Category: Life

Life

When in doubt, unplug

Mary C

The printer at work was giving me a run for my money last week. If it wasn’t callibrating, warming up or asking for new toner (it needed all four cartridges replaced in three days time), it was going into power save mode and to wake it up I had to open and close the paper tray several times which usually does the trick. More than once I simply turned it off, took a few deep breaths and turned it back on. And of course this is going to happen when the workload that requires a bunch of printing is at it’s height!

My job is not stressful. I work in the Faith Formation office at my Catholic church and spend most of my three day a week gig organizing for the in-person weekend mass as well as corraling volunteers to help give out communion in the parking lot. My favorite part is talking to parishioners who call to sign up for mass and I get to learn about the intricacies of their lives as I become a trusted listener.

Continue reading “When in doubt, unplug” →
Life

What makes you anxious?

Mary C

For several months I have been consciously avoiding the news which isn’t easy when your husband turns on CNN before bed most evenings. Turn off the hearing aids and whala – no more news. The reason is mainly because I hate politics as much as Michelle Obama claims to and I do understand it is a necessary evil but the rhetoric of Trump’s campaign was really getting to me.

I decided to tune into the Democratic convention and thought it was well done. It kept my attention all four nights and the words spoken were a balm to the crushing, anxiety inducing rhetoric coming out of the White House these days. By the Friday morning after the convention I felt my anxiety lift as hope took over and that in a short time there would soon be adults running our country again. Optimism for our country’s future was on the upswing. And that’s when I started to tune into the news more.

Big mistake. Once again, Trump has managed to make my anxiety for our country soar. We need someone with feelings, empathy and heart leading us in these uncommon and hard times. He doesn’t seem to care the USA is number one in COVID deaths by a good percentage of the overall population and he keeps saying it’s going to “disappear”. He lives in a different world than the rest of us, I guess. He incites radical behavior, fueling the fires of unrest and blaming it all on Joe Biden who IS NOT PRESIDENT.

My optimism has faded as I read the latest polls which has Biden and Trump a bit too close for comfort. How do we live in a society that doesn’t care about equality and the health of our neighbors? How have Republicans let this man (and family) take over a party that didn’t used to be so radical? Who can we blame for all of this? The people who didn’t exercise their voting rights in 2016?

I have become used to gently rolling my eyes at my husband, a lifelong Republican, who feels it is his patriotic duty to gobble up all the books that lay bare the sins of Donald Trump. I do not wish to know how truly bad he is although I have more than an inkling. But when it came to hearing what Melania was about (because we have barely heard a peep from her in four years), I couldn’t help but be drawn to a New York Times article about the new book her former friend wrote. The last sentance of the article left me chilled. Melania claimed to her friend who was worried she was having a nervous breakdown that “You give people nervous breakdown, you don’t have it your own”. I, for one, do not wish to live in a country that promotes this kind of anxiety and I hope I am not the only one.

MC

Life

Nothing to do

Mary C

As a parent, there are very few words that pain me than when my teenager says …but there’s nothing to do. Or, what can I do? Or, I’m bored. Reaching back into my own childhood, those questions and statements would be met with a list of chores guaranteed to keep you busy for days and would teach you that uttering such phrases to your parents was a very bad idea. To my chagrin, that does not work with my own kid.

Since we are all new to the land of The Cape, we don’t have a handy list of things to do when the weather isn’t cooperating. And so we Googled it (or more precisely asked Siri) when presented with overcast and rainy weather on our second day here. The list was good but it required us to be in “normal” times and not our current social distancing, everything’s closed state of being. It sent me back to our second summer visiting Delaware when he was barely three and we were unlucky enough to presented with four consecutive days of rain and very little to do outside of shopping at the nearby outlets. You can imagine this isn’t a three-year-old’s idea of fun. Fortunately we had packed a dvd about farm animals and we watched it non-stop until our eyes were bleeding but it kept him occupied. When we couldn’t take it any longer, we packed up the car with two days left on our week’s rental and headed home.

That’s where my thoughts were drifting yesterday afternoon, not even twenty-four hours into our trip as I stared into a pair of sullen eyes. The kids is addicted to The Office and even episodes of that would no longer placate him. Let’s go for a ride, I said. Always an option regardless of the weather and so we jumped in the car and headed to explore what lay beyond our very “boring” room at the Inn. We hunted down a shack selling lobster rolls and the best clam chowder I have ever tasted. We drove a little more but then I remembered my quest to visit the nearby bookstore and so entered the address into my mapping software and guided my husband on what turns to make.

