Dad

One More Little Good-Bye

June 14, 2019

At the harness races--one of my favorite photos of us

Seven and a half months ago, my father died. This year, on Father’s Day, for the first time, I won’t have a father.

This feels strange. Something I have always had, and taken for granted, is missing. The months since his death have been filled with little goodbyes. Realizations that I won’t be able to share certain things with him, and vice versa. For example, when it was time to plant tomatoes this year, I decided not to—not only did I not feel up to battling the bugs and the squirrels for the fruit, gardening was something my dad and I liked to talk about—his tiny backyard plot produced tomatoes and cucumbers galore. We liked to compare harvests (he always had more) and compare what we had planted.

I’ve been thinking a lot about my dad. Coming to terms with losing a parent isn’t easy, even when you’re all grown up and have a child of your own. I decided to jot down some memories and thoughts about him in his honor this Father’s Day.

Even though my dad had his flaws (as we all do), he was a loving and kind man. My dad loved animals, especially cats. In addition to gardening, he was an excellent golfer, and loved fishing, and going to the horse races. He was in the Navy and served during the Korean War. He was a Baptist, and loved his church.

At his best, he was charming and charismatic, full of zest, humor, and mischief. He worked hard all his life—at 84, until his last illness, he still worked part time doing marketing for a Servpro franchise.

He was born and grew up in Virginia, moving to California as a young man looking for work.

He was extremely lucky, winning often at the horse races or casino, even finding money lying on the ground!

He loved his grandson, my son Nick, deeply. Dad smoked for many years, and after trying unsuccessfully to quit several times, stopped cold turkey when he saw his toddler grandson imitating him smoking.

Dad and Nick

I always asked him to make his special salad when I came to visit. I technically know how to make it myself, but it’s not the same. But perhaps I will try making it in his honor now and then, trying to perfect what he did so well.

The chef at work

My parents divorced when I was three, and I didn’t have much contact with my dad in my earliest years. The circumstances of my parents’ divorce were unusual, and without going into detail, let’s just say it was no one’s fault. I know it was devastating to him when my mom and I left, and I don’t think he ever quite got over it. It shadowed our relationship for years. Once I was old enough to stay with him, I spent part of summer vacation at his house, and either Christmas or Thanksgiving break. My stepmother had always wanted a daughter, and she embraced me as her own immediately. At the time of his death, they had been married 42 years.

At times, my dad and I hurt each other deeply in ways that only family can, each of us making mistakes, saying the wrong thing, convinced the other person was wrong or just did not understand. Now that I’m a parent, I better understand some of our exchanges. I regret that we didn’t have the lifelong closeness I’ve observed in other fathers and daughters. Over the years, I’ve grieved for what was denied us, but now grieve for what we did have that is now lost. Sometimes it hits me anew that he’s gone, taking me by painful surprise.

Now I can choose to remember the fun we had , letting go the old hurts. He did the best he knew how, and so did I, and sometimes we came up short. There was never any doubt that we loved each other, fiercely.

He always called me his favorite daughter (I’m his ONLY daughter), so last Father’s Day, I sent him a sweatshirt with the words, “My favorite daughter gave me this shirt” printed on the chest. He loved it, and since he was always cold (even when the thermostat said 85), he wore it proudly.

I have a voice mail on my phone—my dad’s last message to me from April 2018 when I was getting ready to come to California. He sounds excited about the upcoming visit. I can’t quite get my head around the fact that there will be no more visits, and that when I said good-bye to him last year, it was the final time I’d see him in person.

Last visit

We spoke on the phone many times after that, and I sent him a message on his 84th birthday, which he celebrated while I was in France last October. Only a few days after I returned home he was gone. I knew his health had been failing, but I thought we would have more time. I guess we all think that—or hope that—about the people we love.

Happy Father’s Day, Dad. I miss you.

Books

It’s Sooooo Hot and All I Want to Do Is Read

June 10, 2019


Last week a friend asked me what I planned to read this summer. Um, everything, and never go outside again until December?

Sadly, that will not happen. I have been mulling over what I want to read this summer, though. I often make a summer reading list, if only to try to get a few books off my TBR shelf/list. (Click here or here for previous lists.)  I’m a highly distractible reader, always diverting into unlooked-for paths (newest obsession: Lucy Knisley’s graphic memoirs), constantly seduced by unexpected reading tangents. 

Here is my tentative summer reading list for 2019:

I like to read the biography or autobiography of a writer every summer, so this year my major reading goal will be the Autobiography of Mark Twain, Vol. 1. It looks like there are three volumes, but for now I’m only tackling the first. At 679 pages, it should take me a while.

Mansfield Park, Jane Austen. Looks like the Kindle version is free, but I have a pretty print hardcover version that is part of a set. This will be my summer classic.

