joy
Today was a rare day of working from home. I say rare because it is not often that I can be at home all day, the entire day, whether working or not. And well…this one started out great…and rare…but it ended up being an ordinary day after all, and not so rare. A grandmother assignment knocked on my door and I was called out to active duty.
I was sitting in my jammies and it was almost noon. The morning had consisted of plowing through mounds of work, answering emails, talking to folks on the phone, setting up appointments, housework and anything and everything that was on the “to do” list. Yes, it is an actual list. I keep a physical list…written on a yellow lined legal pad…updated daily, sometimes hourly…and yes, I do get a lot accomplished and marked off that list each day. But the one thing that always bugs me is this: there is ALWAYS a list. I never get done, it is never empty, and I never find myself saying “Holy cow, what will I do now?” I was about halfway down the list when a voxer message came through from my daughter (look it up if you don’t know what that is, that is subject for another blog), about nothing earth-shattering or intense, but I could tell in the conversation that it was an edgy day for her. She wasn’t feeling too spunky, the boy kids were being rascals and the girl kid was occupied and peaceful for the moment but that is a volcano ready to blow anytime…she’s six. Enough said.
After a few messages back and forth I could see Samantha was not really feeling like getting out later to take my granddaughter to her square dancing lesson. It is an event taking the boys, busy little beavers that they are. They really are quite good, but by the time she gets them up from naps, fed, snacks ready for dancing because it runs late, everyone piled into the car, driven there, un-piled from the car and inside to watch young Sassy Sue do her stuff, then home and doing it all backwards to get them into bed for the night before they turn into pumpkins, it is pretty exhausting and leaves one wondering if it is really worth the effort at all.
I could see this wasn’t working for them and their family, but I also knew my granddaughter was loving every minute of it. She is a free-spirit and anything that she does in the creative field is like putting wind under gossamer wings for her…you can just see her lift higher in her confidence, her belief in herself, her talents and her pure joy in living. Her words to me after her very first lesson were pretty telling. “So, did you like this Lorelai, did you like square dancing?” to which she answered “I LOVE this, it is my THANG!” I snicker now to think of how sincere she was, and really how true it seems. So today when it began to look like she might have to stop doing something this important and nurturing to her, well, GiGi stepped in without a thought. I did take one tiny look at the piles of papers still on the desk and I winced. I knew my schedule was already crowded this week with an upcoming estate this next weekend, followed by meetings with vendors to get the home cleared and cleaned out next week and Thanksgiving holiday shoved into the middle of all that. Every moment this week and next was booked and planned and…on the list.
I told Samantha I would come get Lorelai and take her to class tonight, and I would designate myself her chaperone each Monday and make sure she got there for her classes. As I put down the phone, I did what I often do when Divine Intervention comes to visit…I make a little sighing sound, take pen in hand, mark out the non-essentials on the list leaving only the most urgent, and move the non-essentials to other days and hope for the best they will get done, too. This time I did a write in of ” GiGi pick up Lorelai at 6:30″ on all my Monday nights for the next several weeks, and perhaps months, because this had become an unexpected priority for me.
Unexpected priorities come in all shapes and sizes. They come in people who have a need for money when you just happened to get a little windfall in your mailbox this week. They come in the sudden extended illness or injury of a co-worker that places an additional workload on you when you are already a bit overburdened with your own job requirements. It comes in the little girl who loves to dance, the boys who need to run free on the playground even though there are dirty dishes waiting in the sink, the kitty cat who needs to sit in your lap, cuddle and purr and make both of you feel better and cared for. They may even come as strangers who teach you that you will either evaluate the substance of your days, or the substance of your days will one day evaluate you.
