CHOCOLATE: OF THEE I SING

         I read that chocolate stimulates the same part of the brain as marijuana.  They did a big study.

         They shouldn’t have bothered.  I could have told them that.

         Same with sex.  The guys with the lab coats had to plaster electrodes on people to find out that chocolate is the next best thing to sex.  Well, duh.

         The truth is that chocolate is the next-best thing to virtually every cosmic pleasure, and far surpasses the more pedestrian gratifications.  I mean, which would you choose – bowling or chocolate?

         Then there are the pleasures that chocolate enhances – reading, bathing, walking.  And the activities that it renders tolerable – dishwashing, vacuuming, routine office work.  Sure there are other foods that heighten pleasure or distract from tedium, but would you eat a burrito in the bathtub?  Could you eat a plate of spaghetti while washing windows?  

         Chocolate is a compact and portable delight with an efficient pleasure-delivery system.  In fact, if you’re not too fussy about nutritional value, chocolate may be the perfect food.  Oh sure, there’s the caffeine and the sugar, but consider the sensual pleasure.  Imagine a sliver of bittersweet chocolate on the tongue, slowly melting with the body’s heat, conforming itself to the very shape of the mouth.  Imagine chocolate surreptitiously licked from a finger, the singular momentary rush.  Now imagine, say, a cheeseburger.  

         Chocolate is nature’s way of reminding us that eating doesn’t always have to be a serious business, and that small pleasures are all around us, if we will only pay attention.            

         If I have not yet succeeded in convincing you of chocolate’s superior virtues, let me leave you with this question:  Who would you rather kiss -- the person who just ate a piece of chocolate or the one who just ate a hot dog? 

         I rest my case.


Photo by Tetiana Bykovets on Unsplash

ON DAUGHTERS GROWING UP

My daughters are 26 and 28.  I love them beyond measure.  And I love knowing them as adults and seeing what they are making of their lives.  Giving them life and starting them on their paths is the best thing  I have ever done. 

Here’s the rub, though – the thing that I want to write about now, the thing that nothing prepared me for:  I did not know how much I would miss their younger selves.  Of course, I knew they would grow up.  I just couldn't anticipate what it would feel like to lose forever the babies, the toddlers, the little girls that they had been.   

A couple of months ago I was walking through a park on a weekday.  The park was filled with young mothers and their children.  I sat down for a few minutes and watched them.  They wore their youth so lightly.  They would live in this world of young motherhood forever.  (You can’t see the end of it when you are in the middle.)  I envied them that tunnel vision, that feeling that this is your life—days filled with children, with you, the mom (and the other parent, of course) at the center, loving, caring for, feeling both amazed and exhausted by, your children.   

And, then, it is over. 

Slowly, at first, as they reach puberty and begin the turn outward, and then – following a rush of senior-year activities – they are gone.  They leave home to go to college or whatever the next step is for them.  They come home.  But by the time  they finish college (if all goes as it ought) they don’t live with you anymore. 

Don’t get me wrong.  I don’t live my life in a state of mourning.  I don’t think about this all of the time.  But, sometimes I see a young woman with two little girls and my heart cracks a bit, thinking of my little girls.   Where have they gone?  They have turned into amazing young women.  But where are those babies, those toddlers, those little girls? 

It is different for our children.  They have always known us as adults.  Granted, we get older, but we are essentially the same people they have always known, only older and creakier.  Sadly, they don’t remember the baby-and-toddler years when we were the center of their universe, nor do they remember much about the little-girl years.  Their memories likely begin with the years when it became important to separate from us.  

But we remember it all.  I think that is probably why parents of adult children drive their kids nuts with stories about their childhoods.  They want to relive those moments that their children have forgotten.

Today, my oldest and her boyfriend got on a plane back to London, where they live, so I am feeling the sadness of that distance as well.

I am so grateful for Skype.  And for the photos of my daughters in all of their growing up incarnations—I will try not to foist these on them too often. 

Most of all, I am grateful for the experience of being a mom, with all of its bittersweetness.  I would not trade it for anything.        

    

YOU HAD TO BE THERE (and you had to be young).

            I have read a couple of articles in the last few days about the baby boomer “fixation” on the death of John Kennedy.  I have read that we have highjacked the media and the public discourse for purposes of our annoying navel gazing.  It would seem that there are those who are ready for us to quit the scene.  Or to at least shut up and quit hogging the stage.  

