"Kay, This One's For Gabby

I gleaned the title of today's blog from the introduction to Israel Kamakawiwo'ole’s haunting rendition of Over the Rainbow from his album Facing Future. If you are the last person left on this earth who doesn’t own a recording of this song, I suggest you get it, now. You’ll thank me. Anyhoo, today is my daughter Gabby’s birthday (coincidentally it is also Israel’s) and so, “This one’s for Gabby”.

As the title and first paragraph and almost all of my blogs would indicate, I am profoundly moved by music. In fact, and I think I have mentioned this before, I would like my life to be a musical. This week, in the days leading up to my daughter’s fourteenth birthday, that musical would be Mama Mia and the song "Slipping Through My Fingers". Cut to scene of mother singing plaintively,

Schoolbag in hand, she leaves home in the early morning

Waving goodbye with an absent-minded smile

I watch her go with a surge of that well-known sadness

And I have to sit down for a while

The feeling that I'm losing her forever

And without really entering her world

I'm glad whenever I can share her laughter

That funny little girl

I might continue copying these lyrics if it wasn’t so difficult to type through the tears. And I think you get the idea. I first fell in love with this song when I went to see the play Mama Mia in 2000. My girls were only four and two years old at the time but I immediately latched on, with a sort of maniacal sentimentality, to the feeling of desperate longing of the mother who had watched her daughter grow away. I told my sister, who was kindly babysitting my daughters (one of whom had a nasty fever that night) about the song when I got home from the play. I had gotten a cd and played it for her and cried. Over the years it has become a running joke, a sort of code word to halt a slide into obsessing over the passage of time. She’ll belt out “Slipping through my fingaaaaaas.” in a vaudevillian mockery of my maudlin hysteria and somehow that helps bring me back from the brink of said hysteria.

Fast forward ten years and my four year old is, indeed, slipping through my fingers. I remember being fourteen. I’m not ready for her to negotiate her first kiss via Truth or Dare on the back of a bus to Great Adventure. I’m not ready for her to go to high school. I’m not ready for her start disdaining me and hate the way my breath smells. I’m not ready for her to stop constantly trying to hold hands with me with her sweaty meat paws. I’m not ready.

Slipping through my fingers all the time

I try to capture every minute

The feeling in it

Slipping through my fingers all the time

Do I really see what's in her mind

Each time I think I'm close to knowing

She keeps on growing

Slipping through my fingers all the time

She’s been sick for a week and while it was terrible to worry over each successive day of over 102 fever, there was something horribly comforting about having her with me on the couch for an entire week. The week before, her sister was home with a similar virus and I greedily devoured that time as well. For two weeks, I got to hold back the advancing tide of time and separation with each of my girls. Perhaps writing it out loud sounds weird. It is a weird paradox. So weird that when I was watching the Sixth Sense with my kids the other day and we got to the part with the whack-o murdering Munchausen-by-proxy mom, I thought, “maybe that loon started out just wanting to halt time.”

Sleep in our eyes, her and me at the breakfast table

Barely awake, I let precious time go by

Then when she's gone there's that odd melancholy feeling

And a sense of guilt I can't deny

What happened to the wonderful adventures

The places I had planned for us to go

(Slipping through my fingers all the time)

Well, some of that we did but most we didn't

And why I just don't know

I almost deleted that last bit about the Munchausen lady because nobody wants to be even remotely associated with a lunatic. But I believe the fleeting seed of a thought conveys the struggle between wanting to hold on to your kids forever and rejoicing in watching them blossom into incredible, strong, talented, beautiful adults. While my most selfish nature might want to keep Gabriella to myself, the part of me that loves her most can’t wait to see the places she’ll go, the people she’ll meet, the wonders she’ll do.

