A Day's Gift

I woke up this morning after an incredible night’s sleep. It was 10 a.m., so I’d just missed a gathering of friends, but instead of feeling disappointment, I only felt amazement: I had SLEPT! Sleep has always been elusive for me, but with Covid, I tend to sleep only every other night for a few hours.

I woke up to glorious, glorious sun in Anchorage. Sparkling cloudless skies. And I had an adventure planned: Tim and I were going to get an ice cream pop.

The adult daughter had visited us for the whole month of August – a whole month to outlast quarantine! – and we’d covered almost all the wished-for-and-missed food. With Forest Fair and State Fair cancellations, it seemed we’d never be able to have those chocolate-dipped Original Gourmet Ice Cream Bars again. So I searched and searched … and discovered they’d be at the “Friday Fling” in Palmer, 45 miles away.

I cannot tell you how delicious that ice cream bar was. Vanilla ice cream with delicious chocolate, all covered with Oreo cookie crumbs. I think it was the best one they’d ever made. We sat in the sun far away from anyone else, unmasked and in ice cream delirium.

As soon as we arrived home, the phone rang. Sophie just had to tell us that she’d had a great victory at work, wonderful choices presented themselves, and she was happy (but jealous about our ice cream). My mother used to say she could hear a “ring” in my voice on the telephone when I was happy; Mom, I now know what you meant.

Afterwards, I had to get to the library to pick up three books on hold before they were closed for the weekend. (Desperation lurks if I perceive I may run out of books.) So off I biked. When I turned in my library card to the always-helpful Sophie (a different one), she returned with five books! Two more had come in off long-time holds. A bonanza of library books!

As I biked home in the sunshine, it hit like a ton of bricks: a feeling of unadulterated joy. I can’t even describe it: it’s like sunshine lit up my soul with energy and happiness. It was a miracle. I was like the bike scene in E.T.

A miracle because it had been such a very long time. So long that I’d decided joy was no longer happening, that I wasn’t even marking its absence because it was just a non-event. Not sadness, not depression, just not-joy.

So what was it? Sleep? Sunshine? An ice cream bar? A bike basket full of books? A happy daughter? Living in a place where the air is clear and I can simply hop on a bike to ride to the library? A husband who may not think a 45-mile drive to get an ice cream is an “adventure,” but who happily does it with me nevertheless? (and who laughed as he pointed out that he only shows up as #6 or #7)

I am living a very fortunate life, free of violence, fire, smoke, financial collapse, hunger. I know that. All I “suffered” today were irritations:

• the unmasked lady on the ice cream line who kept coming closer and closer to us
  
  
• the next-door neighbors who added a sixth parked vehicle to the junkyard they call a backyard
  
  
• the creeping crud that invaded my house plants

I could go on, fully aware that those are just irritations – not hardships or catastrophes – but most times, I guess, even irritations get in the way of joy. Something gets in the way.

But somehow, SOMEHOW, joy crept in. I don’t know why. I wish I did so I could know how to hold onto it, how to usher it in when it’s absent.

But joy is not a function of reason. There is no formula that dictates sunshine + ice cream + library books = Joy. There is no chemical equation – no necessary and sufficient causes – that make joy the inevitable result of anything.

 

This joy was just a gift. Maybe it will be gone when I have a sleepless night tonight or if it rains. It will certainly fade when I read the news and hear about another political crime, racist murder, and/or environmental disaster.

But I’ve written it down; I’ve now documented it: Today, I felt Joy.

Joy exists.

Contentment Lurks

Let me introduce myself. A therapist once told me I was an Enneagram 4. She said 4s look at a room and say it would be beautiful with a chair over in that corner, and that’s absolutely true as 4s add creativity, but 4s tend to focus on what’s missing. That’s all I know about enneagrams and 4s. I also know I’m a Pisces/Aries cusp, for whatever that’s worth. I also know I’m bipolar. And it’s dark outside.