            Fair enough.   If you are one of those who has had enough of boomers, this is your chance to turn away.  

            Here’s how I see it.    

            I don’t think that we are any more fixated on the Kennedy assassination than the “Greatest Generation” is on Pearl Harbor.  Speaking for myself, months, even years, go by when I barely give it a thought.  But this is a big anniversary, one that not only brings back memories but that reminds us that we are no longer young.    

            I admit that we baby boomers are a very large group, and that, by virtue of the size of our cohort, our interests and concerns dominated the public conversation for decades.  That focus, however, is a thing of the past.  I don’t even recognize many of the figures who turn up in the “news.”  Kim Kardashian – her wedding and then her divorce – showed up for weeks as the number-one headline in my Google news feed before I finally asked someone who she was.  The answer was not illuminating.  As near as I can tell, she is famous for being famous.  (So what generation cares about her and is subjecting me to these headlines?)  

            But, I digress.  

            I’m not going to bore you with a long description of where I was when I learned that Kennedy had been shot.  (9^th grade algebra class).  I am not going to assess his presidency or weigh in on conspiracy theories.  And I’m not going to belabor what everyone already knows:  The “60s” actually began in 1963 with the assassination, and ended with Nixon’s re-election in 1972.  

            Here’s what I want to talk about:  We were young, those of us who remember where we were and what we were doing on that terrifying day.  I was ten when John Kennedy was elected and just three days past my 14^th birthday when he died.  He was the first president I was conscious of.  

            We had grown up in the shadow of “The War” (WWII), but we had not yet become accustomed to watching wars being fought from our living rooms.  (That would come a very few years later with the Vietnam war).  The only people we had seen shot before our eyes were cowboys, and we knew that the blood wasn’t real.

            We had spent a week terrified by the Cuban Missile Crisis, and then we had gone back to our lives and the background dread of nuclear war and Nikita Krushchev.

            So, one minute we were watching Leave it to Beaver and being the kids that we were, and, the next minute the president was dead.  We all sat in front of our TV sets and watched the same news coverage for three days.  We didn’t go to school and many of our parents didn’t go to work.  We watched the shooting over and over again.  And then we watched Jack Ruby shoot Lee Harvey Oswald.  Over and over again.  We watched Lyndon Johnson take the oath of office on Air Force One. We watched the very tall Charles DeGaulle walk down Pennsylvania Avenue next to the very short Haile Selassie. We watched Jackie hold herself together, and we watched John John salute the casket.    

            Did I mention that we were young?  And that Kennedy was young? And that Jackie was even younger?  She was 34 when he died.  They had little children -- younger than my friends and I.  We had seen pictures of them in the Sunday supplements frolicking on the White House lawn.    

            The world was an orderly place.  And then it was not.    

            And then five years later, there were more deaths.—two more young men.  Men younger than most of our fathers  -- Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr.    

            I think that the emotions come back on an anniversary like this, not because we were the only generation to ever face fear and confusion—we were not-- but because there is something about the combination of youth and traumatic events that imprints those events on the memory.  

            For Americans of my parents' generation, the traumatic event was Pearl Harbor.  For my mother, who grew up in Scotland, the traumatic memory is of being 20 years old and learning that Hitler had invaded Poland, and Great Britain was entering the war.  

            9/11 will likely be the traumatic event that stays with our children.  We adults will remember it in a different way – a way not tinged with the heightened emotions of youth.  

            So, we can imagine, sort of, what it was like to hear about Pearl Harbor, and those who are now younger than, say, 55 can imagine, kind of, what it must have felt like to live through the trauma of Kennedy’s assassination, but none of can us really know what the previous generation experienced.  

            So, bear with us boomers as we relive the events of 50 years ago.  The week will pass quickly, and there are tragedies enough to break the hearts of every generation.    

ROOTS (or where is the place we call home?)

            Breathes there the man with soul so dead


            Who never to himself hath said,


            This is my own, my native land!


                                    - Sir Walter Scott

           

          The story begins with a wedding in wartime Scotland.  The year is 1943.  The bride is 23, the groom 31.  In their wedding photo, they look happy and as cautiously hopeful as is possible under the circumstances.  

