Pearl of Wisdom #1

We don’t reach our Third Third without accumulating some wisdom. One of my little bits of wisdom isn’t earth-shaking. It’s not high on the list of Great Values or Good Deeds or even How to Be a Better Person, but it does pop up again and again. So I’ll call it a Pearl of Wisdom. I’m sure you have them, too. Tell me about yours.

This one started at a summer job at Tramco Automatic Transmissions. Oh, there were so many things I learned there – sexism, unfair working conditions, boredom – but this is not about that. Our job at Tramco was to assemble transmission repair kits according to specifications printed out on a sheet. The women sat in one room and assembled the kits and got paid less. The men roamed the warehouse, filling the bins with the right parts, and got paid more. One other woman and I were rovers; we were given shopping carts to go out into the warehouse, find the right part in the bins, gather all the parts for an order, and bring it back to the women with the kits.

Sometimes, as I wandered the warehouse, I would come upon an empty bin for a part I needed to complete my order. I’d stare at it, wondering what to do, and one of the men would say, “Oh, check with Maria. She has a private stash of J2Z89 gaskets.”

So I’d go over to Maria, who had some sort of domain in a corner of the warehouse, and I’d ask for a J2Z89 gasket. Marie had five, but she was unwilling to part with one. I’d cajole her, somewhat confused: “How am I going to fill the order without one?” Eventually, after telling me about her grandchildren and how they were doing, she’d relent, and I’d walk off satisfied.

Until I needed a 2KL47 ring, and that bin was empty, too. “Check with George. He has a private stash.” George, too, had his little corner, filled with his own little boxes and tubes and containers.

“Hi, George, can I have a 2KL47 ring?”

“But what if I need it?”

“Do you need it?”

“I might.”

So I’d chat him up a little, beg a little, finally get my 2KL47 ring. But I had to do all this wheedling and convincing and persuading just to do my job. And this happened over and over again. The solution just seemed so obvious, so I made an announcement:

“Everyone, if we all gave up our little private stashes and put everything into the bins, we could do an inventory and see what we really have and what’s really missing.”

You would have thought I’d planted a bomb. “That’s not how we do it.” “Crazy college girl thinks she knows how to run the place.” “What a stupid idea.” “If we gave up our stashes, they wouldn’t need us.” (We wouldn’t be indispensable.)

Aha! That’s my pearl of wisdom, but it didn’t register until I worked for an organization much later on. Now I wasn’t dealing with gaskets and rings; I was dealing with information and skills. For example:

“How many employees have been reassigned in the last year?”

“Which employee are you interested in?”

“No, not one, any of them. I’m looking for a pattern.”

“Give me a name, and I’ll tell you.”

“No, I need the whole list.”

“I’m the one who keeps the list.”

That’s The Guy Who Keeps the List. Or maybe it’s The Woman Who Operates the Machine. Or The Person Who Knows the Number. Do you know them too?

It’s about private stashes of information or skills or knowledge … and the resistance to sharing. Yes, there are some reasons for dividing labor, but when the Common Purpose requires sharing, private stashes get in the way. When someone holds on to being indispensable, organizations flounder. Any organization. Any group.

I was 18 when I worked at Tramco Automatic Transmissions, and the guys in the warehouse seemed to smell me out as I wheeled my shopping cart around. Somebody decided that was inappropriate, but I was the one fired. The guys felt bad and got together to find me another job … as a topless dancer. Which so freaked me out that I ran from them on my last day of work.

There were a lot of lessons learned on that job, but the little bit of wisdom that lingered had everything to do with sharing … or refusing to.

Parable of the Pressure Cooker -- the Sequel

The pot’s still black. My beloved pressure cooker (sob!).

It started with a gift of a hunk of moose meat. I eat meat, but I don’t cook it. I’m a vegetarian + fish cook, so while meat-eaters would probably call it a roast, to me it was a big ole hunk of meat. I had to check Google to see what to do with it. There I discovered “Pressure Cooker Pot Roast,” which was exciting because I could get to use my pressure cooker. My basically-beans pressure cooker could experiment with meat. This would be a New Thing.

The recipe – for umami pot roast – called for fish sauce, which would also be a New Thing. I went to the Asian grocery, and there were LOTS of fish sauces, which it turns out, is anchovy juice. It was my kind of recipe; it came with instructions like “pressure cook for 36 minutes” and “add 1 tablespoon.” I’m a chemistry lab cook; I need very explicit instructions. It even had a video.

First step: get my pressure cooker “as hot as it can be,” then add oil and my roast to “promote Maillard reaction and prevent excessive moisture loss.” I had to look that up, but it had to do with browning my meat to kick in flavor and aroma. I could do that. The recipe said to do it “for exactly 10 minutes on each side.”

I should have watched the video again.

Their video shows a happily sizzling roast in the pan. I set my timer for 10 minutes. After about 5 minutes, the dining room was filling with smoke. At 8 minutes, I opened the windows. At 10 minutes, the bottom of my pot was black. I was following the recipe; I thought this was what meat did!

I added all my onions and garlic and mushrooms. I was then up to “deglazing,” which (after further Google research) means “scrape up all the good stuff stuck to the bottom.” I was supposed to do this with a wooden spoon. Which is pretty much impossible when the bottom is thick, black, and impenetrable. When the bottom looks like hardened lava from a volcanic eruption. Something was not right here….

Nevertheless, I persisted.

Even now, I can’t figure out what I did wrong. Was I supposed to go less than exactly 10 minutes or have my pressure cooker not as hot as it could be?

In the end, the meat was cooked just right, the potatoes and carrots done to perfection. Flavor good … for meat. Tim liked it.

But the bottom of the pot was totally, unrelentingly black. I, of course, returned to the Internet.

This is like the time I checked Google for what to put on burns. I sunk down the rabbit hole of blackened pot remedies. Since then, my pot has experienced:

• Boiling with dish soap in it
• Boiling water and equal parts vinegar (with and without the addition of baking soda)
• Baking soda paste
• Coca-Cola
• Massive doses of elbow grease
• Steel wool, which some YouTube videos promote and some decry because it scratches the steel – hey, we are well beyond worrying about scratches….