I had gone to lunch with a friend a few weeks ago. It was spontaneous and unexpected and I had that “list” going for the day. But I quickly decided to go to lunch, enjoy the food and conversation, and cross off a few things on the list so I could do just that. As we sat and talked I noticed a couple, about our same age, at the table across from us. The conversation between them was more one-sided than mine and my companion’s chatting, although it appeared the other couple was related, but maybe not married. She rattled on in a light manner, talking about family, about church and so forth. The man was hyper-focused on his food, and after a bit I could see he was struggling with his utensils and seemed to have every bit of effort being used to just eat his meal. The woman didn’t let that keep her from carrying on cheery talk. The man, after a few moments, got up from the table and headed to the restroom. My dinner companion was already away from the table. The woman leaned in after a few minutes and asked “Will you tell the waitress to bring our check if I have to leave the table?” nodding in the direction of the restroom. I said I would, but the waitress returned and I watched the lady pay, chat with a smile to the young girl, and continue to wait on the man, who I had found out in more small talk was her husband. “He is on heavy medication, but I try to let him do things on his own if I can. He has been ill a long time but only this ill a short while.” I could tell she wanted to talk to someone, so I said I was sorry to hear that and she teared up a bit and said they were celebrating their anniversary today. I wished them a happy one, but I was surprised when she said their real anniversary was not till January, and this was November. She then told me he had been diagnosed with terminal cancer the week before, and had been told he had only 3-4 weeks to live, and they decided to celebrate today. He was three weeks away…a bit more, a bit less…from completing “the list”.
I have thought about them often since that day. It is very possible he is still here, still working the list, still being her husband as best as he can. But chances are, if the doctors were right, he is no longer making choices about how he spends his time, who he spends it with, what he puts on the list, and what he takes off. Those choices have been made for him now, and also for those he loves. The wife had been taking care of him for almost five years and now that would no longer be on her list. All the errands, appointments, picking up prescriptions, crying in the darkness, wondering what she was going to do when she did lose him…was gone, too. An unexpected priority had presented itself in the care of a suddenly ill husband. A different priority was a now terminally ill husband’s care. Priorities had changed again and it was time to take care of herself, alone. I wonder if he would have made different choices in his moments, the things he placed on his to do list for his days if he had known this was how it would all end. More importantly I wonder if she would have chosen differently if she had known she wouldn’t have all the time in the world with him as one part of “them”?
Three weeks is such a short time when you are living the last of something…and seems like such a long time when you are living the first of something. We don’t have all the time in the world to get this thing right, we can’t always make it up later. Later isn’t always there for us or for those we love and have in our care. I think maybe it’s time to sharpen my pencil, get out the rubber eraser, and start eliminating some things that maybe were on the priority list but have moved on down or off the whole legal pad. It may just be time to pencil in a little more dancing and a little less “do it”. Dancing through my days…well, it may just be my “thang” very soon. You too?
All over the world today, people celebrated an annual event. Some call it Fat Tuesday, others by a name indicative to their own culture or language, but many aspects are the same in all lands. It is the day before the launch of the Lenten season and full of joy, merriment, and in many cases a bit of untethered self-indulgence. My 4 year old granddaughter, Lorelai, had arrived yesterday to spend the night, so this morning we had our breakfast at IHOP, one of her favorite places. That was just one piece of a day of coincidences, I realized, as I tucked her in tonight and she closed her eyes in peaceful sleep.
When Lorelai woke up this morning, she did as always and took off her pj’s and slipped into some dress up clothes. She is at the age where, although she is very confident of who she is, it is always a bonus to her visit if she can dress up like Cinderella or Belle, which is usually her choice. But not today…when she came out of her room, she was wearing a hat I had placed in the clothes bin a few visits back that she had looked at but never played with as yet. It is tall and fluffy and pink, and just a little grand for every day attire. She asked me to zip her dress, and I also realized she had on one she had never worn…again, very odd. Then she ran back into her room and returned with a mardis gras mask on. I laughed at her and said she could wear it to breakfast when she pleaded with the look that GiGi’s cannot resist. So off we went…
It was lunch time and our food order was taken quickly so we had time to just hang out together and she colored while I checked messages on my phone. One of my emails came through with a “Happy Fat Tuesday” message, and only then did I realize what day it was. I looked up and sitting across from me was a brightly masked child that had no idea she had dressed up for a celebration day. But there she was, outfitted to the nines and ready for the holiday I had not even been aware was happening.
While I was musing over this coincidence, the waitress brought back our meal. Lorelai, as usual, had ordered the create-a-face pancake. I almost invariably would look at the menu, then order a favored patty melt, but for some reason I decided to order pancakes as well today. The face of her pancake was made out of fruit and yogurt and she pretty much decorates it the same way every time. But today she decorated it, then kind of looked sad. “What’s wrong, don’t you like your pancake?” I asked. “Yes, I like it, but I REALLY wanted to have a mask for my pancake too so it could be a party and I don’t have anything to make a mask.” So we took blueberry and strawberry syrup, made a “mask” and I was struck again by another coincidence when I picked up my phone to finish the earlier email. A traditional meal on Fat Tuesday is…you guessed it…pancakes.