So mostly, I live in a world of lots of unlimited possibilities that feel impossible. I collide with things and events, try inadequately, do them wrong, and mostly don’t fit. I can find my way into a profound depression at the drop of a hat and spend most of my time working my way out of one. With tiny bursts of elation in between. My glass is often half empty … unless it’s overflowing.

But every now and then,

once in a while,

just occasionally,

simple contentment settles in me.

Sophie, the adult daughter, was in town. She’d raved about a book, and I put a hold on it at the library. When it came in, she said, “Let’s go to the library, get the book. Now.” We did. It’s a 700-page book! (Who reads a 700 page book?!? Oh, no. Another insurmountable chore...)

We came home. She went into the living room.

I did laundry.

“Where are you?”

“I’m putting things away.”

“Where are you now?”

“Just washing up.”

“Where are you NOW??? Come into the living room and read with me.”

I did.

“What page are you on? Don’t you like it?”

I did! We sat in the living room and read.

The next day we had friends over. We had LOTS of friends over. (4ish Barbara said, “Oh, no, there won’t be enough food.” Judith, my role model who looks at life through the prism of abundance, said, “There’ll be enough food. Friends will bring.” Judith is a miracle of non-4.)

Long after our friends left and Tim and I were putting away LOTS of food, the twenty-somethings were still playing and laughing in the living room. Laughter rocked the house. Sophie turned to us and said, “This was a great party!” It was. I am part of a community, and that community was in our house (even though I wasn’t a very good hostess because I was distracted a lot of the time).

That night, I couldn’t sleep. Sophie had gone out and hadn’t come home. I worried. I thought of that nightmare that always peeks around the corner.

In the morning, she said she’d gotten in earlier. I hadn’t heard her.

Tim and I took her to the airport. She’s off to her own New Year’s Eve party. We’ll see her in March.

I lay down on the couch. The couch that Deena had noticed at the party and said it must be heaven to lie on that couch and read. It is my spot. I pulled out the book. (I’m on page 300 now.)

I looked around at the living room and didn’t see the plants that need trimming, the old videos that need culling, the pillow that needs repair. I didn’t fret that I should be exercising or out in the air, that I hadn’t written or painted in a while.

I looked at my living room, and it looked like home. A home with scraggly plants, old videos, and a torn pillow. (And although I thought about all the refugees without homes, I didn’t WORRY about them right then and there.)

I let contentment in.

I lay there – with that book – in the right place for me in that moment. The universe was good, I was in it, and I fit.

Tomorrow I won’t fit, but today, I remember that I did.

Happy New Year.

I was there.

So if we’re going to talk about music, I have to tell you about Woodstock.

I was there. That is my big claim to membership in our generation, my major 1969 merit badge. My big attention-getting, conversation enhancer for Third Thirders. I was at Woodstock.

I was 16, naïve to the nth degree, and had no idea what I was getting myself into. I didn’t really follow music except folk: Peter, Paul, and Mary; Arlo Guthrie; Joan Baez. Music was not my big motivator, even though it was called “3 Days of Peace & Music.” Peace was motivating, BUT the tiny little ad in the Sunday newspaper also said there would be art in the woods. There’d be potter’s wheels in the woods.

I went to Woodstock to throw pots in the woods.

I paid my $18 and bought my tickets in advance by mail.

We went up in two cars driven by parents. Kevin’s car went up earlier with the tent. Debra’s car – with me in it – sat in traffic for hours. We were going to find each other at the entrance gate … which ceased to exist when the 100,000th person entered, I guess. We arrived to utter chaos, and Debra’s father was having none of this … until I spotted Kevin over thousands of people. I waved, “Hi, Kevin, we’re over here!”

That was only the first proof of Woodstock magic.

We moved our stuff into the tent and then went in search of music, which lasted till 2 in the morning. As we trooped back to the tent through the mobs of people, something was wrong. The tent was gone! Kevin’s mother, freaked out by news reports, had come up to retrieve everyone and bring everyone back home.

