Thanks...Again: Reimagining the Moon

Posted Wednesday, November 8, 2017, 6:57am

Today, dear friends, I’m grateful for…

How big the world really is, big enough to hold us all

Patrick’s burst of energy last night, resulting in another wonderful dinner and some veggies fermenting merrily on the kitchen counter

Granola on top of fresh applesauce

Pink and blue sky blending on the horizon

Dusting off those plans for a moon phases quilt

What are you grateful for today, my friends? Every breath…every breath.

I have some pretty great ideas. Or, I think I do.

I keep them in this part of my brain that’s becoming more crowded, and the supplies I need to bring these ideas to life are kept in the downstairs guestroom/studio, which has always been crowded.

A month into last year’s lockdown, I stood in front of the old primitive cabinet in the studio whose contents—mostly fabric—had stopped behaving themselves and were spilling forth, cascading down the shelves onto the floor. It looked rather bohemian and artistic until the afternoon I found one of the kittens sleeping on a pile of fat quarters next to a zip-loc baggie of thread. Time to reclaim control—of the kitten, the fabric and the room—in that order.

I came into the art of quilting in my 30’s, which was a lot like trying to learn a new language well past the age when the brain is capable of doing so (for this comparison, I strongly encourage you, dear readers and lifelong learners, to explore the controversial body of work presented by linguist Noam Chomsky regarding the “language acquisition device”. He proposed that we are born with an innate mental instinct for learning the fundamentals of any new language—it’s grammar, syntax and vocabulary—up until around the age of 12 or so, and then it sharply declines, right about when school systems introduce foreign language classes in the curricula. No wonder Spanish and I had verbal fistfights all through my sophomore year in high school). Mom taught my sisters and me the basic language of mending, and in our teens we dabbled in creating pillows and such, but no one on any branch of our family tree, to whom we still had living access, quilted, at least not in front of us or with a room dedicated to the craft. What quilts we did encounter sat on the shelves of the local JC Penney’s in their clear zippered thick plastic bags and cost too much for us to each have one. We were content with cotton blankets layered one on top of the other in the winter.

But as I rounded the corner on 29-heading-toward-30, I came across a lovely coffee table book about the quilt art of Japan, and fell into a world of colors and textures that eventually led me back to that primitive cabinet and its cascading contents. I wanted to learn how to do that, to make art that would hang on a wall instead of drape over a bed, and how did they get it to be so puffy-looking? I started rather ambitiously, assembling a small rectangular piece depicting my grief over losing a job I loved. I knew nothing of technique or mechanics, just plowed right in, attaching beads and upholstery cording and gold metallic thread that would curl and knot up on itself and frustrate the bejeezus out of my bold and naive artistic spirit. More than once, I’d furiously push the work-in-progress aside and go bake something, then return all humble and repentant and freshly determined to be as patient with those Quilt Muses as they were with me. It worked, and the piece hangs on the wall in the guestroom/studio, testament to what some thread and fabric and not many rules can produce.

Somewhere between hanging that expression of grief on the wall and the morning I wrote this 2017 gratitude post, I must have imagined a much larger art quilt involving the phases of the moon and found the sketches for it. Thirty pale yellow curved slices of moon in the process of becoming full arced across a dawn-into-dusk sky background, the whole of which—get this—would hang suspended from an intricate network of lines and rods in the ceiling to create a quilt-in-the-round; you’d have to step inside this circle of fabric to see the design in its entirety. No, our house at the time didn’t have that cathedral arch over our heads, and the one we live in now has about three and a half feet of clearance from the top of my little pate, so…some blueprint modifications are in order if I’m going to get this baby off the ground.