So, happy Birthday my love, enjoy being fourteen and this one’s for you Gabby:

Haints and Faeries

The God I know is desperate to be in a relationship with His children. When we aren’t in a relationship, He will go to any lengths to build a bridge across the chasm that separates us. On a grand scale, the whole story of Jesus, the Son of God, also God, lowering Himself to be the helpless human baby of a poor woman who undoubtedly had a bad reputation for her “virgin birth”, a lowly carpenter, a prophet of sometimes ill-repute: all just to eventually face humiliation and death so that He might paradoxically become the escape from sin and death for those who choose Him, is an unfathomable demonstration of that desire for relationship. On a smaller scale, the God I know makes an effort to cross the chasm on a minute by minute basis. He calls out to His children on just the level that we can understand. If people would just open their ears, they would hear the whispers or shouts from the God they thought long dead.

In my case, God often catches me in the garden. There, He has taught me as many lessons as are species of plants in my humble patch of land. Why does God meet me in the garden? Because I am an excellent gardener? On the contrary, I am a shamefully poor gardener. I have no innate gift for gardening. My garden is overrun with gophers, deer, a multitude of blights, nutrient poor, hard, constricting, clay soil and an incomplete and faulty watering system. The problems I have listed are just the highlights in a never ending litany of flaws that plague me in the garden. Basically, my garden is a undeniable metaphor for my base nature. I am overrun with blights I wish I could conquer: anger, pride, laziness, lack of perseverance. The soil of my heart is naturally claylike, desiring to squeeze out the root of human relationship in almost all its forms. My poor watering system is probably a good representation of my inconsistency in maintaining discipline in my own life. And so the garden is where I learn about me.

I quite enjoyed the book,The Shack. Thanks to CS Lewis, I am a lifelong fan of the magical, supernatural journey. On the journey through The Shack, the part that I liked the most was the representation of the Holy Spirit as a delicate asian woman who worked the garden with expert care. I found the use of a big black woman as the God figure a little hackneyed but the Madame Butterfly of the Holy Spirit was a wonderful visual tool for me, given the myriad lessons I have learned in the garden of my heart and my own back yard in tandem parallel.

As I read back, this might seem like theological mumbo jumbo, what John Steinbeck described in East of Eden as a mixture of “haints and faeries and Old Testament Jehovah” (my editrice Jessica helped me remember this quote better), so let me give a concrete example of how God has spoken to me recently in my garden. In 1997, when my husband and I first started renting the home that we would eventually buy, there were three well-established wisteria plants at the corners of the front facade of our home. The owner before us was a botanist who had planted and trained the vine around the eaves of our house. Every year, around Easter, the wisteria bloom in a one-time pale lilac riot of hanging bunches. As I walk out my front door, the scent is, literally, heavenly. Each year, this miracle of rebirth reminds me of grace. For me, the definition of grace is undeserved favor and the wisteria are the physical manifestation of this grace. I didn’t plant those plants, I didn’t train them, I don’t even actively have to water them because they are fully established. I have never fed these plants, not once. The only thing I have ever contributed to the existence of this gracious bounty is some severe pruning three or four times a year. Every year, the blooms say from God, “Meghan, look at what you’ve been given; not because you’ve worked hard for it, not because you earned it. Not through anything you’ve ever done do these blossoms bloom and yet here they are.” Grace, hanging from the doorway of my home.

This year has brought some different weather patterns to the bay area. It was unseasonably warm around February which provoked my wisteria to poke her delicate blooms out in an untimely dare. Just as the tender petals began to hope against hope, a violent wind storm came and stripped the vines bare. I walked out one morning to the broken remnants of flower buds all over my driveway and deck, fragile purple grey corpses everywhere. This might sound dramatic to the reader, but, as I said, the wisteria have come to signify a dialogue of grace between God and me. What could this loss signify? As I mentioned, the wisteria only has one full, lush bloom every year. There are some stragglers that mix in with the foliage over the rest of the season, but the riot of grace only comes once.

I was sad but figured that God had a different way He wanted to speak to me this year. After all, He doesn’t stand on ceremony and tradition and sometimes He comes at me in a totally different way so that I can hear Him new and fresh. Then one day, right before Easter, I saw new buds peeking out. I was going to blog about my “Easter Wisteria Miracle” because I was so excited about this “second chance” that the vines had received, so reminiscent of the million second chances I receive when my tentative signs of growth have been stripped away by the violent windstorm of my own creation. After a few days, though, I realized that the new buds were not flower buds but leaf buds, the tender reddish purple of the new leaves tricking me into anticipating flowers. I thought, “I’m glad I didn’t embarrass myself by claiming this Easter Miracle in writing, talk about your haints and faeries.”

