Posts Tagged ‘family’
Out Late
Cyndie and I had a night out on the town with her brother, Ben, last night.
Guess what city we were in?
We met for dinner in a historic diner.
Guess who we saw in concert at the Palace Theatre?
Guess who didn’t get enough sleep last night?
Yeah, that’d be me…
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Brothers Reenact
Continuing my tour through past posts, I found this old favorite. I love my family.
From April, 2011:
Now Then
I have already shared this with all of my siblings, and also with my Brainstorms community, so it almost seems redundant to post it here. However, I think it has a universal appeal for the novelty of capturing the similar poses and for the always interesting visual of comparative shots of people when they are young and when they aren’t as young.
I have been wanting to do this for a long time, but younger brother, David, lives up north and older brother, Elliott, wasn’t able to be at our family reunion gathering last summer, so getting the three of us together has been rare.
My family tolerated my attempts to try (probably too hard) to direct the shot to be exact. I thought Elliott should take off his glasses. He disagreed. I respect his opinion that they belong.
In the end, Elliott got in the ‘last word’ about my drive to accomplish a pose exactly the same as the first picture. I only had one image available on my camera when I got home, so after I pasted them together, I sent it out to the family asking if anyone had a better version. I noted that in this image, I didn’t have my shoulders squared to the camera, and with multiple photographers taking pictures, Elliott was looking at a different camera than this one.
Elliott sent this, in reply:
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A Discovery
Portrait of the author after hand-shoveling around the barn doors this morning.
We received a walloping amount of snow overnight (between 10-11 inches) and strong winds are creating epic drifts. It will be a monumental day of digging out. Luckily, I wrote most of today’s post yesterday afternoon. I’ll give a more complete report on the details of our winter storm recovery tomorrow…
Meanwhile:
After waking up too early yesterday, I resorted to random searching Google while awaiting the return of sleepiness. I simply typed the word, “love,” and happened upon an article from 2014 about living happily ever after in a long-term relationship.
In lieu of the Wikipedia definition of love, I clicked on the headline, “The Secret to Love is Just Kindness.”
That title included two things that I value the most: love and kindness, together with the enticing word, ‘secret.’ How could I resist?
Eventually, I drifted back into a dream-filled sleep, but not until after I had gained great insight, and felt totally convicted, about moments of my behavior. After breakfast, I read the article to Cyndie. She had the same reaction as me.
We have been married for 37-years, and somewhere in the middle of that span of time, dedicated a few years to marriage-saving couples therapy. Basically, our sessions went like this: we entered the hour looking to have our therapist “fix” the other partner, and left each time having learned more about ourselves than we sometimes wanted to know.
The years since have been better than I ever dreamed possible between us. How could this ever be improved upon?
Now I know. Despite all the work I have done toward seeking optimal health, specifically, not taking on any of the several deplorable traits of my father, I am very clearly a product of my parents. (Luckily, I did inherit plenty of Dad’s finer qualities!) In the midst of any project I undertake, I will find myself doing the “air-whistle” my mother often “phoo-whewed.” I am also all too adept at seamlessly replicating Ralph’s ability to be a sourpuss.
Cyndie is sweet enough to tolerate the random –and I’m hoping, mostly subtle– air-whistling (song-breathing?) habit, but she never deserved the boorish behaviors she has endured in our marriage.
In my depressive years (multiple dubious skills of which I no doubt picked up from my father), I could totally relate to the line in John Prine’s song, “Angel from Montgomery:”
How the hell can a person go to work in the morning
And come home in the evening and have nothing to say.
I knew exactly how that is done. Ralph did that to my mother so many times it became normal and accepted. It was no wonder that I could recognize when he’d imbibed to inebriation. He was suddenly chatty as could be with Mom.
From the article in The Atlantic, I now understand how divisive it is when Cyndie’s bids for connection are met with my lack of engagement. The kind thing to do when someone seeks connection, is to turn toward them, not away. For some reason, I have an uncanny skill of treating the one person closest to me at home, with a cold shoulder, something I would hard-pressed do to a person in public.
“There’s a bright red cardinal out the window!” Cyndie might report.
If not silence, I might offer an uninterested, “Okay.”
She hadn’t asked a question, so did it require an answer?
The healthy thing to do for a relationship –one that I want to thrive for a lifetime, not just survive– is to meet all of her bids for connection with kind attention, even when I don’t necessarily feel like it.
Even if it is limited to telling her that I just don’t feel like being kind right now, that would be a connection.
Actively being kind to our partner’s bids for connection, especially the trivial (ultimately, not-so-trivial) ones, seems the healthy way to nurture a thriving life-long relationship.
That isn’t a mind-blowing insight, but it was an eye-opening self-discovery for me that resulted in a quest for greater love.
Onward, on my quest toward optimal health…
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Risking Again
After last week’s risky and dangerous commute home from work, I intended to be more cautious about venturing out when the weather gets wild and the roads are dicey.
However, there are some things that cause us to push that envelope of safety, like, say… a funeral for a family member. That is what we were faced with yesterday. The service for Cyndie’s aunt was at a church in Plymouth, MN, not far from the location of my day-job.
I stepped out to clean off the front steps yesterday morning, and soon learned the snow was coming down so fast that the areas where I shoveled were getting covered right back up in minutes. That caused an alert that our drive to the cities was going to take much longer than normal.
I rushed inside to let Cyndie know that we needed to depart as soon as possible, and anything she was hoping to accomplish before leaving needed to be immediately re-evaluated as to whether it was more important than possibly missing the funeral.
