True Thanksgiving Thankfulness

We were invited to my long-time friend Sharona’s house for Thanksgiving this year.  We have been looking forward to it for weeks.  She truly puts on a feast for her extended family and assorted friends.  We were to be 30 for dinner!  When we arrived, her house was dominated by very long table running the length of her dining room and living room, reminiscent of a long ago banquet table.  It was set beautifully, with candles, art pieces (handblown glass pears and Sharona’s stained glass pears and hot pads), handblown green glasses, tablecloth and cloth napkins folded fancily with colorful dried pressed autumn leaves as place cards with our names written on them.  Who, but Sharona, has dishes and glasses and cutlery for 30?  Needless I was very impressed.  Sharona has one of the biggest most generous hearts of anybody I know.  But what impressed me more than the table was how she orchestrated cooking the dinner.  It included 2 turkeys and a big boned leg of lamb, plus yams, spinach, roasted potatoes, huge plates of green beans, cranberry sauce, stuffing, mushroom gravy and assorted other dishes the guests brought.  I brought a salad for 15.  I learned she has a small notebook with a plan of the order in which things are cooked and she starts days ahead.   She has a small kitchen with just one oven.  It is an amazing feat of organizational talent and hard work.  As time approached for dinner, she came and recruited 3 guys to carve the meat.  Bob began carving the leg of lamb.  I don’t know exactly how long it took to do that, but about 10 minutes later, I came back to see how he was doing and found him sitting in the corner looking not all right.  He was bent over, profusely sweating and couldn’t form words or respond to my questions.  What had happened?  Sharona called 911 and that set in motion a system into which he had now been placed.  One of the guests was a doctor, another was a nurse and they soon found their way to him and decided he should lie flat as possible.  With assistance, he walked to a reclining chair and seemed better, more like himself, nevertheless the Paramedics arrived.  He walked outside unassisted and was soon strapped onto a gurney.  As I went in the house to collect our things, everyone was seated as the table and I heard Sharona introducing the meal.  There were people from nine decades of life, from two to over eighty, at the table.  There were people from many different professions and many different origins.  The diversity pleased her immensely.  I was sad I couldn’t click my glass and get everyone to lift their glasses in a toast to Sharona in gratitude and thanks. (She would have hated that.)  I left and went to meet Bob at the ER.  It was shocking to be there sitting alone on the green chairs in the very cold empty waiting room.  When I found Bob

in his cubicle, he seemed himself.  Tests were done, a CT scan of his brain, blood work, an EKG and all came out normal.  After 2 1/2 hours, he was released and I was seriously grateful for his clean bill of health.  You see at the same age, 79, his father had a stroke from which he never really recovered.  We don’t know what caused his syncope (new word we learned for fainting in the ER) but my suspicion is that it was heat stroke.  Bob’s health, the good health both of us enjoy, is something to be really thankful for and not just on Thanksgiving, but every day.

Truth is Beauty at Burning Man

Bob has been talking for weeks about going to the Oakland Museum to see the Burning Man exhibit there.  Today after lunch we took BART down to the Lake Merritt Station and walked 3 minutes to the Oakland Museum to see it.  We got in free with our UCBot. Garden membership (I got the highest level membership this year and it gets us in free to all sorts of local museums and Botanical Garden across the country).  I had the impression that Burning Man was an excuse for a wild hippie-like camp where anything goes, like in the 60’s—drugs, sex, nudity and all manner of excesses.  It seemed too wild for me.  The exhibit showed a much higher minded event.  It started with a display of their 10 idealistic principles.  The museum played Burning Man as a counter-cultural week where a fabulous city is created out in the middle of the Nevada desert in August, where great art is made, where people give each other presents, where people interact intentionally in open and friendly ways.  People are free to be, indeed encouraged to show, who they really are (that of course is the ultimate philosophical question in life , who are we?).  The exhibit had only two galleries.  What I enjoyed most were the time lapse photography movies shown on huge screens on the wall.  I was totally taken by the huge metal statue of a young woman reaching up to the sky framed by a rainbow.  It was beautiful.  The random gongs gouging and the flashing lights in the dimly light gallery made me feel like my brain was assaulted after a while.   Later, in the outside display,  I saw the same statue of the young woman and the piece was almost as impressive as in the desert photos.  It was titled “Truth is Beauty.”  Also outside was a laser cut temple made out of sheets of plywood reminding me of those thick paper models you get at Christmas and can put together, but of course the temple was much bigger.  It had a Buddhist feeling about it.  What impressed me were the messages that had been written on the wood and on squares of plywood left out for people to write messages on.  They were all beautiful, loving wishes for the wellbeing of us all.  One after the other, the messages were positive statements.  I was blown away by the amount of love that was expressed there.  Maybe that is what Burning Man is really about.  This amazing goodness that can come out of ordinary people when the better angels of our nature are encouraged and released.  It gave me hope in what humans could do if we put our minds and hearts together to create something instead of fighting with each other to destroy things.  Maybe Burning Man is about experiencing that hope.