Hey, I’d paid my $18 and I was not leaving! Fortunately, three boys nearby from Penn State heard all this and said I could stay with them.

So I did.

One of them was named Jack. Jack was my second bit of magic because every time I got lost, I’d call out “Jack!” and he’d always find me.

There was a lot of getting lost. The sea of people between me and the porta-cans didn’t mean I could give up needing the bathroom. I went to the truck that distributed peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, turned for half a second, and got lost again. Getting lost in a crowd of half a million mud-covered people and tents is a scary proposition. The odds were you would NEVER find your tent or your stuff.

And then, of course, I just had to go into the woods to throw pots.

Except that everyone in the woods throwing pots was naked. Everyone in the woods was naked. The woods must have been the center of clothing optional land. I ran out of there so fast I couldn’t remember what direction I’d entered from.

“Jack!”

The trucks that gave out peanut butter and jelly sandwiches also gave out Spam sandwiches. I’d never heard of Spam. Spam was very weird. I would try to swallow it, and it would float back up. Spam can’t go down me. It refuses.

In the end, it was time to go home. I remember wandering around and then shouting, “Oh, there’s Debra!” She’d stayed behind and her father would meet her somewhere. I have no idea how this happened. I have no idea how I found that ride back home. Magic, I think.

We had to take trains and buses. For days, whenever you traveled and came across a starry-eyed, grubby, our-age person, you’d say, “Were you there?” and they’d understand … in our shared starry-eyed, magical way.

Only years later did my two younger sisters explain what it was like at home, with my parents watching the news and freaking out. I came home starry-eyed (it was epidemic) and dirty and told my father nothing was wrong with marijuana – which I hadn’t tried but those Penn State guys did, and look how helpful and friendly they were! (My bold adventure was taking my bra off.)

A few weeks later, on a family vacation to Montreal where Expo 67 was still continuing, my father deposited me in the P.O.T. Pavilion. After eight hours of truly scary films about the dangers of drugs – displays of babies born with their skeletons outside their bodies and people “flying” out of windows to their death – I was cured of any curiosity about marijuana.

And then, in the 1980s, while I was chairing a political meeting after-hours in a San Francisco bookstore, a man came in shooting a gun. He told us to throw our wallets into his bag. I actually asked if I could keep some bits – my Woodstock tickets – but he waved his gun, and there they went.

End of an era.

A Paper Doll for our Times

Do you know those special times when you complete something or create something and you are so happy about it, you admire it over and over again? Maybe you’ve planted a garden or crocheted a pillow or set a table; and you go back to it again and again just to look at it?

These are Golden Moments, and you receive them in rare bursts of well-being and accomplishment. Mostly, you keep them secret unless you drag in new victims to share it with and you get to crow a little.

So here’s my creation.

It’s a paper doll, but instead of changing clothes, she changes her protest signage. Just like me.

In real life, I carry the same sign and stick but just cover it with a new paper sleeve each time. (Just like my sister Allison! And we didn’t even know we both did that.) While I was working on this, Tim was de-cluttering the garage. He found some of my very old signs from the Iraq War. What was going on in Latin America? I’d forgotten I had those colored ribbons, too.

Now I’m at work on a paper doll with a wardrobe of new books she’s reading. Maybe reading to a child. Maybe I’ll make an assortment of the activist dolls like an assortment of Barbies – do you want the brunette, the older one, the guy? All of us, standing up and speaking out.

It all started with this wonderful poster about “creative resilience and the artist’s duty in dark times”:

This led to a mental Third Third flash: was I moving through these “dark times” as an activist or an artist? Or had I never decided – never even thought of the choice – and so was moving through half-assed? And was I really neither anyway?

But then my bricolage group delivered the next assignment: make paper dolls. And I thought of McCall’s magazine and mounting each issue’s Betsy on cardboard and cutting out the clothes with their little tabs. (Did you do that?) And how when my brother wanted to play, we created the Legion of Super Heroes paper dolls and wasn’t it miraculous that when I was de-cluttering Uncle Wiggily’s Story Book, out fell all the Super Heroes (whose clothes were all their normal identities of course and who must have been in Uncle Wiggily only because it was the fattest book)? Why do I have Wonder Woman’s tiara but no Wonder Woman?