Tim offered to put a steel brush on his drill and have a go at it, but I have yet to add the OxiClean or the dishwasher powder or the tomato sauce. My friend Riki suggested Mr. Clean’s Magic Eraser, whose miracles I have chronicled here, so he’s next on the list. The YouTube people try their remedies and show off newly sparkling pots, but I have also followed poor Peter’s efforts, who – with the help of loyal commenters – seems to have run the gamut of tips on his pot, too.

One loyal commenter told Peter to just accept his pot as “seasoned.”

And so the pressure cooker teaches me yet another lesson for life in The Parable of the Pressure Cooker: What can’t be shiny and new is … seasoned.

Visits from a Newly-adult Daughter

You know you’re in your Third Third when your daughter says she’d like to come for visits … and she buys the plane tickets!

You know your daughter’s still in her First Third when her visits are for Thanksgiving and Hanukkah; she still hasn’t created traditions and commitments of her own for those holidays.

But this is a visit from a newly-adult daughter, and it’s fraught with transition. One friend described her planned visit to her daughter. The daughter told Mom that the visit would be too long; Mom would have to move on after several days. Mom knew this was true – guests and fish go bad after three days – but Mom had held out hope that she wasn’t one of those “other mothers,” the ones who have to leave. (sigh) So do we all.

So when we go to the movies, and I lean over to ask something of the adult daughter, and she glowers at me because “You don’t talk in movies!” I wonder if she never lets peers talk to her in movies. It’s not like I’m chatting; I just have a question. And I know that very particular form of mother-daughter irritation, and it shatters the visions of the wonderful, mutually-approving, adult mother-daughter interaction I’ve been hoping for.

But I really admire this newly-adult daughter. She makes New Year’s resolutions that she keeps. She’d decided to read 52 books, to travel monthly, to do more daytime social activities (which I learned was meant to pose an alternative to night clubbing). And she’d done them all … but still had four books to read over vacation.

I had heard about the new book Feminist Fight Club which might shed light on some issues in office politics the newly-adult daughter was confronting. I borrowed it from the library for her. First trip, she tossed it aside. Another mother dud. Second trip, I renewed it and prodded a little more. (By my Third Third, I know how to prod.)

Victory! I went up MANY notches on the Big Mother Scale. Not only did I give her a book that spoke to her issues, but she completed her 52-book resolution with it! I had done something right!

It colored the whole rest of our trip and our conversations. Somehow I was now a person who’d learned something worth sharing. I’d grappled with professional life, faced my own workplace trials in my Second Third. In my Third Third, I had perspective.

Meanwhile, she taught me about making New Year’s resolutions. I told her I’d given up, that when I set a goal of working out three times a week, I’d miss one week and then have to catch up, and I never knew how I was doing. And she said I had to do it differently; that if I said I’d run 500 miles in 2017, it was cumulative. I could see my progress, not the times I missed.

Brilliant! I’ll do it.

I think coming home for the newly-adult daughter is a time to decompress, to give herself the space to cocoon. We save up some interesting things to share, we play lots of Five Crowns, do a jig saw puzzle. We make sure we do winter; she sees old friends. The rhythm of my Third Third makes all this easier.

And of course, she helps me put Find My Mac on my laptop and create a master password and look for a blouse at Nordstrom.

I invite her into the kitchen to make a simple avocado dish I’ve discovered. She loves it, asks for the recipe. I just glow and glow.

This is the first time she’s been here for Hanukkah in a long time. She pulls out the menorah – her favorite – and is  in charge of lighting the candles all week. The candles just glow and glow, too, and we are a family.

Roads Taken and Not

Do you have regrets? By the time we’ve reached our Third Thirds, are there things you regret?

And what is a regret anyway?

This was today’s rambling café conversation. I was describing a lunch of many years ago. An older woman at that table had said she regretted not putting money in her IRA when she was younger and adding to it every year. All the older people at lunch had repeated that same regret, and today’s café table shook their heads in agreement, too.

But then we got to talking about roads not taken. Or wrong roads taken. Yes, I spent a horrible year at Cornell in graduate school, but I came away with some friends-for-life, an awareness of how I really wanted to spend my life, and some inner resources about making things happen.

Basically, then, I tend to believe that if you like where you are, you have to appreciate the bumps and detours that got you there. We don’t have to like them, but we do have to recognize their role in forging our lives to get where we are now in our Third Thirds. Yes, there were probably easier ways to get here, but they didn’t emerge or they wouldn’t have provided all those Valuable Life Lessons.

Is regret something you only feel if you’re inherently constructed that way, some pessimistic orientation? Why do we all know the expression “mired in regret,” usually preceded by “hopelessly”?

Yet I can imagine big, giant regrets that can color a whole life with a sense of “what if.” I think of them as Before and After moments, how your life can change on a dime and your Before life ends, never to be retrieved again. Teenage recklessness figures big here: a car accident, a stupid prank that goes bad, a burst of mischief with terrible consequences. To think of these is to shudder at the thought, at the narrowness of escape and the sheer luck of it all.

What if the guy who picked me up hitchhiking wasn’t a nice guy after all? What if I hadn’t blown out the candle before I left the house one night? So those are Big Regrets that I don’t have … luckily. Parallel universes that never happened … but could have.

Little regrets? They’re more like lost opportunities, unrealized fantasies. I wish I hadn’t dropped out of the Venceremos Brigade to Cuba when I was accepted in 1977. I wish I hadn’t canceled that boat trip down the Seine in France in 1985. But they’re idle wishes, adventures not taken, and other adventures took their place.

We realized we were all talking about regrets from the distant past, as if that’s where regret originated. We couldn’t do anything about them any more. But what about that bag of potato chips we finish in one sitting? Those things we immediately regret? And then we got off on willpower, on delays of gratification. We could have moved on to beating up on ourselves – with regret – but Colleen said, “We’ve learned we do the best we can.”

Nevertheless, I do regret moments of missed kindnesses; times I could have been nicer, more empathetic, more caring. We all do. Is regret guilt? Remorse?

I’m thinking regret is a signal. It’s a sign saying, “Learn from this. Make amends. Do better next time.” Are we motivated by regret? By regret avoidance?

And then I just happened to come across this in a book I’m reading on another topic: “…research has also shown that the regrets about exercising restraint prove much stronger—and can also last much longer—than regrets about yielding to temptation.” Hmmm, what’s to learn from this?