So I moved on. Grow up Meghan. The greenery of the wisteria is a lovely addition to the eaves of my home, so why complain? Maybe I’m supposed to learn about maturity and something about unmet expectations, right?

Then, it happened: without notice, amidst the new green leaves, in an unprecedented simultaneous display of flowers and foliage, the inverted pyramids of purple appeared everywhere. Though I had lost faith in the miracle of second chances, I was wrong. Though I had been ashamed of my childish hopes, I was wrong. Though I doubted God, I was wrong. This lavish and new display spoke to me in a new language: it spoke of God’s creativity, His ability to overcome all obstacles, His faithfulness despite my faithlessness, His desire to show me something new.

I do realize that this might still sound like haints and faeries to some. That’s okay because I know what I’ve heard. I would encourage those of you who are so inclined to open your ears, open your hearts and listen for what God has to say to you. He is waiting in just the place where you can understand Him and has a secret that He wishes to whisper that’s just for you.

Post Mother's Day Blues

I would like to put a word into the management that the Monday after Mother's Day should never be gloomy. Already feeling a little...what's the word?...ooglety about the whole "my mother is dead and my children are ingrates and though my husband is exceedingly generous with flowers and dinner at fab restaurants, that's not really a reflection on me as a mother", I could have used a bright sunshiny day to coax me out of doors to do some gardening, exercise and put the whole fabrication of Mother's Day behind me.

Here's the thing about Mother's Day, it is just an opportunity to be disheartened over your children's general lack of enthusiasm over you as a mother. At least when they were littler, they would bring home some sweet confection of handmade love. In fact, Mother's Day comes just before or after "Teacher Appreciation Week", so in a reciprocal agreement of mutual understanding, Moms and Teachers ensure that elementary school age children never fail to send strong signals of enthusiastic gratitude to each side of this partnership.

Somewhere around Middle School, the blush starts to fade off the rose. I have a child in sixth grade and she symbolizes for me that last tenuous strand of Mother's Day enthusiasm. On Friday, I walked by the computer and she quickly shut the window of a young child and mother in silhouette and put a hand over the paper she was drawing on. I pretended that I was upset with her for hiding what she was doing on the computer, telling her "That will not fly in my home. If you're ashamed of what you're doing on the computer, you shouldn't be doing it." She seemed to want to keep her card-making a secret so I thought I would play along....after all, this might be the last time we get to play this little game. On Saturday, knowing she would be playing an early morning soccer game on Sunday, (btw who made that schedule?) she tried to make me a Mother's Day Breakfast. Although I wasn't hungry, she made me a lovely fruit salad, desperate to find some way to express her love in some material way.

I'd better enjoy it while I can because just two short years later, my eighth grader is completely disinterested in the overt displays of "I Love My Mommy" expressed in construction paper and glitter. I have it on good authority that she and I are grand friends and yet I could tell by the block lettering on the stark white sheet of the card she made me that Mother's Day is no longer a priority. Seriously, I have seen her put more creative effort into a note she passed in science class. Where are the coupon books filled with unredeemable promises? Where is the flower yanked carelessly from the garden outside? Where is the hand-painted yardstick that can never measure our love for each other? In her defense, she did give me a rock. "Ooh a ring?" you say? No, a ROCK. A Mexican River Rock that she took from her sister. Why a rock? Does it have special significance? You are my rock, Mamá? Not so. The rock was chosen because it was within arm's reach when she was quickly searching for something to hand me on Mother's Day.

And it just gets worse. My boys didn't even say Happy Mother's Day to me on Sunday morning as they were preparing to go to church. I know they thought the fabulous dinner that their father had taken us to the night before was sufficient HMD for the weekend but they thought wrawng. I feel guilty thinking complaining thoughts as they get ready, on their own, to participate in the musical worship at their church. "Really, I have so much to be thankful for", whispers into the back of my mind as I yell, "HAPPY MOTHER'S DAY TO YOU TOO!!!!" to the space around the boys who have failed to greet me properly after several pass-bys in the hallway, kitchen, den and bathroom.