My deck of Peter Dunlap-Shohl’s wonderful White House of Cards arrived in the mail, and I thought: Could I make other paper dolls with their signs? Elizabeth Cady Stanton for the vote, Sojourner Truth “Ain’t I a Woman,” Elizabeth Warren “Nevertheless, she persisted.” Would you want a paper doll that looked like you or your friends or family? With a blank to create your own signs?

I think I’m still rather half-assed as an artist and activist, but inspiration struck and now I have paper dolls – a new generation of Super Heroes, but they’re us. Or rather, we have to be them. Let me know if you want one.

Hidden in Plain Sight

Today, I walked out of Loussac Library and a woman came up to me, all aglow and excited. “Come see my artwork,” she said. She led me off just to the side of the entrance. Eventually, it will be planted I’d guess, but right now, it’s all torn up with construction so there are just loose rocks thrown around. It’s a pile of dirt and rocks and pebbles.

She was a woman about my age, dressed nicely, but just so excited.

“I don’t see it,” I said.

“There,” she pointed.

“A few pebbles? Stacked up?” There were three on a rock. They weren’t even a cairn, nothing balanced on anything. Who was missing something here, me or her?

And then I saw it. The indentation in the big rock.

“Do I need to highlight it with marker?” she asked.

“No,” I said, “keep it natural.”

And that was it. A smile when and where I least expected it. But this is what I really loved: Somehow, that regular woman – could be a PTA mother, a secretary somewhere, or even a banker – had seen the potential of a smile in that rock. She’d followed her imagination through and was so excited about it she grabbed me – a stranger – to share it.

I don’t know if she lives her life like this, or if this was a fluke for her, too. But I’m glad I was in the right place at the right time.

How many hidden smiles do I usually miss?

A New (old) Thing

I ice skated when I was little, but when I did it again in college, I could barely stand up. Everyone says you don’t forget how to ride a bike, but apparently, you can forget how to ice skate. Much, much later, when Sophie was little, we faced a snowless winter in Anchorage. Without cross-country skiing, we had to pull out ice skates or we’d suffer terminal cabin fever.

Which is beginning to look a lot like this winter. So, after twenty years, I pulled them out again.

As we reach Solstice, things are very, very dark. Darker than other years, but I think that’s because I have three big windows that look out … on the dark. In my last office, I didn’t even have a window in front of me. I would go to work in the dark and not notice HOW LONG it stayed dark. I would leave work in the dark, not knowing HOW LONG it had been dark.

Now I know, and it’s A LOT of dark.

So just when I’m remaking my personality and trying to be a more generous spirit as my Third Third gift to myself and the people around me, I’m facing the dark. Dark = grumpy, but I’m fighting it off. So when Tim suggested ice skating, I didn’t growl, complain, or ignore him. I didn’t bury myself in a book, look for a DVD, or start on some chores. I went downstairs and pulled out the skates.

I remember when they first started clearing Westchester Lagoon. Families came out, little kids pushing chairs around to help them balance. Some fancy ice skaters, some just skating and talking. The air was crisp, people were smiling, coming together as some great winter community. Sophie was learning to skate, excitedly chattering away at us. Tim can skate backwards – he played hockey – but I was holding my own. I actually remember it as one of the truly Golden Moments of my life; all was well with the universe, with Alaska, with the winter, with our family.

The problem with remembering a Golden Moment is that they can’t be duplicated or repeated. You can’t walk into an experience expecting a Golden Moment. They have to sneak up on you unawares.

If you’re approaching your first time on skates in twenty years with a certain amount of trepidation, fear, and dread – but which you are disguising because you’re remaking your personality – and if you remember that glorious golden time, a sort of loss sweeps over you. I think sometimes Third Thirds have this: a time or place where memories rush in. Sweet memories, but memories nevertheless.