When we arrived at the sparsely stocked new/used store they both looked at me with a look that may have said $%@& but I gently pulled them inside and said I’d buy them anything they desired if we could have a few minutes of peaceful browsing. The store does not accomodate more than one family of browsers so we had to wait our turn at the back of the store until the others had been checked out. In the end, the visit netted three new/used books and at least two happy people (me and my husband, in case you didn’t guess). I bought a book that has over 100 people waiting for it at the library both online and hard copy and the book seller warned me I wouldn’t be available for family interaction for the next day or two until I finished it. This sealed the sale for me!

We did not come up with any other options about spending the rainy day but somehow we mananged to survive and today the sun is gloriously shining for a beautiful day at the beach. We made it to the other side. At least for now.

MC

Life

Untamed

Mary C

Did you happen to read Glennon Doyle’s recent book, Untamed? While I have been familiar with Doyle through the years, I never got around to reading any of her other books. She popped up in my consciousness through authors I am keenly interested in – Elizabeth Gilbert, Brene Brown and of course, Oprah. If Oprah likes you, you are gold, right? But somewhere between the time I discovered her and sort of knew who and what she was about (life struggles included anorexia, alcoholism, drug addiction and unplanned motherhood to name a few) to her writing the book Untamed, she seemed to have undergone a complete shift in thinking.

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Life

Empathy for lives lost

Mary C

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Life just got incredibly hard for four families in my community. No longer are worries about finances and social distancing and lack of toilet paper on the forefront of their minds. My interest in reading the obituaries in the local paper doesn’t usually send my morning into a wave of saddness because if you see one young person in the pages, it’s occasional at best. Today there were four. Thirty-one, thirty-one, twenty-five, twenty-three.

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Life

Music For Life

Mary C

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Music has always been a big part of my life even though I wasn’t born with talent as a musician myself. Unlike with writing, I have never been bothered by lacking this innate aptitude many others enjoy and I’ve taken up my lot in life as an enthusiastic fan. From an early age I was blessed to possess my very own compact turntable and I collected 45’s of my favorites so I could play them ad nauseum. My first favorite song ever was You Never Promised Me A Rose Garden by Lynn Anderson (remember Hee Haw!) and I think I made my family crazy playing it over and over and over until YMCA and then Funkytown took its place. By the time I was nine or ten, I graduated to full albums and collected everything by Shaun Cassidy, Leif Garret (my secret boyfriend), the Jacksons and the Osmonds (I liked Jimmy but he wasn’t a big star like his other siblings). 

Of course I was highly influenced by my older siblings tastes so by my teen years I was turned on to a wider range of artists including Boston, The Eagles, The Steve Miller Band, Peter Frampton (my older siblings) and The Clash, AC/DC, Yes, U2, The Kinks (my brother, Jeff who was two years older than me). I borrowed their albums and sometimes returned them with scratches, much to their dismay, which probably caused them to hide them on me. My dad was no fan of AC/DC and I recall an incident where he broke one of their albums over his knee due to unwholesome lyrics, I guess. It was the same album I brought to play at our catholic school’s sixth grade Christmas party and I was probably lucky there was no time to play it because I might have been expelled.

High School was a time I came into my own as far as musical tastes went. The early years were Loverboy (my first concert sans parents), The Little River Band, Journey, Tears for Fears, Culture Club and Prince. When I discovered Prince, everyone else took a back seat and I’d play and pause the albums (particularly 1999 and Purple Rain) on my cassette player while I’d write the lyrics in a notebook so I could sing along. Kids these days don’t know how good they have it with the internet as lyrics were not always included in the liner notes. One of my bucket list items was to see Prince in concert and luckily I crossed that off when he came to Boston and I made the six hour round trip trek to hear him from the top of the bleachers. It was a moment in time I’ll always cherish. It’s a good thing my dad didn’t take note of his lyrics as I’d have a lot more broken albums on my hands.