But it’s not the construction that has me feeling all nostalgic. It’s the realization that my imagination soared that high and spread out that wide to even conceive of something so bold and elaborate in its architecture yet simple in its artistic design. Thirty slices of pale yellow fabric wouldn’t take that long to cut out, and a dawn-to-dusk background is largely a matter of fabric selection from some vendor’s ombre sky collection with a bit of careful cutting. Arrange the moon slices on the background in order of new-to-full moon, hand-applique them down, then assemble the layers of quilt top, batting and backing and sew the whole thing together in gentle swirling lines of shimmering silver thread. I’ve gotta tell you, just re-reading that makes me want to quit my day job and devote my remaining time on earth to bringing this soft vision into life.

Liz, whispers one of the quilt muses, you could still make this one.

Come on…I’ll help you.

Thanks…Again: Grace and Gratitude at a Golf Outing

Posted on Friday, June 16, 2017, 8:13a.m.

Today, dear friends, I’m grateful for…

Dancing in the morning while serving breakfast at a golf outing

Repurposing wood pallets

Patrick’s sense of purpose

Tuna salad wraps for lunch

Taking a well-deserved break from the media

What are you grateful for today?

The best part of baking with Mom was being next to her and learning, though it didn’t feel like learning until I was on my own trying to remember that secret ingredient in her chocolate no-bake oatmeal cookies. Those cookies were my birthday cake of choice for years. “Just stack ‘em on a plate and stick the candles in the top row”, I said, and she did. Let me make them for you sometime (candles optional, but hey, every moment is a party waiting to happen, right?).

Mom’s cooking was simple and direct, and kept us alive while we all lived together in the family home. Her go-to menu included roast chicken, boiled dinner, spaghetti with meat sauce (five kids and individual meatballs wouldn’t have stretched as far), chuck roast with vegetables, tuna casserole, and endless iceberg lettuce salads. She also baked and you should know—her coffee cake was epic. I wasn’t a big fan early on because it was like a spice cake and that wasn’t ever my favorite. But at some point in my pre-adolescent years, I set that aside and once I saw how the ingredients came together, it all made delicious sense, especially the part where you added the baking soda to the vinegar-soured milk and it foamed up and over the rim of the glass measuring cup. That was cool for a middle school kid fresh out of science class.

Fast forward to the charity golf outing at my hospice workplace in June, which took place one week before the Kids’ Grief Camp it helped fund. I offered to cater the event’s breakfast in an effort to drive more of the monies raised toward the camp budget, and had been looking for an excuse to try some decadent new recipes on a new audience. Shortly after we moved out here, I entered some of the county fair’s baking competitions and did pretty well for years and then it was time to do something else; the golf outing breakfast seemed a good place to start. At least two days before the event, I took over the kitchen making scones (apricot ginger, cranberry walnut, chocolate almond with a bourbon cream glaze), muffins (lemon blueberry, cherry cheesecake) and tray after tray of Mom’s coffee cake, cut into squares or baked as individual muffins and arranged on platters that were carefully stacked into the backseat of the red Tacoma the morning of the event. As with most golf outings, we got an insanely early start, setting up breakfast in the shelter house on the course just as the sun was rising over the trees that skirted the 16th hole. I’m a bit fussy about presentation and committed to efficiency wherever that’s helpful, so made sure that when I arrived, all I had to do was cover the serving tables with that five foot wide paper covering that comes in 20’ rolls and creatively arrange the plates and platters of baked goods among the baskets of bananas and pitchers of orange juice. The coffee bar had its own table with plenty of room for golfers to linger and chat, and a few other hospice teammates joined me on the other side of the whole set-up. We looked smart in our khaki capris and t-shirts bearing the organization’s logo.