At least one book from Modern Mrs. Darcy’s Summer Reading Guide, perhaps The Island of Sea Women (one of my library holds, see below) or The Mother-In-Law

My library holds. I currently have eight books reserved, and even though I’m in varying positions on the hold list, sure as I’m alive, they will all become available the same week and I’ll have a mini nervous breakdown trying to read them all within the time allotted.

From my own TBR shelf:

Ride with Your Mind, Mary Wanless. Already in progress.


The Foundling, Georgette Heyer. I have several of her books on my shelf, but I’ve already started this one. If you’re looking for a fun, light read, you can’t go wrong with Heyer.

An art or creativity book, possibly The Journal Junkies Workshop, or The Muse Is In.

Though it’s likely I’ll go off on other reading tangents, I hope to finish these books this summer. Since “summer” here lasts until November I have a pretty good chance.

What do you plan to read this summer?

Choice

Will It Bring You Happiness?

June 07, 2019

Photo by Sorin Gheorghita on Unsplash

“Although there are no easy solutions to avoiding…destructive pleasures, fortunately we have a place to begin: the simple reminder that what we are seeking in life is happiness. As the Dalai Lama points out, that is an unmistakable fact. If we approach our choices in life keeping that in mind, it is easier to give up the things that are ultimately harmful to us, even if those things bring us momentary pleasure. The reason why it is usually so difficult to ‘Just say no!' is found in the word ‘no’; that approach is associated with a sense of rejecting something, of giving something up, of denying ourselves.

“But there is a better approach: framing any decision we face by asking ourselves, ‘Will it bring me happiness?’ That simple question can be a powerful tool in helping us skillfully conduct all areas of our lives, not just in the decision whether to indulge in drugs or that third piece of banana cream pie. It puts a new slant on things. Approaching our daily decisions and choices with this question in mind shifts the focus from what we are denying ourselves to what we are seeking—ultimate happiness.”
The Art of Happiness, His Holiness the Dalai Lama, and Howard C. Cutler, M.D. 

Everyday adventures

Summer Fun List 2019

June 03, 2019

Luna's summer fun list involves a) balls and b) swimming

Even though it’s summer (or about to be), we’re not kids anymore, looking forward to the unbridled freedom of weeks of summer vacation. We have jobs, housework, and Other Important and Grown Up Tasks to accomplish. That doesn’t mean we can’t schedule a few special, summer-ized simple pleasures and everyday adventures. After skipping it last year, I’m resurrecting the Summer Fun List this year (originally known as the Summer Bucket List). It’s still a work in progress, but instead of making a long list that will overwhelm me, I’ve kept it short and sweet:

  • Read by the pool
  • Have a movie date with a friend
  • Attend yoga classes at Karma (no affiliation) while our circuit training class teacher is off having a baby 
  • Schedule a massage
  • Go on a playdate with Laure Ferlita and her puppy, Shelby
  • Create and read from a Summer Reading List (post to come about this)
  • Indulge in a black cow
  • Escape for a beach weekend with my husband
  • Go to the 2019 Etsy Craft Party
It’s not a very long list, but it gives me several things to look forward to during the hot, humid months of summer.

How about you? What are you going to do for fun this summer? 

Link love

Escape with Link Love

May 31, 2019

I may be spending a lot of time indoors this summer—yesterday, the “feels like” temperature was 101 degrees. And it’s only May! If you need me, I’ll be at my computer, sipping a cold drink.

If you need a break from heat, cold, or just life in general, here are some links you might enjoy:

Check out “9 Mostly Free Ways to Spark Creativity and Fun.” I’m a visual person, so one of my favorites was: “Think of what you want more of in your life, such as a sense of surrender, more time for creative exploration, or more serenity. Then create visual cues that remind you of your quest.”

Jennifer Louden’s “Thoughts on Taking Care of Yourself When Life Is Hard” lists a number of simple, comforting things we can do when we’re feeling down. One of my favorites: “Think of all the other people in the world feeling exactly the way you are right now and imagine everybody holding hands while nodding at each other with kindness.”

What creative type are you? An Adventurer? A Maker? A Visionary? Take this quick test to find out! (I’m a Thinker.) 

I’m a big believer in the power of baby steps and the Japanese concept of kaizen. Check out “The Power of Micro Steps: Take Tiny Steps Forward,” for some ways to use tiny steps to move forward in multiple areas of your life. As Confucius said, “It doesn’t matter how slowly you go so long as you do not stop.”

Can Reading Make You Happier? I think so and I’m not the only one: “For all avid readers who have been self-medicating with great books their entire lives, it comes as no surprise that reading books can be good for your mental health and your relationships with others, but exactly why and how is now becoming clearer, thanks to new research on reading’s effects on the brain.” And someone please tell me how one gets a job as a bibliotherapist!