It was another day of crash-defying navigation in horrible visibility with heavy snow falling and roads slippery and snow-covered. Just the conditions I never wanted to find myself in again for a very long time. It’s exhausting.
To complicate matters, we needed to drive separately. We would both stay overnight in Edina, and I would drive to work this morning, while Cyndie will join immediate family at the cemetery for a brief burial service. After that, she will drive home to take over from our house/animal sitter, Anna, who stayed overnight at Wintervale for us.
I drove ahead of Cyndie, but kept a close eye on her in my rear view mirror. Together, we slowly made our way with barely a minute to spare, luckily avoiding the fate that we witnessed maybe a dozen times along the way, of cars losing control and crashing into the ditches all around us.
It was crazy making. It was white-knuckle gripping of the steering wheel the whole way. That kind of “edge-of-disaster” driving is really, really exhausting.
Follow that with heavy emotions of a funeral service, and that’s one heck of a draining day.
Wouldn’t you know, tomorrow we are due to get hit with another big snow event.
Something tells me I won’t be driving to work Tuesday.
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Flying North
Today, we fly back to winter, just in time for a blast of snow and Arctic cold air to put an exclamation point on the end of our 9-day visit to Florida. We ate like royalty, played cards, laughed, shopped, explored, watched movies and never wore mittens once.
Yesterday, maybe as a primer for our return, the temperature hovered on the cool side of comfortable, compressing our outdoor activity to a couple matches of bocce ball and a walk back to the house before the next rain shower.
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Barb was the difference maker in both close competitions, despite the missing sunshine that would have allowed for much more relaxed muscles during tosses.
We expect to arrive to the Minneapolis airport in the late afternoon today, and hope to drive the hour toward home without suffering any delays that may result from snow-covered roads.
Whether I will be able to execute my usual commute across the Twin Cities in my return to the day-job tomorrow morning remains a mystery, at this point.
The forecast (as of late last night) is rather ominous:
The predicted high temperature on Wednesday could remain in the double-digits (F) below zero. That will be the warmest part of the day.
One tiny shred of consolation about coming home to this brutal weather, is the fact that the polar vortex pushing down into the middle of the country will have an impact all the way to Florida. Cyndie’s parents had us put the insulating cover on their pool last night, in preparation for the cool week ahead.
Good thing we are going home, so we don’t have to suffer in any of the cold Florida weather they will be dealing with down here.
It’s all relative, isn’t it?
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Shopping Dining
Yeah. Remember that thought I tossed out before we left, about considering posting one picture to portray each of our days. Never mind that.
Yesterday, we shopped the Miromar Outlet mall.
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In the evening, we dined at Divieto Ristorante.
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In between, we snuck in a little swim.
Rinse. Repeat.
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Multitasking Indoors
It was a mostly cloudy, very windy, and generally cooler day yesterday, so the bulk of activity was indoors. Leisurely reading was the early pursuit, followed by a combination of watching memorials for Walk Off the Earth keyboardist, Mike ‘Beard Guy’ Taylor on YouTube, while the NFL playoffs were on in the background.
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We’re Acclimatizing
Our first day at Cyndie’s parents’ Florida home was a period of acclimatization to the dramatic change in environment. We are adjusting to the 1-hour difference of the Eastern time zone by soaking up the sun while lounging in and around the pool.
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Plane Delay
Our plan for the day played out perfectly, right up to the point where the pilot, standing next to his suitcase, took the microphone to speak to the throng standing in queue to board.
The walk-around revealed a leak that would require taking the plane back to the hangar for repair.
How can you argue with a delay situation that involves not flying in a plane with mechanical issues?
We didn’t settle into a bed until the wee hours of this morning, but did so safe, sound, and thrilled to be laying heads on pillows.
We’re here!
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She Knows
I walked into the kitchen and said to Cyndie, “She knows.”
Cyndie instantly agreed, “Oh, she totally knows.”
Our departure for a 9-day getaway to visit Cyndie’s parents in Florida was still a day away last night, but both of us picked up a powerful vibe that Delilah was already beginning to mope as a result of our telltale activity.
She laid under the table and watched us with her eyes, without picking up her head. Suitcases had been brought out of storage. Cyndie was kicking into high house-cleaning gear, and both of us were mentally grinding through virtual lists of tasks to be done, items to be packed, “i”s to dot and “t”s to cross.
Delilah has witnessed this scene before.
One of our newer house and animal sitters, Anna, will be taking care of our place while we are away this time. I’m hoping the weather will be uneventful and the predators all stay away while she is on duty. Wouldn’t it be a shame if we lose a hen (or hens) during her stay?
I’ve tried to point out to her that it can happen at any time, hoping she won’t suffer too much if a loss occurs on her watch.
We drive to the airport this afternoon for a flight out around the dinner hour, departing just as a mass of colder air with a chance of some snow is expected to pay a visit. Guess it’s not the worst time to be escaping to Florida.
I’ve been pondering what I might choose to do for blog posts while we are away. One possibility that keeps tugging at me is the challenge of choosing one photo per day to convey what we are experiencing. At the same time, I assume a week of leisure might free me up to do more writing than usual, so maybe I don’t want to restrict myself to a single picture.
Either I’ll write more, or I’ll take a break and write less. We’ll just have to wait and see what captures my fancy, after I settle in to that eastern time zone with the warm, humid air.
One way or another, you can rest assured that, for the next week, I will somehow be sharing the most delectable morsels of our adventures in Florida, visiting Cyndie’s mom and dad.
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Relative Something 