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.

I won! I'm rich!

Last blog post, I told you all about the surveys and questionnaires and self-tests I take, BUT I started off with a link to the Recycle It Right Tip for the Alaska Recycles Day Sweepstakes. How many of you clicked on that link?

Well, too late … because I WON! I won a $500 gift card to Fred Meyer. Thank you ALPAR! I am rich!

My tip wasn’t what won me the prize – it just got me into the drawing – but here it is:

Anything I buy (tortilla chips, pretzels, toilet paper, tissue) that comes in a larger bag — that bag is what I put trash in. I don’t have to use separate plastic trash bags, and I use cloth bags to buy groceries. Packaging is my only source of trash bags now … and with recycling, I don’t have much trash either!

It’s true; sometimes our entire trash for the week fits in one Snyder’s of Hanover Olde Tyme pretzels bag. During the summer, with composting, the bag isn’t even full. I am a relentless recycler.

Not such a relentless contest-enterer, but my friend Judith tells me I need to enter all the contests I can because I must be on a winning streak. (Does one win constitute a “streak”?) But, as I’ve noted before – in a blog post three years ago [Wow, have I been doing this for three years?!?] – I find myself entering more contests in my Third Third. As I asked then, is it some way to bring in bonus money or yet more evidence that I can waste time in ever more creative ways?

Back then, I concluded that “It’s not a way of getting rich.” Ah, but that was before I won the Alaska Recycles Day Sweepstakes and got rich!

Now, on the eve of Thanksgiving, I reflect again that I AM rich. With love and friends and family and home. And mostly, I am hugely rich only because of the sheer luck of my birth in this time, this place, and to those parents. I am so very, very lucky. And grateful. Happy Thanksgiving.

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.

A Food Love Story

Our kitchens are filled with stories, but some stories lurk in one special dish. It’s the dish with a whole history behind it, a history you can’t separate from preparing, tasting, eating that dish. So let me tell you about noodle kugel.

Noodle kugel is a traditional Jewish side dish. When my mother first made it, Mott’s had come out with a variety of applesauces they called Fruit Treats. So we had Mott’s Chunky Apple and Raspberry Fruit Treats, Mott’s Chunky Apple and Apricot Fruit Treats – in jars, like applesauce. They were delicious; I don’t know why Mott’s discontinued them.

My mother’s recipe calls for “1 jar Mott’s Applesauce with apricots (Fruit Treats),” but that’s impossible now, so I’ve always had to buy a can of apricots, dice them, and add them.

My mother made hers in a 9x13" aluminum pan. It was so heavy with ingredients, it was hard to lift in and out of the oven. I have that pan now. I look at the pan, even when it has lasagna in it, and I think “noodle kugel.”

My mother called it noodle pudding. Maybe it was the name on the recipe when she received it; maybe it was her generation’s way of Americanizing their food. I call it kugel … because I entered it in the San Francisco Kugel Cook-off.

It was San Francisco’s inclusive way of trying to include everyone in their urban version of a state fair. There were maybe 50 entries: 25 older Jewish women, 24 gay guys, and me. The winner was the lone potato kugel. I guess after tasting 49 noodle kugels, the judges were relieved to encounter a potato one.

It was at that cook-off that I encountered my first traditional noodle kugel, which is very cheesy, with lots of dairy. My mother’s is full of fruit: apples, apricots, raisins. I had no idea her kugel was so revolutionary! Her kugel became her go-to side dish, the surest crowd-pleaser.

My sister lives near Amherst, Massachusetts, and we’ve visited the Yiddish Book Center there. I became a member and, in 2013, heard they were asking for recipes for a national contest. I submitted my mother’s noodle kugel recipe, and it was selected as a finalist. (They renamed it noodle kugl, which goes to show how languages are changed as they’re assimilated, so I guess that’s the “original” Yiddish version in English characters.)

I’ve written here about my mother’s and my prickly relationship, but over the course of our lives together, there are a handful of things I did for her outside my “shitty daughter” box. Entering her kugel recipe is one of those things. When I think back about all the things I didn’t do for her, I try to remember her kugel moment.

The way it worked, people had to go online and vote on the finalist recipe to win. I went into action: I contacted everyone I’d ever known for years, I enlisted my siblings, I was a “Vote Tibby” machine. Friends solicited votes from friends; my sister got the Berlin Women’s Philharmonic Orchestra to vote. The Daily News even printed my request. Facebook was a sharing frenzy. Votes for Tibby’s kugl poured in.