Here's my ultimate problem with this day of opportunity for mutual failure between mother and child: Have I not done enough to teach them to be grateful and gracious? Have I coddled them too much, making them spoiled and unable to count their blessings? Am I such a shrew that they actually don't like me enough to use this day to tell me how great I am? Am I losing them as they grow up and grow away? Why don't they spontaneously want to clean my car for me? It's just another opportunity for me to analyze in a gillion different ways, my failure to produce the perfect children. GRRRRRR.

On top of everything, my Mom is dead so I can't call her and tell her how much I appreciated (too late) everything she'd ever done for me. I can't commiserate with her and make up for all those years I didn't buy her an orchid corsage from the Bellport Florist that she could wear proudly at Mary Immaculate Church on Brown's Lane. I can't hear her assure me that, one day, my own children will call me and be in awe of what an awesome Mom I was and still am. By the time they realize my awesomeness, I might be dead!

My husband, knowing I have MD issues, tries to do his level best to make it a beautiful weekend. You should see the flowers he bought me: they were absurdly extravagant (try as I might, my photography skills fail to capture their beauty). But here's the thing of that: HE'S NOT MY CHILD. So basically his wonderful behavior just highlights what a good job of mothering his mother did and again how I have fallen short in the teaching of graciousness. Frown. Not to mention, my kids think that everything he does is credited to their account. Not even close. I know I shouldn't be keeping accounts but that's the insidious nature of Mother's Day. I didn't make the rules.

So basically, despite a reasonably lovely weekend, I am happy to have Mother's Day behind me. Except the gloom of the Monday after has left me sulking on the coach, minding and reminding my feelings of inadequacy and marginal sadness. I guess I'll just have to break my blog silence and purge this particular bit of bleccch.

There, I feel much better. Maybe now I can get something done today.

Happy Happy Birthday Baby

My Mom died yesterday. On her birthday. Ten years ago. According to Webster an anniversary is the annual recurrence of a date marking a notable event. So yesterday was the anniversary of my mother's death (or deathiversary as some of the more Tim Burtonesque in our family have dubbed it). In a perfectly bookended piece of poetry, it is also the anniversary of her birth. So what does that mean? I don't know. Here's what I know: the day and days leading up to this deathiversary leave me with a dull, empty feeling, like something is amiss, like I have a project due that I haven't even addressed, like I can't get that little piece of abrasive grit out of the eyeball of my soul. Yesterday, all day long I had a faint desire for some sort of monumental "moment" in which homage would be paid to my mother on the tenth anniversary of her death and sixty-ninth anniversary of her life. Somebody should say something shouldn't they? Actually a few people in my family sent out emails that failed to hit the spot for me. As Randy Jackson would say: "It just didn't do it for me dawg." The grit remained in its secreted niche.

And then I was watching Lost. I love that show. My siblings and I have a private chatroom in which we discuss the literal, moral, and mostly spiritual significance of the various bits and pieces of Lost. You'd have to understand all the ins and outs and twists and turns of this show for me to set up the scene that gave me my much awaited "moment". Instead of giving you a synopsis, I'll just throw out the briefest of a context. A woman (I still don't even know this character's name) is sobbing over the death of another character Jacob. Holding a gun to Jacob's murderer, she tells this character named Benjamin, "He is the closest thing to a father I ever had." Her heart is clearly broken and she is about to exact her revenge on Benjamin by taking his life in return for the life of her beloved Jacob. Knowing he has done wrong and been wrong and has failed completely, Benjamin begs for mercy to be allowed to run away. The mourning woman asks, "Where will you go?" Benjamin tells her his plans to take up with a character that epitomizes evil because, after all, "He's the only one who will have me." In an act of sudden and surprising mercy, she lowers her gun and tells him, "I'll have you."

This briefest act of mercy reminded me of my Mom and all she stood for, all she taught me, how she lived her life and ultimately The One after whom she modeled her life. And I got my momentous occasion. Tears washed away that nasty piece of grit as I contemplated the life of a merciful woman.

