Posts Tagged ‘family’
Tolerable Suffering
Now that my routine has returned to a relative normal, post the holidays, I’m going to provide an update on the status of my solo living. Even though it’s been almost 4-months since Cyndie moved east to accept a position with Boston Public Schools, it still feels a bit new. At the same time, it has been long enough to pretty much figure out what works for me. I have been getting my needs met, and am tending to the needs of the household. With only one person messing up the place, shouldn’t I be able to sweep the kitchen half as often? It does not appear to be the case.
For the most part, I am taking advantage of having groceries delivered to the house. I do my food shopping online. Thus far, I am happy with my ability to avoid relying too heavily on restaurants for my sustenance. In fact, I think I am eating out less than when Cyndie was home. Since I don’t automatically have a companion, that seems like a logical outcome to me. I expect it might be different if I was inclined to eat out alone.
The real staple has turned out to be soup from my good friend and fellow Himalayan trekker, Chef Pam Knutson. I buy soup through her Birdsong Soups business out of the Kitchen in the Market facility. I get a quart each week that her husband, John, generously brings to his work in Eden Prairie where I can conveniently pick it up. This has been providing about 4 different meals a week for me. I don’t think I will be able to eat soup out of a can ever again after this experience. What a treat! This is gourmet level eating that seems like it would only be available in fine restaurants, and I have it in my own kitchen! I highly recommend you check out this community supported soup business, Birdsong Soups.
I have also become just a bit more social since Cyndie has moved out, hosting a number of gatherings of friends at the house, and going out with others. Part of that is a result of friends offering to step up to help fill the void. Thank you, friends!
The one thing that isn’t working so well is my being able to touch base with my lovely wife with any regularity. All too often, multiple days pass where we fail to speak or even successfully exchange a text message. You’d think a one-hour time difference wouldn’t be a big deal, but I find it does complicate things, or maybe it just seems to, because Cyndie’s work hours have been ridiculously long. I was shocked to be unable to reach her on a Friday night, nor the entire following Saturday, only to find out she was working both times and had unknowingly dropped her phone under the seat of the car they provided for her use.
I figure I should be nurturing a relationship with the security personnel in her building so I can contact them to find out where she is if I want to speak to her. Nothing can really replace the small talk that has been dashed from our relationship. I miss how she would politely listen to me talk like a little kid about the excitement I enjoyed at soccer in the morning. Yesterday I would have whined to her about the owie I got when I sprained a finger playing around with a basketball in the gym before soccer started. Then I would have bragged about the success we had making multiple one-touch passes to score lots of goals, or mentioned that I forgot to use my asthma inhaler before playing and noticed some suffering as a result. Tolerable, but noticeable suffering.
Kind of like the feeling of suddenly living separated from your beloved spouse of 30 years.
Lost Intimacy
I have been known to wonder what it would be like if I lost my wife to some accident or illness. It seems like a morbid thought, but less macabre and not so uncommon, you might hear the phrase, “What would you do without her?”
Well, with Cyndie living in Boston, I am getting a chance to find out.
Our intent was to use FaceTime to keep in contact across the miles of distance. We’ve succeeded a couple of times, leaving the connection open while we each went about our separate business, creating a feeling of being together. It worked pretty well for that. Unfortunately, Cyndie’s schedule isn’t providing very many opportunities for this kind of connecting. More often than not, we have been spending our days out of contact. I am left to fend for myself.
It takes a toll. No doubt about it, when days go by and you don’t talk with the person who would otherwise be your most intimate relationship, there is a loss of intimacy. I find myself inclined to put up a protective barrier in defense. After a while, I don’t want to talk with her. It is so counter-productive to the ultimate goal that it seems ludicrous, but that is the natural reaction that occurs to me.
This is a classic example of depressive thinking. It is dysfunctional, but the unhealthy mind presents it as a logical, helpful defense.
If I was feeling a lack of intimacy in my childhood, and it felt natural to create a protective barrier in defense, it would explain how I now feel so comfortable with this reaction. I’ve had years of practice. It feels right, not talking to the person closest to me. My father taught me well. He was a master at shunning my mom.