I started to learn about heartbreak as I moved onto college and there would be playlists to recover from these season of life events. Gloria Gaynor’s I Will Survive was the gold standard of breakup songs along with Nothing Compares 2 U, Missing You by John Waite and anything by Natalie Merchant and Alanis Morissette. My last really hurtful breakup was in 1997 and I spent hours driving around listening to Chris Isaak’s Forever Blue (my newest favorite artist after seeing him on a Friends episode) until I was out of tears. Listening to his live rendition of his iconic song Wicked Game (also a good break up song) was the background music of my impromptu engagement in 2002. It was my very first Chris Isaak show, another bucket list event and special memory.

There are many, many other musicians I enjoy and when a song I haven’t heard in years pops up on the random selection feature of my iTunes library, I am often pulled back into the past to relive a time when I played them over and over, the times vivid once again, both good and bad.

MC

Life

Beyond the headlines

Mary C

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We are holdouts on dropping our subscription to the daily newspaper. Although you can get most of your news from other sources these days, especially national news, the newspaper is still a long term habit we’re not ready to let go of. Of course the fact I used to work there and had nearly twenty years to build this habit at half price gets most of the credit for this. Also, for several years after I left, the familiar bylines were like an invisible connection to the people I knew and grew to love. Yes, reporters are a curmudgeonly and questioning lot. The sky is blue? Prove it.

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Life

Life is weird and good

Mary C

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It’s 8:00 a.m. on a Friday and Starbuck’s is nearly empty, a half dozen tables moved to the front of the store with chairs stacked on top, denote we are living in a new time. It’s chilly (for August) and raining but the three meagerly spaced tables outdoors, under the eave of the building are occupied with the die hard coffee and wifi borrowing devotees who need to be in the vicinity of a coffee shop to write. Today, I am one of them as I wait while my dad undergoes a quick procedure at the hospital before he is released back out into the world. Of course, I wasn’t allowed to go in with him because – COVID.

But sitting here writing in a once bustling shop is a starker reminder of the unusual times we are living in. Weirder than masking up to grocery shop and go to work. There are no tables of early morning seniors or students or business people having a quick early meeting over a cup. The tables aren’t full of writers or readers or others just needing a quick escape from home. This particular Starbucks carries noise in perpetual motion around the room from front to back, side to side, but no conversations are bouncing back to me today. Just the peripheral vision of masked customers waiting 6 feet apart for their name to be called. A quick pick up and run.

School is on my mind these days because I have a rising eighth grader and the memories of a chaotic spring semester of online schooling from home are whirling back to me. What is school going to look like this year? Will there be sports (probably not), will there be a regular school day (probably not), will there be a return to a teen social life (probably not) – or a parent social life?! We are grinning and bearing it as best we can but the teen hasn’t been out of my vicinity (except when I do my fifteen hours a week at my job) since mid-March and I think we both need a break. COVID has changed so much for all of us but we still have each other and the instincts to keep going on regardless, day after day. We are resilient, thank God.

I can’t help but wonder what our country would be like today if we had a different leader who could have given us some real guidance in the time of this pandemic. I will leave it at that as I shy away from political commentary here. The thing I am grateful for is that I only have to worry about today. Sitting here, enjoying a coffee, retrieving my dad from the hospital and getting him back to his loved ones. Life is still good. Weird but good.

 

 

Life

Imagining a different life

Mary C

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I’m not one to sit around and think of the roads that diverge in life as events lead you down one path or the other (this always sends me back to Frost’s The Road Not Taken), but today would have been my brother Jeff’s fifty-fifth birthday and my mind has drifted backward, undoing all the intervening years to his twenty first year which was his last proper birthday, the day he became of legal age, and he was on his way to getting the life he wanted. I had turned nineteen a week and a half prior and we were looking forward to being in the same city for college that fall as he was transferring to his dream college only they didn’t have space for him on campus, an incoming transfer student in his junior year.

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Life

Life is a Mixed Bag

Mary C

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Dad and me at his 80th Birthday Celebration

It’s been a while since I’ve published a blog post and even though I say “published” I may as well say attempted too. In the time of Coronavirus I may have run out of things to say. If like me, your days have turned into a perpetual Groundhog Day, you know what I’m talking about. What is there to say about the waking up, brushing teeth and doing eight other things, the same ones you did yesterday. Actually, it’s not as bad as I make it seem and one bright spot in my last month was that my dad was visiting me. He has slowed down quite a bit since turning eighty last December but I wasn’t prepared for the amount of help we would need to get around our house. He fell on his first day here and it was then I realized how fragile he’d become. But with a cane and someone’s crook of an elbow, it was manageable.

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