The One Place

That place you call home, is it the country you left, the city where you grew up, or an actual house?

My husband’s grandmother immigrated to the United States from Italy in the early 1900s and settled the family on the lower west side of Michigan among a group of fellow Italian immigrants. Most of her five children, including my husband’s mother, remained in the area and raised their families there.

My husband grew up in the big house on the corner, and his mom remained in that huge house until her early 80s when Alzheimer’s disease began to take its ugly toll on her life.

After his mother’s passing, my husband and his sister made the difficult decision to sell their family house, the house that had been in the family for nearly 65 years.

My past is quite dissimilar to my husband’s.

Though my parents stayed in the same part of Michigan until my sister and I were in our early teens, they had already changed locations twice before I was three years old.

While I had considered the house I lived in from about three years of age until I turned 13 to be my home, I learned that the time had come to move an hour south for my dad’s job, and so we moved on to the house where I spent my teen years and the house to which I would return while I was home from college throughout my early 20s.

Once again, my parents decided to move, this time about three hours north, to pursue a longtime dream they had put off while we were in school. They purchased a seven unit motel in northern lower Michigan.

Since I had completed college, I chose to stay in the area and was eventually able to find a job that paid enough for me to move into an apartment with a friend. In order to be closer to my job, I eventually moved into an apartment of my own, and I would move two more times after that before I married.

My parents, having moved on from the motel business, now rent a house about 15 miles away from the motel property.

It has been a very long time since I have felt an emotional attachment to any one house or even one community.

My parents used to own a small camper that was said to sleep six. Since there were only four of us, mom, dad, my younger sister Lesley – Lez, and me, it was quite spacious and served our purposes rather well.

One summer when Lez and I were around 9 and 11 years old, my parents pulled the camper into lot number 24 at Tawas Point State Park, a beautiful, lightly wooded campground that sits between the shores of Tawas Bay and of Lake Huron.

We enjoyed the privacy that the trees created around our spot, and the “secret,” short path that went from our campsite out to the sandy shore of the bay. We liked the playgrounds, and the fact that this campground had not one, but two beaches with their different personalities, the bay warm and calm, and Lake Huron, chilly and “wavy.”

Some ten years later, our family returned to Tawas Point State Park, in a borrowed motor home and with two new sisters, two of the foster children our parents had adopted.

At that time, campers didn’t reserve campsites in advance so Lez and I were more than thrilled to discover that we had been assigned lot number 24, as were our parents too I think.

After dad had parked the motor home, Lez and I hurried out. Both eager to see how our campsite had fared over the years, we eagerly headed down that secret path to see the bay. One of our little sisters had started to follow us, but I heard my mom quietly say, “Let them go.”

Though the shoreline had changed somewhat due to erosion, the campsite looked as it had when we had been kids not much older than our little sisters.

One night Lez and I went for a walk along the bay. The nearly full moon provided a pleasant, muted glow on the sand. One of us picked up a twig, and we signed our names in the cool, damp sand to confirm the pact we had just made.

We had promised to return to Tawas Point State Park one day with our own families, though I remember pointing out at that time that I wouldn’t be returning with children because I had never wanted children, and to share this place that had come to mean so much to us with them, whoever “they” would be.

And so we have returned to Tawas Point with our families: me with my husband, whose work schedule always seems to work out so he can only be there to spend the last night and then take me home (he doesn’t love tents and camping); and my sister Lez with her three kids; and my sister Steph with her husband; and my youngest sister Heather; and both of our parents.

Through the years as we have returned to our favorite state park to camp, various members or our families have attended and have missed our camping trips, but in June of 2016, everyone was there – both parents, all spouses, and Lez’s three children.

We sisters secretly wondered if it would be the last time everyone would be there together, with our parents’ age-related health issues and with the older niece and nephew soon to set out on their own life adventures, but I not so secretly hope not. In fact, we are trying to convince my nephew to plan his graduation party to take place next year like his 16th birthday party took place last year, on a campsite at Tawas Point.

