Trick or Treat

Halloween! Such excitement over this pagan ritual turned into rampant egregious consumerism. According to the 11/05/07 issue of Newsweek, we Americans will spend almost $2 BILLION on Halloween this year!
Are we wacked or what?! Where are our priorities? How about sending all that candy and costume money to New Orleans instead? Unbelievable.

Now for the dilemma...

I hear the sounds of the trick-or-treaters approaching as I have my overstocked candy bowl ready to greet them. And the picture here is of my beautiful wonderful grandson dressed as a pumpkin for - what else Halloween! So where can I draw the line here!
I get a lot of pleasure from seeing the neighborhood children in their costumes, excitedly going door to door in pursuit of that great sugar coma! And I adore going out with my grand daughters; I love to see them dressed up and playing pretend as they too collect more candy than any sane dentist would recommend.


But does it have to cost TWO BILLION DOLLARS?



I remember how much I enjoyed and looked forward to Halloween when I was a child. But things in the 1950s were a bit more parsimonious when it came to trick-or-treating. We had homemade costumes and used paper bags from the A&P grocery store. We also did not have to worry about home made treats - I loved Mrs. Candy's (Yes, her name really was Mrs. Candy) homemade popcorn balls and Mrs. Schaller's pumpkin cookies. We did not have to have our parents go through all of our goodies looking for needles, pills, razor blades, the modern-day "tricks" of the holiday. At the age of 5 years old, I could go out with my 5 year old friends without our parents tagging along because our neighborhood was "safe" for children. There were plenty of parents standing at their doors watching us go from house-to-house; we knew them and they knew us.

But did it cost the equivalent of today's TWO BILLION DOLLARS! Should it?

Baby Nights and Biases

Little baby Fletcher spent the night last night. He is almost 2 months old and growing fast! That's a good thing! I was reminded, however, of nights with his mother 34 years ago; colic.
If you have had a colicky baby, I need not say more. If not - well, sleep becomes a memory; it is fleeting, ephemeral. You fall into the Wishful Thinking bias hourly. You know, "maybe if I hold her like this on my stomach " or "maybe if I give her a bottle at room temperature instead of warm," or "maybe if I could just be 18 again" ..... Then you pass on into let's try this again, and again, and again phase and guess what! Nothing changes!
Then the escalation of commitment bias rears its ugly head! Since it has already been 3 weeks of trying to get the baby to sleep for at least 2 straight hours without screaming in pain from the colic, you cannot stop trying to stop it. You have already invested 3 weeks of your sleep deprived time so you have to just try harder! So you look for any remotely feasible suggestions on how to make the colic go away so that you can sleep. You introduce pacifiers into the crying mouth, you try swaddling, gripe water; you rub olive oil on her stomach in a clockwise motion, eye of newt, toe of frog...you find yourself willing to spend hundreds of dollars on "products" guaranteed to soothe your baby properly because obviously you have demonstrated your utter failure to know how to do so yourself!

So now you slide into depression, despair, low self esteem, insomnia-induce temporary psychosis, stop bathing, eating, talking, what a mess! Also this because something that weighs eight pounds can't seem to stop crying, no matter what you do! Well, yes, I remember it well.

But now I am the gramma and NOT the mom. So Baby Fletcher and I managed rather successfully to make it through those night time hours. He fussed and I adored him. He grunted and groaned and I adored him. He even cried, and I adored him. Sometimes he even managed to sleep a little, me sitting in a chair and holding him close and adoring him. What a change in perspective 34 years can bring about!

Saying "NO"

Anne Lamott, in her book Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith, said:
"I live by the truth that NO is a complete sentence. I rest as a spiritual act."

What an amazing concept! When I first read that, I was stunned. How difficult it has always been for me to say NO to any request for my time, money, support, service. And I generally just say YES immediately without even taking a breath and some time to consider WHAT is being asked of me. And then I am stuck!! I am left with hitting myself on the head as I sit and stew and fret and regret whatever it was I just said I would do. I look at my calendar, sigh, moan, shake, and hit myself on the head again as I see myself filling in all of the days with activities that not only do I not have time for, but that I don't even want to do in the first place!

So Anne Lamott really "spoke" to me with her words. Since I read them, back in 2005, I have actually put the word NO into my vocabulary.

errrr no
nnnoo
um no?
no
no
NO
NO (period)!

Olivia is 7!

My granddaughter Olivia turned seven this weekend. Such an advanced and important age for a little person. We went to Syracuse to celebrate with her, as we do every year. Everything these grandchildren of mine do is momentous to me as well it should be.

I never expected to come to such unconditional love in my life as I have experienced with my grand children. And I have delighted in every moment of it. It is fleeting, evanescent.

I can sit and watch their faces for hours and find that a more than sufficient way to spend my time. Listening to them talk, play, think out loud is the most important learning experience in my life these days. The world view of children is so fresh and clear - clean, open, naive and elegant.

Olivia has eyes that sparkle like the splashes of light on the ocean's waves. They are deep and endless. Inquisitive. Playful. Her world has so many possibilities, so many interpretations. Convention has not yet set in and turned fairy dust into concrete. I hope it never does.