I’m not a golfer, so am only watching this culture unfold in front of me as they line up to fill small paper plates with what looks appealing to them. The clothes, the special shoes and gloves…Sometime in the wee dark hours of the morning, while I was loading up my truck with muffins and coffee cake squares, foursomes of all varieties were also loading their cars with clubs, terrycloth towels with one corner bearing a metal grommet, perhaps an extra poncho or jacket in case the rains showed up, and quite looking forward to chasing a tiny white dimpled ball across dew-damp velvety grass, getting their photos taken for the company’s charity wall back at the office. We fed them, handed out prizes for holes-in-one (hole-in-ones?) and offered them beer from a cart that made its first appearance on the course around 9:30a.m. I don’t think any of my hobbies or pastimes are that involved. But I suspect what got them all out of bed, besides love for the game itself, was the poignant connection they had to our work. Perhaps we tended to one of their family members as she exhaled one last time, or helped a grandchild learn healthier ways to grieve the sudden loss of a younger sibling. Strange at it may sound, this day in the sun gave them a fun and necessary way to say thank you, to send that gratitude forward to someone they’ll never meet who will also vigil at a loved one’s bedside, feeling lost and rudderless. We’ll alter our morning routines to do something like that, gladly.

This was the first year Mom’s coffee cake was on the breakfast buffet, two years almost to the day after she’d passed, and I had peeled off a few more layers of sorrow, coming to a more peaceful place with her complicated departure, (“family dynamics” as we say in hospice care—they are ever-present and plentiful. Best advice we can offer is proceed with caution and be gentle with yourself). I was lighter than I’d been in months, and in that rolling hill setting with its grand and sweeping views in all directions, I felt like dancing. So I did, right there in the serving line, to the back-beat of a funky playlist on my phone as our good golfing patrons came forward smiling and filling their cups with coffee. “Thank you so much for being here today. We are grateful for your support!”, a cheerful greeting welcomed each and every one of them. “Well, whaddya have here?” they’d ask, pointing to the carb-crowded trays. “That’s my mom’s coffee cake, signature recipe—nothing like it anywhere!”, I’d reply, and we’d replenish the platters’ empty spots as quickly as we could. They returned for seconds, wrapped in napkins to take with them on the course (I wonder to this day how it pairs with Busch Light), and I smiled gratefully, knowing that Mom was happy to feed them.

Those golfers don’t know the gift they gave to me that day. I still hold it close and dance.

Thanks...Again: Attaboy, Luther! Another Family Christmas

Posted December 25, 2015, 7:40a.m.

Today, dear ones, I’m grateful for…

Making brownies and granola at 6:00a.m.

A husband with a sense of humor

“The Ghost and Mr. Chicken”—a holiday tradition

Different creation stories attempting to grab onto the mystery of how we got here, and why

This breath, this heartbeat, this moment

What are you grateful for today?

I know exactly when it began.

Before the quarter-mile gravel driveway that opens up to our reveal our land-locked 41.1 acres, before the goats and the barn fire and the peacocks and cutting the path up the Hill and raising Bourbon Red heritage turkeys and that first Leonids meteor shower out by the sweat lodge… Before all of that, we lived in a small townhouse apartment on a street that ran parallel to a set of inconveniently active railroad tracks and an even more active major freeway. Each time the clock spun around to mark the hours of 2, 4, 6 and 10 (yep, twice for each of those), a load of coal or scrap iron would rumble past the crossing, announced by a sustained horn blast that took its job Seriously. It was only a slight gesture on mercy’s part that we were away from the apartment for four of those eight blasts each day, one that evaporated quickly during the dark 2a.m. one. Our first month there was harrowing for our sleep cycles, to say the least.

It was 1997. Patrick was studying environmental technology by day and chopping fresh garlic cloves by night for the pizza place down the street. On Saturdays, dinner was half-price and hot from the oven at the end of his shift. He could have walked home, distance-wise, but the pie would have been cold, so I’d make the five-block drive to pick him up, plant a kiss on his sweet cheek and swap places in the car so he could drive us home while the heat from the pizza warmed my lap. We’ve put chopped fresh garlic on most pizzas we’ve made or ordered since then. Good times, for sure.

