As I wrote about last week – for SoCS and as a personal reflection – my birthday was on Saturday. We were able to get away for a few hours to the Ithaca area for a walk along the Gorge trail to Taughannock Falls, followed by dinner at Taughannock Farms, where we had a table overlooking Cayuga Lake with some of the trees showing their autumn colors. It was a wonderful break from our recently expanded eldercare responsibilities.
A few photos from our walk:
Today is my 54th birthday. Not usually considered a milestone birthday, but it is a poignant one for me. Fifty-four is the perpetual age of my friend Angie.
Angie called us “October babes.” She was born in 1950 and I in 1960. It didn’t feel like we were ten years apart in age because we had children in the same grades in school, although – bonus for me – she also had a child who was two years ahead of my elder daughter in school, which meant that I had a preview of coming attractions.
We were different in a lot of ways. I’m 5′ 1.5″ and Angie told people she was 5′ 12″ because she thought it sounded less daunting than saying she was six feet. Angie was raised in New York City and thought of our mutual home now as small. I was raised in a New England town of 200, so our current hometown of 20,000 was as large as the city I traveled twenty miles each way to attend high school. She was a trained artist and skilled in decorating and entertaining, with a great and quirky personal style, which included rocking her signature look – overalls. (Trust me – it was amazing.) I am not known for any of those things. She had a great talent for storytelling, complete with different voices and accents for the characters. I am better with the written word than the spoken word. She had a vast array of friends in various circles of the community and was well-known, while I had far fewer friends and was more comfortable working behind the scenes.
We were, however, both personally dedicated to volunteering, and met when I joined a site-based decision-making team at our district middle school. Angie had already been serving as one of three parent representatives and we quickly became friends. She helped me navigate the surprisingly intricate educational world and introduced me to a lot of new people and ideas.
Even though she had many friends, she was near and dear to all of them. She was a wonderful listener and a wise advisor. She was unfailingly kind and generous. The kind of person everyone hopes to have in their life.
Because her husband was a doctor, she had many friends in the medical community, but had a heightened awareness of the possible health calamities that happen to people of various ages. She talked about being worried about turning 50, because she had known so many people who succumbed to medical problems in that decade. When she turned 49, I gave her a box with a penny from every year of her life, which meant that I gave it to her with fifty pennies in it, and the promise to give her a new penny each year on her birthday. I thought already having fifty pennies in the box might help ease her into her next birthday.
Within weeks of her 50th birthday, a nagging cough turned into a diagnosis of stage 3 lung cancer.
It was a shock. Angie had never smoked, but through some combination of factors – growing up in a congested city when vehicles still used leaded gasoline? lung damage from infections? genetic vulnerability? secondhand smoke, as she was growing up before anyone had even thought of smoke-free rooms? – here she was with a frightening diagnosis.
Treatment was aggressive and achieved a remission. There was a big 50+1 birthday party, which served as a charity fundraiser. But, as we all feared, there were metastases that developed and more treatment with some short breaks but then the next problem and the next round of radiation or chemo until finally around the time Angie turned 54, there was nothing else that could be done.
After the new year started, I began searching for a 2004 penny for her box. We knew she would not live to see her 55th birthday and I hoped to get the penny to her while she was still able to realize it, but even the coin shops did not have them available so early in the year. Angie died in March.
When I found the penny later in the spring, I sent it to her husband to complete Angie’s box.
I still miss Angie and honor her memory. One of the ways I do that is by donating to the fund set up in her memory which raises money for scholarships and for the LUNGevity Foundation, which supports both lung cancer research and patients and their families.
Another way is to spread as much love as possible and to dedicate as much time as possible to caring about and serving others.
And for this year, Angie and I will both be 54.
This week’s prompt is “find.”
As I write this, it is not Saturday, but Friday morning. My first thought in reading the prompt was how am I going to find the time to do this and I figured if I didn’t plunge in now, it was not going to get done, so here I am, with the washer running a load of towels, dashing this off before I go back to what I am trying to do today, which is catch up with some of my electronic life, especially my overflowing inbox. 516 emails to deal with, at this second. No doubt it will be more by the time I hit save and schedule.
People who read my blog may recall that my parents had simultaneous health crises this summer. What I haven’t been blogging about is more recent life complications. I am happy to say that my parents, after losing most of August to recovery, are mostly back to their routines and doing well. I spent the first part of September battling a GI thing, but recovered in time to prep for and participate in the Alice Parker tribute at Smith, which I wrote about here and here.