Winners were to be announced at the Yiddish Book Center on October 20, 2013. Tim and I were to be back East, so we drove my mother up to Massachusetts for all of us to be at the awards ceremony.

Alas, the kugl came in second to Esther’s Matzo Balls.

My mother received applause and a mug, and we took her photo. She was really happy. Look at that smile!

Every now and then, when I’d visit her, I’d remind her of her award-winning noodle pudding and dig the mug out of the cabinet. She didn’t remember winning it, but it made her happy. When she moved, I wanted the mug, but I couldn’t find it.

Yesterday, I made my mother’s noodle kugel for the first time since she’d died. I boiled the noodles, diced my apricots, beat my eggs. As usual, I cut the sugar in half, added only six tablespoons butter. I put it in the oven.

Then I looked over and saw the applesauce sitting on the counter.

I’m in my Third Third. Things like this happen. I knew what to do. I dumped the kugel back in the mixing bowl, added the applesauce, and put it back in the oven. My book club loved it.

Boobs in Boob Land

It takes a lot to leave me speechless and startled, sort of stumbling through the Looking Glass. It started with the hospital gown hanging outside on the front door, but it was ALL THE PINK that proved overwhelming. I had entered Boob Land. No, I had entered Boob Land!

October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month and many of us are very, very aware of breasts because we’re very, very aware of cancer. In our Third Thirds, the numbers in “the club” just seem to be growing every month, October or not. This time, cancer visited my friend, Barb. Hopefully, it was just a visit and the unwelcome guest won’t be returning.

More than a month ago, Barb sent out “save the date” invitations for her end-of-radiation party. I put it on my calendar. I thought all the women would come, we’d eat, drink wine, talk.

I never expected to be throwing orange ping pong balls into bras.

It’s like Barb had completely redone her home in Breast Décor. There were pink boob-type decorations everywhere, pink boas, posters. Pink socks as party favors. Pumpkins with breasts and nipples.

I didn’t expect Barb to be greeting us in her hospital gown with boas either.

And now the pièce de résistance: the reminder to get your mammogram – squeeze those marzipan breasts between graham cracker plates. Use your imagination, that plateful was a real eye-popper.

It’s a relief to celebrate someone who discovered her cancer so early that her prognosis is good. It’s a joy to celebrate the strength, the resilience, and the courage this cancer requires of women. And it’s a total treat to spend an evening laughing with women who are funny, talented, and happy to be alive. So happy to be alive.

Procrastination is our friend.

The clutter that defies my attempts at de-cluttering is usually the result of either of three things:

• being in-the-middle of a project or idea, or
  
• being completely stumped as to how to disperse the particular object, or
  
• pure procrastination

In the second category, I had a few problems I’d mentioned before: my cacao bean roaster, my mother’s samovar, and my audio cassettes. The cacao bean roaster ended up on my friend Judith’s mantle, where she’s trying to figure out what to do with it. The samovar and audio cassettes are still my problems, still taking up space while I … procrastinate.

BUT, every now and then, procrastination is our friend! Every now and then, failure to de-clutter means you still have the thing you were considering giving away, and you need it!

No, I still don’t need a samovar or audio cassettes. Does anyone?

Way back on June 5, 2012 was the last Transit of Venus. This is when Venus passes between the Earth and the Sun and you can see the little black dot of Venus moving across the face of the Sun. If you missed it, sorry: the next one isn’t until 2117. It’s a very big deal if you’re trying to measure the distance from the Earth to the Sun, and history is full of expeditions to observe it around the world.

So there was no way I’d miss it on June 5, 2012, when the University of Alaska Anchorage Planetarium set up telescopes and had us all watching the skies. They gave out special solar sunglasses.

Desk space is the most valuable real estate in my office. Papers and articles, mail and bills need that space. Desk space is the space where items of immediate concern – items of current necessity – fight for attention. Desk space is the place where urgent items are at risk of missed deadlines if they get covered over. Desk space is my High Priority Zone.

The cardboard solar sunglasses have been sitting on my desk since June 5, 2012.

Every time I’d pick them up or shift them around because they were in the way, I’d know they really needed to be relocated elsewhere. But then I’d ask myself: Where do cardboard solar sunglasses go so I’d be able to find them when I need them?

I couldn’t come up with a single obvious and apparent location.

Without an obvious and apparent location, you run the risk of not being able to find things when you need them. I just barely stumbled across the TSA luggage locks when I needed them, but where-oh-where is the large-size label I was saving for the cover of that notebook? Or the short extension cord? If something doesn’t come as a whole family of objects – if it travels solo – it can go astray.

