Found it!

I found it!

I found a whole ton of things! Lost things are popping up all over! I am on an incredible roll!

When too many things need to be found, the frustration eventually erupts into a war on crap de-cluttering. So I went to my art desk, saw an old, unfinished project I wasn’t interested in any more, and picked up the papers to recycle. Guess what was underneath?

The broken piece of the glass mobile! And I still had the glue and the broken mobile. All required pieces accounted for! Hooray!

So that freed me to stroll down another mental tangent. When Sophie graduated from high school and had her senior picture taken, I showed her mine. It was startling how much we looked alike (and I’ve always felt she looked exclusively like her father). So recently I came across my mother’s graduation photo, and I thought I’d line them up next to each other.

You know what that means: I have to have three things in the same place at the same time. That’s a challenge. First, I had to find my high school photo. I pulled out the carton of saved memories (yes, the same one that housed my Tab Hunter novel that my mother did not throw away).

Sitting right on top was the marionette! The marionette without shoes. And I still had the shoe. A shoe. (I actually believe one was thrown out many years ago in one of the earlier iterations of this recurring lost-and-found story.) So I put the shoe in the bag with Yvette, the Marionette, and they will lie there together, resisting de-cluttering. At least, when they go, they’ll go together – minus one shoe.

But still no senior class photo.

This saga requires another mental tangent. Two weeks ago, out of the blue, I heard from Jim, a former freshman when I was an R.A. in his dorm. We hadn’t crossed paths in forty years, but he’d discovered that Sophie and his son had shared the same freshman dorm.

A few years ago, when Jim’s class of freshmen were having a reunion, I wanted to send them the posters I had made to welcome them to college. I’d arranged all their senior pictures in a floor plan I made of the dorm, roommates with roommates. But, of course, I couldn’t find the posters….

So here I am now, looking for my own senior picture. Under the Tab Hunter carton, I discover another carton. I open it up, and right on top are the dorm posters! Jim won’t have another reunion for three years, but I’m putting the posters in the mail today. I can’t be trusted to find them again three years from now.

Eventually, in that carton, I find my senior photo. Whew! Then I have to find Sophie’s, but that should be easy. Well, not quite. She tells me over the phone that I’d picked the wrong one, she describes another photo. I’m very confused, but I have a photo that will work (although not as dramatically as I remember). This is us:

Distracted now by this box, I find all sorts of stuff. One of them is a newspaper clipping from 1972 from the local newspaper in my hometown, The Long-Islander. My high school social studies teacher, Mrs. Angela P. Ryan, had edited a book and noted she was inspired by my graduation speech, which she quoted. I remember trying once to find the book on Interlibrary Loan, and I remember trying to find her; but I never had any luck. I decided to try again.

This time, the Internet yielded a home address, and I’ve written her a letter.

If my luck holds – and some amazing alignment of the stars is putting things in their places in my universe – then I may find Mrs. Ryan, too.

A broken piece of glass, a shoe-less marionette, an old dormitory poster, a senior class photo, and an address – together, they feel like a triumphant victory of Order over Chaos. What was lost is found, what was broken is restored, what was forgotten is remembered. Now – in this very moment – my world feels so stable and organized and meant-to-be; I must be in my right spot, too.

An In-Home Treasure Hunt

A long time ago, I built a marionette. She hung out in a plastic bag in some not-yet-de-cluttered box, but she lost a shoe. Every now and then, the shoe would turn up, but then I wouldn’t remember which box held the marionette. Thinking they were fated never to manifest at the same time, I finally threw the shoe out. Then, during my recent de-cluttering binge in the laundry room, I know I considered tossing the marionette. I looked her in the eye and evaluated whether she gave me joy. But did I throw her out? That is the question because – you guessed it – a shoe has turned up!

When de-cluttering runs up against memory lapse, it’s unclear whether something is really gone or I-just-can’t-remember-where-I-put-it. I am sure the marionette will turn up as soon as I lose contact with the shoe.

A few years ago, my sister and I took a road trip to Corning, New York, where I made this glass mobile. Except that it doesn’t really look like that because as I was hanging it, I crashed into the window and broke the third glass strip.

I put the broken piece aside, awaiting repair.

Do you have things “awaiting repair”? Do you have a set location for items in limbo? I do not. The broken piece sat on the lamp stand for a year or so.

But then I moved it to a safer location because I knew I would repair it eventually.

I have no idea where that safer location is.