If your brain feels overloaded, you may need Sandra Pawula’s, “How to Declutter Your Mind With a Brain Dump.” I haven’t done one in a while—perhaps it’s time. As Pawula writes, “A brain dump will declutter your mind and bring you back to peace. It can be a great way to offload worries or capture creative ideas too.”

Click here to access the Action for Happiness Joyful June calendar.

I found this interview with soccer player/speaker/author Abby Wambach thought-provoking and inspiring. (Be aware there is some adult language.)



After watching it, I put her book, Wolfpack: How to Come Together, Unleash Our Power, and Change the Game, on hold at my library. Here’s a quote I’m still pondering:

“Leadership is not a position to earn. It’s an inherent power to claim. Leadership is the blood that runs through your veins. It’s born in you. It’s not the privilege of a few. It is the right and responsibility of all. Leader is not a title that the world gives to you. It’s an offering that you give to the world.”

Happy Friday!

Creativity

Creativity and Love

May 24, 2019


Photo by Jamez Picard on Unsplash

“To be creative means to be in love with life. You can be creative only if you love life enough that you want to enhance its beauty, you want to bring a little more music to it, a little more poetry to it, a little more dance to it.”
—Osho

Dry

Spring Break Report

May 20, 2019

Zzzzzzzzzz...

My spring break was boring. In a good way.

I was so tired. Physically, mentally, emotionally. I went blueberry picking. I slept. I read. I took my vitamins every day. I puttered in my house, getting rid of things and putting small messes in order. I visited Tank (who, apparently, is tired, too—see above).

I shouldn’t be surprised, I suppose. After big strides in productivity last year, a once-in-a-lifetime three-week trip to France, followed immediately by sickness and upheaval in my personal life, and trying to keep up and catch up with everything at the same time, I was due for break, if not a breakdown.

While I’ve been keeping up (as well as “keeping up appearances”) as best I can, I have rarely felt so “dry” as a writer. Writing feels like squeezing a lime—a whole lot of effort for a trickle of juice. Understandably, this has made me very unhappy, as writing has always been a solace as well as a way to contribute to our finances. Hoping for inspiration, I’ve been revisiting my favorite writing books, and participating in the shewrites.com #whyshewrites challenge on Instagram.

Despite this dry spell, I do still have the desire to write, so I’m adjusting and readjusting the balance of work and rest—of creative output and creative input, what I call well refilling. I had not been allowing myself enough simple noodling time—time spent letting my thoughts drift and dream. Some of my best ideas come that way, and this is probably at least partly why I’ve been feeling so parched. While I believe in the Maya Angelou quote I posted Friday, I also believe that creativity needs nurturing, and I have not been doing enough of that. 

You’d think I would understand the need for creative rejuvenation by now, but we don’t learn our lessons all at once and for good. We learn, we forget, we remember, we learn more, we learn deeper, hopefully on a continued upward spiral. 

What do you do (or stop doing) when you’re in need of rejuvenation, creative or otherwise?

Busy-ness

Spring Rerun--What's the Rush?

May 13, 2019


I’m still on my own personal spring break right now, doing my best to rest and slow down. Here is a post from 2014 that shows this is an ongoing issue for me. Maybe for you, too?

“Slowness is an option for everyone on the planet, not just a privilege reserved for the very wise or very young or very rich. All of us can decide (and the phrase is a potent one)
to take our time.”
—Christian McEwen, World Enough and Time

For the past few weeks, I’ve been experimenting with deliberately slowing down my actions. I’ve been surprised by how many times I catch myself rushing, as opposed to simply moving efficiently and deliberately. When I take the dog’s medications out of the cupboard, when I get out of the car to go inside, when I unload the dishwasher—I feel an internal push to hurry. (Gretchen Rubin describes this feeling perfectly in Happier at Home: “I always have the feeling that I should be working. I always feel pressed for time, as if someone were shoving a pistol in my back and muttering ‘Move, move, move!’”) I’m already aware that when I hurry I break things and hurt myself, and I really don’t need to hurry every minute of every day, so what gives?

It’s at least partly the familiar and eternal battle between doing and being. No matter how hard I try, it seems that I can’t shake the feeling that if I’m not doing something (or hurrying on to the next something) then I’m not worthy. No matter how much I streamline my do-do list, there’s always more to do than I’ll ever be able to accomplish. Hurry has become a habit. One I’m determined to break.