My son Antonio was born today. On his birthday. Eighteen years ago. My mom used to joke about how, if the doctors hadn't tried to stop my labor because he was three weeks early, Antonio would have been born on her birthday. I am eternally grateful for those doctors today because, with her death, March 9th became a very crowded day. Still, this reprieve only allows me one short day to recuperate and pull up my happy pants to celebrate the birth of my eldest child. Every year I feel guilty for the shadow that is cast over his day. The year my mom died, we travelled on Antonio's eighth birthday back to Maine to attend the funeral. In a complete daze, I hoped that visiting with his multitude of cousins would constitute a party of sorts. My brother Tom got him a wooden train with the block letters Toño spelled out in train cars. Sweet of him because that was the only celebration Antonio got that year...that I can recall. Every year thereafter, I have wondered if he is affected by the whiff of sorrow that surrounds his day.

Last night's Lost, again, brought me some thoughts on this matter. There is this character, a woman named Sun. I love her and the way she has developed into a maternal, nurturing, giving, supportive and ultimately strong woman over the course of this series. She is a steadying influence. Last night her friends returned from being missing for a period of time. As they walked onto the beach, the joy that radiated from her face was beautiful. The wide embrace with which she greeted these "lost" loved ones reminded me, again, of my mom. I imagine if she met my Antonio again she would be so delighted to see him. She would run across the sand to throw her arms around him and tell him how she had missed him so. She would touch his hair and tell him how tall he had gotten. She would tell him how thrilled she was that he loved to sing songs and play the guitar. She would listen to all of his songs and then insist he teach her to play. She would slip her arm into his and walk with him along the water and tell him funny stories about herself and ask him all about what had happened to him in the last ten years. She would ask him about his girlfriend....she would want every detail because she loves romance. She would ask him about his plans for the future. She would love him so much. She would be so proud of him. And then she would play him a game of "gotcha last". He doesn't even know about this game, it's one of things he's missed out on. But she would show him how to play and they would run and play and laugh and fall into the sand in a tangle of exhausted hilarity when she finally won.

When I feel sandy grit of my mother's death, it is the missing of these moments that abrades the most. And yet, I have a hope that there will be a reunion and all the missed moments will be made complete. Strange how a show like Lost can remind me of that hope and help to wash away the grit of another year. And so I can pull on my happy pants and be the mother who is celebrating the eighteenth year of her son's life.

Happy Birthday Antonio. I love you. Bunny would be so pleased.

Daphne

A brief editor's note: The flower assigned to my last blog "Stop and Smell the Flowers" is a Daphne. I took a picture of this little confection of beauty from a plant in a pot on my deck. I walk by the heavenly scent of my dear friend Daphne every time I come in and out of my house. Introduced to this floral delight by friend Laurie...my gardening guru, she gifted me the plant that acts as sentry to my home. It is a winter blooming gem that has the waxy flower quality of a stephanotis, gardenia or orange blossom; all four seem to share a similarly haunting fragrance as well. It seems to flourish when neglected, which is a boon for me. Still, I love this plant best for its name. Daphne DuMaurier, who lives in my mind in a cozy house with Jane Austen and The Brontes, is one of my favorite pioneering female authors of all time. If I ever have another girl child I will name her Daphne. In lieu of giving physical birth to a Daphne, I might just name a literary child after her....we shall see.

Stop And Smell The Flowers

Since my book “Night of Grace” was recently rejected, I have been disinterested in blogging. Rejected might not be technically accurate. I submitted my little ouevre into a book 'casting call' of sorts from a reputable agent and neither received a rejection or even an acknowledgement or explanation for its inadequacy. Rather, the deadline for the contest came and went without my poor defenseless book receiving any feedback. So disheartening. I hate rejection, technically accurate or not. To make matters worse, I only started this blog so I would have some writing samples for that agent to check me out. This makes the blog guilty of rejecting me by association. Or of failing to win over the agent. Either way, poor blogsite is tainted with the stink of failure and so I don’t want to be associated with it anymore. I think I’ve mentioned my penchant for quitting. It’s kind of my thing. I live with this motto, slightly different from a common adage: “If at first you don’t succeed, never, ever try again.” Truth be told, a less pithy cousin of this motto more accurately describes my modus operandi: “If at first you don’t succeed, throw a snit fit, slip into a funk and finally quit with a snide, ‘I never really wanted to do that anyway.’”

