I will have to pull out my patience cards today because, yes, it’s snowing. And I have family supposed to come from east and apparently that atmospheric river is dumping in the mountains. It’s supposed to snow in the mountains until midday Thanksgiving. I’m not sure I can have the whole meal all ready for them to arrive.
Ok, but patience, and let’s get creative. We could always do the cooking and have the meal on Friday instead of Thursday.
It is supposed to turn to rain here and the snow will be gone by noon. I jumped out of bed like a little kid, though, shouting “SNOW!” Sol Duc is unthrilled. The roads don’t look too awful and I wonder if anyone will cancel in clinic or it will be as usual.
Yesterday was a bit of a zoo, mostly because over 100 people realized that they are nearly out of some prescription and called for a refill. I knocked my message box down from 48 to 31 in the first 25 minutes and then it kept piling back up over 50. I also wish that if an 87 year old has a serious emergency room visit, they’d give me a longer follow up, because it can’t be done WELL in 20 minutes.
I expect that today will continue a bit nuts. Getting ready for Thursday and Friday off, to lie around pooped!
I took this on New Year’s Eve on a walk with my kids and old friends in Maryland. We fooled around in a park. I like the low fog hanging in the trees, always further away when we walked to it.
Seesaw, Margery Daw, Jackie shall have a new master
He shall have but a penny a day, because he can’t work any faster.
That is the version of an old nursery rhyme that I learned from my mother. There is more about it here.
I am going through and starting to delete old blog posts and photographs to make room for the new ones. Not one of my stronger talents!
Our family of four is visiting the Hoh Rain Forest. I think my husband is a relatively normal person and that he and my daughter are just being silly.
Suddenly they morph into dinosaurs! Pterodactyls! Ferocious long toothed beaks and weird speckled feathers! My son looks at me and gives me a hug. “Thanks, mom.” He morphs too and they are in flight, off in to the rain forest!
They weren’t being silly. They were practicing and apparently my daughter has now learned to fly.
I still miss them terribly and hope that they are well. Be careful, and do not marry a pterodactyl.
I keep wondering at the stubborn part of me that will not let go. That wants to reconcile with all, no matter what they’ve done. I go inside, deep and deeper, in the depths all is slow. That part is the holy part that longs for the One. I have been told to let go of things, forget, no more longing. But the longing is a sacred place, a longing for the Beloved. I think that excising it would be a horrid evil wronging. Handle gently, with care, with love, and gently gloved. I meet someone who says, “You are very in touch with your inner child.” I know it’s not a compliment, I smile and pay little mind. My Child is my connection to the Beloved, fierce and mild. Jealous judging rolls right off, people can be unkind. I won’t excise the holy core, the Beloved inner child. I feel the Beloved’s laughing play and joy, heart running wild.
My favorite female author is Laura Ingalls Wilder. My favorite male author is Walt Kelly.
Louis Carreas wrote about how descriptions can be cages, here. WordPress won’t let me comment on his blog (Hi, Lou!), saying that I have to be logged in. Even when I AM logged in. Ah well, maybe the AI has a sense of humor and is messing with me. Anyhow, his comments make me think of the DSM V, the list of behavioral health symptoms defining them into disorders, fifth version. We humans make them up, these lists. My daughter pointed out years ago, “We make up all the words.” It’s all an effort to communicate and we make it all up.
Walt Kelly is my favorite master of playing with words and word silliness. One time Howland Owl and Churchy are trying to make a bomb. They need a certain material. They have a small yew tree and a geranium. They both fall over and CROSS! Owl and Churchy dive for the floor. There is no explosion. Howland Owl says, “The natural born reason we didn’t git no yew-ranium when we crosses the li’l yew tree and the gee-ranium is on account of cause we didn’t have no geiger counter.” They decide against an A-bomb and put a honey bee hive in a shoebox, making a quite effective B-bomb.
Laura Ingalls Wilder starts the book about her youngest years explaining that she tries to be good but she just can’t be as good as her sister Mary. There are ways they are supposed to behave and she fights with her sister and misbehaves on Sunday and runs around. They are also not supposed to talk about certain feelings, but the feelings show through the events. When I read the books to my son and daughter, I found myself a bit appalled and editing the bits about the blackface minstrel show that they do and about Laura’s Ma talking about “dirty Indians”. Mrs. Wilder edited her life quite severely for those books, but I too chafed under the cage of society’s rules and what feeling I was and was not allowed to express.
Now there are series based on Laura’s mother, grandmother and great grandmother. I like them though the feelings aren’t as authentic to me. Not quite. My daughter loved the books about Laura’s mother and I think is like her. My daughter objects to Anne’s behavior in the first book of the Anne of Green Gables series. “No one is like that!” she says. I mention a classmates name, who is very very extroverted. “Hmmm,” says my daughter, “Ok, she is like that.”
The photograph is from 1965. My maternal grandmother, me and my sister. I do not know who took it.
This brought up work stories. Now, are these coping skills or manipulation or a bit of both? You decide.
Long ago I work in a lab at the National Institutes of Health. We are super busy and doing a lot of overtime and have some media pressure as well. Our boss gets us together and gives us hell, about making mistakes. I am annoyed, because I’ve been really careful. I stew. I write a letter, what I think he should have said, which is telling us all great job, you’ve worked super hard, we are under pressure and also we need to not make mistakes. I circulate it to the four other lab techs, who enjoy it. The lab cheers up a bit. Eventually I get brave and give it to the boss. He likes it and reads it to everyone, who try not to laugh. A year after I leave the lab, I visit, and he has that letter up on his bulletin board.