Tech for the Tiny

If you’re lucky, one of the pluses of your Third Third is grandchildren. But be forewarned: child rearing now comes with its own technological challenges in the form of new baby gizmos. For this guest blog, I’m copying here an email received from Judy, who was delighted to welcome her new granddaughter to the family (and who spent a lot of time prepping on YouTube).

“Baby girl was born 2 weeks ago Sunday night. I have watched videos on ‘how to swaddle correctly’ (There seem to be some differences of opinion!);

how to correctly insert the car seat base; how to correctly insert the car seat into the car seat base; how to correctly insert a newborn into the car seat (while screaming);

how to correctly ‘throw’ open the stroller (instead of kneeling on the hot cement in front to the hospital valet stand in white pants frantically pushing every available button); how to correctly insert the detachable car seat into the ‘easy open’ stroller; how to correctly detach the detachable car seat from the stroller (instead of breaking down in front of the nurse checking baby weights and begging for help!);

how to correctly attach and unattach all the instruments of torture to the breast pumping machine;

how to correctly attach and detach smell proof bags from a very sophisticated diaper pail (which still defeats me so when no one is looking, I just stuff the damn diapers in the garbage under the LA Times which I haven’t had time to read yet anyway!)

Who knew life with a new baby was so technically complicated? The best news is mother and baby are doing great! That’s all that counts, as we all know.”
                       — Judy

Life and Death Lessons

Things I’ve Learned in the Last Week, or Growing in My Third Third:

I learned that losing a parent is painful.

Yes, yes, I knew that, but I didn’t KNOW that. It’s like when I first had a baby. Suddenly I felt like I needed to apologize to every friend I knew with children. I’d had no idea it could be so HARD. I didn’t know about the sleep deprivation, the worry, the demands on your time. I didn’t know about the disruption to life-as-you-knew-it. I didn’t know that finding the right childcare was so hard, that you’d be torn emotionally in so many different ways. These were abstract facts to me, not life-wrenching realities.

The same is true with losing a parent. I’d offer condolences, but I didn’t offer CONDOLENCES, if you know what I mean. I didn’t know you’d be shaken to your core, that the shaking would last and last. That anyone could be this sad.

I’m sorry. I didn’t know.

I learned that expressions of sympathy and comfort make a huge difference.

Yes, it was right here in this blog that I made fun of greeting cards: “NO ONE looks at old greeting cards.” But I didn’t know the power of new greeting cards. Returning from my mother’s burial, picking up the held mail at the post office, I was moved by the sympathy cards. I was moved by the cards that came from people relatively distant in my life, from my past, from my synagogue. It made me feel part of a community. They took time out of their lives to comfort me.

I was moved by the phone calls, the visits, the hugs. I was moved by the comments, the emails, the “loves.” I was honored by all the requests to help. It reaffirmed me as a member of the larger community of human beings: we all hurt, we can all comfort.

When she was little, we never let Sophie play with or wear a gift until the thank you note was written. We wanted to teach the necessity of demonstrating gratitude. It didn’t occur to me that I should also teach – and learn – the necessity of showing support.

My sister has said the same thing. In our Third Thirds, we want to be card and note writers.

I learned that rituals exist for a reason. They are in place to help people in difficult times.

When I had a child, I joined the ranks of mothers from the beginning of time. I was a mother in a long line of mothers. When I became bat mitzvah, I affirmed my place in a long line of Jewish women. And now, my mother’s death placed her – and me, as a mourner – in the Jewish tradition.

Prior to burial, my mother’s body was bathed and purified in a ritual called taharah by a group of women known as the Chevra Kadisha, a holy society. My sisters liked that; they thought of how my mother loved having lotion rubbed into her dry skin, how she would have appreciated being bathed. My mother was buried in a plain shroud in a plain pine box. To my mind, it asserts dignity and respect for the deeds of her life, not any material acquisitions. All these things make me feel better.

In the Jewish tradition, there is a seven day mourning period known as sitting shiva. You’re just supposed to sit at home, receive visits, let your grief out. And here, life has intruded. I had too many commitments – my own good deeds in the world, I guess – that I couldn’t break. But I really appreciate the value – the necessity – of shiva.

Susan said to me, “Please honor me with the mitzvah of helping you at this time.” What an exquisite way to offer help. Now I understand where rituals come from.

I learned that preparing with Advance Directives, Health Care Proxies, and The Conversation Project were critical.

Again, that’s one of those abstract facts that became real in the last week. I’d pushed my siblings to get all the paperwork agreed to and signed. Now, a week later, I know my mother could not have died the way she wanted to without the preparation we did. With The Conversation Project starter kit, I knew how my mother wanted to live her final days. With the Advanced Directives, we could ensure that would happen.

It’s all about dignity and respect.

I learned that de-cluttering accomplished BEFORE my mother died was absolutely the best thing.

My mother and we siblings had already cleared out the family home. Truckloads of furniture, memories, and photos were distributed, dealt with, disposed of years ago. My mother was an active player in all this as she launched her own downsizing. In July, her apartment was further condensed. When she died, she was surrounded by only her favorite things. My siblings and I dealt with it all in a few hours.

By de-cluttering early, my mother gave herself the gift of lightening her life. I still remember us asking where she wanted to put the photo albums in her new apartment. “I’ve had them for years,” she said, “It’s time for one of you to take them. I don’t want them filling up my new place.” By getting rid of the weight of her old life, my mother could make room for a new life.

She gave us the gift of that lightness, too. Everyone who has dealt with parental clutter says the same thing: I don’t want my kids to have to deal with all this. I cannot imagine sorting through 90 years of memories and possessions while grieving. Thank you, Mom, for sparing us that.

Mostly, I’ve learned that life is short. Live it well.

A Recipe for Clutter

Years and years ago, I had accumulated enough recipe clutter that I needed a way to organize it. I took an empty photo album, added tabs for the sections, and slid the recipes under the plastic. The tabs say things like “Main Dishes,” “Salads,” etc. The binder is big and red and full of favorites.

Well, not big enough. There are no more empty pages.

