Chance encounters
Stuff matters not. Friends matter. I had that old truism abundantly reinforced in the past several weeks… when I’ve been blogging only in my head. That’s my excuse for this stale blogspace, and hopefully it merits putting down in black, white and cyberspace. I made the leap into a new – gasp – quarter century on June 8, with the help of something over 100 friends in the Bay area and warm wishes from absentee friends elsewhere, something worth celebrating indeed. All were invited not to bring Stuff, but to bring, if they chose, contributions in amounts of 75 cents, $7.50, or multiples that seemed interesting to my three favorite causes. We raised a bunch of dollars; the hostess had a ball. Shortly thereafter I hopped a $99-one-way flight from San Francisco to Baltimore, because who can refuse a $99 cross country flight, even if it’s not going exactly where you want to go? I had not bothered to fill in the blanks until almost the moment of departure, but it worked out this way: An old college friend arranged for her housekeeper to fetch me from B.W.I. to her home in McLean, VA; then delivered me the next day to the Corcoran museum where another friend is curator of American Paintings. That afternoon a childhood friend fetched me from the Corcoran, sated with beautiful art, and took me to her home in Alexandria. Two days (and more art, see Ann McDowell at the Torpedo Factory Art Center) later she and I drove 90 miles south to our hometown of Ashland, VA for a reunion of the famous Ashland High classes of ’47, ’48, and ’49. (We are a sturdy bunch of Depression-era-raised farm kids and small-townies.) Another childhood friend that night nursed me through the cold and laryngitis all this had produced. The next day my second-grade boyfriend fetched me from Ashland to the Richmond airport, where the Alamo people kindly offered a car for return to B.W.I. without charging an arm and a leg. Two days later, nourished by visits to more old friends, a fetched myself back to B.W.I., onto Southwest’s pleasant airplane and home. Exhausted, but exhilarated, because friends just do that, and thank heavens for them all.
Chance encounters
A gentle apparition
My mother, who died at 70 in 1967, made a brief reappearance here in San Francisco last week. It was during a visit I made to the bedside of Lik Kiu Ding, age 90-something (born in the jungles of Borneo he never knew exactly when.) I had not seen him in years, until learning he’s now at a nearby assisted living facility. Lik Kiu was like a son to my father, who helped him finish his education in the U.S. (at Randolph-Macon College in my hometown of Ashland, VA.) After his medical training Lik Kiu and his Chinese wife Lillian, also a physician, lived, worked and raised their family in Hong Kong, returning to the States before Lillian’s death of cancer in the ‘90s. (Her remarkable story is part of my book, Dying Unafraid.) Beaming from under his tightly-tucked blankets, Lik Kiu took my hand as I bent near, reached out one long finger to touch my cheek, pointing first to my eyes, then my mouth, then making small circles around my face. His daughter Mary, standing nearby, said, “You look like your mother, don’t you?” It’s true, I’m a double for my mother before her own health began to fail. For those few moments, trying not to cry over his still-handsome face, I evaporated. It was my mother who was holding his hand.
A gentle apparition
Comfort and Joy
I spoke recently to a group of incredibly informed and articulate women, members of the San Francisco OWL chapter. (It used to be an acronym for Older Women’s League, but is now simply OWL, and its members do tend to be very wise.) Plus, any time you can get several dozen busy women to come out on a cold, gray, drizzly, Saturday morning for a talk entitled Living for Now, Preparing for Later, it has to be an encouraging day. More encouraging were the questions and comments. They pretty much boiled down to this: the participants wanted to make sure their documents (and their lives) were in order in case they got hit by a truck this afternoon; many wanted to get involved in my Compassion & Choices of N.CA cause, all of them were very definitely living for now. A few days later, when I met another informed and articulate woman named Colette Lafia and her new book Comfort and Joy: Simple Ways to Care for Ourselves and Others, the two episodes made a nice fit. (More about that on my Redroom.com blog.) Colette’s lovely little book is designed as a personal guide for finding comfort; there are even ‘Cultivating Comfort’ advisories at the end of each segment. The good women of OWL, who focus consistently on local, national and international issues of all sorts, are taking care of their own basic now-and-later comfort issues. And guess where it leads? To joy. Good tidings.
Comfort and Joy
Barack and Jane and Me
I had such a good time writing a brief blog about bonding with Barack, thanks to a sometime shared agent, on my Red Room blog, perhaps you’ll surf over to my author page on redroom.com and read it. Too lazy to re-write. But I AM going to get something new and profound up on this space soon, I am, I am!