On a more practical front, I’ve been a little busy. My in-laws celebrated their 50th anniversary by inviting their five children, spouses and ten grandchildren on a cruise to Ensenada, Mexico. Immediately thereafter, my sister gave birth and I was able to stay at her house in LA area for a week to help her acclimate to the wonders of a fourth boy. Flying home, I was soon whisked away by husband and kids to Tahoe for my 41st birthday. Sidebar concerning the age forty-one: it lacks the novelty and excitement of turning 40 but assures me that I am stuck in the forties for the next decade. Blah. Upon my return from my sister’s house at which I helped her reorganize her closets and drawers and give some bathrooms a militant scrubbing, I was struck to the core that I hadn’t done the same in my own home since the last time she gave birth two years ago. So I’ve been in the throes of determined cleaning and reorganization of my home. Have I been avoiding the blog? Perhaps. But I’ve fabricated some seriously legitimate excuses for neglecting my blogging duties.

But this Monday morning I read something that broke through my blog anxiety. Unfortunately, as part of my ongoing house revamp, I had already determined in my heart that this Monday would be the day to attack the odious and olympic task of cleaning my sons’ room so I couldn’t take the time to blog. Background: My sons are sixteen and soon-to-turn-eighteen. Not to cast aspersions on an entire gender(male) and breed(teenager) but these children of mine are some kind of gross and their room is a monument to their worst hygienic mishaps. Times two. Here is a historic sampling of things discovered in their room:

• week old taco bell tucked under the bed for later consumption
• empty bag of french fries with a small container of mustard inside
• empty box of Good Humor strawberry shortcake ice cream bars
• cafeteria style gum collection stuck to the back of a headboard
• dirty socks stuffed under mattress
• dirty underwear lost in the back of closet for nigh on a year

The list goes on and on. Because this is not an attempt to shame my sons (as if that were possible) but rather an effort to convey my reluctance to attack this job, I have only listed a smattering. But Monday was the day on which I had scrounged up the resolve to sally forth into the fray. My son’s eighteenth birthday is coming up and I thought it would be nice way to start his year: with a clean room and a new paint job.

It is now Wednesday, the sty is almost clean, new paint a-drying and I have a chance to refer back to the reading that ignited a tiny flicker of inspiration. For my aforementioned birthday, my dear friend Laurie gave me this beautiful tiny antique book called “Pure Gold.” Bound in elaborately stamped and embossed red leather, this book contains little snippets of wisdom for me to ponder in the mornings. On Monday I found this:

I have at length learned by my own experience (for not one in twenty profits by the experience of others) that one great source of vexation proceeds from our indulging too sanguine hopes of enjoyment from blessings we expect, and too much indifference for those we possess. We scorn a thousand sources of satisfaction, which we might have had in the interim, and permit our comfort to be disturbed, and our time to pass unenjoyed, from impatience for some imagined pleasure at a distance, which we may perhaps never obtain, or which, when obtained, may change its nature , and be no longer pleasure.

~More

Sigh. This has been particularly true for me lately. First of all, having built up my hopes in anticipation of my first cruise ever, I was kind of disappointed. My expectations were dashed to bits when Julie McCoy did not greet me on the Lido Deck. I was further upset by the strange, stale stink that pervaded the entire boat. At the Captain’s Dinner I was taken aback by the graceless goofball who was supposed to be running the ship, no Captain Steubing he. Curse you The Love Boat for making me think my experience would be an endless round of romance, moonlit dances and white shorts clad employees just waiting to make me smile.

Then, my birthday trip to Tahoe left me feeling a little unsatisfied. In all fairness, having some gem of a human being break into our car by shattering the driver’s side window to steal our GPS might have put a damper on the festivities. Also the inedible ahi tuna at my birthday dinner was gastronomically upsetting. Still, there was so much I could have been grateful for but because I had built up the event in my head, the slightest mar kind of spoiled the whole deal.