But Monday is the Total Eclipse of the Sun, and I am ready! Sunglasses are apparently sold out all over Anchorage, and FAKE ones are being offered for sale online, but I just had to shift a few papers aside, and there mine are! They spark a lot of joy! For now, the joy of de-cluttering has been replaced by the joy of NOT de-cluttering.

Yes, this sets back the de-cluttering cause significantly, and I know those sunglasses really do need a permanent home, but that can wait till after 10:14 a.m. on August 21.

Getting Back Up

How does a person in her Third Third handle disappointment? I mean, have we learned things? Are we better at this?

I still repeat a quote I found once: “Heroes are not born, they’re cornered.” Sometimes I think any coping wisdom that arrives in the Third Third is more a factor of having kids (so you can’t be the baby), having a job (so you have to get dressed), knowing how much things cost (so you can’t throw things), or generally having responsibilities. We’re cornered into getting on with it.

But by now, we’ve also learned that “this too shall pass” or that one door closes and another opens.

My friend Linda recently closed her business. She poured years and heart and money into creating a wonderful space for the community in Terra Bella, a space that my women friends and I inhabited every Friday morning. And now it’s closed.

Meanwhile, I knitted and knitted and organized and arranged, and on Friday, the group met earlier so Sunnie and I could leave to go yarn bomb the trees at Westchester Lagoon. It was cold, but the tree sweaters were colorful, the Guerrilla Knitters energetic, and the crowd appreciative. Bicyclists stopped to ask if they could help. By the time we were done, it was a landscape of art. It was a totally happy day. Joyful even. People took photos, everyone smiled giddily.

And the next day, we discovered that vandals had destroyed every piece of knitting, torn them off, thrown them in garbage cans.

In the royal order of things, I can’t even compare my disappointment with Linda’s. But I bet we’re feeling some of the same things. We’re wondering if there’s something we could have done, something that might have created an alternative path. We’re wondering when we’ll be able to plunge into something with unbridled optimism.

We tried to add our little bit of positive to the world, and we got foiled. In my case, there’s a bogeyman. In Linda’s, it was just too much uphill.

When I told my friend Connie how the day had been such a happy one, she said, “You still have that day. That day happened and was happy.” She’s right. They could take away the art, take away the experience from people who didn’t see it, but they can’t subtract those hours of happiness. Instead of being an art exhibit up for three months, it turned out to be a performance piece up for several hours. It was theater; ephemeral but inspiring. Terra Bella lasted a lot longer, but the group of us forged in its space will last even longer.

You can tell I’m getting over disappointment because I can write things like this now. I’m focusing on what doors may open, how maybe people will see that building a positive community takes all of us to have lots of ideas. Some will fizzle, some won’t be your cup of tea, but some will take off. Parks & Recreation wants us to try again, TV news wondered if there will be a groundswell of knitting, and Rue at the newspaper captured the whole mood in this video. My friend Pam said knitters will rise again.

It’s not about knitting. It’s about trying. If I’ve learned anything by my Third Third, it’s that trying doesn’t mean succeeding. It means trying.

It’s about way more than knitting.

A Happy Yarn Bomber

I’m knitting again. (Still knitting, no purling. I haven’t progressed that far.) I’m still using very big needles and very fat yarn so I can see very fast progress.

Knitting was one of my first New Things in my Third Third, and it was part of one of my happiest discoveries: yarn bombing. We covered the trees in front of the Anchorage Museum with knitted art. You can read all about it here, but the big thing was that we made Art! It was spectacular and fun and … joyful.

So now, I’m knitting again. I still can’t do anything fancy, but I can make rectangles, and that’s all that’s needed. Then the rectangles get stitched onto the trees. And this time – next Friday – we’re decorating the trees at Westchester Lagoon and the nearby Coastal Trail. You can, too.

This is the amazing thing: Even my dopey, non-fancy rectangles with bizarre yarn combinations make Art. When all the knitters bring out all their rectangles, and all the trees get sweaters, it becomes Public Art. All those decorated trees! It makes people smile to see something unexpected, something colorful, something happy.

I’m thinking back over my recent year, and I have often been happy. I’ve even made people laugh when I tell a good story. But I don’t think I added as much happiness to the world as when I helped knit the trees at the Museum. And it mattered that it took many of us to make all that happiness.