Always Beginning

You are so young, so before all beginning, and I want to beg you, as much as I can, to e patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Age Blips

I picked up Richard Russo's new book last week and began reading it. It begins:
"First, the facts. My name is Louis Charles Lynch. I am sixty years old, and for forty of those years I've been a devoted if not terribly exciting husband to the same lovely woman..."

Well, I thought, Russo's books are populated with wise, flawed, clueless, astute "old" people and here is another one! THEN, it came to me - the dreaded fact that I am 59 years old. Only ONE YEAR younger than Louis Charles Lynch!!! I could be one of Russo's "old people!"

My perspective on "age" is definitely skewed. I do not view myself as "old" or "elderly" or anything even close to my perception of old people from when I was a girl, or in my teens, twenties, thirties... Yet, here I am - soon to be 60, an age that I had perceived as ancient, over-the-hill, decrepit, senile. What am I to do?

Is 60 the new 40? or even the new 50? hmmmmmm

Glenview Road

I grew up in a smallish town in the 1950s and 60s - Glenview, Illinois. The midwest. Carl Sandburg land. Chicago. Lake Michigan. Four seasons. It was a great time to grow up in Glenview. And it was a great time to be a kid there.

I could ride my bike everywhere - the town was small enough so that distance was not an issue. Nor were there any highways, expressways, or other such things to worry about. We even had sidewalks to ride our bikes on (for the less daring, of course).

I walked to school giving me the opportunity to crunch the crispy ice that had formed overnight on the puddles. To stomp and kick through huge stacks of autumn leaves piled up waiting to be burned over the weekend. To pick lilacs from the wildly abundant stands of lilac bushes to bring to school for the May altars. We did not have or need school buses, let alone door to door school bus service that we see today! A mile was seen as a very very little bit of walking to have to do.

I could play outside at night - even after dark! We did not think about danger or crime - if we wanted to scare ourselves, we would tell each other ghost stories in the shadows of the huge elm trees. It was safe to walk in our neighborhoods at night, to play softball in the middle of the street, to run through the backyards playing tag. We would iceskate at Roosevelt Park at night under the stars and then walk home with our skates over our shoulders and our breath frosting the air.

After school we would "hang out" at the drugstore. How utterly daring! Our drugstore had a real soda fountain and it was a daily ritual to sit at the counter and have french fries and a green river, or vanilla coke. And then we would walk over to Rugan's general store for penny candy - really - only a penny!

I look back on Glenview today and wonder if it still exists anywhere in this country. I see all of the sheltered and heavily guarded children in my community - well, I actually do not see them as they are not allowed outside to play. They make "play dates" with approved "friends." No spontaneous knocking on a friend's door to "come out and play" for them. No soda fountains but for the tarted up replicas in the shopping malls. No playing outside at night.

I sound like an old something-or-other I guess. But it was a good time to be a kid in the 1950s, in Glenview, Illinois.

Baby Quotes

Little baby Fletcher is just getting cuter and cuter, more alert, and bigger and bigger each day. He has gain more than 2 pounds in the last few weeks and he is not yet even one month old (or young?)! I just love sitting and holding him. It is so peaceful and makes me feel so centered.

Babies are a good and wonderful thing after all. They are a blessing and a hope for the future. Here are some quotes that echo my thoughts about babies.

One of my favorites is from the great poet of the prairies, Carl Sandburg: “A baby is God's opinion that life should go on.”

Don Herold, a humorist from the 20th Century said: “Babies are such a nice way to start people”

And that wonderful, sometimes curmudgeon Mark Twain adds: “A baby is an inestimable blessing and bother.”

James Matthew Barrie, that eternal boy playright, said: "When the first baby laughed for the first time, the laugh broke into a thousand pieces and they all went skipping about, and that was the beginning of fairies. And now when every new baby is born its first laugh becomes a fairy. So there ought to be"

Van Gogh was also a wonderful painter with words. "If one feels the need of something grand, something infinite, something that makes one feel aware of God, one need not go far to find it. I think that I see something deeper, more infinite, more eternal than the ocean in the expression of the eyes of a little baby when it wakes in the morning and coos or laughs because it sees the sun shining on its cradle."

And I will close with words of wisdom from one of my all time favorite writers, Anne Lamott:
"Honey, you'll never draw another calm breath as long as you live. That blissful amniotic unconcerned state of people without children is a thing of the past."

What the heck does that mean?

I have been long fascinated by word phrases that we use in our everyday conversation, that, when taken literally, make no sense. Why did someone call an exam a "turkey shoot?" Or why am I "barking up the wrong tree" when I am looking for my skinflint aunt to send me money on my birthday? Why am I looking for a "square meal?" Won't a round one do? I love these things!

One such phrase that has puzzled me for a long time is "dead as a doornail." A doornail was never alive, so can it be dead? And why a door nail? Is this a good thing? hmmmm

Well I found a site that has some of the answers to the origin of phrases and here is what "dead as a doornail" implies:

"Meaning: To be dead, with no chance for recovery.
Example: You might as well junk that car, the engine is dead as a door nail.
Origin: Nails were once hand tooled and costly. When an aging cabin or barn was torn down the valuable nails would be salvaged so he could reuse them in later construction.

When building a door however, carpenters often drove the nail through then bent it over the other end so it couldn't work its way out during the repeated opening and closing of the door. When it came time to salvage the building, these door nails were considered useless, or "dead" because of the bend."

I found this information at Origins of Phrases.