We lived there for a little over a year while we rearranged our agendas to include an eventual move to what some city friends still call “the middle of nowhere”, and collected some of our sweetest and also most challenging memories from that final urban chapter of our lives. I think any memory that includes fresh pizza made by the one you love will always be in the top five on the “sweet memory” list. Patrick, being the gift that keeps on giving, added homemade cinnamon rolls to the half-price pizza dinner menu on the only Christmas Eve we lived in those narrow train whistle-blasted walls. I brought a copy of “The Ghost and Mr. Chicken” to the mix, and on that winter night in 1997, a tradition was born. We rocked that video old school on the VCR, and still have it in a Rubbermaid tote somewhere in the attic. Each Christmas Eve since, cinnamon rolls and Don Knotts are nonnegotiable on our to-do list of holiday activities.

If you haven’t seen the film, didn’t have the privilege of growing up in the 60’s and 70’s, you have my sympathies. No life well and truly lived should be missing this classic cinematic gem, and we still shake our heads regretfully as we acknowledge that Mr. Knotts was cheated out of his Oscar in 1967. In an attempt to help soften the blow for him, we created an elaborate trivia game that includes such brain-benders as “what is the population of Rachel, Kansas?” and “Recite the incantation uttered outside the old Simmons mansion by the town’s all-female occult-worshipping group.” Bonus points if you can also name how many times this incantation is spoken in the film. Make no mistake—we’re GAMC hard-core.

My sister Peggy and her family have lovingly, if not enthusiastically, embraced this quirky Christmas Eve observance, making sure their copy of the film (on Blu-ray DVD; we’re so over VCRs) is out and near the television when we all troop over to their place for good food and happily chaotic family conversations that tumble over one another out of genuine love and affection for the news and humor in each other’s lives. Not two minutes into the film’s opening credits and someone will shout out the iconic “attaboy Luther!” (another line that pops up most opportunely throughout the film, but only as a disembodied voice. I don’t even think the closing credits give credit to the person honored with hollering the words). Our dad loved that line a lot, as remembered movie scripts go, and would spontaneously drop it into whatever he was talking about at the moment. We always echoed it back to him, giggling as only 60’s tv show-raised children can do. Add another item to the “sweet memory” list.

This year is different in our present Christmas day circumstances, but that wouldn’t be new for us (except for the overarching ache of the pandemic, of course). Patrick and I have spent more than a few holidays in our own mutually-adoring company, so we’re adapting to that same arrangement today, banking on the hope that, as the Queen Mother said in March, “we will meet again…”. And when we do, the cast of The Ghost and Mr. Chicken will join us. Gathered family members will find their respective spots on the couch or floor in front of the tv, keep pens and trivia question handouts nearby, and wait eagerly for the first “attaboy Luther!” to ring through the family room.

How many times is that line hollered? You’ll just have to watch the film and find out for yourself.

And don’t forget the cinnamon rolls.

Merry Christmas, dear ones.

Thanks...Again: Proximity

Posted January 4, 2017, 7:00am:

Today, dear ones, I’m grateful for…

Planning for abundance and not just disaster

The hairbrush in my purse

A touch of whimsy in our living room decor

The scent of a freshly-peeled clementine

People whose hugs leave no part of you unhealed

What are you grateful for today? Look up at the sky and wonder…

You know what I miss most right now?

Whispering.

Because it requires closeness. Being right up next to someone.

And that’s rather thin on the ground at the moment, if you’re trying to be that domino that steps out of line to break the chain reaction of infection.

I’m lucky—I live with another human being, a fantastic human being who is rarely more than an arm’s length away. We hug and whisper and hold hands and pass the salt and fold the freshly-washed bedsheets over the blanket chest that serves as our coffee table in the living room. If twelve a day is still the recommended hug prescription for health, we’re there.

I come from a family that embraced embracing. Respectful, ask-first embracing (especially important with new folks and friendly co-workers). We understood that the relationship determined the kind of hug given, and still do. But once all that is settled, future encounters and greetings are likely to include a warm measure of affection, the reassurance that who you are in that moment is fine and safe in my arms.