And then you have to get on the skates. I never fell! One circuit around, and Tim commented that I no longer looked like the Tin Man.

Two circuits around and I didn’t have to flail my arms around like a windmill.

Three circuits around and I felt smooth. Four circuits around and I felt punchy with sloppy legs. I remembered that I used to turn corners by overlapping one foot over the other but that seemed kind of elusive right now. But, hey, I skated! I’ll do it again tomorrow. And the day after that.

Dread was gone, replaced by exhilaration. By being outdoors, in the light. By conquering both fear and sluggishness. By identifying a New (old) Thing I can do and get better at. By setting myself up to be ready for a new Golden Moment (should it just happen to pop up and enter my life).

Total Immersion

Years ago, soon after the Alaska SeaLife Center opened, I visited it at night. Very few people were around, and I went downstairs and sat on the bench in front of the big tanks. The lights were dim so the tanks seemed to be glowing, and everything was so quiet. The giant sea lions were swimming around and it was just them and me.

For that time – and I had it all to myself for quite a long time – the SeaLife Center was no longer a sea life center, no longer an aquarium. It was a Temple to the Sea. There was something magical, something spiritual, something incandescent about the experience. I’ve never forgotten it.

Somehow, I had entered the realm of the ocean. If you’d asked me then, I probably would have said I lived in the ocean for that time, felt the water the sea lions felt. Swam smoothly and fluidly. And all I was doing was sitting on a bench.

It was a Golden Moment, those moments I've written about when the universe lets you know that you are in the right place at the right time and all is good with you and the world. In Muriel Barbery’s The Elegance of the Hedgehog, she says

“…the forward rush of life is crystallized in a brilliant jewel of a moment that knows neither projects nor future, human destiny is rescued from the pale succession of days, glows with light at last and, surpassing time, warms my tranquil heart.”

I live for moments like this! And just last week, I had another.

It was in the Anchorage Museum’s Van Gogh Alive exhibit. Robin and I entered the exhibit and read the introductory panels. It divided Van Gogh’s life into periods and said there would be music to match. I didn’t quite get it, but we sat down in the first room and let the giant slide show happen in front of us. The colors were overwhelming, and the music brought another sense into play. I kept thinking of the Sistine Chapel and how, after restoration, they realized that Michelangelo painted in vibrant colors, that the muted images we were used to were just dust and fading.

But what I really loved was the panel with Van Gogh’s words. He wasn’t just a man of color and paint; he was a man of letters. He expressed himself so well and felt the struggle for the right word the same as the struggle for the right brush stroke.

After a while, I noticed that the other rooms had images, too. I didn’t want to miss anything so I asked the attendant how was I supposed to go through it. She said I should just walk, let each room reach me in a different way. So Robin and I did that. Some rooms filled us up, others gave us a new way to look at the art.

Like the SeaLife Center’s Temple to the Sea, I felt … incorporated into Van Gogh’s world. I can identify with the “otherly mental” of us in the world, and I appreciate the gifts of the double-edged sword. Van Gogh’s creativity was both his pleasure and his pain, and the exhibit was heartbreaking in laying out the evidence of how very good he was … and how bound up that was in his distress and disturbance.

When the mentally ill are only talked about in relation to mass gun deaths, the world can forget the beauty, the poetry, the richness that comes from alternative ways of looking at the world. We need the Van Goghs of the world, and it was just so sad to know that he never felt that. Maybe other people will make that connection, will look at the Van Goghs they know and … accept them, encourage them.

I came right home and started reading Lust for Life, Irving Stone’s book about Van Gogh’s life. The book emphasizes Van Gogh’s social conscience, that he could draw peasants and miners because he felt one with them and their struggles. It was that empathy that was first deemed crazy by his contemporaries.

I’ll go back to the Museum. I’ll sit quietly on the bench, immersed in Van Gogh’s world. I’ll cherish his big, awkward heart, lament the tragedy of his pain, and be grateful for the beauty he left behind.