AncienTrails

Chicken Leek Pie

Lughnasa                                Waning Artemis Moon

The chicken leek pie has cooled down and sits in the refrigerator awaiting lunch tomorrow.  Using our own leeks, onions, carrots, parsley and thyme made the cooking fun and satisfying.

Kate’s first night back at work and she was the only physician scheduled.  Unusual.  She came home tired, but no more tired than I would have expected after major surgery and a two month lay off from the standing and walking she does at work.

Well, tomorrow will come soon.

Eternal Tru Luv

Lughnasa                               Waning Artemis Moon

Kate’s at work.  Two months almost to the day after her hip surgery she has returned to the Allina Clinic in Coon Rapids for her last four months of full time practice.  I anticipate a successful evening and final four months for her, having seen a remarkable recovery in terms of her day-to-day pain.  The hip is wonderful, the back’s pretty good, the only clinker right now is her bursitis on her left hip.  Still, compared to the awful weeks just prior to her surgery, she’s a different woman and it’s great to see.

Having her home full time, practice retirement, helped us see the possibilities in the next phase of our life together.  We’ll manage our gardens and our orchard and our bees with greater ease, two persons engaged from the start of the growing season.  We’ll have time to go into art galleries, out to lunch, just wander around more.

Other people must find the one who gets them, around whom they can be their authentic selves, I’m glad to say I’m among them.  And that the experience is reciprocal.

Eternal tru luv, as we used to say.

Shame, Guilt, Fear

Lughnasa                                                  Waning Artemis Moon

While it’s fresh.  A meeting this morning with our financial manager where we went over, again, the various moving parts of our investments.  It resulted in a down feeling, almost defensive.  What was this?  He said we’d be fine financially and I believed him.  We overhauled our whole approach to money now over ten years ago and have a great track record since then.  When I mentioned my feelings to Kate, she said she trusted in our ability to adapt.  Again, I believed her.  We have and will adapt to changed circumstances.

It took a while to delayer my feelings.  First, I noticed anxiety (my unfortunately favorite response to the unknown), as if a vast pit were about to open ahead of us.  A pit of this and then a possible that and more stuff we didn’t know, or have impact on.  A little deeper I recognized a fear about being dependent on a bag of gold held in some financial dragon’s lair and only won back by dint of great effort.  Silly.  Obtuse.  Still, the case.

Pushing a little further, a different layer.  Retirement.  When Kate retires, my long tenuous connection to the world of work would fray, then vanish.  It’s as if she’s retiring for both of us.  Or, rather, that I feel the imminence of retirement perhaps in a manner similar to the couvade, a strange situation in some cultures where a husband takes on the characteristics of his wife’s pregnancy, often placing a heavy rock on the belly near the birth moment and heaving it off.  So, there’s the unknown, the strange sense of money coming in from a pot somewhere far away, a feeling of retiring that is sympathetic or empathetic rather than actual.  But, that wasn’t the end.

What finally came to me was a mixture of shame, guilt and fear, all related to no longer having a viable connection to the world of work.  This is my middle class roots talking.  As long as Kate practices, I have a tangible though fragile link to work and the income it produces.  After she retires, all semblance of that relationship vanishes.  In the central Indiana world where I grew up not to work was shameful, weak, irresponsible.  Kate responded with, “Well, I’m upper middle class and I don’t care! (about the abandoning work)”

All of our life comes along for the ride and we never knew when one part or another will express itself, rise up and claim attention.

Work

Lughnasa                                         Full Artemis Moon

Kate now gardens like she used to, full speed ahead, churning up weed piles and moving on, like a gopher of weeds.  She’s constantly in motion, going hard, being busy.  Now that her long-arm quilter only awaits plugging in, she’ll have another tool to use.  Kate’s work ethic doesn’t seem to have an off switch.

It’s good, most of the time.  My work ethic, however, is not hers.  Sometimes I feel as if I need to get in motion, too, be doing something.  This is moving against my nature, which requires solitary, reflective time.  She doesn’t press this on me, instead my inner Teuton responds to her activity, feels guilty.  It’s a hard balance for me to maintain.  Part of the delicate dance of a long term love affair.