Even with my new focus on not hurrying, and even though I’ve written several blog posts about the concepts of doing less and slowing down (see “Do Less in More Time” and “One Less Thing,” for example), I still struggle to follow my own advice. Take last Thursday. First, while driving home from the grocery store, I stopped too quickly at a stop sign, spilling my coffee into the cup holder and down the center console. After I cleaned that up and got the groceries unloaded, instead of just chilling for a few minutes, I got caught up on the computer and was late leaving for yoga class. I barely had time to take off my shoes, drop my keys and roll out my mat before it started. I felt flustered, distracted and off balance for at least half the class and the quality of my poses suffered. After lunch, while on the way to run an errand with no timetable, I realized I had a death grip on the steering wheel as I tried to hit every traffic light just right.

Slow down there, girl.

After that, I started reminding myself of a principle Natural Horsemanship practitioner Pat Parelli often refers to: Go slower to go faster. Here’s an example in action: that five seconds I saved by hurrying to go in the house is more than eaten up by the time it takes me to retrieve the mail from beneath the car where I just dropped it. If I’d taken my time in the first place, I’d already be inside (in the air conditioning) rather than crawling on the floor of the garage.  

When I remember to slow down, time does seem to lengthen. I’m able to move more smoothly from one thing to another without feeling internal pressure goading me on. So I’ll continue to pay attention to the speed at which I move. Keep saying no to busy work and rushing. Value the time and space between activities as much as the activities themselves. Seek out activities with a slower pace. And I’ll keep working on taking my time.

What makes you feel rushed? How do you slow down?

No rushing allowed

Creativity

Interesting Things May Develop

May 10, 2019


“Creativity is an awful lot like sex. If it always has to be great, that creates a certain amount of performance anxiety. If, instead, you experiment a little, even when you’re not in the mood and don’t have time for a long candlelight dinner with your muse, interesting things may start to develop. You are married to your creativity, not just out on a first date.”
—Julia Cameron, The Vein of Gold

Artist's dates

Spring Rerun--Picking Blueberries: An Artist's Date

May 06, 2019

I’m on my own personal spring break right now, which included a blueberry-picking excursion yesterday. So I dusted off this post from 2015, a throwback to the first time I went blueberry picking (it took me a shockingly long time to fill my bucket—I’ve improved my average quite a bit since then, even with stopping to take pictures and pick a few unripe berries to paint later, as one does.)

A few minutes from my house, and just down the road from where I keep Tank, there is a blueberry farm that is now open for U-picking. After several weeks of unseasonably hot and humid weather, this weekend was fresh and spring like—the sun shining from a cobalt sky dotted with cottony clouds, so I decided to go blueberry picking for the first time. Here’s what happened:

Acres of blueberry bushes

After I park my car, the farm proprietor ties a white plastic bucket around my waist and tells me which sections were picked for market and which should have berries left. I walk down the grassy road between berry sections and choose my spot. There are other pickers scattered through the rows, a few with children in tow. U-picking with kids is popular, and this is one of the first weekends the farm is open. I see several generations of family members, from grandparents to toddlers, enjoying the experience.

And that’s why I’m here: to enjoy the experience. This is an artist’s date as well as a way to stock my freezer with fresh blueberries.

Once I choose my section, I begin slowly walking between the rows of shoulder- to head-high blueberry bushes. It takes me a few moments for my eyes to adjust to seeing the plump purple berries hidden in the foliage. I drop my first berries in my bucket with a thunk. While I search with my eyes, my ears listen to the sounds around me: the breeze flirting with berry bushes, the lady in the red t-shirt humming along with her iPod, the children calling out excitedly, and even the loud speakers periodically blaring screechy bird sounds to keep away other birds who would eat the berries. My mind is free to wander, but I find it mostly stays quiet, absorbed in the task of looking carefully for the ripe berries. I deliberately pick a few unripe berries to paint because they’re such pretty colors. I also remember and use Laure Ferlita’s advice to look up, look down, look all around.



As in life, in blueberry picking, it pays to go slowly, look carefully, and be gentle (so the fruit doesn’t fall on the ground instead of into your fingers). You need to look at the bushes from several different angles, and sometimes you will find perfect berries missed by others who have worked the same row. This is sort of like the process of creativity—good ideas, ripe for the picking are out there, waiting for the right person to come along.

It takes me about two hours to fill my bucket. I probably could have moved to a section with more berries per bush, but for once I’m not in a hurry. It is a pleasure to be doing one thing and one thing only. Once my bucket is full, I return to the entrance, pay my money, and carry a plastic grocery bag to my car filled with my bounty.


When I get home, I’ll have the work of drying out the berries (they don’t like to be wet), freezing them, and deciding what I want to do with the ones I won’t freeze. Blueberry muffins for my son, and lemon blueberry scones for me, I think.

This artist’s date was a huge success. I not only deeply enjoyed it while it was happening, but I also wrote about it in my journal and in this post, and I painted those berries! So far, I’ve only experimented with different colors for the berries, but I also want to do a full watercolor sketch page of various elements from the day.

What did you do this weekend?