Christmas Cactus Memories

I have a floppy Christmas Cactus I cherish in my kitchen and it is blooming now.  Its blossoms are white.  I remember very clearly the morning I took a cutting from the white Christmas Cactus in the middle of Helen’s glass breakfast room table.  I’d never seen a white one before and I asked if I could take a cutting.  Helen said, of course, but she didn’t know if one could do such a thing as start a new plant from just a few leaves.  Helen was one of my dearest friends.  She was my mother’s age, but somehow we became fast friends soon after Bob took me over to meet she and Willis at their spacious old Spanish style home on Oakdale Street in Pasadena very close to CalTech where Bob was a graduate student.  Helen and Willis were the parents of one of Bob’s Yale roommates—Bill Stork.  The story she always told was around this time when Bob took over another young woman to meet her.  She said, “Where’s Julie” and picked up the hor’derves and took them out to the kitchen.  No special treats if it wasn’t Julie.  After we moved to back to California, I’d visit her fairly often, always sleeping up in Bill’s old bedroom over the Porte-cochere.  The mattress was old and thin but the sheets were always ironed.  Helen volunteered to have Bob’s and my rehearsal dinner at her house for Bob’s parents, since they were from out of town.  Over the years, I loved my visits, especially the breakfasts.  We always had the very same thing:  a pink grapefruit, carefully sectioned, a toasted English muffin and orange juice and coffee.  Looking at the white flower on the Christmas cactus reminds me so of Helen.  It was Helen who gave her granddaughter a little gift each day on her Advent calendar, an idea that I have carried forward, doing it for our four grandchildren.  It is

 a big job getting 80-90 little presents for their combined Advent calendars.  I always say I’m going to stop, and then I imagine how much fun it would be to open a special present every day for the whole month of December and I do it again.  Christmas is a time of many happy memories.  It gives me pleasure to relive old memories especially this time of year.

Applesauce

We’ve been picking and gathering apples from Arne’s apple tree for two months now.  The abundance is overwhelming.   Bob has picked the remaining apples and there are two big 5 gallon buckets full.  So I’ve been making applesauce.  It’s very forgiving.  It’s a good use for the multitudes of little apples, for the bruised apples and the disfigured ones.  This morning with my encouragement Bob undertook making a big pan of applesauce.  As is his way, he bought a new tool for the project—-an apple slicer.  He figured out a way to peel the apples faster, bending his wrist in funny ways, rather than moving the apple, then he’d pop the peeled apple on the cutting board and push the slicer through the apple.  His pan is by my counting the ninth one this season.  I’ve got five big container of applesauce in my freezer.  We’ve eaten many containers full and some “lucky” friends have received applesauce as a gift.  The abundance of harvest of our one apple tree awes me.  The harvest is shared with birds who peck holes in some apples, with some creature that sits every night on our steps by the garage and eats a half an apple.  I think it is a raccoon, because I imagine the critter sitting on its haunches holding the apple in its little hands munching away.  We certainly have enough to share!  Once again, I say, next year I’m going to seriously thin the new apples so all the trees energy goes into making fewer bigger apples.  In the meantime, we’ve got apples for at least two more big pots of applesauce and some left over for apple pies and apple cakes and apple galettes.  What a gift these apples are every year all from one sprouting apple seed the young Arne found eating an apple and then planted it.

Cal Women’s Volleyball

Our youngest son played volleyball in high school and college.  He loves it so much he has played in Amateur leagues ever since.  Interestingly, he loves to watch Women’s volleyball so he follows Cal and Stanford teams.  This week he decided it would be fun for Bob and me to go to see Cal Women’s Volleyball team play UCLA.  Cal is ranked nationally and even though it has a better record, UCLA is still of very good team.  So he got us tickets for the game at 2pm on Friday afternoon.  We handled the parking challenge well and had time to stop at the Musical Offering for a nostalgic latte before the game.  Entering the Haas Pavillion was a maze.  First, I had to check my purse (only bags as large as an index card were allowed in which pretty much excluded everything).  I filled my pockets with my valuables and keys.  We went through a security check and got in.  The Cal pep band was playing loudly and with spirit.  They were about 20 musicians all dressed in straw hats and blue vests covered with those buttons you get with mottos and advertising on them.  The sections danced together as they played.  Cal was just finishing its warm up.  After the National Anthem, the game began and UCLA immediately got ahead in the first set.  Cal never managed to capture the lead and lost the set by 10 points.  The playing was exciting, lots of spikes and digs and some long rallies.  The second game wasn’t any better for Cal, with UCLA dominating and winning easily.  Unfortunately one of the Cal star players was injured badly.  After a break, the 3rd set began and finally Cal began to play up to their potential, the game was tied, point by point, until at 24-24, UCLA went ahead and went on to win the match, 3-0.  After the match, the Cal team lined up and faced the band and the band sweetly serenaded them, maybe offering some consolation.  Bob spent much of the game measuring the sound with his IPhone.  He loves to measure things.  The sound was loud, very loud, peaking at 90 - 110 dBs when the band played or the  peppy recorded music was blasting out.  What surprised me was when it was very quiet, Bob still measured 50-60 dBs.  Now my ears are still ringing.  I wonder how many little hairs in my cochlea are newly bent over and frazzled?  It was so fun to do something totally out of our comfort zone.  On the walk to our car, Bob suggested we stop at Yogurt Park and have a frozen yogurt.  We were transported back to the 1980’s when our family used to go to. Yogurt Park after church.  Even though “our team” didn’t win, it was fun to go to a Cal sporting event and watch the exceptional Cal women athletes play