Grand-daughter Ruth has started pre-school.  Kate sent her a bouquet of pink flowers and I sent along some fairy tale books and two books on starting school.  Showing that she will do well in the educational system, Ruth plucked individual flowers out of the bouquet and took them to her teachers.

In reflecting on her starting pre-school, the momentousness struck me in a way Joseph’s didn’t.  Having the experience of my own education–long–and Kate’s–long–and Joseph’s–longish, I got, maybe for the first time, what a journey the formal education process requires.  She may be at this 20 years from now, when she’s 24 and I’m, oh my, 83.

We turn over a good, large part of our lives to education in class rooms, handing in assignments, following required curriculum, reading what others tell us to read.  In part, I know, this means giving ourselves a chance to mature without clogging up the work force.  In part the system tries to occupy our time in meaningful and useful ways; in other parts it attempts to restrain, to lock us into a hierarchical system with rigid expectations.

Good luck, Ruthie.  A 20 year journey starts with the first pre-school day.

The Buddha

Lughnasa                                   Full Artemis Moon

No.  Not that Buddha.  A small, bald, slightly pudgy baby Buddha.  That was what we called my sister when she was still an infant.  Mary had an inscrutable baldness going for her.  Now she lives in the land of the Buddha, the oldest Buddhism of all, Theravada, and has long since shed her Buddha appearance.  She’s traded the robes, or the diapers, of the Buddha for academic regalia, Indiana for Singapore, North America for Asia.

She’s been over there a while now, a long while, living a good part of her adult life on the Malay Peninsula, first in Kuala Lumpur and now in the Air Conditioned Nation of Singapore, a city state like days of old.

The life of an ex patriate had no texture, no reality for me until first Mary, then Mark ended up in Southeast Asia, both spending at least two decades there, plus a little.  That left me the only stay at home, still rooted in the Midwest.

As things go, however, I developed an ongoing interest in Asia art and from that Asian history and, in particular, Chinese philosophy, so we all share a common fascination with the Far East, though mine is more bookish and museum oriented while theirs is everyday life.

Mary has gone faraway and built a life in a land with lifeways and assumptions often very different from our own.  It’s an impressive achievement and as she nears her 58th birthday I wanted to acknowledge it.  Happy Birthday!  Dr. Sis.

Feeling Better. Me. Dwindling. Hilo.

Lughnasa                                    Waxing Artemis Moon

Ah.  It seems the nasties have journeyed on to other warm bloody creatures, leaving me in peace for now.  I hope my body now recognizes and will fend off these creatures that live only to replicate and in so doing make us feel bad.  But they don’t care.

Groceries this morning.  Filled up the cart with fruit and vegetables and turkey burgers, soy milk and slim milk, Sharps and Diet Cherry Coke, a bit of feta cheese, some sliced turkey for the dogs, a few cheese curds, some peanut butter, oops, just realized I forgot the cereal, chicken breasts.  You know.  The stuff of daily eating.  It was church time while I shopped so I suppose we were all heathens in there, except for those righteous Catholics who went to Saturday night mass.  Grocery shopping has a soothing quality.  It combines shopping with a genuine need so the selection of items reflects not so much consumer driven behavior–though that does rear its head–as it does animal needs.

(The Mexicans do mercado better.)

Hilo has, as Kate says, the dwindles.  She’s becoming very thin and tentative.  We believe she’s lost the better part of her sight.  Last week she seemed frightened, wide-eyed and jittery; this week feels different.  Perhaps a resignation of sorts.  It’s sad to watch her fade away, but she still lives her life.  Napping with us this afternoon, going outside to wander around the yard.  Eating a bit now and then.  Live until you die.  That’s what I want for me and for her.

The sewing machine is on its movable platform, the wind-up reels for the cloth are in place, we attached a high-tech stitch regulator and a laser pointer to the apparatus that allows Kate to guide the needle.  Now it’s RTFM, a couple of extension cords and she’ll be ready to practice.  No more taking pieced work out for quilting, now it happens here, right in our lower level.

