THERE’S ALWAYS BEAUTY IN THE SKIES, SEEN FROM THE ROOFTOP
“Get as far away from lights as possible . . .”
Still, I so wanted to see the Northern Lights, and there were reports that the rare spectacle was visible in San Francisco. So up to the roof of my building I went, about midnight.
If you squint, you can see a smidge of green through the fog above.
Mesmerized, I stared north. Possibly I just imagined it all, but for about ten minutes, while I watched in wonder, rosy wisps or shimmers of pale green floated briefly into view just above the urban horizon. Could that be the moon (just above the two-eyed building) or are my eyes seriously playing tricks on me?
I think it mattered not. The universe was simply doing its universal thing, throwing a solar storm of a party, everyone’s invited.
“He doesn’t know he’s sick,” a friend said this morning; “he simply can’t separate fantasy from reality. It’s called anasagnosia.”
The friend was referring to a politician who will remain nameless, but I think it may be a national malady. By definition anasagnosia is “a neurological condition in which the patient is unaware of his or her neurological deficit or psychiatric condition.”
Or maybe, reality. For exampIe, I have a habit of getting national news from the print edition of the New York Times, from PBS and NPR and a few left-leaning TV channels. But at least twice a week I watch another major TV channel favored by those of a more conservative mindset. It presents a narrative that makes perfect sense, and most days bears absolutely no relation to anything I’ve gleaned from the sources above.
(If you get your national news from social media, well, bless your heart. There’s no hope for you.)
To be clear, there is nothing humorous or satiric about anasagnosia. In the realm of mental illness it applies to many of the worst diagnoses.
But half the country, I think, may be suffering from it. (Pick whichever half you like.) A changed, hopeful future can emerge from a dangerous present. And scary past. But which past, and which future? Are half of us blind to our blindness?
If there is relief, before mid-November, I’m not sure what it might be. But for the mentally healthy there is, at least, a treatment: Work to support your reality. Write letters, send postcards. Speak softly but carry a copy of the Constitution. Vote.
SMALL TOWN GIRL TO CALIFORNIA GIRL & BACK: HOME IS WHERE THE HEART IS
I discovered that it’s true: you CAN go home again.
All it takes is a home — a place of belonging, of the soul’s peace, of long ago that managed to keep just a whiff of itself. Maybe a bit of landscape, a water’s edge, an old house or two, a gnarled oak. And if you’re lucky, one friend who anchors the past. I can recommend my friend Carlene.
Going home again is a matter of recapturing some elusive, indelible memory etched into your soul: what it was, why it came to be yours, how it shaped you. If past is prologue, exploring the past is a fascinating chapter in the book of aging.
For most of us humanoids, once we hit the half-century mark — a mark I passed almost that many years ago 😱 — there’s a mysterious, built-in yearning to go home again. Going there can be painful while still and often useful. Or it can be enlightening, uncovering skeletons you never knew existed. Or uplifting. Or startling, or bewildering, soul-strengthening, enriching . . .
Or it can be, as in my case, pure joy. Admittedly, mixed with a smidge of most of the above.
I’m particularly lucky to be able to start a homecoming with a visit to The Father — a statue of my dad on the campus of Randolph-Macon College in beautiful downtown Ashland VA. The last thing any college needs! But in this case one determined student launched a memorial campaign some years back which resulted in The Father. A daughter sure can’t argue.
But you don’t need a memorial. Going home again is better when you conjure up that memory out of something more abstract. The shape of a fallen leaf that came from the same tree you climbed as a child. The smell of sawdust from an old feed store or factory or abandoned house. The images cast by shadows on a sidewalk that your mind can miraculously shift back to images of long-gone neighbors, buildings and picket fences that the sunlight of decades past imprinted on that site.
Carlene and I spent a lot of time driving around, pointing out homes that, in my mind, are still inhabited by the neighbors of my childhood. Those neighbors are still in my psyche.
Like the old Cox house on College Avenue that backed up to ours. It was Walter Cox who ratted us out when my sister Mimi and I, aided and abetted by our friend Beverly Ann, set out to go around the roof by inching along the gutters. It’s a three-story house with a slate roof. I would like to claim having had that sort of adventurous bravery at age 6; actually I just couldn’t be left behind by Mimi and Beverly Ann.