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Aging as a Spiritual Practice

For the last six Monday afternoons from 4 to 5:30, I’ve been attending a group on the topic of Aging. We were loosely following the book, Aging as a Spiritual Practice, but since only a few of us read it, we didn’t follow it too closely.  With all the sharing about our views and experiences around our aging, we bonded.  I loved hearing other people’s outlook on our common experiences of having lived a lot of years.  By the last session, I told someone as we walked in, “It’s getting old, talking about getting old.”  But this last meeting was the most profound as we all spoke about what we think about life after death.  We all agreed that we don’t know what is going to happen and most of us were happy leaving it a mystery.  By chance, this week, I learned one of my favorite ministers had died.  He was a Swedenborgian and as such had firm and positive beliefs about life after death.  Swedenborg, who lived and died in the 18th century, explained a complex organization basically saying we ended up with those on the same level of spiritual energy.  I loved and trusted Forster, but I still don’t know about his beliefs.  I guess we all just have to wait our turn and then in a blink of an eye, in a single breath, we’ll know.  In the meantime, I know that I want to live the days I have left with joy and gratitude.

An Experience on BART

Several months ago, I got a whole lot of bug bites on my legs over days and weeks.  As I thought about where I could have picked them up, I think I brought them home from a trip on BART.  The   bugs settled into my living room chairs, I kept getting bites on my legs.  The bites looked very much like bedbug bites and in the end to get rid of the pests, we had to trash the living room chairs.  Today I saw how bedbugs and other parasites are spread on BART.  There was a nearly naked homeless man sleeping on the yellow seats set aside for elderly folks with his bare feet lying on another pair of seats.  He had a very dirty pillow and a dirty white sheet wrapped him.  As I looked at him, I felt a mixture of very uncomfortable feelings—-disgust, fear, horror, guilt.  At one point he sat up straight and called out “Does anyone have a dollar?”  He said it over and over.  I looked around at the faces of my fellow passengers, the faces were all stony, hard, not acknowledging his presence.  So he lay down again.  After he spoke, I realized I had not said a silent blessing for him.  So I did that and also blessed  the inner unlovable parts of each of us.  I wondered what I could possibly say to him?  I didn’t want to approach him.  No one did.  When I got off BART and walked to the Art Museum,  I didn’t see any homeless people, but the sidewalks reeked of urine.  Homelessness is such a big problem and has resisted all attempts over the years to solve it.  It seems only to be getting bigger and worse.  Whatever can we do?   I don’t like to live in a place where so many people don’t have anywhere to go.

Gun Violence Vigil

Friday at noon I attended a Gun Violence Vigil at the little church we’ve been attending.  I wanted to support the minister, whom I like very much.  People don’t generally come out for such events I learned years ago when I was a minister.  I emailed the friend I was meeting for lunch that day that I’d be attending the Vigil and could we meet afterwards at a nearby restaurant.  She said she’d like to attend the Vigil with me.  She’s not a church go-er and so I warned her with what I thought would happen.  She decide to come with me and that made three of us that showed up.  There was beautiful music playing as we came in to the back of the church (Bach Cello Suites with YoYo Ma playing) which set a lovely tone.  It was a very simple Vigil.  We listened to beautiful music, heard several interfaith readings and then the minister read the names of cities where a mass shooting had occurred just in the month of October.  A mass shooting is defined by 4 or more people dying.  Friday morning I learned there had been a mass shooting in Orinda, CA, a town no more than 3 or 4 miles from us on Thursday, Halloween night.  I was shocked it happened so close.  The list the minister read went on and on.  I found my eyes filled with tears to hear and realize how common these senseless mass murders are.  There were 28 cities named and that doesn’t even count the homicides or suicides that happen by gunshot.  That means there is a mass shooting nearly every day here in America.  We sat in silence when he ended,  giving us time to reflect on what we heard and then spoke about this.  The thing is, the Vigil is great to raise awareness but what needs to happen is action.  Humans are a violent species and the easy access in America to guns increases gun violence.  Surveys show that the majority of Americans, including many gun owners, want laws to restrict access to assault weapons and want background checks, but nothing ever happens.  Why is the NRA so very powerful and why is Congress (especially the Senate) so impotent?  Why do we allow our children to play violent video games and watch violence on TV and in the movies?  In Europe they rate movies by the amount of violence in them so people know before they go to the movie.  I want something to change in our culture and country.  I want gun violence to stop.  Everybody does, but no one knows how to stop it.