Now, when I tear a recipe out of a magazine, it has no clear destination. It sits on the counter for a few weeks, awaiting relocation. (Along with all the other clutter-orphans awaiting their own relocation.) Recipes are a recipe for clutter. Eventually, I stuff them into the front of the big red binder. Loose. Now the big red binder is REALLY big.

But it’s an unstable kind of big. Unstable as in when you pull it off the shelf, all the loose magazine clippings fall out all over the place.

Something had to be done.

So I sat down one day and culled the recipe pile. Created a big recycling pile and a little pile of sorted recipes. (In your Third Third, you know you are NEVER going to make something requiring more than five steps….) I put them in folders, but this time – after years of cooking – I had more specific categories: Pasta, Vegetables, Rice and Grains, Salmon. Eleven relatively thin folders. Plus one folder titled “Favorites,” those things that we dub: the repertoire.

And then it occurred to me: What if eggplant were in season and I wanted to cook with eggplant? What if the eggplant recipe was in Pasta or Rice? How could I find it? Pasta comes with other ingredients – how would I find them? And what about the wheat berry salad; does it go with Grains or Salad?

My friend Judith says the only solution is to make an index. She’s making an index. To me, an index is more than a to-do list item; it’s an insurmountable hurdle. It would need constant updating. Before I’d get to that, I’d make a list of all the movies I’ve seen so I’d stop coming home from the library with DVD repeats I don’t remember….

So I took the dilemma to my friend Sharon-of-the-400-cookbooks. Sharon has two file cabinet drawers of folders. Over time, just as I’d discovered, the categories refine themselves. Sharon’s “Meats” split off into “Beef Brisket” and “Lamb.” “Soups” spawned “Tomato Soups.” She has separate folders for “Avocados” and “Dates” and “Asian and Curries.” The problem Sharon is facing is that her favorites file is now two unwieldy files thick so she has to figure out some way of culling it.

Then I took the dilemma to my friend Marj. I’d remembered that Marj had a meticulous shelf full of white binders neatly labeled with her categories. Well, the four feet of binders is now eight inches of folders – a de-cluttering victory for Marj!

Marj sorts her folders by function, not by ingredients: “My big confusion is does beef stew go under Beef or under Stew or under Slow Cooker. Again, I look at the function – if I want to make a Crockpot meal, I only want to make a Crockpot meal, so everything Crockpot goes into one Slow Cooker folder, regardless of ingredients.”

All of us – good de-cluttering Third Thirders – are going through our cookbooks, identifying the keepers, copying them, and donating the cookbooks. In the meantime, Sharon puts flags on her cookbook pages. I’m going to start doing that because a good recipe tends to get lost in a closed cookbook, but Sharon even keeps a Dinner Party Journal citing the page numbers and cookbooks of what she prepared.

In my mother’s Third Third, when her last child left home; she ate out, brought home leftovers, and stopped cooking.

What’s your recipe for de-cluttering recipes?

A Good Question

This is very short, but one of those quick jolts to the brain.

I was giving a workshop for teachers on resilience. We were looking at how we could reframe events, incidents, obstacles so we could better deal with them. One woman said she’d been frustrated over where she was in her career, but the change she wanted to make would mean going back to school for a degree.

“If I go back to school now, I won’t have my degree till I’m 55!”

Her husband: “How old will you be if you don’t go back to school?”

I’ll let that sink in.

Profiles in Third Thirds: Sharon

Let me tell you about Sharon. Sharon is my hero (and role model). For all the time I’ve known her, she has put her energy into improving the world. She just reminded me that we first met when she was teaching workshops on training nonprofit boards and I was in one of her classes. But after that, Sharon went on to start the YWCA in Anchorage. She took it from a tiny, little one-person operation to a major force that owns its own building, positively impacts thousands of women’s lives, and is thoroughly sustainable even when Sharon left after many years.

During all this, she served on the School Board for 7½ years and, not to go unmentioned, was a BizBee judge for TEN YEARS. (We both love spelling and grammar.)

So now Sharon is 75 and retired. Her Third Third? Pursuing her domestic hobbies: mostly wool appliqué and cooking. She has a sewing room dense with projects and hundreds of cookbooks (a thing which totally mystifies me – I can’t even imagine how one would begin to peruse that many cookbooks. Sharon says looking through a cookbook at the end of a day is her reward for getting some of her to-do list done.) Sharon even batches all her out-of-house appointments and errands so she can stay home most days with her projects.

As Sharon puts it, “I gave up trying to save the world and being personally responsible for ‘empowering women and girls and eliminating racism’ and am content to play a very small part.” But she still registers new voters at citizenship ceremonies and donates her sewing work for nonprofit auctions. Friends receive her gifts, and I love her rhubarb chutney on salmon.

During her professional life, I tried to learn how Sharon balanced it all. Now, in our Third Thirds, I’m trying to learn about contentment from her. She says it took her seven years to “come down” after retiring and give herself permission to enjoy it. She tells me wise things like:

“What is the rush? Have you taken some days to just do nothing since being employed? Taking a day with no goal in mind usually ends up being a day where you end up doing something that you like to do….”

“I’m learning to accept that there are only so many hours in a day and what doesn’t get done today, bar some catastrophe, will get done tomorrow.”

“We realize that we gave it a shot but we can’t save the world so it’s now OK to focus on what makes us happy….”

This is what I’m trying to learn from Sharon even though I still hear a nervous calendar clock ticking away in me: I still don’t know what my next Big Thing will be. What passion will drive me? Do I even know what makes me happy? And besides, is that too selfish to pursue? What makes for contentment?

But Sharon knows – and now has the time for – her passion. Her passion is sewing. She calls it her dessert. In the fall, she’s teaching her first class on wool appliqué at a local quilt shop, but she’s always experimenting with new techniques and tools. She couldn’t show me any of her work – she gives it all away – but we went through photos together.

Sharon made this purse out of ties for her husband’s daughter. She said, “It’s made from his old ties (since he doesn’t wear ties anymore). She loved it and I cried when she told me that she could smell his closet on them when she opened the present.”

Her sewing connects Sharon to the women who came before: “My grandmother had her own little sewing shop and my mother at one time did sewing to bring in extra money.” She’s made pincushions that fit in vintage teacups, folk art designs, and wall hangings. She’s made table runners, placemats, and many, many pillows. She’s even made a crown for a princess. They’re all given away as gifts.