Before we plunged to certain death, though, Walter spotted us, alerted his mother, who called our mother, who came out into the back yard, called upward in a voice calmer than I can today even imagine, “Dahlings . . . you really mustn’t do that. Just back up to where you started and climb back into the dormer window . . .” Which I can now admit I was happy to do; having been the last one onto the gutters I was the first one back in the window.
My mother, accustomed to her daughters forever climbing trees, explained to us about height limits, thin gutter wires and slate roofs. We went on to other adventures, but we never forgave Walter Cox.
Carlene and I even revisited the old swimming hole at Horseshoe Bend. Before there were community pools there were swimming holes:
Usually these were bends or eddies of rivers into which kids could jump from bridges or tree limbs in endless acts of derring-do. In my memory the river at Horseshoe Bend is wide and deep, the water sparkling, the bridge (still today a narrow two-lane) and overhanging tree limbs daringly high. So it’s a muddy creek bounded by a shrub or two? Going home again means scratching the surface of reality to recreate images of the past. Even when those images prove, ahem, altered over the years.
Carlene’s memory of the old Blair house produced a story I had never known. It involved a surreptitious multiple-girl spend-the-night party in the midst of which a late-night decision was made to sneak out in search of adventure. Possibly involving a similar party of multiple boys that was going on just outside of town.
So as not to wake Mrs. Blair, some of the girls crept out the back door, pushed someone’s family Buick a few blocks — also to avoid waking Mrs. Blair when the noisy engine cranked up — and set out. As the adventure developed, a few of the girls returned to the house to get the ones left behind (in those pre-seatbelt days you could pile a lot of girls into those cars, but not all 10 or 12 at once.) On arrival the returnees were met by the lady of the house standing in the doorway proclaiming them all hopeless Bad Girls, threatening to call the sheriff, their parents . . . it was not a happy scene. But somehow, eventually they prevailed upon the hostess not to call the cops. Or worse, their parents.
The reason I had never heard this tale, over all these decades?
“We absolutely swore each other to secrecy forever,” Carlene reported. “If just one parent had learned of our escapade, word would have quickly spread and we would all have been confined to our rooms for years.” But on this Going-Home-Again visit she decided that since most of the partiers and all of the parents involved are now dead – – perhaps it was safe to tell the story.
It helps, if you’re going home again, for Home to have been a railroad town. Trains, before diesel engines made them less interesting and airplanes made them less necessary — for passenger travel at least — are at the heart of memory for generations of us.
Trains connected us to glamorous people and places, serving as a constant reminder of the wide world. Where the old tracks remain they hold those memories: of flattening pennies and bobby pins on the tracks, of racing along the ties or balancing on the rails.
Trains or trees, roads or rivers, old haunts or old houses, any or all can take us home again.
Or maybe Home is just those collected memories, deep in the heart.
A recent New York Times story confirms that dirt is good. (The real kind, not the political or social media kind.) Dirt even contains microbes beneficial to our mental & physical health. Who knew?
Actually, I did. Mud pies were always my beloveds. You can express yourself in mud: Pressed-leaf creations, happy faces or sad. If you’re angry you can just splat it back down with great force. Digging restores the soul, and occasionally creates gardens.
I taught my kids to wash up before meals, but otherwise to love Mother Earth. Even a little on the inside floors if I’m being honest. Didn’t Native Americans build immunities by ingesting bits of bad stuff? Don’t you have to eat a peck of dirt before you die? (Take your time.)
Please accept this seal of approval: Go ahead. Get grimy.
THE 2024 SEASON? A BUNCH OF CHALLENGES, A SPRIG OF HOPE
Cherry blossoms framing the Washington Monument (Author photo)
Springtime. Season of rebirth and renewal. Season of hope.
This year, in addition to the cherry blossoms and sunlit fountains and melting ice cream cones, Spring brought us a rare new gift.
(Author photo, taken just before dipping the toes)
(Author photo, taken hastily)
We got to watch the sun and moon do their planetary dance. It brought a reminder of one more possibility: reunity.
