at 9 p.m. from my mother-in-law’s house when I gingerly slipped off the road. Never mind that I was wearing only long underwear, a coat and heavy slippers (a woman can kick a lot of snow in her slippers when necessary). Rocking the car just rocked me further into the hinderlands. Ken was in Wichita for the night, although I called him for ideas, and eventually, I called our good neighbor Monty, who got out of bed, worked with me shoveling, pouring kitty litter around the wheels, and pushing the car forward while Natalie steered it. We almost got on the road, but no cigar, and the backwards approach didn’t work either. Monty then drove to town to get his truck and towed me, first forward, then backwards, then forward again, and then actually sideways until I was on the road again.

Now more snow is readying itself to fall, and unlike past years when the snow was so rare that it was magical, now it’s magical-plus. While it feels like the road to hell is paved with snow and ice lately, I’m also sure that the road to heaven to paved (or plowed) by friends. Thanks, Ray, Ozzie and Monty, our good neighbors. And may all our paths be passable.

Photos: Okay, the top one is sideways, but that’s what it feels like at times.

The Christmas Vase

Many years ago when I was visiting my father and stepmother from college, my father, in an uncharacteristically sentimental mood, handed me a small blue mottled vase with milky glass throughout it. He had collected antiques for years, but he had never given me one before. “Here, take this with you,” he said, putting the vase in my hands. “Thanks, Dad,” I told him, delighted because he wasn’t one to ever give me a gift.

I was also delighted because it was Christmas, a painful holiday each year because my stepmother was always sure to give her own children piles of gifts — a half dozen boxes of beautiful sweaters and dresses — while giving my siblings and me one small token gift. Just a few years before this Christmas, my stepsister got a car and I got a blowdryer. This year, I got pastel bath salts.

I packed the vase in my suitcase, and the night before I left, when I finished packing, I noticed it was gone. Sure enough, my stepmother went through my things and slipped it out but didn’t put it back in the living room where I could have reclaimed it. I asked her about it, explaining Dad had given it to me, but she just shrugged and walked away.

Years passed, and eventually, when I visited my dad and stepmother, I noticed the vase back on a shelf in the living room of their new house. I looked at it longingly, but let it go.

In January of 2003, just after my own cancer-related hysterectomy, Ken and I visited my father, who had been in a coma for 10 days after his months of living with advanced pancreatic cancer. By all accounts from doctors and websites, he should have died within three or four days of no food or water, but he hung on. Yet just 20 minutes after I arrived, he died with only my stepmother and me, both of us telling him that we loved him and he could let go. Afterwards, I sat in the living room with my sister, Lauren, who arrived within hours of his death, and we both glanced at the vase on a nearby shelf. “I can put it in my purse right now,” she said, reaching for it. “No,” I told her, sensing that wasn’t the thing to do.

I knew my stepmother wouldn’t give me any of his possessions, even a trinket. Yet I also knew that I would find a similar vase one day, buy it for myself, and that would be my talisman of dad, a gift from him despite my finding it because it was what he intended. For years, I’ve looked for a vase similar to the one that Dad gave me, but no dice. I searched antique malls and tiny hovel stores wherever I traveled, gift shops and art galleries too.

On December 23, in my hometown, I was walking with my son Daniel past a local gallery, and there was the vase. It was about the same height, color and shape with milky veins of glass, and it stood at the bottom of a window display for a local gallery. I walked in and asked a friend who worked here how much it was. “Probably $70-something,” she said as my heart sank. Too much money, and yet when she gingerly lifted it out over the other glass bowls and platters, she told it was $47. “That’s, strange. It’s probably one of the older designs,” she told me.

I carried it around the store, feeling its weight and smoothness, cradling it in my hands. It was still beyond our worn-out budget. I tried to call Ken to see if he thought I should buy it, but I couldn’t reach him. I thought of calling a dozen friends to ask them if I should buy it, but I figured all would encourage me. After all, I had said that whenever I found the vase, I would simply buy it. So I did: $50.23 with tax.

At home, holding the small bag with the bubble-wrapped vase, I wanted to tell Ken the whole story right away, but he first wanted to read a holiday letter, so I opened the other mail. To my surprise, there was a check for some poetry published. Now if you’re a poet, you know already how bizarre it is to ever get paid for poetry, and if paid, to get more than, say, $10. The check was for $50.

When I told Ken the story, he smiled and said he knew my father was perfectly capable of making all of this happen. “Remember how, right before we went to see him when he was dying, I heard his voice say to me, ‘Don’t worry. You have enough time.’” I had remembered that Ken heard, “You know why I’m still here? I’m waiting for Caryn,” and I was happy to hear he also said not to worry, we had enough time.