So yes, I’m knitting again. I had to go back on YouTube to learn how to cast on and bind off. I still can’t do anything but knit while I knit because I have to concentrate. But there’s something meditative about moving needles, finishing rows, starting new rows, seeing progress. The transformation from ball of yarn to knitted rectangle is so concrete, it satisfies. I’d forgotten this. I even forgot that when I knit, I don’t snack.

I’m a confirmed beginner, a nincompoop knitter. I don’t want to get fancy about it. I’m just going to knit rectangles because that’s all I have to do to add to world happiness with my knitting. I don’t have to follow a pattern, count rows, worry about dropped stitches. I can just click my big needles, throw my fat yarn around, and it turns into Art. What a discovery!

If you’re a knitter, make some rectangles. If you’re not, help us dress the trees. Otherwise, just take a look and smile. That’s why we’re doing it.

(More details and updates on Facebook)

I'm converting ... my videos to DVDs

I did it. I did the DVD thing, the Third-Thirds-DVD-thing: I sat down with the VHS videotapes and now they’re being converted into DVDs.

It was the carpet that pushed me over the edge. Of course, that’s what it’s been doing with everything. The pile of videotapes is in a crate that sits on the carpet. If the carpet has to go, I have to face the videotapes.

Videotapes come in several sizes. Big cassettes which have been copied from little cassettes. Uncopied little cassettes and even tinier where-did-those-come-from-what-are-they cassettes. While the little cassettes have no labels, they’re still first generation, which is a good thing. To watch them, you have to put them in the adapter thing. First one in got munched. Now I know how to use the adapter.

So I had to sit and watch. Unfortunately, last week I finally donated the pile of dust-covered remotes for things we didn’t own anymore. Hmm, one of them must have been the remote for the VCR….

I have a friend who said, when her daughters were grown, that she still saw herself as a mother of young girls. I know how she felt. Going through those videos, I remembered that bond and I craved it. Craved it. I was like a long-sober addict who still feels the biological pull years later. When that little girl in the video spied me in bed, she giggled and ran under the covers to cuddle with me. When she put on dress-up clothes and pranced around like an actress possessed, I marveled at the world she inhabited. Even later on, when we were filming her science experiments and had to do a dozen takes because things weren’t working and she was in such despair but then it FINALLY WORKED, I knew our family was a team.

The most dramatic thing about those videotapes? How much laughter they record. You can’t watch hours and hours of people laughing and enjoying each other’s company without being affected. It’s like that guy who cured his disease watching funny movies. I got in the car, drove to Tim’s workplace, and kissed him.

You don’t take videos of making beds, vacuuming, cooking dinner. You don’t take videos of watching TV, mowing the lawn, going shopping. No videos of laundry, being bored, writing to-do lists. But to see all of us laughing and enjoying, telling stories and laughing, ice-skating, swimming, riding waves and laughing. The camera operator always laughed at what he or she was filming; you could hear it. All that laughing! The laughing was contagious.

Studies have shown that Facebook makes people depressed. They look at all those fun, happy things other people are doing and get bummed out. But the videos were of US! We were looking at ourselves having a terrific time. Yes, some of those videos were taken during times of unemployment, stress, fatigue. But despite that, we were still laughing – there’s evidence!

Maybe watching videos for so many hours is like brain-washing. There I am, kind of negative and harassed about carpeting, and I spend six hours watching laughing videos. You can’t come away unchanged. I am resolved: I will add more laughter to my days and appreciate all the people who are part of that laughter.

At the same time, it’s bittersweet. Time has passed. I discovered the oral history tapes I’d made of my mother in 1997. She was thrilled to be filmed, needed no prompting to tell me of her grandparents, her parents’ immigration, her life growing up in Brooklyn. This is the woman who now can’t remember the beginning of a sentence by the time she gets to the end. It made me want to fly to New York and watch these videos with her.

The videos just keep on giving. Pulling out the camera back then meant it was a special occasion and made it even more special. (It was before iPhones, before oppression-by-camera.) Watching the tapes this week has been such pleasure, such happiness. Taking them into Karl at Action Video was such a treat, too; all that personal attention! Now, when the DVDs are ready, I get to share them, to spread all that laughter around to my extended family. I can hardly wait. I bet we laugh.

Moving the Body at Rest

My body at rest has become a body in motion. The rest of the time, I’m recovering. I know it may seem wrong to call me a body at rest when I am a distance runner, but it’s really true. I lie on the couch until I get up and run, and then I go back to the couch. This is not just metaphorical. I’m sedentary in my core. Hand me another book.