It’s all rather timely because last August, when my sisters and I went on a road trip, we encountered a glass artist. I talked with her about repairing my mobile, and she gave me a tube of E6000 to use. Of course, now I have to re-find the broken piece.

I have checked out all my secret stash locations, my pending piles, my do-something-with-it-someday spots. I checked the little decorative boxes that sit on the dresser. No luck. I can’t find the broken piece anywhere.

But then I discovered another decorative box downstairs – my raven box – hidden in what I guess is now a really secret spot.

When I opened that box, I discovered my chunk of the Berlin Wall and the scrap of Christo’s wrapping of the Reichstag from my sister! Yes, the very same items I’d assumed were inside the little, decorative, heart-shaped, wooden box upstairs when it was stolen two years ago and which I wrote about here!

Why do I feel like my house is a scavenger hunt venue? Or some escape room with elusive clues? Why do things-that-go-together (broken piece and glue, marionette and shoe) go their separate ways in my house? And you’re probably wondering, What’s with all the little boxes and hiding spots?

Note: they do not start out to be hidden. It’s just that in my world, everything has an assigned place; fabric goes in the fabric place, art supplies in the art area, books on the bookshelf. But when something is not easily categorized, it doesn’t own a designated home. Where would a chunk of Berlin Wall, a broken glass piece, and a marionette shoe belong?

Anyhow, despite all this treasure hunting in my house, there are now two things I don’t know:

1. What was in the little heart-shaped wooden box that was stolen two years ago? (I’m guessing it was rocks. Rocks belong in my fancy boxes. Jewelry belongs in old, rumpled plastic bags tossed somewhere else. Personal priorities.)
   
2. The Big, Still-Unanswered Question: Where is the broken glass piece from the mobile???

What's your 'resting face'?

My writing pipeline got clogged.

I’d written a piece for Valentine’s Day, and I balked at posting it. I was saying nice things about Tim, about Third Third revelations and appreciation of marriage; and it just seemed so … smug. Even though I admitted to “explosions, terrible ‘discussions,’ voiced regrets, shouted furies, quiet hopelessness,” it just seemed so … self-congratulatory. Like, hooray, we’ve made it!

But then I felt bad about putting aside a post that was so nice to my husband (since “nice” is not an adjective I really own); so I just … ran aground. That stalled post was blocking all alternative and future posts.

Combine that with winning a free two-month trial of Team Training at my athletic club and my discovering how utterly exhausting fitness can be. Basically, I ran around the room zipping through exercises that involved things like kettle balls and medicine balls and sliders for my feet. And big long ropes and elastic stretchy things and hanging from the ceiling. Not to mention jumping up and down and squatting for interminable periods of time. After all that, swimming a mile seemed like a rest day.

I was comatose by 7, asleep by 9.

We’d been on vacation and saw relatives, alligators, and manatees. In Epcot Center, in record-breaking rain, Sophie and I were on Spaceship Earth and somewhere along the line, they took photos of us. Afterwards, cartoon characters showed up in a video with our faces. Sophie’s face was pleasant and smiling. Mine was scowling.

“How’d you do that? Did you know when they were taking our photo? How come mine is so grumpy?”

“I just have a better resting face.”

“Resting face? Who ever heard of a resting face? Do people have resting faces?!?”

Well, I guess they do. And what I thought illustrated curiosity on my face actually looks like confusion if you’re generous and pissed-off if you’re accurate.

So then I had to practice a better resting face. Which is impossible while hauling kettle balls and medicine balls and pushing up. Or just sitting around fretting about that bit-of-love blocking my blog.

Someday, I’ll tell you about the valentines my husband has hidden around the house for me for thirty years, but right now, I’m just going to borrow a little quote from one of my favorite authors, David Grossman. In Someone to Run With, he describes the rotten underworld of the city, but then the wise woman of the novel, Leah, says this:

“You need a man with a big hand,” Leah pronounced. “You know why?” 


“Why?” She knew she would now be painted a picture. 


“Someone who will stand with his hand up, open, strong, steady – like the Statue of Liberty, but without that ice-cream cone she’s holding – only his hand, open, in the air. And then” – Leah raised her square, rough, nail-bitten hand and moved it gently from side to side, like a flying bird – “even from far away, from any place in the world, you’d see that hand and know you had a place to land and rest.”

That is my husband’s hand. And when I think on it, my resting face smiles.

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.