            Unlike most new grooms, the man does not immediately leave his bride to rejoin a military unit.  He has not been permitted to enlist because his work as an engineer building ships on the River Clyde in Glasgow is too important to the war effort.  Instead, because housing is in short supply, the newlyweds set up housekeeping with the bride’s parents. 

            Just under a year later, the man and woman produce a son.  Five years later, the war is behind them and the man and woman are living in a flat of their own.  Still, rationing continues, and the man is eager to move to Canada, where his sister reports that there is housing, work, and no rationing.  The woman, who is pregnant again, is not eager to leave her family or her home country.  The man prevails.  The man and woman move to a town near Montreal, where their baby daughter is born. 

            Two years later the family moves again, this time to the United States.  Soon after that, another baby is born in New Jersey, where the family has settled. 

            The man and woman are my parents.  I am the Canadian baby.  The little boy born in Scotland is my brother, Jim.  The American baby is my brother, Ron.             

            And, so, we three children are raised in New Jersey.  We are just like all the other American kids at our American schools.  Sort of.  Other kids have grandparents who don’t speak English very well, but my parents are  different.  Sure, they speak English, but not in the same way that the other kids’ parents speak it.  I am not troubled by their accents---some of my friends ask me to let my mother answer the phone so they can listen to her.  (This was long before cell phones - back when everyone in the house shared the land line.) No, it’s their word choices that set up land mines for me.  My mother says “wee” instead of “small," and “dear” instead of "expensive."  An advertisement is an “advert,” not an ”ad.”  And don’t get me started on “Hoovering,” the word of choice for “vacuuming.”       

            So what’s the big deal?  From my perspective now-- nothing.  But, as I child, I live in horror of saying the wrong word and enduring the teasing that will follow.  I am not a child with the force of personality to start a trend with my word choices.  I am, instead, a child who wishes to fit in, to get by without making waves, to not draw attention to herself.

            Still, my Scottish heritage is important to me.  I enjoy the gatherings of family friends, Scottish immigrants all, at holidays. And as I get older, and become more sure of my ability to use the right phrases in the right context, I become more comfortable with my parents’ use of language.  I even enjoy it. 

            And yet, Glasgow, the place my mother always refers to as “back home,” remains a mystery to me.  I live in New Jersey.  I cannot conceive of any place else.  When we plan a trip to New Hampshire one summer, I overhear the milk man (yes this is a long time ago) say to my mother, “It’s really different there.”  I am maybe 12.  I ask myself, “What could ‘different’ look like?”  My imagination fails. 

            And then I see New Hampshire.  And over the next few years, I visit Canada, where my aunt, uncle, and cousin still live.  And I visit Florida with a neighbor.  And I visit Maine with my best friend’s family.  And I begin to understand what “different” means. 

            When I am 21, I spend most of a summer with an aunt, uncle, and cousin in Scotland.  I learn about really different.  I am delighted with my relatives and my heritage. 

            When I am 24, I opt for different.  No, I don’t move to Scotland.  But I leave New Jersey and move to North Carolina and, a year later, to the Pacific Northwest, where I live still. 

            So that’s the arc – conceived in Scotland, born in Canada, raised in New Jersey, and long-time resident of the Pacific Northwest. 

            But what if my folks had not emigrated?

            I found myself thinking about this last month during a visit to Scotland.  My husband and I looked for, and found, the flat where my parents last lived before they left Glasgow.  

           I stood in front of the building feeling very strange.  I imagined my pregnant mother coming in and out of the basement flat with my brother.  I looked up and down the street and pictured her pushing me in a pram.  I asked myself, What if they hadn’t left?  What if I had grown up with my cousins and aunts and uncles?  What if I had known my grandparents?  Who would I be now?  Clearly, I would have a different accent.  I would have a very different life.  (There’s that word again.)  Another “different” that I can’t quite bring into focus.

          I don’t wish that my parents had stayed in Scotland.  How could I?  I wouldn’t have the kids that I have.  Or the husband that I have.  Or the friends that I hold dear.  The places of my conception and birth notwithstanding, this is my own, my native land. Home is where I have put down roots and centered myself.  I feel it every time that I fly home to Portland from somewhere else, and cross the bridge over the Columbia River into Washington State.  I am home.

            And yet. 

            And yet, I know that I am also a Scot.  And that if it weren’t for my father wanting something different, I would live in Scotland still.  I would say “wee” and “adverts.”  And I would be quite at home. 