But not anymore. Not since I signed up to hike the Chilkoot Trail. I’m not sure whether that’s a carrot or a stick, but it’s certainly lit a fire under me. The fire of refusing to be humiliated, the fire of realizing the only way off the trail is over it. So I had to train. That led to the Zumba experiment, but now, with the weather turning glorious (and one little episode of barfing in the middle of a group weight-lifting class), I’m back outside.

A snow-less winter of no skiing meant I was entering the spring with enough flab for several people. I always start off slowly to avoid injury, and I usually run every other day. This avoids injury but also allows me to resume my inertia position of body at rest. This time, though, I have a rooting section called Tim. While I am a body at rest, Tim is a body-always-seeking-motion. So far, I have been able to resist.

But now, he whispers, “Chilkoot Trail,” and I gear up. We’ve added hiking to my days off. Not only do I have to practice steep; I have to practice walking, period. For some reason, I find it easier to run ten miles than to walk six. I think it has to do with standing on my feet that long or maybe it’s momentum, but I reach the groan-level much earlier with walking. Our friend Kris has been organizing weekly hikes for years, so now I show up, too.

One week it was Kincaid Park, hiking the bluff to the beach. I was glad to be with a group; maybe this would be the time I could actually find my way back from the beach without bushwhacking through brush. It was a glorious, sunny day – I applied my sunscreen – until we got to Kincaid, where the wind was ferocious. The first time I discovered the sand dunes at Kincaid, I thought I’d landed on a Star Wars planet. Woods, cliffs, rocks … and sand dunes?

Sand dunes + wind + sunscreen on face = a total crust of sand encasing my face.

The trail goes up and down, up and down. This is called “hill work.” It is work because it’s single-file and you don’t want to slow up the people behind you (Is there a hiking version of corridor rage called trail rage?). There was no smelling of the roses; we hustled along. Up and down. Up and down.

There were lots of tree roots and lots of dogs. I don’t do tree roots well. Not cracks in sidewalks, not uneven pavement, not broken branches or rocks, either. I must be a vigilant trail runner (and sidewalk walker) because tree roots eagerly await me. Tim says they’re like the trees in the Wizard of Oz when they see me. My toes are the usual victims, but I’ve been known to go down whole body, involving even my head in the calamity. Dogs just complicate the issue.

The good side to all this motion: I’ve discovered a lovely, nearby trail that has been here for all 31 years I’ve lived in Alaska and I’d never been on it. I walked a trail that I’ve only skied before – ski trails can be hiking trails in the non-winter! That was a good day; I found Joy, that shy spirit, on the trail, too.

In the midst of all this running and walking, my friend Connie passed on an article about “dead butt syndrome,” otherwise known as gluteus medius tendinosis. Ironically, you don’t get a dead butt from lying on the couch; you get it if you run too much and too exclusively. Your butt is connected to your hips, legs, and back so the pain is well connected, too. This problem goes beyond the sagginess issue, so now I have to add Other Things to my body in motion repertoire.

Some days, I actually do two things in one day: run in the morning and bike somewhere in the evening. Oh, yikes, what’s happening to me?!?

Speed zone ahead

Sometimes I’m fast and sometimes I’m slow. Sometimes I want to get where I’m going and teleporting would be preferable. When I’m in the corridors of an office building on my way to somewhere and a person in front of me is ambling along, I feel something like corridor rage. I try to pass, but she’s just poking down the center of the hallway. This just pops my cork (even if I’m not on the way to a restroom). Why take so much time getting from here to there? I also get incredibly aggravated when I’m on a food line and the person in front of me waits till they’re at the front of the line to decide what kind of pizza they might want. #!x*/%

Other times, I just want to amble along myself, and the world is too speedy for me. I really liked cross-country skiing when it was ski touring and the trails wound in and out of trees. Then someone invented skate skiing and everything became a workout session, with skiers zipping by on newly-widened trails so there was room for their flying skis. Yes, I’m a runner, but when I hike, I like to walk slowly enough for conversation, for looking, for inspecting.

I like public transit because you can only get there as fast as the schedule allows. It enforces a slower pace to one’s life. My bicycle does the same thing: it’s a one-speed with coaster brakes. I didn’t like fussing with gears and I like my bike riding slow (for conversation, for looking, for inspecting). That bike has taken me through triathlons, but the goal was always finishing, not finishing fast.