It is a goal of mine to invert the pyramid of dysfunction that passes from generation to generation. I want to be healthier than my father, and I am hoping to imprint better health on my children to equip them to become healthier than me.
I need to go call Cyndie.
Short Version
This is one of those moments when I would like to be able to tell you all about the exciting adventures, not the least of which included what went on in my dreams last night, that have occurred for me over the last few days. However, I am still living the adventures, and unlike my studious chronicling of bike trips, Nepal treks, and Portugal paradise visits, I have not been keeping a keen journal of events.
The short version is that we are at the lake with Cyndie’s family and our wonderful community of friends that serve as extended family, playing and relaxing in the beauty of the woods that surround us. Friday we survived a terrific storm that knocked out our electrical power for about 12 hours, mostly the hours we slept. Finding our way to bed was the hardest part, in the total darkness.
The storm released us from oppressive humid heat and the weather is now luxuriously ideal. Today will be the annual games of the US Independence Day celebrations, and the evening will bring a community feast at the lodge.
Otherwise it has been lake play, with boats pulling kids on a variety of fancy floating rafts, resting in the new hammock, walking with Cyndie in her wheelchair, watching cycling and the Women’s World Cup of soccer, and Scrabble games on the iPad.
It goes without saying that the food has been spectacular and plentiful. We are enjoying ourselves immensely. If I had time, I’d tell you about it. The only thing we can think of that could out-do this would be to have successfully landed in Portugal and be visiting our friends, the Rowcliffes, at their Forest Garden Estate.
Yesterday afternoon, Cyndie and I were lounging together on the hammock overlooking the lake as all manner of glee was audible from the kids down on the beach. She had a book and I brought out my laptop. I noticed that our friend, Ian, was logged into gmail, which would support a chat. We were overjoyed to find him available and spent over a half hour visiting, getting a taste of what we were dreaming of achieving before the calamity that postponed the trip. What a pleasure that proved to be for us. We woke up this morning feeling the joy, still.
The amazing power of friendship.
It’s Mary’s Birthday!
I’ve often wished that this song had become the new universal birthday anthem. Just insert the proper name in place of Johnny’s. Today, insert Marebare, and sing along, loud and proud. My big sis is another year wiser today. Have a great day, Mary! Like having the wind at your back on a beautiful bike ride!
For Mom
What little boy doesn’t feel that Mom is everything? It is not so hard to understand why a person would believe that their mother is the best in the world. My mother invented food. She made my clothes. My mom was the rock in all situations; the calm in any storm. Elizabeth (Betty) Elliott Hays did not lecture me on who I should be, she enabled me to become who I am. She demonstrated to me how to be a good person by being a good person. Most of the time, she was oblivious to that fact. Not only was my mother the most wholesomely classy person imaginable, she was the best mother in the world. Happy Mother’s Day, Mom.
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 the ‘last word’ in 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:
Authentic Joy
Lately, I have been thinking about the accuracy of memory, in particular, earliest memories. Many are augmented, or even supplanted by photographs we have from the past. I don’t actually remember some things that happened, I remember what it looked like from a picture I have repeatedly seen that depicts the moment.
I recently began tinkering with transferring some of our old home-videos from tape to a digital video file. I do remember this particular moment, but it would never be so genuinely presented if we hadn’t managed to capture the video of it. I’m so glad to have this to show my daughter, Elysa, the fun we had during the time before she can remember.
For Elysa
Many times I have voiced the insight that my children have taught me more about myself than I ever expected to learn. Try as I did to figure out a way to instill what little wisdom I was able, while also granting them a healthy amount of independence, I never really felt like I was accomplishing a laudable level of fathering. Too much? Too little? Probably most parents share that feeling.
From my early memories of holding baby Elysa while we both watched ice hockey on television (she cried when play was suspended between periods) and the time she guffawed with genuine total body laughter over my silliness with the jack-in-the-box toy, to the difficult days when I didn’t know what to say to the adolescent she had become and she didn’t know what to say to me, we have forged all the firsts. Every time she faces something with me for the first time, it is my first time, too. She is my firstborn.