I was so desperately “impatient for some imagined pleasure at a distance”, that “I scorned a thousand sources of satisfaction which I might have had in the interim”. On the drive from San Francisco to cruise embarkation at Long Beach, I could have basked in the fabulous time I had with my kids. We literally laughed the whole way. I could have been overwhelmed by the fact that, every night, outside my window, a full moon graced the waves. I could have relished the moments, quickly dwindling as the children grow older, that we could all be together. Ditto for my birthday trip. Why wasn’t I, in the moment, appreciating the funny, smart, enjoyable beings these young humans have become? Why was I waiting for the next fabulously forty-one birthday event to make me feel like the Queen of the May?

In the same way, when I failed to win the opportunity for that agent to choose my book, I was thoroughly deflated. Instead of enjoying the blogging experience, being thrilled with the fact that I had actually completed a book, glad of the opportunity for growth in sharing my writing with others, I focused only on what I thought was my ultimate goal. I was so desperate to win the prize of being a published author that I failed to to stop and smell the flowers.

So, this week, armed with my nugget of Pure Gold, I have decided not to be indifferent to the blessings I do have, even during the loathsome process of cleaning a filthy room. My new wisdom firmly tucked in my pocket, I was ready to appreciate everything from the spiritual to the physical. As a reward for my new attitude, I was blessed with an unexpected windfall: not precisely a flower but some kind of flora...cultivated right inside the room of my very own children. How could I have ever failed to appreciate these "thousand sources of satisfaction"?...more commonly known as mold spores.

dyeing my soul

This morning, I was reading a book that quoted Marcus Aurelius as having said: “The soul becomes dyed with the color of its thoughts.” For me, this is true. On a bad day, if I'm not careful with my thoughts, I can have stained my poor soul all the hues of a gangrenous rainbow before midday. There are people who are glass half full people and those who are glass half empty people. If I allow myself free reign with my thought life I can be a "this filthy glass is half empty with tepid water that stinks of sulfur," person. I don't want to be that person. I don't want my children to learn from that person. In a combative effort I've adopted the motto: "Whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things."

Please don't get me wrong, this doesn't give me an instant Pollyanna outlook (BTW Pollyanna gets a bad rap. Read the book, she has the right idea.) that renders my whole life lollipops and raindrops but when I catch myself focusing on the negative, I try to turn my sights on something better. It helps.

It's not necessarily easy. Take, for example, the Case of The Disabled Dishwasher. My dishwasher has been on the fritz for approximately six months...maybe more if I am honest. I'm not exactly sure when it started but the dishes just stopped coming out shiny clean. Then they started coming out with scummy white residue. Then the dishwasher itself started getting greasy build-up the kind of which one might find between the teeth of a person who has not been acquainted with a toothbrush in a fortnight or in the ears of a child who never met a bar of soap. I was reluctant to call Sears for a service repair for a few reasons:

1. that loathesome time window that presupposes I have nothing else to do with my life.
2. the inevitable lecture blaming my poor maintenance for the resultant appliance failure.
3. I have avoidance issues.

I hoped that if I ignored it long enough, it would get better. Surprisingly,this magical thinking didn't work so I tried troubleshooting the thing to death. I concluded that the water was just not getting hot enough. Maybe the heater was broken? Finally I became desperate enough to overcome my reticence—I just wanted my clean dishes. So I called the Sears service center and made an appointment. Of course, the automated robot voice gave me a appointment window for a Friday between 8am to 5pm. Not an auspicious start. I waited all day long and the guy never showed. He called at 7:30pm to say he wouldn't make it but would put me on the schedule for Saturday...unlikely. Didn't happen. After several aborted reschedules, he showed up the next Wednesday.