On the other hand, I have to squash down my impatience when other people’s decision-making seems unenduringly slow, when something can be done smoothly and efficiently but the person seems intent on dawdling and plodding. (We used to come back from a particular post office complaining about “no sense of urgency.”) Maybe the other person is just not alert to what’s going on, but it expresses itself as slowness. Meanwhile, my speedy electrons are piling up in collisions inside me. For years, Sophie thought we played a game at K-Mart: leaving the cart because the checkout line was so slow, I’d get fed up and leave.

Yes, this is a checkered, self-centered reaction to speed: when I want fast, you’d better be fast; when I want slow, don’t rush me. But then I found a wonderful collection of thoughts by Doris Grumbach as she approached her 100th year. She’d seen an article in the Wall Street Journal about Audubon Day at the Louisiana State University’s Memorial Library. A librarian stood in front of a beautiful, open page of Audubon’s Birds of America for several minutes: ‘Very slowly she turned to the next page. A small audience of awed spectators watched. What was most impressive about the description of the activity was the newspaper’s headline: “The Joys of Slow Looking.”’

“The Joys of Slow Looking”

I like it. You can’t look slowly if you’re moving fast or in a rush. You can’t look slowly if you have to be somewhere else. You can’t even look slowly if you’re even thinking about the somewheres else you have to be or do. Slow looking requires looking, not spacing out and staring.

Lots of books and magazines tell me to Be Present in the moment, but when I remind myself, I get all knotted up with runaway thoughts and frantically try to rein them in. But telling myself to “look slowly”? That seems more accessible. It helps me stop because I have to look. To look, not to glance or peek. To look outside my head, not in.

I’m going to try this. The Joys of Slow Looking await.

I don't know how many underpants to pack!

There’s a great Doonesbury comic I think of often. Joanie Caucus is packing to start law school at Berkeley, and she freaks to Zonker, “I don’t know if I’ve got enough toothpaste!” He calmly, Zonker-ishly replies, “Don’t you think there are probably drug stores out there?” And this is Joanie’s response:

“I don’t know! I don’t know what the drug store situation is like out there in California! I’ve got to be prepared!”

Whenever I pack for a trip, I think of Joanie. Ridiculously, because this time, I know the drug store situation in New York. I visit New York twice a year. So why am I having conversations with myself like this:

“How many underpants should I pack!?! I don’t want to get stuck doing laundry too often, but I don’t want to run out.” (Never mind that the apartment comes with a laundry, as does my mother’s place.)

“How much contact lens solution do I need!?!” And this despite measuring how many ounces I needed when we were in New Orleans for ten days. This is complicated by the Costco factor: I own big containers of contact lens solution, and I’m always reluctant to transfer them. You never know if your transfer container is as sterile as it’s supposed to be.

Tim spied me adding my pumpkin flax cereal to the bag, but I don’t know what the grocery store situation is like in Manhattan!! I know Manhattan as a visitor. The whole reason for this trip is to know it as a resident, but that may take a while, and I’ll want my pumpkin flax cereal for breakfast. With raisins.

This whole thing is mystifying me. Where did all this goofiness come from? I have gone to other countries for months and traveled the U.S. nomadically for an entire summer, never knowing where I was going to sleep. Here I’m going to a place with no currency exchange, a place I have visited often, a place where I already have my own personal subway map, several relatives, and a laptop with Google.

I think it’s because I am just incredibly excited!

Wanted: An all-consuming passion

I’ve just finished reading The Great Detective: The Amazing Rise and Immortal Life of Sherlock Holmes by Zach Dundas. I read all the Sherlock Holmes’ stories when I was in junior high … except the very last one because I didn’t want to live in a world that had no new Sherlock Holmes.

Little did I know there’d be Benedict Cumberbatch, Robert Downey, Jr., and Elementary.

Dundas was that kind of kid, too. As a preteen, he founded the first Sherlock Holmes fan club for fans under 21. Now, with a young family, he decided to find out what the Sherlock Holmes mystique is all about. He visited the Baker Street Irregulars (New York’s still-active fan club from the 1930s) and London’s Sherlock Holmes Society. He met the editor of the Baker Street Journal, discovered the Baker Street Babes. He read or watched the scripts, plays, and films “starring” Sherlock Holmes. He researched Arthur Conan Doyle’s life, all the derivative literature, the Great Game (scholarly studies about Holmes and Watson). He checked out assorted 221B Baker Streets, the moors of the Baskervilles, London streets. Along the way, he discovered that FDR was a secret fan member and that a whole genre of fanfiction (“fic”) exists (which I think is kind of Sherlock porn).