So Ordinary. So Unique.

Lughnasa                                   Waxing Artemis Moon

Kate’s birthday has drawn to a close.  We spent part of the afternoon continuing to assemble her long-arm quilter.  This machine is big, a full 10 feet in length, large enough for a queen size quilt.  We have the base set up and need now to put on the rollers and mount the quilting sewing machine.  That’s the last step and she’ll be off to the races.

In some ways birthdays are so ordinary.  Every one has them.  They commemorate a day, a particular spot in the earth’s orbit, when birth occurs.  Births are common; we’ve each been through at least one, the women among us sometimes many more than one.   People are common; there are billions of us.  Billions.

At the macro level birthdays are ordinary.  But in the particular, in the idiosyncratic, in the once ever in all of history side to it, birthdays are downright unique, very special, celebrating the beginning of a life, a life that will never be lived again, will never be lived by anyone else.  So special.

Take Kate, for instance.  There is no other person on all the earth, in all of history like her.  She’s a combination of genes, a lived history, a spark, a singularity.  She has a rare compassion, a keen mind, manual dexterity, dogged persistence, creativity and a talent for relationship.  I’ve been lucky that my own journey joined hers.

Here’s to another 20 journeys around our Sol, maybe 25, for Kate and me.

Happy Birthday. Giggle, giggle.

Lughnasa                                Waxing Artemis Moon

A red letter day here at chez Olson/Ellis.  Kate’s 66th.  She’s upstairs right now signing up for social security.

We went out for breakfast this morning to Pappy’s, a place that already has a place in my heart.  It reminds me so much of Indiana, a part of it that I didn’t know I missed.  As a gift, I gave her a photo album of her ascent to grandmahood starting with a pregnant Jen and running up to the present.   She liked it.

Being married to Kate these 20 years we’ve shared many birthdays and each one finds me more in love with her than the last.

We had a waitress at Pappy’s that had a Fargo accent and ended each encounter with a girlish giggle. More coffee?  No?  Giggle, giggle.  Here’s the check, pay me when you’re ready.  Giggle, giggle.  Creeped me out.  Like having too much sugar in your coffee.  Hee, hee, hee.

Violence

Lughnasa                             Waxing Artemis Moon

The Woolly discussion topic tonight is violence.  I have tried to write out where I stand in what follows.  It is an unsatisfying position, full of weasel words and difficult choices, but I can see no other that makes sense in this, not at all one of the best possible, worlds.

Violence.  It seems to be everywhere.  Wars.  Homes.  Schools.  McDonald’s. On TV.  In video games.  In books we read.  Graphic novels.  Movies.  In the past, check any history book.  In the future.  Read any Rand report.  And that’s just the most common, banal kind, trauma inflicted by another through physical force.

In seminary, in a course called Constructive Theology, a more subtle analysis of violence got introduced.  In a society of plenty, when millions go hungry or without housing or medical care or decent education, that, too, is an act of violence.  In a world of plenty, when billions go hungry or without housing or medical care or decent education, well, you get the point.  Certain kinds of psychological behavior, whether between spouses or parents and children, violently disrupts the human developmental process or can crush another.

There is, too, the often blatant, but sometimes subtle violence of racism, sexism, any situation in which people in power judge another person or a whole group of people on the basis of secondary characteristics like skin color, gender, sexual preference.

The most extreme examples of violence that occurred in Stalin’s USSR, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, Hitler’s German, Rwanda, Bosnia/Serbia and Armenia are, sad to say, only this last century’s examples of a pervasive human tendency to eliminate the other, the one who makes us uncomfortable, the one who reminds us too much of the dark side of ourselves.

Violence then, is not an aberration, it is a common human response, a way of expressing power or dominance, of enforcing prejudice, of maintaining political rule, of holding on to hordes of cash or weapons or countries.  It is also a tool to defeat oppressors, to defend family and property and to maintain the safety of a town, city, state or nation.