Yes, Sharon finds that her time often just dribbles away with projects getting deferred by the “shoulds,” by errands and appointments and watering the garden. And now, her time is getting squeezed because two big tasks have been added to her to-do lists: cleaning up her sewing room jumble of projects and purging her cookbook collection. It’s the de-cluttering albatross. As she puts it, “I don’t want to leave a mess.”

Sharon tackled the big jobs in her Second Third and is now devoting her Third Third to more personal pleasures. Is it so different? Sharon thinks she’s run out of steam, but she’s still giving of herself. Maybe before she used her talents to empower, to fight racism, to save the world. Now she’s using them to add affection and kindness to those around her. The world is still a better place for having her in it.

I will make a will!

Here I am, looking for purpose, meaning, and simplicity in my Third Third. Fretting over it, writing about it, thinking it to death. Making plans, researching options, supposedly leaving no stone unturned.

But now I am embarrassed to admit – yes, even more embarrassed than being caught peeing by the side of the road:

I do not have a will.

Didn’t hear that? Let me try again: I do not have a will.

The universe screams in outrage: How did you get to be this old without a will?!? And with a daughter?!? How could you have left her care so unprotected?!? What were you thinking???

I didn’t get around to it.

Mostly, I just kept putting it on the back burner. Procrastinating. Tim and I did visit a lawyer and start the whole process, but it kind of derailed over the choice of guardian. I kept observing the changing life situations of assorted family members and I just couldn’t be sure. They kept moving in and out of most favored guardian status. Observing this, Tim went ahead and made an interim will, but I kept dodging closure on the subject.

It’s not like I couldn’t face the Death Thing. I have very clear and thorough Advanced Directives. I’ve covered every base in my attempt to avoid a miserable end of life.

But as to the end itself? I’ve got nothing in writing.

Well, that’s going to change because now there’s Wills Week – this week, May 9-13. Starting Tuesday, there are free community events to guide us through the process. Take a look: www.alaskawillsweek.org. On the website, we downloaded a really useful workbook.

Here I’ve been writing about de-cluttering and clearing out stuff so our daughter wouldn’t have to face a houseful of junk, and we leave a potential legal and financial mess for her. What kind of legacy is that? Just when she’d be grieving, I’d give her headaches?

Nope, not anymore. We’re doing this. You, too?

Use it, use it up!

Do you remember the big box of 64 Crayola crayons? You’d get it brand new … and then you didn’t want to use it because it would dull the brand new points? Or the journal you thought twice about writing in because it was so pristine and beautiful?

This morning my friend Connie called to ask me to join her on a hike. “What are you wearing on your feet?” I asked (because I didn’t know if she planned an icy place, a muddy place, or a dry place). So we talked cleats and grip-on thingies, and she said, “Oh, I assumed you’d be wearing your new hiking boots.”

“I didn’t want to get them muddy.”

Yes, boots are made for getting muddy, and yes, getting muddy is part of breaking them in. But besides that, in our Third Thirds, I should be finished with keeping things pristine. I think of that Erma Bombeck quote where she hopes that at the end of her life she could tell God “I used everything you gave me” or the one that shows up on Facebook about arriving “thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming – WOW – What a Ride!” Erma was talking about talent, not crayons or hiking boots, but it’s all about using things – even us – to the max.

In our Third Thirds, we can ask the question, “What am I reserving it for?” For some perfect occasion or some perfect use? I have delicious bottles of wine bought on a memorable trip, saved for a memorable occasion. The wines from Italy, from Maui, from Argentina, from Homer. But now I’m not really into wine anymore. So they sit.

That candle that’s so beautiful – the perfect occasion may not happen or even, if it does, you won’t be able to find the candle when it does. Worse yet, as happened with me, you’ll find the colors faded, the candle warped. It needs to be lit now or given as a gift now so we can feel the pleasure now. Now is now and later may be too late.

Or else it will just be someone’s great deal at a garage sale.

I’m looking around my house now, trying to spy never-used things waiting for their perfect use. My mother once had a couch – no, a whole living room – that waited. I had a set of fancy teacups, but I started using them when I realized they were just … waiting. One broke. So what?

Life leaves evidence – of things used, things worn down, things broken.  Crayons – when they’re used – leave color behind.

I’m in my Third Third. I use my crayons, my paints, my journals, my fancy paper. I’m working on my fancy gift bottles of oils and vinegars. Hey, I’m even going to make plans for those memorable wines. Soon plans, not distant plans.

And yes, I wore my hiking boots. They made me happy. They were great, both uphill and down.

What do you put on a burn? Whatever you have.

There we were in my Alaska Literacy Program class, going through the workbook, learning the English words for safety and accident prevention. We were also working on the difference between “should” (see a doctor) and “have to” (go to the hospital). We were describing what had happened in this illustration:

“She burned her hand.” “She should use a mitt.” And then, in those moments I love, the conversation took off.

Irma from Guatemala said she should put eggs on her burn. Rebecca from South Sudan agreed, but she would add sugar and milk to the mixture and make a paste to spread on the burn. I’m not exactly sure of the recipe; ingredients were coming fast and furiously, in a mixture of several languages, with energetic hand motions for emphasis. Irma was “stirring” her eggs for me while Rebecca was “applying” her paste.

But Fioly from the Dominican Republic was busy grating potatoes. Her mother had a terrible burn from a pot of boiling water, but applying grated potatoes meant no scar. So Irma showed me where she’d received a bad burn but the eggs had cured it.

Afele from Samoa got in on the action: “Butter,” he said. “No, no, no,” the women chorused, “Never butter.” I explained the little I knew, that butter continues to cook from the heat of the burn, making a burn worse.

Sandra is from Colombia and found the whole thing hilarious. She said she puts ham and cheese and bread on her arm and then mimed eating her arm. I didn’t think Sandra understood. I thought she wasn’t following the conversation, that she thought it was about eating. It took me a while, but then I got it: she was making a joke. It really seemed like we were putting meals on our burns.

So, of course, I had to get in on the action. I told them what everyone should do when they get a bad burn in Alaska: cover it with snow. I knew that the temperature had to be lowered quickly, and I’d heard stories of miraculous rescues by throwing fire victims in snow banks. But then the women all shouted, “No, not water. No water at all.” They were adamant.