Within hours of my return from Northampton, we got word that my mother-in-law has a lumbar compression fracture due to osteoporosis. The time since then has been a blur of appointments, errands, transport duty, trying to get her to eat and use her medications properly, and rest, and not twist or bend or try to do things that put strain on the back, like changing the bedsheets or picking up the paper from the stoop. There is also a lot of mental energy going to figuring out the next steps, which may include having a neurosurgeon inject a cementing substance into the collapsed vertebra, but first we have to get through an MRI and another consult appointment next week. And a caucus with my brother-in-law, her elder son, who is a physician but who is several hundred miles away.
Meanwhile, I have been able to carve out some time yesterday and today to tackle the backlog on my computer. It’s impossible to get to everything, so I am trying to jettison everything I can bear to, while still attempting to create at least a shadow of my presence here at Top of JC’s Mind, through my personal correspondence, and for my Facebook friends. There are at least half a dozen blog posts that I have in my head that I need to find time to get worked out on screen, unless I suddenly become a stream of consciousness blogger. No, that would be a bad idea. Forgoing editing once a week is one thing. All the time? Shudder…
And, as you read this on Saturday, I will be “celebrating” my birthday. Under the circumstances, original plans have been pared down and even those are vague, pending seeing how today goes for my mother-in-law and what she is like in the morning. At this point, I’m hoping to be able to at least have dinner out with enough notice that we can wrangle an early dinner reservation at a fine dining type of place. If push comes to shove, we can go impromptu, even if it means picking up a wood-fired brick-oven pizza and eating it with my husband at the kitchen table. Maybe we can put a candle in it….
519 emails…
Badge by Doobster @Mindful Digressions
This post is part of Linda’s Stream of Consciousness Saturdays. Please join us! Visit http://lindaghill.com/2014/10/03/the-friday-reminder-and-prompt-for-socs-october-414/ to find out how.
Emily J has been doing a great series of posts based on Rosemarie Tong’s book on the different schools of feminist thought. This post is on ecofeminism. I find that I am a hybrid feminist and ecofeminism is one component of that.
“Kindness is a language that the deaf can hear and the blind can see.”
– Mark Twain
Join in Linda’s One-Liner Wednesday: http://lindaghill.wordpress.com/2014/10/01/one-liner-wednesday-swingin/
Thanks to Emily for writing about this book. I admit that it continues to bother me that homemaking is not considered as contributing to the economy/society, unless you are paying someone else to do the work. I hope to read this book someday.
This is the first of what I hope will be several followups to the Smith College Alumnae Chorus celebration of Alice Parker ’47 which took place on September 21. I thought it best to begin with a post concentrating on Alice Parker and her music.
The Alumnae Chorus sang two sets of Miss Parker’s compositions, Three Seas, with three poems by Emily Dickinson as texts, and Incantations, with four poems by Elinor Wylie. We also sang a Parker arrangement of the spiritual “Come On Up.” Miss Parker conducted her pieces in the concert, although we were able to rehearse with her only on Friday afternoon and Sunday morning.
The music was challenging, especially under the circumstances, with each member of the chorus learning the pieces on her own before coming together to have everything performance ready in under 48 hours. (We also prepared three Ralph Vaughan Williams settings of English folk songs, which were conducted by Jonathan Hirsh, the current Smith Glee Club director.) I knew there would be mistakes in the concert, but the performance was successful because we were able to communicate the poetry, music, and mood to the audience. We were relieved to hear Miss Parker reminds us several times during rehearsal that there is no such thing as a perfect performance.
The best part of the experience of working with Miss Parker was hearing her talk about poetry, her process as a composer, and her life. She read the poems to us in rehearsal – and to the audience in the concert, relishing not only the meaning conveyed but also the sounds of the vowels and consonants tumbling along one after the other. She talked about how poems in English fall into rhythms in groups of twos and threes, which results in so much of her music being written in 5 or 7 (3+2 or 3+2+2) to follow the word rhythm. Miss Parker works only on commission, so she always has a specific group for which she is writing and a deadline to deliver the score. She explained that once she has chosen the texts, she reads them aloud over and over and, as she begins to compose the melody for the text, sings and dances the poems, filling in the harmony and counterpoint in her head. She wants the music to be fluid and alive as long as possible, only committing it to paper when the deadline is looming. She said, “The page is nothing but a prison for music.” I was so struck by that statement that I hurriedly wrote it down. It will always remind me that music is alive and not the static black-on-white notation that we struggle to replicate.