            And that would have been a good life as well.  

           

                                                               

WHAT WOULD THE DALAI LAMA DO?

            My mother is 93 years old. For the last 11 years she has lived about a mile from me in an assisted-living center.  For the first 8 or 9 years she did very well, taking the bus provided by the assisted-living center to stores and doctor appointments, enjoying books and crossword puzzles and outings with family.  

            And then things began to change.  Over the last couple of years there has been a rapid downhill slide. Her eyesight and hearing are failing.  She is in constant pain, and becomes frailer and more confused each day.  Outings exhaust her.  As her world becomes smaller and smaller, she has few pleasures left.  In fact, she states emphatically that she would like to slip away in her sleep.  

            So what does this have to do with the Dalai Lama?  Here’s where I need to talk about my role in my mother’s life.  During her early years in assisted living, I called her every day and took her out once a week.  Now, I visit her several times a week, write checks for her, do her laundry and shop for personal items.   She can no longer go to a doctor appointment without a family member to keep track of what is going on.  She calls me most days—sometimes more than once—to ask me what day it is or what time it is.  In short, I am now among her caregivers.   Fortunately for me, I am not alone.  One of my brothers handles her finances from the east coast.  My husband helps out with appointments and errands, and my ex husband (bless him) steps up again and again, visiting her and taking her to appointments.      

            So, with all this help, what’s my problem?  It's just this:  Help notwithstanding, on any given day I may feel tired or grumpy or sad or helpless or perhaps several or all of the above.   When I visit my mom, I am never sure who will greet me.  Will it be happy-to-see-me, grateful mom or will it be unhappy, critical, impossible-to-satisfy mom?  Of course, it is true that she has plenty of reasons to be unhappy.  See paragraph two above.  Still, I confess that there are days when my patience is thin, thinner than I would like.   There are days when I don’t want to stop on my way home from work after a long commute.   Days when I don’t want to navigate a confusing conversation in which I am likely to be blamed for the confusion.  And on days when I am happy to be there, when I feel honored and pleased to be able to tend to her, my heart breaks over her frailty and over her isolation.  It must be terrifying to wake up from a nap and not know what day it is or whether it is time to eat or to get ready for bed.   And then there is the sad fact that every person of her generation who ever mattered to her has passed.  And she wants to be with them.    

            So how can I be my best self with her?  What, I asked myself recently (changing the bumper sticker slightly) would the Dalai Lama do?  Or the Buddha?  Or, to return to the bumper sticker, Jesus?  Here’s the funny thing.  Although I have a pretty good idea what they would say about love and compassion and doing unto others and doing unto the least of these, I have no idea what they would do.  None of them, to my knowledge, ever played the role of caregiver to a sick or elderly family member.  We don’t know if Jesus had a wife or children, but we do know that by the time he began his ministry, he had no family in tow.  The Buddha left his wife and child when he went off to seek enlightenment, and, as far as I know, did not return to check on them.  The Dalai Lama was removed from his family as a child.  If he has put in stint as the caregiver of a family member, I have not heard about it.  

            So, although I revere these enlightened beings and try (with occasional and very modest success) to live by their teachings, they are of no help to me as role models in my current situation.  Where do I look?  I look to my friends.  I look to the friend who drives two hours every week to spend the night with her elderly parents, who organizes caregivers, and jumps in her car whenever one of her parents takes a turn for the worse.  I look to another friend who flies to Boston from her Oregon home every three months to spend two weeks relieving her sister, who tends to their mother the rest of the time.  I look to the friend who saw two children through bouts of mental illness.  I look to my sister-in-law’s sister to who gets up every morning and tends to her severely disabled son.  And I look to parents everywhere (including myself many years ago) who walk the floor with their crying infants when they would love to be sleeping in their beds.

            What do these people have in common?  They show up.  They show up when they are tired.  They show up when they are grumpy.   They show up with as much good cheer as they can, and when they run out of steam and cheer, they continue to show up.  They try not to lose it too often and to forgive themselves when they do.   They are my heroes.  Their strength gives me courage.

            So, I will go to hear the Dalai Lama when he comes to town next month, but I will look to the ordinary mortals who deal with mortgages and food shopping and finances and sick family members and crying children for my role models.  Thank you all – you know who you are - for being with me on the path, for laughing and crying with me during the hard times, and for helping me to find my way.