Turns out we had enough time for his gift to come back to me, paid for by surprise and art, and now sitting on a shelf in my bedroom. As I begin the next 50 years of my life, and as we approach Christmas, my one true (material) holiday gift from my father is mine again. Thanks, Dad.

Photos include the vase with shots of the Great Christmas Blizzard of 2009 and Dad holding Forest in 1995.

Dyeing for Beauty

Yesterday I did something I had yearned to do for years: with good friend Kris, I dyed a multitude of silk and velvet scarves. There’s something about color and texture, length and hue that makes me outrageously happy. I suppose I’m drawn to this for the same reason I love beading: the older I get, the more I turn into a crow who aims toward shiny things. It also felt like the right thing to do at the right time: working with light and color on the shortest day of the year.

The process was outrageously easy. We mixed the powdered dye in jars, soaked each scarf in warm water, wrung it out and lay out on a large surface. Then we painted, sometimes gathering handfuls of fabric and skimming the edges, and sometimes landing in muddles of color or long streaks. Then we put each scarf into a plastic bag and let it stew for six hours before washing it out and then soaking it briefly in a fixer. Once dry and ironed, the colors powered out.

In any case, it’s a joy to simply lose myself in making something vibrant. Color particularly is often irridescent, shifting in the changing life. For this holiday season and well past it, I encourage us all to pitch ourselves toward the vibrant in our lives, making what makes us happy. In doing so, we can find that part of who we are, always were, at our core is infused with a deep well of joy and beauty.

Meanwhile, thank you, Kris for showing me how to do something I love.

Fence Post Moments: Write From Your Life

Listen to a podcast of this post on fence post moments featuring music from Kelley Hunt

Right now in your life, you have stories to tell and a way of telling them unlike anyone else. When you use your own words to tell your truth in your own voice, your writing is strong. Writing can introduce you to more of yourself, illuminate your particular gifts and challenges, put into words your life’s biggest questions and answers, and land you in that wide-awake feeling of being utterly alive. It’s also one of the most democratic of arts. All you need is some paper or a computer screen, a little time, and enough faith, imagination or suspension of disbelief to simply begin. From there, to paraphrase Robert Frost, way leads to way, and words lead to words.

In Kansas where I live, particularly in the western part of the state, the land is curved and lined with beautiful stone fence posts, each one holding the wire fencing from one place to another. We have such fence posts in our lives too: moments, events, occasions that stand as strong posts leading our lives along the same route or turning us new directions. A fence post moment could be something seemingly large and overwhelming, like the birth of a child, the death of a parent, a move to a new city, or the singular moment you decided to change careers. It can also be a quiet moment of meaning for you: perhaps you’re sitting in a lawn chair in your backyard in late spring after mowing the grass for the first time this season, and as you lift a glass of water to your lips, you suddenly realize how much you love the smell of the grass, the light wind, and the cluster of iris blooming.

Fence post moments are the times we want to remember because they changed or reinforced something vital about who we are, how we live, why we’re alive. They can encompass bad vacations with kids throwing up on each other in the backseat while you ascend high altitude roads, Thanksgiving dinners that end with your aunts throwing rolls at your uncles, a small burial service with your best friends for your beloved beagle, the time you tap danced with a small herd of other five-year-olds across a stage while your parents gave you a standing ovation, the first time someone gave you a handful of daffodils or the last time you saw a dear friend.

Here’s an example of a fence post poem, which shows how one moment can illuminate a whole life.

Happiness

by Raymond Carver

So early it’s still almost dark out.
I’m near the window with coffee,
and the usual early morning stuff
that passes for thought.

When I see the boy and his friend
walking up the road
to deliver the newspaper.

They wear caps and sweaters,
and one boy has a bag over his shoulder.
They are so happy
they aren’t saying anything, these boys.

I think if they could, they would take
each other’s arm.
It’s early in the morning,
and they are doing this thing together.

They come on, slowly.
The sky is taking on light,
though the moon still hangs pale over the water.

Such beauty that for a minute
death and ambition, even love,
doesn’t enter into this.

Happiness. It comes on
unexpectedly. And goes beyond, really,
any early morning talk about it.

Start your own list of fence post moments, and what you’ll soon find is that one moment makes you recall another one, which brings to mind yet another mind. Keep the list going over days, weeks, even years in a notebook or on a computer. Sometimes when you’re interested in writing but not quite inspired to actually write, list-making can give you a sense of accomplishing something. And by listing your fence post moments, you will be actually accomplishing something: compiling your own writing prompts for the rest of your life.