For a few minutes or a few hours on April 8, millions of Americans didn’t care what the politics, peculiarities or skin color of their neighbors happened to be. We all simply turned into specks inhabiting the same little planet in one vast universe.
Partial eclipse as seen from a San Francisco balcony (Author Photo)
Perhaps, some day, there will be a season of peace.
Since the next one will be in 2045, and — at 90 — I have no plans to be around then, I guess I’ll finish life on this planet without having witnessed this extraordinary phenomenon. Which is OK. I’ll watch it on TV, in real time, and that’ll be special.
But being there would be spectacular. It’s the business of how to separate the special from the spectacular, and make rational choices between the two, that gets harder as we humanoids get older.
This is my recent lesson in making such a choice.
It started with an invitation to join a trip arranged by a favorite San Francisco-based organization, the Commonwealth Club , for which I’ve long been (and still am) a volunteer. Small group, brief time, expensive but not break-the-bank expensive, and this would be a once-in-a lifetime event. Another Club member was even looking for a roommate so I’d avoid the single-supplement cost.
The trip was to a south Texas ranch directly in the path of the solar eclipse, pick-up in Dallas on Sunday afternoon, return to DFW Tuesday morning. As just about anyone in the country knows by now, the eclipse will cross the U.S. — its ‘path of totality’ extending from south Texas to Maine — on Monday. I paid the fee and called my travel agent.
Lesson one: Find out travel costs in advance.
SFO to Dallas, how hard could that be? Well, as it turned out the airlines thought about this eclipse, and its path of totality, long before the rest of us did, and adjusted their prices accordingly. Nonstop from SFO to DFW would be roughly an arm and a leg. I gave up flying on anything that stopped between home and destination about the time I turned 70. But after my fearless travel agent ran through the nonstop options and their prices we went quickly, nonstop, to Plan B: find something connecting through weird travel patterns and invoke the Little Old Lady privilege of being met by a wheelchair to make changes in unfamiliar airports.
The LOL wheelchair option is onerous to me. I mean. I walk three or four miles a day, San Francisco hills included, and despite the wrinkled and rumpled appearance validated by my ID I detest being treated as Old Person. But we do what we need to do. Fearless travel agent found flights to DFW through Chicago (Chicago? Yes) returning through Denver, on the same airline for which I had mileage to cover the costs.
This, of course, now made it ridiculous to try going from home to Texas ranch in one day, so I opted to book a hotel at DFW for Saturday night. More added cost, but at least the excursion is less stressful.
Photo by fellow Cloud Appreciation Society Member Bob Osborn
Lesson two: Look at the bigger picture. Seriously. Not just the trip but the peripheral costs, the time involved, other commitments, everything else.
I’d known all along that I had a long-planned trip to the east coast in March. But the eclipse is in April! I’ve traveled for ages to different sites in consecutive months. I’ve been known to take back-to-back trips, often a weekend visit with friends followed by a longer trip just a few days later for a board meeting downstate.
But I’ve also never been 90 before. At some point, the body would like a little time to readjust from timezone changes, crowded airports, strange cities and the stress of it all no matter how much fun it was. The bottom line here was that I got home from the (nonstop) flight, DC to SFO, late Sunday night and the flight out was scheduled for early morning on Saturday. The same week.
By Tuesday, dragging a little, I was scrambling to meet deadlines that had piled up during the east coast trip, and I was beginning to have second thoughts about the eclipse.
Lesson three: Remember that the world doesn’t stop while you’re on vacation.
There was a time — say, back in my 70s or 80s — when I could catch up with the commitments of daily life within a day or two. Something seems to have shifted with that. The brain moves quickly into story deadlines, but the body is still on east coast time and wants a nap. It’s possible to avoid major calamity — postpone stuff that’s not on hard deadline, cancel lunches with friends to gain a little time — but Vacation Recovery is simply not as instantaneous as it was in younger years.
By Wednesday, exhausted, I was having so many second thoughts they were adding up too fast to follow. I began looking at weather reports. Storms and thunderstorms in the south and southwest. A CNN reporter, doing a segment on the eclipse Wednesday night, mentioned weather effects and (I promise, you can’t make this stuff up) ended his piece with a throw-away comment, “Just don’t go to South Texas.”