Long ago I am made chief of staff at a hospital. My goal is to finish the monthly meeting in an hour. I have two senior doctors who always blow up about something in the meeting. I decide to be proactive and go to each one before the meeting and prime them. I pick a topic, say I am worrying about it, and what do they think? They each then blow up in the meeting, but now they have no opposition so there is no brawl. I prime them about something that is not really controversial. I do get the meetings done in an hour.
One year I go to the lake with my family. My children are small. My father has been drinking heavily. I call ahead and say, “Will you treat our tent site like my house and not come there if you are drinking?” “You don’t own the lake land,” says my father. “We don’t have to come.” I reply. He agrees not to drink at our tent site.
He is angry, though, and pretty much won’t speak to me. I ask if he would come to a family sing at my site. He says no. I think about it for a while and ask my cousin to hold a sing at her cabin. My father agrees to that, not knowing that I am the instigator. He is happy at it because he’s said no to me and yes to her, and I am happy too, because I love to sing and sing with him.
My father was one of eight people to start Rainshadow Chorale in 1997. I sang with him in the chorale from 2000 until the year he died.
Where is the line between manipulation and coping with a difficult person?
I think this is a time travelogue, so let it be my Ragtag Daily Prompt for today.
The photograph is of my father in 2012. He died in 2013.
My daughter, her housemate and her housemate’s parents came Friday night. We all went to Arches National Park yesterday morning. This is part of the Parade of Elephants.
This morning we went to the Colorado National Monument again.
My daughter and I both practically backed away from this optical illusion. CUT THAT OUT! NOT FUNNY!
Anyhow, the outdoors is my feed, nourishing and amazing all the time.
My now adult children call their father “The fossil”. Maybe they call me the relic, I don’t know. I love this photograph, taken in about 2003, of my daughter and her father. This is what turns parents in to relics, right?
What is older? Anything and anyone older than me? At one point I have 5 women who are over 100 years old as patients. Two are 104. One is local indigenous tribe and tells me about white women moving to another pew if she sat down near them in church, back when she is in her twenties. I am apologetic at that visit because it is hospital week. Our pacific northwest hospital has chosen cowboys as the theme so being a bit oppositional defiant, I have braids with one feather hanging down. I swear that EVERY ONE of my indigenous patients comes in, including the 104 year old. I apologize, but they mostly seem amused by my rebellion.
They also influence me. Now when a 72 year old complains about being OLD, I say, “You are not old in my practice.” They look confused. I say, “I’ve had five people over 100 all at once, so you don’t get to complain about being old until you are 90.” People laugh, but they also usually look pleased. Over 100 is a LOT older than 72. When someone is over 100, I don’t really doctor them much. I might say, “This is what the book says we should do.” “I’m not doing that,” says my 101 year old. “Ok, cool.” I say. It’s hard to argue with.
And the joke about the centurian? What do you like best about turning 100? “No peer pressure.” Um, yes. I want them to tell ME what they’ve done to reach 100. The one thing that they all have in common is that they are all stubborn. I don’t know if stubbornness is what gets them there or if we just get more stubborn as we get older. Both, perhaps.
By stubborn, I don’t mean that they don’t learn and do new things. I had a woman in her upper 70s who I diagnosed with diabetes. At the next visit she said cheerfully, “I found these five apps for my phone. This one tells me the carbohydrates, this keeps track of the distance I walk, this one tracks my blood sugar.” I don’t remember what the other two did. This was a decade ago. She was retired from Microsoft. I wanted her to teach a class for me and all of my other diabetic patients.
My grandmother took classes in her 80s in lip-reading. She was going quite deaf and her hearing aides were not terribly helpful. She had videotapes and a rather shy teacher who would come to the house. She would glare at him and the videotapes. She attacked learning it like a piranha and was furious that she couldn’t learn it faster. I am like that too and my son learned some patience from the violin. He couldn’t play well immediately and found that practice works.
At what age is someone old? I think that’s moving target and the older we get, the older we think it is. I do think 104 is a lot older than 72. When does your culture think that people are old? My fierce grandmother said that she would look out her window. “I see little old ladies across the street and think, oh, poor things, they are so old. But then I think, OH, I am older then they are!” She died at age 93, fierce until the end and curious about death too. Her last words to my father were, “Look, Mac, I’m dying.” He said, “I’m looking,” and she stopped breathing. She was always curious and funny and could tease quite terribly and she and my mother butted heads and loved each other. She loved my father too, and me.
The photograph is my maternal grandmother, Katherine White Burling and it’s one I took.
Discover and re-discover Mexicoβs cuisine, culture and history through the recipes, backyard stories and other interesting findings of an expatriate in Canada
Engaging in some lyrical athletics whilst painting pictures with words and pounding the pavement. I run; blog; write poetry; chase after my kids & drink coffee.
Refugees welcome - FlΓΌchtlinge willkommen I am teaching German to refugees. Ich unterrichte geflΓΌchtete Menschen in der deutschen Sprache. I am writing this blog in English and German because my friends speak English and German. Ich schreibe auf Deutsch und Englisch, weil meine Freunde Deutsch und Englisch sprechen.
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