Now, when you can steal away 10 or 15 minutes, simply look over the list, pluck off one moment that grabs your attention, and without thinking about it first, start writing. Tell the story of that moment, or the story behind the story that made that moment possible. As you’re writing, aim toward sensory experience: what you could see, hear, touch, taste and smell in that fence post moment. The more real you make it, the more you convey what you experienced in its fullness.

Sick as a Dog, Cat in a Hat, and the Missing Menorah

Who knows what I have, but after two days of alternating between flood-of-odd-images half-sleep, World War II movies (for the book I’m writing), and episodes of Rosanne (first season, very sweet and funny), I suddenly found a small surge of energy and a great yearning to find all the Hanukkah stuff for this year. So down I went into the basement where looking for one thing necessitated moving and organizing other things, which led to delivering said other things to other locations, which made for more moving and organizing. I went through many boxes of much evidence of our lives: kids’ toys, children’s books I’m saving for my future grandchildren, old clothes of sentimental value, t-shirts I’m saving to make a great t-shirt quilt, tubs of old letters and clippings, school papers and camping gear, too many carry-on bags, and craft supplies for projects long abandoned.

I found the Hanukkah/Christmas stuff mostly and including the old menorah, the one my family used when I was growing up, which works well despite the music box bottom of it long having disappeared…..all but a new menorah my mother sent me a few years ago. It was gold or silver, large and heavy, and what did it look like? In my semi-feverish-or-not state, it was hard to tell, but I knew it was a menorah of substance.

By the time I reached full exhaustion saturation, not to mention overwhelming hunger, it was 2 p.m., and I hadn’t eaten anything yet. I reluctantly went back upstairs, and while preparing lunch, kept opening cabinets, peering in the back of closets, wondering where the special menorah was. As I ate cold meatloaf, toast and some Very Veggie juice, I started to remember that the new menorah was brass, and could it be that it was composed of dancers holding up the candle holders? Yes, that was it, and didn’t I not ever actually put it away next year but instead keep it above my desk, holding up one end of my long line of Holocaust books?

Yes, and there it was, of course right in front of when I spend most of my well time at this computer. I lifted it up, used a heavy copy of Stan Lombardo’s translation of the Odyssey to hold up those Holocaust books, and brought it to the dining room with the other Hanukkah stuff, including the best cat for living with when sick, Miyako, who loves to sleep in a top hat. Then I went to sleep for two surreal hours until now: the dog of the illness subsiding, the cat still sleeping, the deer outside moving across the field in twilight, and the menorahs right here: the old one and the new one, both bookends to the two halves of my life, and just in time for Hanukkah in a little over a week and my 50th birthday on Friday.

My Tree Called Life

Last week, I had the immense and heart-piercing privilege of taking part in the launch party for My Tree Called Life: Writing and Living Through Serious Illness, a book published by Turning Point of Kansas City that I edited. The anthology brings together the writings of close to 30 writes living with serious illness — cancer, parkinson’s disease, brain injuries, diabetes and more — whether they are the one diagnosed with the disease or a close caregiver. The writings people contributed come from writing workshops I’d led at Turning Point over the last three years, all designed to help people express whatever life was showing them about who they are and what they’re living through.

The book was a true labor of love, and I send great gratitude to Cathy Pendleton, who coordinates adult programming at Turning Point, and also many others on staff there who did such an extraordinary job in helping us put all these strong words into publication. I also am continually inspired by the writing of the workshop participants who proved what Pat Schneider has written in many of her books: when we write in our own words, it’s powerful. Finally, Turning Point itself is an amazing organization which provides all kinds of services for people — from babes in arms to elders — when facing serious illness. Turning Point: A Center for Hope and Healing offers extensive programming for children and adults — classes in cultivating resiliency, knitting, yoga, writing, mindful movement, nutrition, relaxation, Chinese medicine and Jin shin Jyutsu.

Here’s an excerpt from the Introduction I wrote to My Tree Called Life:

Because we write against the backdrop of caregiving for fragile parents 24/7, not knowing if the dopamine will allow for easy walking today, bone scans and heart procedures, scared children or distant siblings, friends who help and friends too busy or frightened to show up, and the vast uncertainty of living with serious illness, attendance can shift radically week to week. Sometimes it’s hard to write more than a few words, and sometimes it’s hard to stop writing. Always, however, we find deep value in simply witnessing one another, witnessing our own words. Words of truth, sometimes words of hope and always words of life.