Can somebody please explain to me whether there is a special class at appliance repair school called "How to belittle the appliance owner 101". Before the sentence, "I think something's wrong with the heater," was out of my mouth, my new friend had dismissed that notion with a flip, "If it was the heater, this thing wouldn't be running at all." Okay, I guess I was wrong. He then proceeded to tell me that he wasn't familiar with the Bosch brand and had never seen my particular model. Additionally, he had no repair manual for this model, blaming the "Information Nazis" at Bosch for deliberately withholding their schematics. He then launched into a didactic about the history of the dishwasher since the late nineteenth century, while never once touching my dishwasher. Seriously? At this point, I began opening the dishwasher and gesturing at it and even taking off the filter and one of the dishwasher arms as if to say, "Please feel free to follow suit." No takers.

After peering into the airgap and making a few unfruitful phone calls, he told me that my water was just too cold because the dishwasher was located on an outside wall. He advised me to run the hot water until it was scalding before running my dishwasher because the Bosch heating unit was inadequate to heat my water sufficiently. I had already tried this little nugget of water-wasting wisdom as advised by my owner's manual... to no avail and told him so. Shrug. I tried to show him the build up of scum throughout the unit and he responded, "Yeah that's pretty gross." Shrug. At this point I felt tears of frustration building up. He added, "Ever try Dishwasher Magic? That should help clean the gunk and I have a special on it today for only ten dollars a bottle." So desperate was I for any result, I almost said yes. I made a quick pitstop at my computer and checked the internet for comparable prices. Lo and behold, several sources were offering this dishwashing miracle for only five dollars...for the same number of fluid ounces...hmmmm. When I declined his amazing bargain he stated, "Well, I don't know how I'm gonna get you outta here for less then $129."

Pause.

Deep breath.

Pause again.

"When I made the appointment with Sears, they told me it would cost $75 to receive an estimate of repair. Why would it cost more?" He sighed and rolled his eyes, "The $75 is just for me walking in the door." Um HELLO, ALL YOU DID WAS WALK IN THE DOOR!!!!!! I just stared in silent disbelief. After several minutes of a staring contest, he said, "Well if you want the $75 dollar offer, you'll have to decline my estimate." Your estimate? WHAT ES-timate? I continued to stare until I finally found my words, "Um, yeah I'll be declining your estimate." Even the $75 was galling.

If there are any readers out there, I bet you are wondering how this story has anything to do with my opening paragraph. How is this me thinking on the noble, right, pure, admirable? You're right, it's not. I am getting there.

The unrepair job happened in mid December. After that, every time I neared the dishwasher, I just wanted to smash plates to smithereens in violent protest. I wanted my glass half smashed. I was bemoaning my dreadful fate to a friend when she told me about a guy who had fixed her Bosch when her heater broke. She looked in my dishwasher and told me, "Oh yeah, that's what mine looked like." She gave me the company's name: Dunn Wright (if you live in the San Francisco Bay Area write this down- it's a name worth knowing) She told me, "My guy's name was Bruce and he was awesome." Awesome? I don't know this Awesome you speak of. I practically ran to the phone. That's a lie. I was so afraid of a repeat of the last repair debacle that I delayed and delayed and delayed. Did I mention I have avoidance issues?

Finally I just couldn't stand it anymore and I called the folks at Dunn Wright. My friend's guy, Bruce, came the very next day, early in his three (yes, only three) hour window and listened to what I told him. He then proceeded to dismantle my dishwasher where the other individual had never even lifted a screwdriver. Within twenty minutes he had discovered that the circuit board that tells the heater to heat was short-circuited and I would need a new one. He ordered the part, came back in one week and installed the item. He charged me $224 for the two visits and the part. Now my dishwasher works to perfection: sparkling clean fabulousness, HOT out of the dishwasher.

So here's the thing, what if the guy from A&E factory direct, the maintenance company contracted by Sears, had fixed my dishwasher in the first place? I definitely would not have been so frustrated, I wouldn't have wanted to punch him in the skull, I wouldn't have spent a month struggling with my ridiculous avoidance issues. On the other hand, I am so wildly grateful for the fact that my dishwasher is finally fixed. I practically skip to the kitchen these days. I almost want to kiss each dish as I take it out of the washer. So, maybe I'm not exactly grateful for the useless ripoff of my first encounter with the Sears guy but without him, would I be as appreciative? Right now, not only is my glass half full, it's completely full with a pretty party parasol on top. Excellent. I'll think about that.