It was on the camping trip in 2012 when my wonderful husband dropped me off at the park, but had to leave to be back for work, that I realized something.

As I sat up my tent alone, the first of our family members to arrive, I discovered that the secret to Tawas Point lie in more than the soft sand of the beaches, the coral glow of the sunsets over the bay, the familiar scent of the pine trees, and the sound of the birds at dawn. The secret was that this place had been bringing our family, in all of its various forms, together for nearly 30 years.

It’s not surprising then that whenever I think of Tawas Point, I think home.

Where is that place you call home, and what makes it home?

Letting the Past Speak

How much power can a place from the past have over one’s present?

Recently I was among the many, many people who were invited to a retirement reception.

I know that most people look forward to their retirement. I even know some people, my husband included, who are literally counting down by days, months, or semesters to their own retirement. For the majority of employed people, it’s certainly something to celebrate.

In this case though, neither the retirement nor the reception seem to be all that celebratory.

The person who has retired had been the principal of a very small, parochial school for much of his life. He was dedicated to the position and to the students. He worked for years for little in material compensation and will likely have little in retirement. Yet, he always welcomes his former students warmly and equally, no matter the choices they have made in their lives.

It is not due to the person who has retired, but rather to the place and the memories associated with it that a somber atmosphere surrounds these events.

I had just completed seventh grade at the Christian school that I had attended since I had been in kindergarten. I had intended to continue to attend that school until my senior year and to graduate with my friends as the first class to go from K to 12 at that school. Two of my cousins had already graduated, my cousin Lisa with honors, and she and her two brothers had played sports for the school. I wanted to follow in their footsteps.

An eighth grader who I admired had signed my yearbook at the end of my seventh grade year, and she had said that I would make a nice addition to the JV basketball team. I was incredibly excited. I definitely wanted to play basketball, and maybe even soccer.

But my dad had a job in a town about an hour south of our home, of my school, and we had to move. I handled the news with the typical grace that a teenager with all of my plans would display.

To say I was angry may have been an understatement.

I still remember the day we arrived at the new school for an intake meeting, of sorts. I said, “This isn’t a real school. Where’s the gym!”

The school didn’t have a gym, nor did it have lockers (during my first few years there), nor a chemistry lab, nor a band program, nor a theater program. It was an addition to the church, small, flat, and to me at that moment, the worst thing I had ever seen.

I knew that there were other Christian schools in the area, closer to where dad was working in fact, and I knew that they had band and sports. Both schools had competed against my school. I didn’t understand why my parents had chosen the school that they did, and I actually don’t know that to this day.

At that time in my life, the principal could have been the best educator – the best person – in the world, but it wouldn’t have mattered. I had lost my chance to graduate with my class and to participate in sports, to have something of the normal high school experience that my four older cousins had gotten. Those were things I would never get back.

After the reception was announced, I recounted those events to a good friend who had also attended the church affiliated with the new school but did not attend the school itself. Her siblings attended, but she had made a bit of a stand with her parents; she is a gifted musician, and, with no orchestra program, her talents would have been wasted at the school that her siblings and I attended.

I found myself once again wondering what would have happened if I might have made a similar stand with my parents, though I guess I sort of tried. In my case it was only sports, but not really.

Though the grammar curriculum was very strong, the math curriculum was up to par (and our teacher tried so hard to help us understand geometry), and the history and government curriculums were fine, the science curriculum was desperately lacking. Opportunities for electives, especially for female students, were extremely limited – to typing and a variation of home economics, and not only was there no competitive sports program, but the physical education class for the “ladies” was practically non-existent – with the exception of the one semester when the math teacher became our PE sub, and we got to play soccer rather than streets and alleys in PE!

There were no social events through the school. The church youth group had activities of an extremely limited nature for socializing. Because my friends who attended the school didn’t attend that church, with the exception of the musician, I rarely attended teen activities.

For the most part, the memories I made during high school linger as murky images of girls in dresses and panty hose and boys in shirts and ties packed into stuffy little rooms with few opportunities.