When I get home that night, my husband asks me how it went, and when I tell him, he says, “Doesn’t it hit on all your own cancer issues to do this work?” He thinks it might depress me, but no, it does the opposite. Maybe some of this has to do with what the woman said about how her dying helps the ones of us not so actively at the end of our lives (or so, we think) cultivate perspective, give up sweating the small stuff so much. But I suspect it has more to do with the courage I witness, week after week, in all the workshops I do: the way that people are willing to take great risks in what stories they write and tell; how the veneer of what we think keeps us safe is gone in such workshops, and what really matters is unearthing meaning – clearing the obstacles out of the way, including fear and doubt, insecurity and low confidence, to create something simply to feel more alive in the process of creation.

It also has something to do with the stories I hear and the stories I witness – the woman facing advanced diabetes opening the sugar-free chocolates another participant brings us one week when we’re having someone’s death-by-chocolate prize cake.

The man who reads a poem he wrote to his wife, who just went through breast cancer treatment, about how strong she is, crying throughout his reading and through his reading of everything he wrote while reminding us, “Hey, I’m an engineer! I never cry, and in this workshop, I can’t stop.”

The woman who’s balanced her precarious life around extreme chemo for five years says the most encouraging and insightful things about the writing of others in the group. When I ask her what the class is like for her, she writes me about how she noticed many surprises in how she ended each story or poem she wrote, “I don’t believe we were writing toward specific endings. They just happened serendipitously and wonderfully.” She reads me one of her favorite endings, “Every fiber of me begs to wake up—to wake up, electric, stunned, and newly alive.”

In such an ending, I hear a beginning: how to begin to live life far more alive, far more immersed in the energy of being here and now. Of course the writing the participants do leaves behind legacies for their family and friends: inside glimpses of how they saw and loved the world. But it also continuously shows those of us in the class that living with serious illness doesn’t mean losing yourself; on the contrary, living with such challenges can – through the magic of writing and speaking stories and images into being – bring us home, even at the turning points of our lives, to who we always were. With the publication of this book, we now share our homecoming with you in hopes of these words helping you find your own way through life’s turning points.

Photos of people by Joann Lesh (who is reading in one and hanging out with me in another). The book’s beautiful cover painting is by Lorelle Mennel, who participated in the Turning Popint class, “Living Your Question Now: Finding One’s Joy Through Painting.” You can purchase a copy of the book at Turning Point’s website.

The Light Gets In: Leonard Cohen in Concert

Monday night I experienced three hours of sitting in a state of pure musical prayer at one of the best concerts of my life: Leonard Cohen plus eight world-class musicians performing at the gorgeous Midland Theater in Kansas City. Despite so many songs of having our hearts ripped open and the existing coming demise of politics and society, I felt such kindness and compassion, such presence and humor, such grace from the man who said in one of his songs, “I’m just a little Jew rewriting the bible.”

One of the moments that pierced me the most deeply was when Cohen sang “Anthem,” and particularly the chorus, “Ring the bells that still can ring/ Forget your perfect offering/ There’s a crack in everything/ That’s how the light gets in” after he told us, “So much of the world is plunged into darkness and chaos.” I found myself crying in the cheap seats from which Leonard was the size of my thumb, but I could still hear most of his words and see all his gestures: the lifting of his hat when he bowed, the way he waltzed across the stage, the continual return to his knees to pour his song into the mic as he sang.

Both Ken and I were blown away by the musicians, particularly the Webb Sisters, musical sisters from England who, when they did a solo for “If it is Thy Will” that sounded like the most lyrical bells in the world ringing. Sharon Robinson, another singer and one of Leonard’s collaborators on many songs, also did a dazzling solo.

He did many standards we loved: “Suzanne” with just a guitar and his voice as he stood alone on the stage; “Bird on a Wire” that landed in me a whole new way; “So Long, Marianne,” which sounded a deep goodbye between him and us in one of the many encores; and the gorgeous “Dance Me to the End of Time” and “Hallelujah.” But I also experienced some songs that I somehow missed below — particularly the hauntingly beautiful “The Gypsy Wife,” which I still hear as I drive around Lawrence.

If you missed the concert, so sorry — at 75 years old, it’s probable he won’t be here again (but who knows?). Yet you can buy the CD “Live in London,” recorded in ‘08, which has most of this concert on it. Play it in a dark room, sit in a comfortable chair and relax, and turn the volume up high. Let Leonard show you how much beauty and peace, meaning and astonishment you can enter into with all of his timeless music.