The Public Restroom: A Technological Challenge (Take 2)

I used the restroom in the new wing at the Anchorage Museum yesterday. It was all very sleek and design-y, only brushed metal fixtures, totally clean and spiffy. A thrilling 10 on my personal Public Restroom Rating Scale. I did my business and washed my hands. With soap. From a soap dispenser recognizable as a soap dispenser.

But then I was stumped: how to dry my hands?

Nowhere in all that sleekness and stone walls and minimalism was anything that resembled towels or air. I should have been warned by the motion detector light when I entered: I was entering a Smart Restroom. Actually, a Smart Inclusive (private stall) Restroom that even signaled vacancy:

I’ve had my challenges with restroom technology, chronicled here. But this was going so well: the water turned on, and the soap dispenser fairly shouted normalcy. There were even two hooks on the restroom door because we have purses and we have coats and two hooks is such a convenience and do you see why I’d give it a 10? (And, of course, the two hooks were Museum quality design.)

Behind the toilet, there was a steel plate with some kind of sensor-thing named Toto. Toto flushed the toilet. See what I mean by sleek?

Other than the motion detector for the light, there was nothing else on the smooth, stone-like walls.

I left my private Inclusive Restroom and walked out into a neighboring Inclusive Restroom, thinking maybe mine was the only one missing the hand-drying thing. Nope. It looked the same.

I took my wet hands out to the security guard and asked, “How do we dry our hands?” He said I had to hold my hands under the faucet arms.

Now, you have to tell me: would you have guessed where to dry your hands?

And in case you think the difficulty is not clear by my drawing, I’m going to go so far as to include a photograph. See? (Tim says it looks like a plane landing on the sink.) I’m just proud of myself that I didn’t think the arms were handles to regulate hot and cold.

I held my hands under the faucet arms, and a good blast of air dried them right off. But I challenge anyone – of any age, any Third of their lives – to enter that restroom cold and discover the dryer. Personally, I’d need a little sticker on the arms saying, “Dry hands under here,” but I’d guess that would disrupt the design.

Either that or I could have a lot of fun counting how many people come out shaking wet hands.

A New and Better Old Thing

In my Quest for New-ness to keep from going stale, sometimes I end up with an Old Thing Renewed. Like swimming.

It started with a free upgraded month from the athletic club, an upgrade that would get me into the clubs with pools. So while this possibility existed all along, I always concentrated on “it’ll mess up my hair color” or “my skin won’t be able to handle both winter and chlorine” or “it’ll be too crowded.” Negativity can really take hold, but in this case, the mere extra of “winning” this free month sent me into the pool.

And when I took that first plunge and swam across the pool, I felt welcomed into the water. I don’t know how to describe it except that water is my element. It relieves me of the burdens of land.

Land is my klutzy place. Land is where tree roots and cracks in  the sidewalk lie in wait to grab me. Land is where I can fall on my head (and this includes ice because when it’s hard, I count it as land, not water). Yes, I know I run, but I run vigilantly, looking at my feet and the hazards awaiting them.

This is how I start a run: “Grunt, grunt, get going. Creak, creak, get a rhythm. Just go, it’ll get better,” and it does. Eventually. After a few miles.

This is how I enter the water: “Ahhhhhh….”

How did I forget this? I don’t know when I first learned to swim, because I seem to have always done it. When the town pool was built in our town, my family got season passes. We’d spend the day at the pool, go home to eat supper, and return to the pool afterwards with my father. I even did synchronized swimming for a while.

Yes, the same girl who suffered through calisthenics in high school. You know “calisthenics” – the ’60s version of Jazzercise or aerobics or Zumba – the thing that involves rights and lefts and choreography. The phys ed teacher would start by saying, “Let’s begin. Will someone take Barbara aside and work with her?”

This same land klutz did synchronized swimming!

So now I’m in the pool again, doing laps. I count odd numbers out and even numbers back in. Eventually, after a couple of trips to the pool, I reach my ¾ of a mile length: 54 lengths of the pool or 27 laps. I get out. It’s where I always stop, where I have always stopped. ¾ of a mile.

And then one day, I decide to do 56 lengths. I have finished 54 and another out-and-back doesn’t seem so earth-shaking, so I do it.

The next day, I do 60. Then I calculate that if I did 63, and that’s divisible by 9 (just like 72), it would mean I had done 7/8 of a mile. Someone said I must have an active imagination to be able to go back and forth over and over again, and I told her I do math problems. I calculate the percentages of my laps, so figuring out – by ninths – is just one of my little games.

And then it occurred to me: I could swim a mile. I could just keep on swimming past what-I-had-always-done-and-stopped-at, and I could swim a whole mile.