So I came home and Googled “burn remedies.” Well, the first thing that pops up is “No ice.” Ice can damage tissue. Cool water is the top recommendation, but then there’s a whole batch of things: vanilla extract; cold, wet tea bags; milk; oats; raw potato; onion juice; vinegar; and honey (although there’s some debate as to whether it’s only special honey). Some say eggs, some say egg whites. And, after all this food, what else? Mint toothpaste.

Not to be outdone, the National Mustard Museum touts the yellow mustard burn remedy, and the People’s Pharmacy says, “Some people have wondered if brown mustard or fancy Dijon mustard will work as well. From what we hear from readers, cheap yellow mustard works best.”

I’d better tell Sandra her ham and cheese sandwich needs mustard, too.

If most burns in the home happen in the kitchen, I can guess why all these food remedies have emerged: everyone grabs whatever they can find. The mustard solution was only discovered after someone realized soy sauce didn’t work. Soy sauce?

And afterwards, wrap the burn in aluminum foil because the foil delivers “restorative minerals as foil contains aluminum and other regenerative minerals.”

I’d better tell Sandra to wrap her sandwich in aluminum foil.

Okay, after migrating through all these assorted food remedies and Google sites, I finally found something reputable (I think): cool water and aloe vera. So I keep an aloe vera plant in the kitchen. I might try a couple of tea bags because I’ve already been told to keep some of them in the freezer for mosquito bites.

But I still don’t know about snow. Was that just an urban legend I’d picked up? Burns happen all over the world and all over the world, people pick what’s handy in their attempts to treat it. My snow may just be Alaska’s answer to Irma’s eggs and Fioly’s potatoes.

Hooray! I'm a mentor.

If you’re lucky, one of the things you get to do in your Third Third is to be a mentor. If you’re even luckier, someone picks you. They think you can be a help to them in their career, their lives, or their general development. There’s no better affirmation of the fact that you’ve acquired experience, expertise, and maybe even a little wisdom.

I got picked! For many years, I’d arranged mentorships for the participants in Leadership Anchorage. I did workshops on mentorships for the Society for Human Resource Management; I worked with organizations to set up mentoring programs. But be a mentor? Never.

And then Derrick picked me. (Why does that sound like a song?) He picked me at a time when I felt overloaded, not so high in self-esteem, a lot bothered. But I agreed to meet with him, still not sure why he’d picked me – where did he even get my name? – or what I could possibly offer him.

Derrick is a young, black, small businessman. He’s run for political office, is committed to his community, family, and profession. So we met. We talked. It was okay, but finally I asked him, “What do you want? What do you need a mentor for?” And Derrick said, “I feel stuck.”

“Aha! Stuck is good. Stuck is what I can help with. Unsticking is what I do.” So we talked about his Big Goals, what was holding him back, how he could free himself up so he could pursue them. We got pretty specific, talked about passing responsibilities to a partner, saying no to things. Along the way, we talked about thank you notes, about how I think sending thank you notes differentiates you from the crowd.

Within a week, someone called, mentioned that they’d met Derrick, spent some time with him, and then received a thank you note afterwards, wasn’t that nice? Whoa, this guy was quick.

The next time we met, Derrick had made plans to take the law school admission test, had researched law schools, was planning to sell his house and his business. Not just wildly scattershot either; he had made Plans. Once he un-stuck, he moved. He claims I’d helped, but Derrick is a guy with a lot on the ball. He’d even read a book I’d briefly mentioned, and we talked about it.

So then I thought, what else can I offer him from my Third Third to his Second? I know people. If he’s planning on law school, maybe I could arrange some interviews for him to meet folks: the U.S. Attorney, a successful defense attorney, another small businessperson who’d gone on to law school. He’s in the middle of those now, and I’m trying to figure out more ways I can tap into my accumulation of years and experience to help him along his way.

I remember reading somewhere that the real reason Alcoholics Anonymous works is not because people GET support but that, as sponsors, they GIVE support. Finding that they have something to offer is a source of strength for the sponsor and that keeps them sober.

So this was my big discovery: being Derrick’s mentor is also mentoring me. You can’t sit down with someone who has so gloriously un-stuck himself without thinking, “What’s your own Big Idea?” Oh, I have one or two, but too many commitments were already in the way, my calendar filled up. They kept getting back-burnered. Not to mention they just seemed … too much, too complicated, too difficult.

But Derrick was selling his business, looking at law schools!

So I had to do something bold and new and adventurous, too. I’ll tell you more about that next post. The thing is, Derrick is leaping off a big cliff. I am stumbling off a little cliff. But I feel a little persistent stuck-ness has given way.

Here I’d set up all these mentorships for others, telling everyone it would be mutually rewarding, and here I am realizing IT’S TRUE. I may offer Derrick the benefits of my experience, but he’s adding inspiration, gung-ho energy, and a whole different view of the world. My world is richer.

What can I say? Go find someone to mentor. Make it official. Enjoy.

Facing down the Big F

I’d first discovered Brené Brown back in November when I wrote about her work as a “vulnerability researcher.”  So now I’ve just finished her book Daring Greatly, and there’s a couple of things that really resonated with me.

Brené’s daughter was freaked out about having to race breast stroke at a meet, that the breast stroke wasn’t her event, that she’d be the last girl in the water. Brené asked her, “What if your goal for that race isn’t to win or even to get out of the water at the same time as the other girls? What if your goal is to show up and get wet?”

Brené explained that there were many things she’d never tried in her life because she feared failure. As a result, she’d missed out on feeling brave. Her daughter could have scratched, could have avoided the whole contest. Instead, she “got wet,” performed pretty badly, but felt brave afterwards. I guess Brené’s advice is what being a “vulnerability researcher” is all about.

Elsewhere in the book, Brené thinks about the well-known quote, “What would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail?” And instead she asks this question, “What’s worth doing even if I fail?”

That’s a whole different question! In the first, you’re evaluating your choices while liberated from potential failure; you’re saved from failure in advance. In the second, failure – in all its soul-crushing devastation – descends. The second question forces you to confront the experience of failure, forces you to decide whether to be brave and still do it. It presupposes failure and then asks, “So what will you do with that information?”

