“The Dog” Journal
Welcome to the Dog Journal, a blog where I periodically share my best finds for taming those puppies that gnaw at your planner.
Could be a quick time management tip, a smell-the-flowers moment, a comment overheard on the elevator. Whatever the inspiration, I hope you’ll blog right along with me by commenting and sharing your tips and stories for taming an overbooked life.
Baby Laptop. Really?
With Christmas coming soon and the weather too rainy for the playground, I decided to invade Toys R Us this past weekend with my two-year-old granddaughter, Taylor.
“Why not let her test the toys and see what really appeals to her?” was the theory. It turned out to be a good one because it turns out that Taylor is not as enamored with the Fisher Price “Sing a Ma Jigs” as the online reviewers were. In fact, she was much more taken with a $2.00 violet vinyl ball.
But the real surprise of the trip was my discovery that toddlers now have laptops. Or can have them if there’s a willing buyer. “My Own Leaptop” comes with a USB cable which magically – only a two-year-old could understand how – would let her personalize the entire set-up to receive e-mails from grandma. She can also do blog posts of some kind, apparently with an electronic dog (sold separately) and create her own playlists. I don’t even have my own playlists.
I think soon she will be writing my blog posts, which is really fine since I am quite far behind. But maybe she won’t have time because she will also be pressing letters to learn the alphabet and common facts about animals. Or, more likely, playing with the $2.00 ball she was actually interested in. Or (don’t tell…I found this on my own) reading the Peter Rabbit book that lets her push a button and hear Peter eating the carrots in Mr. McGregor’s garden.
The real question is whether a two-year-old who already has three cell phones needs a laptop or should simply keep practicing with that vinyl ball. I think I know the answer.
What’s Your Coffee Story?
Once a week, I get together with writing friends for a free-write session. We give ourselves ten minutes or so on each chosen topic and write without stopping. Then, unless we’re so mortified by what we came up with that we pass (and this has not yet happened; we’re very brave), we read what we came up with.
Yesterday, the topic was coffee, and the stories were really percolating. Seems we love it or hate it, have childhood stories to explain it, and clothing stains to prove it. The only thing I cannot drink coffee with is pizza.
T.S. Eliot wrote, “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.” What’s your relationship with coffee? And what does it say about your life?
Biting Tale is Winner
In my June 2011 e-newsletter, Balancing Tips, I ran a contest in which I solicited reader stories of how humor had helped them through a time of loss. My personal favorite came from a Worthington, OH woman, Joan Nienkirchen, under the title “Stories Dying To Be Told,” which she quickly struck through and retitled “Dying Stories To Be Told.”
Among her stories, this “biting tale” in three parts from Joan is my personal favorite. It shows how her mom Peg held on to her girlhood feistiness even at the end, when she was dying of cancer. Joan will also receive a copy of Chicken Soup For The Soul: Grieving and Recovery.
Once, when Mom was just a girl, a neighbor came up to her with her crying son in tow.
“Margaret, you bit Johnny!” she accused.
“No I didn’t”.
“Oh, yes you did.”
“Let me see it.”
The angry mother held out poor Johnny’s arm.
“Oh, no,” Mom said. “When I bite it looks like this!” She chomped down, right beside the bite mark, and Johnny wailed. It was undeniable; her bite was completely different.
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After oh-so-many years of setting a good example to her children, we discovered she never did like her vegetables. When the last of her children had left home, she happily stopped eating them. She also moved to a very little apartment that didn’t require too much cleaning. And ten years later, she proudly proclaimed her oven was “still a virgin.”
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Toward the end, we, her children, took turns flying into St. Louis, each to spend a week tending to her needs. I was so excited to have my turn. I was relieving my sister, Cathy, who is a stickler for rules. The entire week she was there, she had insisted Mom eat all her vegetables! Didn’t she know how Mom felt about vegetables? I was outraged and was determined she would have frozen custard for dinner every night.
Well, Mom was quite ill when I arrived. They had given her a morphine pill earlier that day and would continue until the end. Mom wouldn’t be talking. Mom wouldn’t be eating any frozen custard. Still, I felt like I could save her from the difficulty of it all.
Cathy dutifully showed me the required maintenance procedures. When it came time to give Mom her medicine, Cathy turned to me and said,
“She can hear everything we say.”
I understood. We needn’t raise our voices, just talk, she’ll understand. Imagine my surprise when Cathy then turned to Mom and announced quite loudly,
“We’re going to give you your pill now, Mom.”
I stifled a laugh. Cathy dropped the tiny white pill into her mouth.
Oh, oh, a glitch. The pill landed under Mom’s tongue, and Cathy did not want it there. So, very carefully, she reached her finger into Mom’s mouth, hooked it under the pill, started to raise it out, and chomp, Mom bit down on her finger!
I could barely contain myself. This was Mom, speaking the same language as the little girl who did not like being accused of biting Johnny so long ago. I never was as bold as that little girl, but that night, I loved her.
Copyright 2011 Joan Nienkirchen
Live Art Quilt Inspiring
Until this afternoon, I’d never really considered the possibility of making a quilt of life stories. But a live art performance of personal monologues by a group called Howling At The Moon changed all that.
Rather than each creating yards and yards of fabric by writing a longer personal memoirs, the Howling women – all over 60 – simply brought their own patches of life to the stage and allowed the common rhythms of their stories to stitch together a picture larger than any one of them might have separately envisioned.
The fragments together created a view of female aging – varying perspectives on men and widowhood, on aloneness and busy-ness, exercise and weight-watching, and most soberly, wariness of dementia, losing control, and being “taken.”
Inspiring, this piecing together. And reflective of the way we as women collaborate and connect over the course of our lives. For those lucky enough to live right here in Columbus, OH, the Howling women will train other writers, who can occasionally appear with them as guests, at a Lifewriting Workshop July 10, details online.
If you’re a woman of a certain age, It’s bound to enrich your balancing act.