Children get this. They understand the value and mechanics of closeness, sometimes to near-annoyance, but we forgive them or coach them if it’s over the top, and they keep coming back for more. My nieces and nephews were practically monkeys in their toddler/youth years, and I loved it. The minute one of us elders presented a lap (i.e. sat down), they climbed in, took up residence and filled us in on the important stuff of their little lives. It was an honor to be deemed worthy of such proximity, and to be considered a safe place for their weight and words. I can’t remember the last time I held a small one and heard about her day in one rambling unpunctuated sentence…

As someone who still gets up in front of folks to deliver information, convey some sort of message intended for continued reflection (see also “yammer”, “reflect”, “pontificate”, “lull to sleep”), I’ve used the whisper to helpful advantage. There are moments in the telling of a story where a drop in volume and a careful modification of tone and inflection is the essential delivery vehicle for impact. Paired with the ability to move about the room, place a permission-given hand on someone’s shoulder or lock eyes kindly, and folks tend to walk away from those conversations with a lasting impression that makes them happy they came.

I look forward to being close to people again.

Back on the home front, Patrick gives great hugs; I could take a sandwich and stay for the day, and isn’t that what a marriage is for? But I miss the wide and varied buffet of hugs and closeness that others in my life provided prior to March. The anticipation of greeting someone I haven’t seen in a while always included a flash image of that open-armed “hello—it’s so good to see you!” crushing wrap-around embrace. Or the gentle walk-up approach to a friend in tears, letting him know it’s ok to fall apart, to put his head on my shoulder and just be a bit of a mess for a while. Take your time, I’m here, thank you for trusting me with your sadness. Grief sometimes need to be whispered in between those breath-catching sobs. What a place of honor, to be present to such trust.

And don’t some jokes just demand reaching out to slap the listener’s knee or give them a slight nudge when you get to the punch line? So much is lost now in the space between us, and I know it’s temporary. But we should still keep telling jokes. Somewhere in that exchange, the endorphins will come through and sustain us for another day.

Until then, my dears, let’s make grand plans for the days when we can be within arm’s reach of each other’s good will and acceptance. There’s a meme floating around that predicts how “it’s gonna be weird” when we finally can hug each other again. I can’t speak for your social circle, but where I live, it’s always been a bit weird, and I look forward to taking it up a notch when it’s safe to do so (family and friends, ye be warned).

I’ll ask first, of course.

Thanks…Again: When a Hospice Nurse Laughs

(A bit of context for these reflections… I have a solid and thriving gratitude practice which consists of listing five things I’m grateful for each day on my Facebook page, often before the sun comes up. Been doing this for years, and have occasionally wandered back to these lists to see what I wrote, inevitably finding one-liners whose backstories are worth telling. “Thanks…Again” is where these stories live. I hope you enjoy them. Oh, and the bolded one is the featured story o’ the day).

Posted on May 17, 2019

Good morning dear friends! Today, I’m grateful for...

Thunder at 3:00am, a singular huge ball of rolling, window-rattling sound

An unexpected yet just delightful after-work sprint around the 17-acre field

Laughter with nurses, tears-streaming, water-spewing, endorphins-flowing laughter

Daniel’s easy smile

Ending the day with the solid feeling of a job well done

What are you grateful for today?

The words “hospice” and “laughter” don’t often team up. Even if you’re inside those sacred walls of care and give yourself over to the reality that, when helping someone close their circle of earthly life, you never know when you’ll be right smack in the lap of those anything-can-happen-and-often-does moments.

I work in a hospice setting, and my role is situated about six circles out from the center of that tender and poignant bedside care. Managing the volunteer staff involvement aspect of our work, I broker the space between one person’s selflessness and another’s need, linking compassion to loneliness, relief to caregiver fatigue. My place in the end-of-life constellation of support is well-suited for my expertise and abilities. I work in the company of physicians, nurses, social workers, chaplains, personal care specialists and unpaid companions to the dying.