Failure is a profound experience. Such a bottoming-out, crushing, unpleasant experience. I failed so badly at graduate school, I think it left me with a stutter for a while: I was afraid of expressing myself and being shot down yet again. But it set in motion a new plan for my life, new paths I’d explore. It helped me define what I wanted and where I’d find it. Mostly I think if I’m happy with my life, even the bumps, the mistakes, and the failures got me here so they all served a purpose.

My mother used to say whatever doesn’t kill you outright makes you stronger (which drove me crazy as a kid). That whole graduate school experience made me a little less fearful of failure. It did something to my self-esteem, too. After a while, I could look at academia and critique it instead of feeling demeaned by it. I could understand the influences I’d let operate on me and instead know that I had to make better choices for myself. I began to know myself as resilient.

But twice (at least) I dodged the bullet, didn’t get in the water. Both involved travel to somewhat risky locales, but I think I exaggerated the risks to justify my fears. I still feel squirmy about them, knowing that I caved, knowing that I missed two extraordinary opportunities.

So what does all this mean for my Third Third? How much of my future planning is constrained by a fear of failure? What if I sat here and said, “Try it. It will all go wrong, but will that matter in the end? Will you feel squirmier for not doing it than you will for trying it?”

The thing about the fear of failure is that you have to dissect it. Is it fear of failure or are you just not interested in pursuing something? Are you just fooling yourself (“Oh, I don’t really want to do that anyway.”) or are you backing away? Sometimes we’ve become so practiced at eliminating options that we don’t even know why they fall off the radar. And sometimes, we just dawdle them away.

So now I’m going to look at my assorted Third Third scenarios and examine them: would I feel brave afterwards? Would I feel squirmy if I didn’t pursue them? “What’s worth doing even if I fail?”


* Special little technological treat that I just discovered from Pogue’s Basics by David Pogue. He has all sorts of handy dandy little tricks, like this one: if you have to write Brené with that accent over the é, and you have a Mac, you hold down the e key and – lo and behold – seven different variations of e show up and you get to pick the one you want! That is my delight of the day!

Stop! Do you see a pattern here?!

I’m leaving on vacation to New Orleans this week so I’ll be offline for about ten days. (Attention: thieves, burglars, and arsonists) But before I go, I’ll start by telling a little story from my second third.

A while after Tim and I were married, everything about him started irritating me. No, it was beyond irritation; it was the D-word. How had I gotten myself mixed up in this marriage thing? to him? Now I was just angry, full of regret, and searching for escape.

We went to a counselor. She asked if we were there to figure out how to separate or how to stay together. “Separate,” I said. We had a couple of visits and then had to take a break; we’d previously made plans for a trip to Mexico (when I still liked him), and we’d be away.

But after the trip, we never went back to her. Had no problems. Love was restored.

Just about a year later, our marriage was (in my opinion) back on the rocks. Any fix must have been temporary. This was a bleak story of a marriage that could not be saved. So we went back to the counselor. But again, we had to take a break for a previously planned trip to South America. True Alaskans, we always make sure to head to sunlight, sunshine, and warmth in the winter.

A little dose of light, and we canceled any future visits to the counselor. Life and love were good.

The next year, the counselor said, “Stop! Do you see a pattern here?! You always come to me the third week in January, and then you go to Central America in February. Why don’t you schedule your trip for the third week in January and then you might never have to see me?”

Worth her weight in gold that counselor! We made our light-seeking trips earlier – have done it ever since – and never saw her again. My mood stopped sinking as low as it did back then because now I knew what was going on. But even dawn simulation lights and other remedies just weren’t enough to keep me … pleasant. I needed my infusion of light to come from natural reality. Just earlier.

So, the marriage was preserved, and the lesson learned. Tim and I are leaving on vacation this third week in January. Oh, but this has been a snowless winter. There’s no snow to reflect back the minimal light we have, no snow to be out and about in. No cross-country skiing, no winter wonderland. It’s even hard to find addresses in the dark, to drive on certain roads. It is dark, dark, dark. Not even crisp and cold dark; it is soggy, wet, dingy dark. (Attention: tourists and visitors)

So I looked back on my last few posts, and I see the pattern there! All that moaning, all that doom and gloom. Depression and lethargy, DVD binges and sleep disturbances. In a snowless winter, I needed to be out of here earlier!

At least, by my Third Third, I’d learned it had nothing to do with my marriage. Thank heavens I wasn’t dragging us back to marriage counselors. Now, whether Tim might feel differently … hmmm, I’m not pushing my luck: he had to deal with that zombie on the couch, the voice from the abyss.

See you all in about ten days!

Drowning in paper

It’s the paper that defeats me. The mountains of unread things. I’m not even talking books. The problem is magazines. A long time ago, I discontinued magazine subscriptions when I realized Newsweek was oppressing me by showing up weekly.

The Life-changing Magic of Tidying Up deals with unread books: “Get rid of them today.” Okay, I understand that: I can always get it at the library when I’m ready to read it.

But ending my magazine subscriptions didn’t solve the magazine problem. Just like AARP found me when I turned 50, AARP The Magazine AND the AARP Bulletin found me. Suddenly magazine subscriptions started coming as extra little perks with my donations: Better Homes and Gardens from the Alaska Botanical Garden, Sierra from Sierra Club, The American Scholar from Phi Beta Kappa. PaknTreger from the Yiddish Book Center, Reform Judaism, even Via from AAA. The list goes on.

Individually, I love these magazines. I donate to the organizations because I find them worthwhile and interesting so of course the magazines cover topics I’m curious about. I never fail to find something noteworthy in each issue, something I’ll share with someone or tear out to cook, create, ask about, or follow up on.

For instance, in my latest batch, I discovered a new toothpaste (Livionex) that’s been confirmed as cleaning better than traditional toothpastes. I got instructions on how to cover an old lamp shade with fabric, which popcorn brands aren’t coated with Neonicotinoids, and whether Sophie should get the new meningitis vaccine. That doesn’t even count the book reviews I tear out (to add to my reading lists), the recipes, or the places I fantasize about for our next trips.

And that’s the problem. Magic calls these “papers to be dealt with.” “Make sure that you keep all such papers in one spot only. Never let them spread to other parts of the house.” Ha, ha, ha.