The one good thing that came from those days gone by are a couple of friendships that remain, one of which I value to this very day with a woman who was and is my kindred spirit.

I recently spoke with that good friend, and we have decided that we will not attend the reception. Though we didn’t actually attend classes at the newer building where the church and school now meet, many of the people and the place still hold those same feelings of opportunities lost and of time wasted.

About five years ago I returned to college to pursue an exercise science degree. I had developed a friendship of sorts with a professor there, also a person of faith. He once told me that he had chosen to forgive some people from his past because he believed that “They were doing the best they could.”

While I do not believe that is true of all of the people associated with that church and school, I do believe it is true of the principal. I believe his concern for us as students was, and is, sincere.

As a teenager, I felt that I deserved more from my high school experience than what I was given. In some ways, I think I still do. I also believe that the principal, and his family, deserved more than what they had back then, and that he and his wife deserve more than that they will have now given all of the years of work he invested.

My good friend and I plan to arrange to take him and his wife for a meal soon in honor of his retirement, and I definitely wish him well in the years ahead.

 

 

So Happy For You – Really

Looking through my YouTube playlist, I came across “Yoga for Loneliness,” and that was the 20 minute yoga practice I chose on a recent morning.

My “Yoga for Loneliness” choice was not quite as pathetic as it may sound. That particular practice is “hands free and off our knees” according to Adrian, the instructor – whose videos I generally like a great deal. After three days of bike workouts, I needed that kind of practice, done almost entirely in the supine position and focusing on stretching the legs, opening the hips, and caring for the spine.

I should also add that adulthood can be lonely at times, even if we’re in a good marriage or family situation. There are things that we face in life that, no matter how much someone who loves us might want to help or understand, they really cannot. And there are things that we all have to do alone at times.

On that particular day though, I was happy to be flat on my back in a cool room in a hip opening position as Adrian guided us through some breathing, a common technique taught at the beginning of a yoga practice. While I lie there, I began to think about where I was emotionally and psychologically, almost more than about what I was feeling physically.

I began to think about my sister who is just over three weeks from her due date. She will soon be giving birth to their first baby, a little girl.

Then I thought about my husband’s daughter, pregnant with their third child – their first boy, and how, at our last visit with them at their home, she told us that she is excited about the progress they’re making on their house and about their growing family.

Then I thought back to a dinner date in late February of this year. I met two of my longtime girlfriends whom I hadn’t seen in a while. One I talk to fairly regularly on the phone, and the other I “see” occasionally on social media, but the three of us had not been together in person in months.

One of my friends talked about a recent career move, and, though it was challenging, how pleased she was that she had felt ready to take on a step up in her career and to put her education and experience to work in her field of early childhood education. She then shared with our other friend, who possesses a master’s degree in piano pedagogy, that there may be opportunities for her to teach at the school when she is ready to return to teaching (after having had their second little girl about a year ago).

As I lie there on the floor working on stretching and refreshing my body, I felt like all of those things had added up to even more feelings of discouragement, and possibly even a little inadvertent jealousy.

Not only are people younger than me experiencing exciting life events and moving forward, but people my own age are also experiencing exciting life changes and moving forward.

I remember having felt like a bit of a loser that February night, even with long time friends who know how hard I’ve worked, and the challenges I’ve faced. But we all face challenges, so I wondered why they were moving forward, but I was so stuck, sitting there with no positive news of my own to share after several months apart.

I am sincerely happy for my sister and her husband. They bought an awesome old house two years ago in June and are working on some renovation. They have made friends in the area. They’re very much on track for this change, and I can’t wait to meet my new little niece.

I’m also happy for my husband’s daughter. We were both pleased to hear that she is having a boy as that seems to fit into their family plan. We’re glad their house is coming along the way they want it to. They both have jobs that they’re happy with, as much as one is happy with a job. Their life is good.

I’m happy that my friend took a step forward in her career. She is like me in that we are not quite satisfied with the status quo; we need something new to conquer. While I suppose it’s not for me to determine who deserves good things, I’m still going to say she deserves this success because she has earned it.