So I did.

I am in my Third Third, and I now swim a mile at a time. Three or four times a week.

My hair is fading terribly (but at least the color is no longer dripping down my neck as I get out of the pool). My body takes gallons of lotion so I don’t itch, and I’m pretty sure the dark circles under my eyes have gotten worse as the swim goggles dig in right there.

But I learned a Big New Thing: I learned that many of the things I carry around are self-imposed limits. I stopped myself at ¾ of a mile my whole life. I’m not sure why, but I think it had to do with having to be somewhere, not having enough time, or just habit. But now, in my Third Third, I have the time. I just had to break my head out of its no-time-to-do-it place and consider the option to … pass that barrier.

This is mildly earth-shaking for me: what other limits are self-imposed? I think of myself as someone who likes challenges, tackles tough things, but obviously, I never swam a mile. Before.

Now I do.

We all fall down...

I fell down and hit my head.

Now I bet you’re thinking: Age-Related. You’re not thinking klutzy-related or athletic enterprise or slapstick or ha,ha,ha or so-what-else-is-new. You’re thinking uh, oh, fragility, weakness, elderly.

Argh!

So when the little toddler on ice skates got confused and bumped around and came backwards at me, I knew I was in trouble. I’m not a hockey player; I can’t turn on a dime. First skate of the season, I’m a Tin Man on skates. So I went down backwards and my head slammed into the ice.

Going down on ice takes your breath away. Slamming your head takes that up many, many notches. I’m pretty sure I panicked inside, and when I realized my jaw didn’t seem to fit in my head any more, I was … distressed.

Suddenly, people were all around me: “Do you need an EMT? Do you want us to call 911? Do you want to go to the hospital?” Tim and Sophie walked me off the skating oval, and I sat on an upside-down bucket. Sophie was worried, “You didn’t cry in Florida.”

“When was I in Florida?” (Was I crying now?)

“Typhoon Lagoon.” Oh, that’s right, I’d cracked my head before going down a water slide while we were on the National Waterpark Tour. I don’t remember that hurting. I just remember the blood everywhere. When I got to the bottom, 10-year-old Sophie exclaimed, “Mommy, all your hair dye came out all at once.”

So Friday, Sophie insisted she had to take my hat off and see if my head was bleeding. It wasn’t. She was relieved. I said, “Y’know what’s really killing me? That everyone here at this whole big Winter Solstice event is probably saying, ‘Did you hear about the old lady that fell?’”

I was on a plane a year or so ago and got up to stand in line for the restroom. Next thing I knew, I was lying on the floor and the flight attendants were telling me to stay there. Then they announced for any health professional onboard to come to the rear of the plane. It was all very confusing since no one else was required to get on the floor, just me.

Since then, I have learned that if you get up too fast from an airplane seat, you can faint. I guess I took down the flight attendant’s coffee pot with me. But it was the look on their faces that said not anyone can faint; only old, frail, infirm, elderly people faint. And then it’s so tragic.

When you’re 20 years old and you faint – I have low blood pressure, I’ve fainted my whole life – you get up, laugh, and people make jokes. They tell you how funny it was.

Now they look at me with Concern. I’m on the downhill slide to bedridden.

Am I being too sensitive? Do you know what I’m describing? Do we look … pitiable … if we stumble and fall?

Now, I must admit, the thing that sticks with me most about the whole event was a very kind woman named Mary (whom I’d met over at the hot chocolate station earlier). Mary stood next to me and said, “Relax into your body and let it tell you what it needs” or something like that which was incredibly calming and true, and I did it. I’d guess Mary was in her Third Third, too.

Very quickly, the daughter-with-an-iPhone looked into my eyes to make sure my pupils were the same size. When we got home, she looked at me again. She was worried because there were dark circles under my eyes, and that’s A Sign. “Or are those dark circles always there? It’s not blood pooling, is it?”

This is why we have children.

Then she said, “I just don’t want you to be a Natasha Richardson story! She hit her head, came home, hung out with her family, and died later. Do you have a headache?”

“What do you mean ‘hung out’!?! Like she was fine and then she died?”

“Only because she had a headache later.”

“But if I take Tylenol, will that mask the killer headache I might have?!?”

“Don’t worry. We’re watching to see if you deteriorate.”

This is why we have children.

Okay, it’s days later. It still hurts to brush my hair over the spot, and my jaw can’t tackle a bagel, but I haven’t deteriorated.

Hooray, I have not deteriorated!