The only way that happens is when people come over. Then I pick up all the papers and magazines that have stopped at the kitchen counter and relocate them to the chest of drawers in the bedroom. Today, in the zealous spirit of Magic, I picked up the whole enormous, tipping pile and polished the furniture under it. Now I’m looking at the pile in the living room.

Mostly, Magic says if it doesn’t spark joy, I should get rid of it. But that’s mostly because she’s dealing with the storage of papers. These papers and magazines are still stuck in triage. They need to be read before I can recycle them.

So I did a little cost-benefit analysis: how many hints/interesting bits did I think I’d get out of an issue and was it worth hunting through it? Four issues bit the dust right there. I opened one to check the contents and saw an article about two friends of mine. Now what if I’d thrown that out?

There are some that will feel like work to read and some that will … spark joy. Mostly, I think the joy comes from being easy and light. The American Scholar is tough to read, but it is … illuminating. Those articles stick with me, lead to many intense conversations, impact my world view. That gives me joy, but it’s a work-hard-for-it joy, not a “spark” of joy.

One reader asked, “If you like something but don’t love it, does that count? How do you know whether you love something or whether you just like it a lot? Is loving something the same as getting joy from it?” Another said that “It’s the emotional energy it takes to make all those decisions that flummoxes me.”

We’re all suffering underneath our clutter and the decisions about our clutter! I have to hope that after a while, in our Third Thirds, we just get sick of dealing with it. We have better things to do with our time than sort, organize, peruse so we just throw stuff out. Then we look at our clean, polished dresser and we are joyful.

Y’know what? I’m getting there. It’s just that my clutter isn’t getting there as fast.

"Keep only those things that speak to your heart."

You can’t write about de-cluttering and not have heard about The Life-changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo. With the intent of not adding to my clutter, I placed a hold at the library. At the time, the library had one copy and I came in at #63. Months and months later, the library now has 18 copies and mine arrived.

I read a bit last night and woke up this morning raring to attack the clutter. I wanted to tear open my closets and discard!

Her premise is pretty interesting. Rather than choosing what to get rid of, she says we should instead pick out the things we want to keep. “…take each item in one’s hand and ask: ‘Does this spark joy?’ If it does, keep it. If not, dispose of it.”

And the big message I got was Discard first, Organize and Store second. All those wonderful hints in magazines about cleverly organizing things in neat storage containers just mean you keep stuff. Even well-kept stuff fills your house, your consciousness, your life. Because if you’re still in “keeping mode,” you get more stuff that has to be filed or put away. And that becomes a chore, the filing piles up, and then you’re “rebounding,” in her words.

The only cure for clutter is getting rid of it. Period. Then you feel so happy to live in an uncluttered house filled only with the objects that give you joy that Kondo says you could never backslide.

Where Kondo loses people is on the respect she shows the objects that give her joy. Socks, for instance. Kondo says socks should never be balled up (like “potato-like lumps”):

“The socks and stockings stored in your drawer are essentially on holiday. They take a brutal beating in their daily work .… The time they spend in your drawer is their only chance to rest.”

This is probably where Kondo leaves readers behind, but I get into anthropomorphizing everything. When I make my bed, it’s happy. When I unload the dishwasher or put away laundry, I rotate the bowls and towels so they “take turns.” (I also have to make sure the coats are on their proper colored hangers, but I think that’s less about the coats’ happiness than it is about my personal oddities. Kondo has lots of little personal oddities, too.)

Personally, I would never ball up my socks. I had never heard of balling up socks till I saw Tim do it, and I promptly unballed them so they wouldn’t get all stretched out. Our socks are Kondo-certified.

When I graduated college, my advisor told me I could house sit her place for free if at the end of the summer, I moved all her belongings into the dorm apartment where she was going to be a faculty resident. I ended up moving into the apartment early – without moving anything else in. Friends and I slept on the floor, ate picnics on the floor, lived in a large, empty space. At the end of the summer, we moved all the furniture and stuff in, and we hated it. Our peaceful, bare, simple place was cluttered and overwhelmed with stuff-ness. We couldn’t breathe.

That’s what Kondo is talking about. If you keep only those things you truly love, your place might seem bare. But it’s like hanging one beautiful painting on the wall versus hanging six. The crowd of six detracts from the simple elegance of the one that gives you joy.

There are things in my closet I love. They’re flattering, comfortable, attractive. And then there are the things I own because I needed a blouse and it was on sale. Slowly, it gets shoved further and further back into the recesses of the closet. Eventually I decided I’m only going to buy clothing I LOVE. I think that’s the message Kondo is trying to leave us with.

I’m ready to give it a bigger try. I’m excited to look at discarding in a new way: find the joy, discard what’s not. Admittedly, it’ll be a minimal, halfway, less-than-ruthless, non-Kondo operation. But if it feels good, I’ll keep at it.

The Adult Daughter: A Total Treat

A few weeks ago, Tim and I got a phone call from Sophie: “I haven’t been back to Alaska in a while. I’d like to book a flight for a visit.”

Delirium! Not only was she initiating a visit – INITIATING a visit – but she was booking it herself. She’s arriving today!

And recently, we’ve been getting phone calls. Phone calls! Sophie has been at her job one year now. She loves it, but she’s discovering the world of work. And she solicits my advice!

Ironically, one of her calls came just as we were hosting a freshman send-off for kids going to college. Later, I found this on my computer – the story of Sophie’s departure – and it still triggers tears.

Much of what she tells us is like a message from another world. (She does, after all, work for a company with an onsite chef preparing their meals; she did work recently in their London and Berlin offices.) This is not the employment world Tim and I know.

And she wanted our advice!

My father used to say the only thing he wanted from his children was naches. That’s Yiddish for “pride.” I hated naches. I felt like it made demands on us to achieve, to produce. Whenever he was proud of me and talked about naches, I’d blow up. I vowed I would never expect naches. Let Sophie be whatever she wanted to be, however she wanted to be it.

But to be wanted for advice! Ooh, that feels good.

And this advice giving is a two-way street. Right off the bat, Sophie told me that if I bought underpants cut lower than my jeans, they wouldn’t stick out the top.

Love moments in our Third Third. Maybe we did something right.