That did it. Thursday at 3 AM I am wide awake, doing the debate thing in my head: Should I do this thing, or should I not? All that money. But maybe it won’t even be visible. What about stuff I’ve not yet done: cancel the newspapers (yes, I’m a print edition person;) water the plants, buy some bug spray, find the sun hat, confirm the flights, pack another suitcase forheavenssakes.
Lesson four: When you’ve lived this long you’re entitled to change your mind.
Thursday morning I began to think it through. Having no trip insurance — actually, as far as I know there’s no insurance that covers ‘changing your mind’ — I would lose a large chunk of dollars. But travel agent friend assured me she could get back all those United miles, and I still had time to cancel the Saturday night airport hotel.
And the tipping point: If I canceled out I would have four Secret Days. A Secret Day, something that increases in value with every birthday, is one in which everyone thinks you’re gone so you can leave the phone on answering machine and do whatever the heck you want.
I wimped out. Left the carry-on on the shelf where I’d stashed it on Monday, emailed the trip people, apologized to my erstwhile roommate, called the hotel, thanked the travel agent, began to fiddle around with some stories, like this one.
Maybe what this country needs is a boarding house revival.
In the very olden days, specifically the century or more ending with the housing boom that followed World War II, the boarding house was everybody’s answer: a home, for a while or a generation, for maiden ladies and traveling salesmen, families on the move but not quite sure where, immigrants and itinerants, students of all ages and inclinations.
Boarding houses were run by couples whose children had grown and left home, by young families in need of extra income, and often by women in the days when few other options existed. Or older people of all types who enjoyed company and had a few spare rooms.
Granted, there was no oversight for health and safety etc; but it was in the boarding house that the citizenry learned manners, handiwork, new trades and how to love — or at least get along with — one’s neighbor. Violations of civility could lead to cold eggs for breakfast.
Memories of these establishments came to me recently at 3 AM, in the form of a song I have certainly not sung for at least 60 or 70 years. There is, I’m sure, some scientific explanation for why I can’t remember what I was talking about at breakfast, but a tune from my college guitar quartet days in 1951 pops into my head, unbidden and utterly precise, words & music complete, at 3 AM. In a continuous loop that is still playing.
In case you don’t want to Google it (several versions appear but mine is the right one) the ‘Boarding House Song’ is below. It is sung to the tune of ‘Silver Threads Among the Gold’ — which is also embedded in my brain but that can wait.
In the boarding house where I lived, everything is growing old; Long gray hairs are in the butter, and the cheese is full of mold.
When the dog died we had sausage; when the cat died, catnip tea. When the landlord died I left there; spareribs were too much for me.
I take the return-of-the-boarding-house-song as an omen.
Problems of housing and homelessness are everywhere today, not to mention the struggle to accomodate immigrants and asylum seekers. Folks in the low-income bracket are often inadequately or improperly housed, and there are all manner of economic pressures on the middle class. Loneliness and depression are on the increase everywhere.
For the obvious solution to all of these issues I refer you to paragraphs three and four above. Civility would be an add-on bonus.
MY HOMETOWN WELCOMES SECRETARIAT BACK HOME TO STAY
Secretariat Monument #2/2, ‘Racing into History’ (Author photo)
I got back to Ashland just in time.
Secretariat was born after I left, but Hanover County is welcoming home its native son.
Born of a carefully arranged marriage (to put it politely) at nearby “The Meadow” in 1970, Secretariat won the Triple Crown when I was long grown and he was three. While at it he set speed records in the Kentucky Derby, the Belmont Stakes and the Preakness.
Secretariat has spawned movies, TV shows, countless stories and a few statues; the above is surely #1. A bronze sculpture by artist Jocelyn Russell it shows Secretariat with jockey Ron Turcotte astride winning the Kentucky Derby.
‘Racing into History’ has recently been on a 50th anniversary tour, but now the extraordinary horse is home again. In the center of Ashland VA, widely known (to its intimates at least) as the Center of the Universe. On the campus of Randolph-Macon College, in time for a rare visit of my own.