Miss Parker also told us stories from her life, especially her famous association with Robert Shaw, with whom she collaborated on many arrangements before taking on solo assignments from him. The director of the Binghamton University Chorus, with which I have sung for years, also worked with Mr. Shaw and loves to tell stories about him, so it was fun to hear stories about him from a different perspective.
What was most heartening was seeing a woman born in 1925, still engaged in creative work and still engaged with family, friends, community, and her alma mater. Should we all be so blessed.
Last night, we went to see a production of Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods at our local professional theater. “We” equals me, my spouse, and my parents. My mother-in-law was to have joined us, but she is having difficulties with her back and couldn’t sit for such a long performance.
Into the Woods is one of my favorite musicals. I find the interwoven fairy tale adaptation fascinating and love Sondheim’s ability to pack both wit and depth of feeling into the lyrics, which move the plot along even more than the spoken dialogue. I also have a longstanding relationship with the musical because it was a favorite of my daughters when they were young. We watched it many times through a recording of the original (1988) Broadway cast. For quite a while, I only let our younger daughter see the first act, which ends with the somewhat expected “happy ever after” vibe, shielding her from the much darker second act, until her four-years-older sister told her what happened and my shielding tactic became moot.
I enjoyed last night’s performance because the brilliance of Sondheim and James Lapine, who wrote the book, shines through. I especially enjoyed the performances of CInderella, the Baker’s Wife, and Little Red Ridinghood and the singing voices of the two Princes. Some of the other performers were occasionally flummoxed by Sondheim’s complex melodies, although those in the audience who have not heard the music over and over might not have realized it.
My major disappointments were with the technical aspects. The lighting was often too dark – and, yes, I get the whole being-in-the-woods thing, but it would have been better to use dappled lighting to give the illusion of moonlight through trees, rather than just not having enough light to see the actors. There was also a gaping hole in the back wall of the set, which was only used in one scene in the second act. It was very distracting to look at it for two and half hours when it was so little used. The stage could also have used some pitch, as quite a few songs took place sitting on the stage; alternatively, the actors could have been placed more upstage to make them more visible to those in the back rows. (The seating is cabaret style, so there aren’t many rows, but each row is deep.)
I was also disappointed with the costuming. Many of the costumes were too drab. A number of them were ill-fitting, especially too tight.
The theater company is in the midst of a change in leadership. I wonder if some of the technical problems are the loss of a long-time team experienced with this theater, which was once a storehouse for apples. It is a tricky space in which to work and the new team may be groping a bit as they adjust to its idiosyncracies.
One of the surprises last night was of a more personal nature. I found that the second act’s deaths of a number of mothers of varying ages hit me hard. As I have said, I know the play well, so I knew what was coming, but I found myself tearing up as the losses mounted. Sitting beside my mother, who had a heart attack on July 31st, missing my mother-in-law who is suffering from osteoporosis, having spoken earlier this week with a friend who recently lost her mother, and anticipating the upcoming birthday of a friend who died much too young nine years ago, my heart was aching more than usual in reacting to the losses in the play.
The loss of a mother – at whatever age – represents its own brand of pain and even fictional losses on stage can echo or foreshadow that pain in our own lives.
We just found out that our firstborn daughter and her husband will be visiting from Hawai’i for Thanksgiving week. This will be their first visit since Christmas 2011, when we were happy witnesses to a Christmas morning marriage proposal. To make this visit even better, our secondborn daughter will be home all that week on break from her first semester of graduate school. So, YAY! Thanksgiving with our daughters and son-in-law and the three grandparents will be soul-warming and prefect, even if the turkey is slow to cook or the pies don’t come out perfectly.
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Linda’s Stream of Consciousness Saturday prompt was use of ordinal numbers. Please join us! Details here: http://lindaghill.wordpress.com/2014/09/26/the-friday-reminder-and-prompt-for-socs-september-2714/
Badge by Doobster @ Mindful Digressions
The magnetic force of hope – Global Sisters Report.
I had to re-blog this post from the Nuns on the Bus Tour on Sister Simone Campbell’s acceptance of the Pacem in Terris Award. She is such a powerful advocate for peace and the common good.
Joanne Corey 