And of course I’m happy for my music teacher friend. She was not sure that she would be able to have a family, and now she and her husband have two lovely little girls. She too worked hard for her success, postponing completing her graduate work while her mom battled leukemia; teaching and directing at a university-sponsored, community music center for a paycheck that was far below the time and effort she put into that project; and finally starting her own home based studio.

My terrific husband believes that my time will come – that at some point I too will have exciting news to share. It has been nearly three long years since I completed my second Bachelor’s degree. Little spurts of success are all I’ve had to report, and it has been over a year since I’ve had even that.

Perhaps you can see why it’s hard for me to share his hope, but for now I guess I’ll just have to “rejoice with those who rejoice” and try to hope he’s right – that soon the time will come when friends and family can celebrate exciting news from me.

 

 

Down With Drama

What is it about drama that makes certain people so – happy?

I have long believed that some people seek to have drama in their lives, and if they don’t have drama, they try to create it.

I then wondered, as I often do, what is the exact definition of the word drama.

It does refer to the theatre of course, but I found the following definition by typing the word into Google: “an exciting, emotional, or unexpected series of events or set of circumstances.”

Exciting, well that’s not so bad. We all like a little excitement to break up the monotony of our every day routines and schedules, but generally, we prefer to choose our excitement, by planning a vacation perhaps, or by hosting a summer party, or by attending a special event.

Some kinds of excitement, like the kinds often portrayed in the dramas in movies and on TV – explosions, police chases, violent weather events – most of us could do without.

I think about how excited the young fans were about two weeks ago while attending the concert in Great Britain, excitement that they had planned. But then their evening was completely marred by the kind of excitement portrayed in show after show on TV; a bomb blast interrupted their night and changed their lives forever, whether or not they lost someone that night.

While it may seem disturbing, there are people who really enjoy turning on the news and hearing about such events, and not all of them are extremists or would ever even consider doing something like that. That level of aberrant behavior is not even a remote possibility for them, yet they’re junkies for that kind of news. It’s the gawker at the accident syndrome. And no, I’m not certain that it’s an actual syndrome so don’t quote me on that. But have all seen those people.

Not only does the definition of the word drama include excitement, it also involves emotions, usually rather intense emotions. You can tell who the drama lovers are because, if there is nothing exciting going on, they will often try to evoke some kind of emotional response, or actually more often than not try to provoke an emotional response.

Of course the media does it well, with headlines telling us how the woman who worked for the NSA “Wants to Burn Down White House,” and about how “Wounded May” will continue on after the election in Great Britain. While this tactic has reached a new level of annoyance, and unprofessionalism in my opinion, it’s certainly not new. It used to be said in the newspaper industry that, “If it bleeds, it leads.”

And so it does, for most media outlets, and for some people in our lives as well.

The definition of the word drama concludes by indicating that it involves an “unexpected series of events.”  It is often the case that the most unexpected events that interrupt our daily routines are among the most stressful, the early morning phone call that someone is in the emergency department of the local hospital – or of a hospital far away; or the meeting where the employees who are about to be laid off are gathered apart from the rest of their colleagues to receive the news; or the discovery that the basement has flooded. Those unexpected events can all cause some drama.

With the exception of excitement that is planned, it seems to me that the three components of drama that are specified in the definition of the word are all things that most people tend to want to avoid.

You may have guessed by  now that I do not consider myself to be among those who fancy drama. I work not to create it; I try not to participate in it; and I must admit I try to avoid people who do.

This blog post was not written for any one person or any one thing that is going on in my life right now. It’s a very general post – though I do of course know some people who seem to like drama, and I could certainly target the media and those who are devotes of that style of reporting.

It’s just that I was thinking that life comes with enough of its own unexpected events that can provide unwanted excitement and provoke difficult emotional challenges. I really don’t need create drama.

For some of us, the routine and the ordinary have their own charm. For those who need drama though, just wait; in this crazy life, it’s certain to find you. Then you can let the rest of us know about it.