She has never shopped for a house before. I have never had a daughter make an offer on a house before.
I still vividly recall the overwhelming feeling of taking that newborn out of the safety of a hospital and putting her in a car to drive to our home. Soon there is walking, braces on teeth, and school graduations. In the next moment, buying a house.
I don’t always recognize what my lesson is, out of all the adventures you bring to my life, my dear, but I can tell you that each and every one is precious as can be. Good luck with this latest endeavor. I expect there will be plenty for both of us to learn.
Relative Discovery
I had a dream the other night, that I was on a road trip with my father. He has been dead for almost 30 years. It is interesting how the sensation that is generated by dream scenes can linger long after the dream is over and consciousness has returned.
When I logged in to my email account yesterday morning, I had 4 new messages from Jim Hays. He provided some family data that he recently collected that reveals our connection through a shared great-grandfather. Our grandfathers were brothers. It was fascinating to be revisiting the names of ancestors with the fresh sense that I had just been with my father, especially since it has been so long since I have really been with my father.
One night, back in the second week of January, I discovered a phone message at home, where Jim first introduced himself and the possibility that we shared ancestors. What an invigorating surprise that was for me. I called him back that night and thoroughly enjoyed the chance to visit and verify our connection.
Jim’s grandfather is John W. Hays, Jr., so I naturally have a heightened interest in that branch of the family tree. We are hoping to find an opportunity when Jim is in town to get together at our house and explore our shared interest in ancestry and the collection of items we have each amassed.
I need to dig out the box of things I have from the time Cyndie and I drove up to Canada to the birthplace of John W. Hays, Sr. We were lucky enough to stumble upon a man who volunteered to drive us out to see the farm property that was owned by my great-great-great grandfather, John Hays. I remember laughing when the man told us that John Hays’ son Stephen really did marry the girl next door, because back then, that was pretty much the only choice in such a rural farming area.
That was in the vicinity of Hawkesbury, Ontario, somewhat between Ottawa and Montreal. We explored an area there which included Vankleek Hill and L’Orignal. We visited the county seat, I believe it was, and were privileged to read and get a copy of the hand-written will of John Hays, the man 5 generations back from me. That is also where we found the land records and evidence that the family of Stephen’s wife, Judith Waite, owned the adjacent farm.
The art of genealogy, of collecting all the data and putting it together in a logical representation of the family, is a lot like assembling a jigsaw puzzle. It can be hard to find all the pieces, and sometimes they appear to fit, but don’t belong. Unfortunately, with genealogy, the pieces are rarely, if ever, all contained in one convenient box, ready for assembly. This is a puzzle where the bulk of the work has to do with bringing all the pieces to the table. In genealogy, that can be a task that is, often times, impossible to fulfill.
Table Memories
Since we didn’t have Thanksgiving dinner at our house this year, my siblings didn’t get their annual chance to be with the old family table, so I am presenting this for their benefit…
I mostly am reminded of trying to do my homework as a schoolboy, when I look at the pattern of dots marking the border of our table. The pencil lead would poke through the paper when you weren’t paying attention and strayed too close to the edge.
The other main memory I have of this table is that it was almost always covered by accumulating newspapers, magazines and old mail, sewing projects, or at the far end, an occasional jigsaw puzzle. There are 5 center leaves available to expand the table to a length that exceeds our present dining room. When Mom allowed Cyndie and I to have the table, she did so with one requirement: we needed to host Thanksgiving, because it was the only table large enough to accommodate everyone when we all gathered.
Now Mom is gone, and some of the family is out of town, so the remaining family has been spending the Thanksgiving holiday with families of spouses. At least that means we didn’t need to clear off the table for a big meal. Lo and behold, it has a sewing project on one end, and fresh home-made holiday treats that Cyndie and Elysa produced over the weekend, on the other.
Relative Something 