In my first couple of years, I sat in the presence of my clinical co-workers, mystified and humbly silent in the face of their collective work. At weekly patient review meetings, I was immersed in the medical details of our patients’ struggles and stories, the family dynamics that stretched across a continuum bookended by unflagging support at one end and chaotic dysfunction at the other. The constant throughout was the skill of the care team working in alignment with each patient’s desires and wishes for a peaceful and painless death, and reassurance that those left behind would be taken care of, from spouses to children to beloved pets. I still sit, mystified and admiring, but less silent than before, because the good work of my fellow staff members—paid and unpaid—requires acknowledgment and praise spoken aloud to anyone who will listen.

Our patients are givers whose gifts cover a broad and deep expanse of life’s most precious and hard-won learnings. Ask a member of the clinical team “what have your patients taught you?”, and the answers tend to settle on a profound appreciation for this moment right here, the fleeting, graced and unguaranteed nature of our existence, and a well of gratitude that never stops bubbling up to the surface. And…our patients remind us to laugh. Some insist that we laugh with them. So we do.

An aide tells this story at a new volunteer training, to offer reassurance to anyone in the room who’s worried about saying the “wrong thing” to a patient or family member: a husband and wife are in our care, husband is the patient. He passes away at home just like he wanted to. The assigned aide is three weeks new on the job, there to provide post-mortem care (bathing, preparing the body for the funeral home transport) but is alone in this physical task, and at one point in the process needs help turning the patient over. Wife steps in to assist, and it’s tough going. Aide grunts beneath the husband’s heft and blurts out “geez, this guy’s deadweight!” Wife freezes for a split second, locks eyes with the aide across her husband’s body, and then they both burst out laughing. Tense moment broken, tears of much-needed release and relief flowing all around. “Wrong thing” said? Not at all. Couldn’t have been scripted better.

I suspect every branch of healthcare has its gallows humor, its raw moments of uncensored expression, and understandably so. What hospice nurses—indeed, all hospice clinicians—deal with daily is beyond most of the lay person’s scope of experience, and certainly mine. When vomit and diarrhea are the topic of discussion over lunch and people keep eating, you know you’ve entered a different mindset entirely. There needs to be a place to unpack all that without apology. Once, at an in-service on wound care which took place in the common area of our administrative offices, I was trying to quietly take a shortcut through the back of the room to the kitchen when I made the mistake of looking up at the PowerPoint projecting an uncomfortably close-up photo of a tunneling wound (do a Google images search if you’ve got a strong stomach. I couldn’t even type that phrase without gagging, and a photo doesn’t give you the whole experience. There’s odor as well and a three-dimensional aspect that would knock me to my knees). One of the nurses on the aisle noticed the unedited reaction on my face and smiled at its honesty. From that day forward—and we’re talking twelve years at hospice now—I am nowhere in the building on in-service days. Hospice nurses have a permanent place on my daily gratitude list.

The clinical team spends most of their time in the field; I’m at the office printing off volunteers’ applications or standing in front of a group of pre-med students inviting them to join us in our good work. What time I do spend with the nurses and other members of the clinical team I cherish, and also register a sort of perpetual ache that I’m not doing enough to support them. Couldn’t I give them some of my unclaimed PTO days, have dinner delivered to their homes, shower them with all the chocolate I keep stashed in one of my desk drawers? What would “enough” look like anyway? I doubt even they could tell me. So we rub along together with this mutually respectful posture between us, the finer points of our respective job duties sometimes blurry at the edges but acknowledged and appreciated nonetheless.

