Soak Up the Sun

Why is our house so big, Mom?

Because we’re lucky, Gavin.

Gavin and I have many exchanges like this. We discuss why our kitchen is so big, how much he likes our bathroom, and why there is so much food in the pantry.

Our house is not big. It is a 1910 threadbare farmhouse. Sometimes I love it dearly. More often I am dissatisfied with its drafty, worn rooms, with no budget (and limited energy) to do much about its flaws.

The first time Gavin asked some of these questions, I could have posed different answers.

It’s not big honey. Don’t you remember Nicole’s house? (Now that’s big).

We don’t have a lot of food, honey. We have to go shopping again.

But Gavin seems to like my standard answer. Sometimes, if I am feeling more instructive, we go on to talk about people who have no home, or not enough food, and how they need our help.

I went with Because we’re lucky because I wanted to reinforce Gavin’s natural optimism and appreciation. I wish I could retrieve the perspective I had as a child. My mom nicknamed me Pollyanna, for the child who played “the glad game”, an enthused, persistent hunt for something positive in every situation.

Young children live in the moment, and only see what is in front of them. Then, as they are exposed to more of the world, they start to make comparisons. When I started to lose the knack for the glad game, Mom started reminding me that “Comparisons are odious” , a quote that goes back many years and is attributed to John Donne and Cervantes, among others.

The quote was Mom’s way of saying “Stop comparing yourself to others.” Funny, though. I always assumed odious meant something more benign, like meaningless or useless. I looked it up today, and the word goes so much deeper than that. It means hateful, horrible, abhorrent, revolting.

Let me add toxic. This week, I found myself wrapped in a suffocating web of tangled comparisons. I compared the clutter of my house to my friend Pam’s pristine, well decorated abode, and my lack of money to someone else’s sudden windfall. I compared my medical writing job to my dream of writing creatively full time. And, worst of all, I compared myself to my own impossibly high expectations (and, of course, came up sorely lacking).

Persistent as Pollyanna, the universe keeps sending me messages. I listened to Sheryl Crow on the way to work, and she urged me to Soak Up the Sun: “It's not having what you want; It's wanting what you've got.”

Tom is reading books on Buddhism, and they seem to be leaping into my hands, with similar messages on almost every page. In a chapter on Right Livelihood, one author talked about peace and acceptance through perspectives like I am what I am, I do what I do (as opposed to I am what I do, or I am what I have). Right away I tie this to my Sunday School days. God said to Moses from the burning bush, I am that I am. Like an adult child seeing her parent in a new light, I think maybe God had something there.

The hard part of all these insights is applying them in a concrete way. But the universe had an answer for that, too. Sarah Ban Breathnach wrote Simple Abundance, a great book for righting a warped perspective. It is time to dust it off. In the meantime, she has created an online gratefulness journal in list format that I have saved to my computer desktop. I can manage a quick list of what is right with my life, and it will be great medicine for the odious ailment of comparison and complaint.

I am playing the glad game today. I don't think I'll ever play it with the same vigor of childhood, but I am happy to know it it is still mine. Maybe my gratefulness journal will become an incubator for great story ideas. Maybe I can send the link to a few weary friends. Maybe this house does have some charm, maybe my job offers more than just a paycheck. I feel so much better already.

Thanks, Gavin.

On the Fly

I knew that I would be in a lot of planes on Thursday, and I looked forward to one shining aspect of that day: the chance to read. My reading life has not been the same since I became a mother. I have to choose my times and places much more carefully, and end up reading half-chapters in the bathroom.

In the streaming dawn light of the first airport (Hartford), I finished Caught in the Fading Light: Mountain Lions, Zen Masters, and Wild Nature, by Gary Thorp. There was something great about sitting in a 100% synthetic environment, surrounded by suits, and reading about a guy’s nocturnal searches for mountain lions. I had this secret in my hands, an intimate account of deep longings by another nature lover. The hard part was keeping the Zen pace of the book while the world raced around me. I stopped to watch a toddler, just starting to walk, double over and look at me through his legs. We giggled at each other. He helped me slow down.