The book is funny, fascinating, and well-researched, but it’s also something bigger: evidence of a quest, a mission. And I am so jealous.

Here he was with something that interested him so much, he’d invest years in it, drag his family along on his exploratory travels, meet people, attend things, follow up on leads.

I want an interest like that.

Back in 1980, I discovered my first waterslide in Spain. I ran up, slid down, ran up, slid down, all day. Then, when Sophie was 2, we discovered a tiny waterpark in Puerto Vallarta. It was a little bitty thing, but it whisked us out a tube in a whirl of water and splash. I was hooked.

After that, I found waterparks wherever we traveled. I told Sophie that if I ever had a summer off, we’d cross the country by waterpark. So then I got a job with summers off.

I began correspondence with waterpark designers, manufacturers, trade associations. They sent specs, photos, videos. We started mapping out our path across the country. Then, in the summer of 2002, we did the National Waterpark Tour. We drove 10,000 miles, visited 24 waterparks across the United States, wore out three bathing suits, and only had ten stitches to my head. Along the way, I stopped off at public radio stations and delivered commentary. We met with waterpark owners. Where we had family or friends, we’d drag them off to the waterparks, too. Tim met us mid-trip.

At each waterpark, we were the first on line at 9:30, the last out of the water at 8 p.m. Every waterpark was different. Every single one aroused our interest and delight and challenged our fears and courage. It was a summer of pure joy. I could write a book about it – and did (an unfinished one).

For years, I couldn’t go anywhere or do any speaking engagement without people asking, “So tell us, which was your favorite waterpark?”

But that was 14 years ago. And nothing has taken the place of that mission, that passion, that all-encompassing quest, since then. Many, many things interest me, but not to the level of two years of preparation and dream fulfillment. And yes, a major part was the chance to spend that time with 10-year-old Sophie.

I could sit here and tell you waterparks may be a silly passion, a shallow exercise in adrenalin. It’s not saving the world, after all. In fact, it’s right up there with surfers following waves, and they’re at least in nature. But really – the thrill, the cleanliness of water, the absence of my land-clumsiness, the variety in design. I still love a good ride, but another tour? No.

My friend Angelo has been in love with trains his whole life; in his retirement, he’s collecting oral histories of railroad folks. He’s working on a book about it. This passion drives his retirement years. I want that!

You can’t install a mission into your life. It has to develop organically from passion. I do believe you can set yourself up to be receptive, to be open to a new interest, but mostly you just have to be ready to follow passion when it emerges. In the meantime, you have interests and projects, mini-passions and mini-quests.

Where is the Big One? How do I find it?

The Great Sunglass Saga

Losing sunglasses did not start in my Third Third. I have left sunglasses all over the globe, wherever there is sun. Once I’m inside and remove them, they’re at risk; restrooms, restaurant tables, fitting rooms – all are like quicksand ready to suck the abandoned up.

But years ago, I acquired a pair of sunglasses that proved unlosable. I was visiting my high school friend, Rieva, in California, and I was left in a sunglass warehouse for an hour or so.

Rieva has a neighbor who managed to break her windows twice while pruning his family’s tree. He came over to fix the window, and a friendship developed. He wanted to start a sunglass kiosk, and Rieva was involved with writing about, coaching, and supporting entrepreneurs. She helped him out. That was back in 1995. Over the years, Rieva advised, he and his brother worked hard, and Sunscape Eyewear grew. By the time I was left to entertain myself in the sunglass warehouse, they were signing papers for international deals.

Their family is Muslim; Rieva is Jewish. But strong bonds developed and Rieva became an honored guest at family weddings. As discrimination against Muslims has grown, sometimes the family – and the business – faced harder times. But their friendship/partnership thrived.

And that meant lots of sunglasses. Lots and lots. I tried on dozens of sunglasses, checked myself out in the mirror. Tried on more. And then I found them:

They were perfect! Big and bold, bright and goofy. Just my style, like “wearing purple.” When Rieva and her friend got out of their meeting, I modeled. Everyone laughed and he said, “Take them,” told me the model name was “Dazed and Confused.” Even more perfect.

Those sunglasses were never left behind, never lost, never misplaced. True to form, my daughter hated them. “No one wears pink sunglasses,” she said. I’d point out pink sunglasses to her, and she’d say, “No one over ten wears pink sunglasses.” But I loved them, and they endured.

Until a friend sat on them in the car.