Two years ago, we celebrated the opening of a new branch office to anchor a large part of our service area, hosting a party for our business and community partners to mark the occasion. I was standing near a tall and chair-less cocktail table, holding a plateful of cheese cubes and bell pepper slices in one hand, drink in the other. Our vice president of clinical services, the new inpatient unit manager and the program manager for the new branch office—all seasoned hospice nurses—somehow got to sharing stories of working 12-hour shifts without a restroom break. One of them began describing some of the products on the market to “assist” females in their profession with elimination in such circumstances, and soon we were careening off into a conversation for which I had no context at all (in my 38 years of volunteer management work, I have yet to experience an unpaid staff emergency that would keep me from heeding nature’s call, much less one that lasted twelve hours. Heck, the restroom is right across from my office. Easy street compared to the life of a hospice nurse). I tossed in a bon mot of my own and it must have landed well because the inpatient unit manager sprayed us all with the sip of water she’d just taken from the bottle she was holding. I was drenched in the laughter of three hospice nurses who had collected more than their share of hard and indelible bedside images, who had logged uncounted hours of treating tunneling wounds, of holding the hand of an exhausted caregiver while the loved one’s body waited nearby for one final and dignified bath. In that moment, humor balanced the scales that teetered too often toward the grim and heavy realities of death, giving three good souls an endorphin-rich moment of release.

I don’t even remember what I said. I was just glad I did. Maybe it was better than chocolate or free dinners or unused vacation days. If those three nurses even remember it at all, I hope they call it up the next time the weight of their days is more than they can bear. In that tender and poignant moment, let it be enough.

Thanks…Again: Gratitude Revisited

If you follow me on Facebook, you know that each day I offer up five things I’m grateful for, and end with the question “what are you grateful for today?”. It’s both a random and thoughtfully-prepared list, fed by a life and an outlook that friendly strangers and acquaintances might call Pollyanna-ish.

I’m ok with that.

I know from the inside out that my life has been, and continues to be, a rich and diverse collection of experiences and lessons, inclusive of peace and heartbreak in equal measure. What got me here and keeps me here is gratitude.

I have no trouble identifying those five things that make the list. I often have trouble stopping at just five, but understand that we all have lives to live and bills to pay. So I post those five and then step into a day that will give me another five hundred.

For months now, I’ve felt a strong pull to reach back and review those lists, to sit and visit with them like old friends, and then, randomly, grab one item from the stack and fill in the back story. Why was I grateful for dental floss that chilly day in October? I could meander in a thousand directions, all from a simple incomplete sentence, a bullet point of thanks that simply couldn’t stay put or unmentioned, but begged for the light of day.

So here’s a risk, an attempt at plunging a bit deeper into the pool of gratefulness and seeing what’s there.

(And for a more in-depth look at where this daily list making ritual originated, check out the post “Today, Dear Friends, I’m Grateful For…” It explains everything).

Here we go:

Wednesday, August 31, 2016, 5:39a.m.

Today, dear friends, I am grateful for…

Starting the day with massage and acupuncture

People who understand the risk of telling their stories, and tell them anyway

How pizza makes a tough day a little better

The aroma of the local health food store—all herby-y, coconut oil and weathered wood

Being in love like we just met last week, after twenty years

What are you grateful for today?

I met my first hippie when I was a freshman in college. He was sitting at a round table in the dining hall, eating a bowl of something heaped over with sprouts. Wearing a plaid cotton shirt, denim overalls with scuffed brass buckles and a broad smile, he stood and reached out to shake my hand, “Hi! I’m Steve. I’ll be coordinating your volunteer project at the migrant center in Hartville this Saturday.” All freshmen needed to complete community service hours our first weekend on campus, before the big kids showed up, and I signed on to paint the buildings where transient workers from Mexico and Central America checked in, got their tools, and ate their lunches. Steve would drive a handful of us over in one of the college vans.