I started feeling flu symptoms before the first leg of my return flight from Raleigh-Durham. I had to change planes at Norfolk, and then flew to Philadelphia in that awful, all-I-want-to-do-is-curl-up state. I had to read total fluff: Time magazine (which has gotten fluffy as an Easter bunny) and Entertainment. All I remember from the entire 120-page glossy journey is that I felt sorry for Harrison Ford, whose abilities as an action hero were called into question. Oh, also, middle-aged people are having more sex. It was a great distraction.

By the end of the trip, in a dehydrated state, I was nearly hallucinating. In the waiting lounge at Philadelphia, I thought a woman in the lounge was knitting. I saw the dart and weave of her hands and found the rhythm comforting. But she was just untangling her earphones. I had to get home.

I took the new Oprah magazine on the last plane. I like her enthusiasm and her effort to embrace things beyond fashion and Hollywood. Every issue has a “bookshelf”, and Sigrid Nunez’s bookshelf contains A Writer’s Diary by Virginia Woolf. I added this to my wish list, pronto. I can‘t wait to see if Virginia also second guessed herself, didn’t want to get up and write, and compared herself to other writers. I will be so disappointed if she didn’t.

I read a piece of my own but gave up, disgusted. This is a piece I have reworked and reworked, but it still has not come together. I have no new ideas. Back into the briefcase. I will banish it to the zippered darkness until it is ready to behave.

The last thing I read was a piece from another writer in my group. How I relished, even while ill, writing notes in the margins. Why, oh why, hadn’t I thought to be a literary editor? She is a brilliant writer but I saw that she too puts things in that should stay out, has some rearranging to do. Very reassuring.

The possibilities in a day of flying are limitless. Maybe next time I will do a write-a-thon instead of a read-a-thon. I love the portability of reading and writing, for it really feels like a comforting friend in even the worst of times. It comes with me on trips and even into my sick bed. So glad I didn’t choose hockey instead.

Requiem

The fish are dead, and probably have been for some time.

It never occurred to me to take care of them myself. Tom wanted the tank; Tom would have to care for the fish. Like Pontius Pilate I washed my hands of their inevitable fate. The tank was rarely cleaned, and I suspect they were not fed regularly.

The muck on the glass had been building for a while, and then the pump broke. Still their little existence persisted, and at the end I found myself wishing them dead. (The guest room would look so much nicer without the deep green algae.)

My wish has come true, and I am much sadder (and guiltier) than I anticipated. For one thing, their death made Gavin wail. He had wanted to feed them, and shook his head in stunned disbelief. “They’re dead; they’re dead!” He immediately started theorizing on the meaning of death: they escaped, they disappeared, someone killed them (yes, I thought of my not-so-benign neglect).

I fibbed: “They were just very old. They had a happy life.” I thought about the funeral, and this made me even lower. The final goodbyes will be generic; the fish never even had names.

Gavin hadn’t been very expressive when Oops and Ow (his hermit crabs) died, so I was surprised by his sorrow. But then, his connection with the fish went further back. On his first tour of our home, fresh from the maternity ward, his gaze seemed to catch the glimmering “fishies”. We hoisted him up many times to sprinkle their food and peer into their depths. He liked to play hide-and-seek with them, behind the plants and, later, behind the thickening algae crust.

Last year, I wrote a nature piece called Fish Story for Snowy Egret, a delightful nature journal. It was a reflection on finding fish in the shallows of the Long Island Sound, trapped by the diminishing tide and stalked by seagulls. The piece has good drama: the craggy backdrop of the winter beach, their shimmering rainbow scales, the malevolence of the gulls, and the innocence of our interaction. I threw them back into the depths one by one, buying them time to live. I completely anthropomorphized their joy at a family reunion.

The fish that inspired Fish Story spoke deeply to me. They made me reflect on the abundant world, its paradoxes, and my own place in it. Of course, it was nothing they had done. They just reflected what was already in my mind and soul. Unfortunately, so did the fish upstairs.

A prophet is not welcome in his own country. The fish in the guest room were a fixture that I stopped seeing. They did not speak to me as their cousins on the beach had.

I would like to say that from this moment on I will always be kind to living things, always thoughtful. But I know that even larger losses have not created a perfect me. The best I can do, as I face a Saturday reserved mostly for mothering and housekeeping, is to recall that even mundane moments host meaningful choices.