Interestingly enough, there was no one who commented on their own initiative to my grandchild about her feathery mask, or bright, colorful clothing, or made mention of the holiday. No one…not the waitress, the hostess, others in the restaurant as we passed by as we were shown to our booth, those we sat around, or the nice young man who brought us our food…no one made a single mention of the out-of-the-ordinary costume or the tiny tot wearing it. But Lorelai did something that brought attention to herself in a quiet way.
There were several people sitting all around us, many were women. As we were eating, she tugged on my sleeve after a few minutes and whispered in my ear ” GiGi, that lady is beautiful”. I looked over and I saw a rather plain, hard-faced woman in muted clothing sitting across from us. There was nothing drawing in her appearance, no smile or features unusual enough to catch anyone’s attention, in particular a child. “Can I tell her she is beautiful?” The woman was with a male companion, so of course I didn’t want to disturb them. Besides, it would maybe seem a little odd to someone so I said ” Well we may in a minute, go ahead and eat ok?” I was hoping to distract her, and started talking to her about what we were going to do the rest of the day and where we would go. She listened and ate, but I would catch her watching the couple closely. When it appeared they were finishing up, had paid their waitress and were gathering their things to leave, Lorelai looked at me almost in distress “GiGi, they are going home, I need to tell her she is beautiful, she needs to know I want to say that.” I could see tears brimming up in her big eyes, so rather than cause a scene one way, I decided a small scene another way was much preferred. The man stepped past our table, then the woman came along and I said “Excuse me, ma’am, she wants to tell you something.” The woman looked up, confused, and then glanced in the direction of her companion and back at us and said ” Yes?” Lorelai, in her pink hat and feathery fluff looked up and smiled brightly and said “You are beautiful!” Instantly, the woman’s face softened, and she looked down at the child and said “Oh” clasping her hand to her heart. “Oh, you are beautiful too, you sweet little thing.” She flashed a sparsely toothed-smile back at us and I saw tears in her eyes when she turned to me and said “That just made my whole day!” A few more pleasantries were exchanged, then I looked back at Lorelai. A self-satisfied grin was on her face, and her whole countenance was beaming as she said “I told you GiGi, she is beautiful!”
After our meal, as we wound through the restaurant, we went past a withered old woman eating alone, Lorelai said ” Hey, you are beautiful!” The lady reared back her head, let out a laugh that rat-a-tatted like a machine gun, and patted the child’s shoulder as she went by, saying raspily “Sweetheart you are fancy as a peacock and beautiful too!” Every chance she got, on her way to the door, she told someone they were beautiful, or she liked their shoes, or your hair is pretty…it was so comical considering her get-up but so much a magical moment suspended in time, and a life lesson I would never forget.
Fat Tuesday is traditionally the day of rich food, uninhibited behavior, bead showered parades, fun times and frolic. Fat Tuesday is followed by Ash Wednesday, a day of giving up something that you participated in, perhaps the day before. But what if the best parts of those two days were somehow blended together in our every day lives?
We go through our typical days…we work, we eat, we drink, and sleep…we do whatever we think it our mission of the moment and a piece in the puzzle we call LIFE. How many times are we in the very midst of an opportunity to celebrate that life and fail to do so because we are either afraid we will make a spectacle of ourselves, or someone will call the white coats on us, or maybe even worse we think we have no special life to really celebrate and embrace? All live the life they choose, no matter what it is. Some choose to live their life in a way that is meager and poor, that leaves them wanting more and never quite having the contentment and fullness and beauty they are promised by their Creator. They may even give up their own life’s potentially glorious future by giving into the demands of others, rather than setting a good course of peace and joy and living their own life instead of letting another’s life live them. They have a daily photograph that looks much like the woman Lorelai felt compelled to lift up…plain, joyless, hard and crushed underneath some intangible hand of fate or failed expectations. I say let’s live a combo Fat Tuesday and Lenten life…give up the nonsense, judgment, and martyrdom and instead live rich, full of celebration and merriment, spread lots of love and, well…. just put away the plain and be downright “beautiful”.