In my case I’ve come up against violence:  in the struggle for civil rights, in the war against the Vietnam War, in a world before a woman’s right to choose how to handle her own body, like many Americans post 9/11.  When I was younger, I would say, “Join the Army.  Visit foreign lands.  Meet exotic people and kill them.” or “They don’t call it murder if you kill by the thousands and the sounds of trumpets with banners flying.”

Even back then, though, I was against the Vietnam War, not war.  It was the wrong war, against the wrong people, for the wrong reason, at the wrong time.  I could point however to WWII as a war whose rationale seemed justified, a just war.  I was not then, nor am I now, a pacifist.  Knowing what I know now would I have fought in WWII. Yes.  Knowing what I know now would have fought in Vietnam or Iraq?  No.  Afghanistan?  Yes.  At least at first.  The current situation has more complex dynamics.

When Joseph joined the Air Force, I struggled with it as a generally peace oriented person, but when he told me he wanted to defend the country that had given him so much, I understood.  I agree that a principle role of government is to protect our nation against its enemies foreign and domestic.  An Air Force, a Navy, an Army, a military in other words, is necessary to that mission. It would be hypocritical for me to pretend my own son could not participate.  Would I prefer he had chosen something else?  Yes, for my own purposes.  But, for his, which is, in the final analysis, what counts, he made the right choice and I agree with it.

What I’m trying to say here is that violence has its place in our world. It may be, most often is, a place we deplore, but it would be naive to ignore state-sponsored violence or the violence of organized terrorist organizations and just hope they will go away.

So, our approach to violence as an issue must be nuanced.  Though the NRA seem like loose cannons (pardon the metaphor), I do agree with one aspect of their rationale.  We must be prepared to defend our freedom and, as Thomas Jefferson enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, it is possible the enemy of our freedom might be the state.  Even the US Government.

It happens.  Witness the colonies and England.  Witness India and England.  Witness the satellite states of the USSR.  Witness the Albanians in the Bosnia/Serbia conflict.  Witness Israel.  Witness Bolivar in South America.  Witness the Sandinistas in Nicaragua.  Witness China against Japan in era of the Nanjing massacre.  The Irish against the English.  The Native peoples of this and many other lands against those who came to visit and decided to stay.  Witness the Kurds inside Iraq.  This is not an isolated story and the only answer for those of us who would not live under someone else’s heel is to pay the price: vigilance and willingness to fight.

Should violence be our first resort?  No.  No.  No.  Preemptive war, as the Bush administration not only supported but engaged in Iraq, is the path to tyranny, if it is not in fact tyranny ipso facto.  Should violence be our second resort?  No.  No.  Violence should only be part of our political or personal agenda when diplomacy has failed or real peril confronts us.

As to interpersonal violence, it seems in all but the most unusual cases, that talk is not only preferable but necessary.

I would characterize my position as one which holds out for the full range of responses to threatening behavior, but intends to use only the least harmful method possible in each particular instance.  This recognizes that in some situations the least harmful method may be to deploy violent acts against another intending the same.  Not desirable, no, but then neither is subjugation or death at the hands of another.

Lughnasa                                  Waxing Artemis Moon

Spoke too soon about the illness.  It returned today with fatigue and coughing.  Still, I’m in a much better place than I was a week ago.  Upward arc.

Our house has become a good sized creative enterprise.  Kate now has a bi-level sewing operation with the Bernina upstairs along with cutting table and ironing board.  The long-arm will be downstairs with her stash.  This latter term has a different meaning to the quilter than it does to, say, your average latter day hippie.  Quilters stockpile cloth, small pieces, bolts, large chunks, left over fragments in all colors, shapes and prints.  Follows the you just never know principle.

We have flower gardens, vegetable gardens, an orchard and bees.  I have space to study and write, communicate with the outside world.  We both enjoy the kitchen, whether cooking meals or putting food by.  We have a commitment to supporting each others growth. The next phase of our life will be fun and fulfilling.