I sat down with my tray of grilled cheese and salad (no sprouts—his overflowing bowl of them was my first introduction. I also didn’t know what migrants were. Looks like my post-high school education began outside the classroom), and I proudly told him I was majoring in Accounting/Finance so I could make a lot of money and buy my dad a boat. At eighteen, you keep it simple and quotable. He smiled and nodded, and the conversation drifted easily past family, hometown, and hobbies. I don’t recall why or how, but I remember telling him at some point that “abortion is my pet peeve” (I’m miles from that position now; another story for another time), and he listened patiently before offering “instead of ‘pet peeve’, how about ‘social concern’?”, and I tucked that phrase away into my fast-growing grown-up vocabulary, where it lives still, worn at the edges for all its use over the decades. We ended on a lighter note, and I wandered back to the dorm, unaware that my feet were now on a new Path I’d be traveling for the next 30+ years.

Steve lived in a large house off-campus with four other recent graduates (don’t all hippies live in communes??), and that Saturday my fellow first-years and I ended up there after the migrant center painting plans were rained out. We had lunch (more sprouts, more ‘social concern’ talk, more education about migrant workers) and I think Steve turned in our service hours for credit, though none of us held a paint brush that day (shhh…don’t tell the Student Life office). After lunch we wandered around the house—an old two-story duplex with wooden floors, a working fireplace, a once-employed kitchen upstairs and a modest backyard where Tom, one of the five roommates, practiced his cello when the skies were clear. There were also two Mikes—one became a teacher, the other was a triathlete—and Rob, psychology major and Dan Fogelberg doppelganger with guitar talent to match. I didn’t know it then, but the following summer, I’d become part of that household and for the first time in my life, I’d have my own room.

Steve worked at the local health food store a couple miles up the street, where he packed and shipped herbs and other supplements in the warehouse next to the retail operation. He mentioned over dinner one night that they were looking for another cashier, and thought I might apply. This would be a big move for me, since my only other form of employment up until then was babysitting. A worthy job, to be sure, but it didn’t require a dress code or timeclock. I got an interview, and was just about to leave the house wearing a nice-fitting but totally inappropriate terrycloth short set (really short shorts; oh dear), and once again, Steve came to the rescue, recalibrating my presentation by diplomatically suggesting slacks and a blouse. I didn’t even know I was being schooled on proper job interview attire, he was that kind.

I met with Don, the owner, in an upstairs office (the store itself was yet another old house with wooden floors, renovated and rearranged for retail but retaining all the charm of its original purpose, a family’s home where the previous residents used to live and kick back after work and maybe raise a kid or two). After a review of my qualifications (basically, I was cheerful and teachable), we closed the deal. As I made my way downstairs to explore the layout and inventory, I inhaled an aroma that would stay with me, imprinted and forever associated with all health food stores thereafter: an earthy mingling of garlic, valerian root, lavender, coconut, carob, trail mix and patchouli oil. This is what the world should smell like all the time, I thought as I walked out into the late May sun and unlocked my bicycle from the metal rack in the parking lot. I would be happy here.

And I was, after that awkward first-day moment where Don ceremoniously presented me with a green t-shirt emblazoned with the company logo (to replace the red “Coke Adds Life” t-shirt I was wearing. I’ll wait, while you snicker and roll your eyes. Ahhh..young folk). This first real job anchors all of my college memories, a mental gathering place where some of the most significant relationships in my life were created and nurtured. My first week there, I was stocking the Celestial Seasonings tea section when my philosophy professor jumped out from behind a cardboard end cap chocolate display, singing “I Can’t Stop Loving You”. You just can’t get that at Walmart.

The connection between smell and memory is well-known and researched (I highly recommend the article from The Harvard Gazette, “What the Nose Knows”, by Colleen Walsh, February 27, 2020), and I suspect on August 31, 2016, my morning cup of green tea triggered the memory of the aromas for which I was grateful that day. Like a spiderweb’s silken spokes, recalling that simple slice of my formative adult years sprouted all manner of wonderful tangents, each a small book of its own with meanderings and writing prompts to delight me for years to come.

A health food store by any other name would smell as sweet (hat tip to the Bard).

Until next time, thanks…again.