She felt terrible, immediately ran into a store to buy a replacement, which I ungraciously refused. I tried not to pout, but I’m pretty sure pouting symptoms escaped: “I’ll fix them,” I muttered. She was really a star, and I was really an immature shit.

I do repair things. If something’s torn, I mend it. If something’s broken, I try to get the new part. If something’s faded and dirty, I restore it. If I can’t do any of those things, I may even use it all torn, broken, and dirty. But even I know when it’s beyond hope. Those broken sunglasses were beyond hope. (My daughter did her happy dance.)

Not only had the metal hinge on one sidepiece snapped, but the plastic anchoring the hinge was shattered. I took them to opticians’ offices, where everyone looked, shook their heads, and said, “Not possible.” But I hung onto them, not ready to throw them away.

So here I was last week, blogging about eye doctors, preparing to go on vacation to a sunny place, and I decided to try again. I brought the sunglasses to Southside Optical, and instead of the shaking head and “not possible,” I was told to leave them for Chet. A half-hour later, Chet phoned.

He’d fixed them! He showed me how he’d had to re-melt and rebuild the plastic, cannibalize a hinge from somewhere else to replace the broken one. In the process, the other half of the hinge broke so he replaced that one, too. He said he was the only place that had “hot fingers” (or something like that) so he could melt it and fix it.

Chet saved the day, saved the sunglasses, saved it all from a “not possible” fate. Sometimes, the world just works.

Not dark: glow-in-the-dark

I found a New Thing, a really new, New Thing. Sure, it was in the dark, but it was right under our noses, here in Anchorage for five years, and I didn’t even know it was there. What a discovery!

My friend, Jinnie, and her husband, David, invited us to glow-in-the-dark miniature golf. I’ve done neon bowling, but miniature golf was new. I was ready. Six of us were ready. Well, as ready as you can be when you have to weave around industrial buildings to get to the right spot, and you’re sure you’re lost, but then it’s there: Putters Wild. Hidden treasure!

It seemed a little confusing at first: why were there 3-D glasses at the sign-in desk? Oh, it’s indoor, blacklight, 3-D miniature golf! Oh, this is getting interesting. We have to pick out two color balls and decide whether we’ll do the Pacific course first or the Polar 9 holes. We start with Pacific.

Yikes, it’s black – except for the glowing walls, fish scenes, underwater-looking sculpture things. The rims bordering the holes are glowing, seeming like they’re elevated in the air. You’re positive you can roll your ball under them, but it’s all an illusion. It is all so disorienting, you love it.

Picture this: six adults – sort of lost in the dark – bumping into things. Realizing the walls are soft canvas, painted with spectacular 3-D underwater scenes, but that the next time we stumble into them, we might fall through. Putting things down and not knowing where you put them.

And six adults, all of whom have a different understanding of the “rules” of miniature golf: one closest to the hole putts second, one furthest from the hole putts second, putt until your ball goes in, putt in order, keep the same order for each hole, change based on how you did on the last hole. But you’re all in the dark, bumbling into bumpers and incredibly disoriented by the dark and the illumination and the 3-D. And someone has to see in the dark to keep score.

Tim has an orange ball. It looks like it’s floating in the air. Julie can’t figure out how he ever hits it. I feel like someone has put a sack over my head and is steering me from adventure to adventure.

And then we get to Humpback Hoop-Dee-Do, and the ball whirls around and shoots out. I try to take a photo, but I can’t use flash and it’s very dark, and it all glows and so you can’t even imagine how you’ll translate this into painting without blacklight.

At Beluga Bend (but I can’t be sure because I’m keeping notes in the dark), the ball goes in a hole, up an elevator, and then down a glowing path whirling all around before it lands on the green.

And Jinnie says she loves miniature golf so much that just as I’d crossed the country visiting waterparks, she wants to cross the country visiting putt-putts (which I think is a regional thing; what did you call them where you grew up?) And we reach the end of the Front 9 and the joke-telling hole takes our first balls while Tim sticks his head in the Killer Capture. It was that kind of night.

And afterwards, we talk to the new owner, who says, “No, this place has been here for five years.” And you can’t believe it because you’re in your Third Third, ready to relocate from Anchorage because there’s nothing new under the sun here and you always thought of yourself as the kind of person who could sniff out anything that was fun. And look, here was something incredibly fun and you didn’t even know about it!

Something fresh and new – and disorienting and goofy – and suddenly you light up with freshness and newness and having the friends to enjoy it with and you think “what else is out there?”

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.