Moving Into A New Home

I used Grammarly to grammar check this post, because: (a) I can't afford to hire a human editor; (b) I can't spell; (c) I suck at typing; and, (d) (most importantly), the folks at Grammarly.com offered to give me a $20 gift certificate if I tried their product. I tried it and discovered that my fifth grade English teacher (mentor, guru and head writing muse) has been reincarnated as a website that points out the errors in my writing -- without smacking a ruler across my desk to get my attention.



This past month, I helped my daughter launch her life-as-an-adult, and I moved into a new place of my own.

I've been reminiscing about the first time I moved into an apartment by myself. I've moved a number of times since then, but none of my moves was as exciting as that first one.

When I graduated from college,  I got a job in a city about 100 miles away from my parents' home. I had no furniture, but I rented an unfurnished townhouse. (I guess I didn't know you could rent a furnished place.)  My dad had an old station wagon that was huge. I had a compact car with a hatchback.  We managed to fit all my worldly possessions in the two cars. The largest volume of stuff was comprised of books, record albums (those vinyl things that you put on spindle .... oh never mind. People who had records will understand, and people who don't know what records were probably aren't reading this), and a mattress.

We put the mattress on the floor in the bedroom.  We put the portable black & white TV my parents gave me for a graduation present and my record player on a plastic table in the living room. Dad gave me a folding lawn chair from his collection and one of those little square plastic side tables.  I had one lamp, which I put by the chair when I was in the living room and carried up to the bedroom if I wanted to read in bed at night.

My mom and my dad's aunt went through their kitchens and put together a collection of kitchen tools from duplicates they owned. I didn't even know the function of half of the tools. I had two plates, a couple of glasses and a coffee mug.  The first thing I bought for my new digs was a coffee pot. The second thing I bought was a new record player -- that played records in stereo. I'd sit on the floor in front of the record player with the speakers pointing at the perfect angle and listen to music for hours.

After a bad experience at a laundry mat, I bought an apartment-sized washer and dryer on credit. I was so proud of my purchase I took pictures of it and sent them to my family.

Some friends of my parents, whose home had been demolished by a tornado,  gave me draperies. Some of their curtains that were stored in the basement survived the storm. They didn't need them any more because the old curtains didn't fit their new windows, so they gave them to me. The draperies were the nicest thing I owned. For years.

The floors of my apartment were bare and the furnishings Spartan (think: third world.), but I was proud of having a home of my own. I was so happy there (for a while)! It makes me smile to think of it even after all these years.  I was young and naive (i.e., stupid) and had no idea how precarious my job was at the time. I didn't know any better, so I was  happy.

Moving into a new home should be exciting no matter what your age or station in life.  It offers all kinds of opportunities to experience new things.

My daughter is settling into her first apartment.  I am settling into my own new place.  We are at different places in our lives, but moving into a new home always offers the opportunity to grow.  If we're smart, we'll seize that opportunity. Kids know they have a lot to learn.  It would be easy for a person who's already lived more than a half-century to think that she already knows everything she needs to know. At my age, a person could switch on the auto-pilot and go through the motions of living. I don't want do that. I want to embrace my new life. I want to learn new things, be as creative as I can be and (most importantly of all) learn to savor small pleasures.

I've spent the last thirty years of my life trying to fulfill the expectations of others (parents, spouse, church community, bosses, and  culture in general).  I'm done with that. From now on, I'm going to do what I want (at least during the hours of the day when I'm not at work), only because it gives me pleasure.

I'm starting over. I have a much nicer apartment than I did when I was 22. It came fully furnished. I'm allowed to use these beautiful things for as long as I live here. I like that. I can have the benefit of enjoying nice things, but when the day comes that I decide to move again, I don't have to worry about taking any of it with me.  The freedom that comes with that is positively exhilarating!

I may be older and (hopefully) wiser than I was in my twenties, but I still have a lot to learn. I'm excited to get on with it.

In addition to enjoying my own adventure, I'm vicariously enjoying my daughter's transition from girl to woman. Occasionally, I give in to the temptation to wax sentimental about my little girl who is now moving on without me.  But, most of the time, watching her test her wings makes me happy.

"Bread and Circuses" -- No, thanks.

People tell me I need to get out more and socialize.  The problem with that is I don't find much pleasure in the kinds of things that most people think of as fun.

Entertainment purely for the purpose of passing the time annoys me. When I see a large sporting event or concert on TV, I am reminded of the Colosseum where Rome used entertainment as a mechanism of social control. Sometimes it seems to me that our culture encourages us to participate in elaborate (and expensive) entertainment events for much the same reason. If we're busy watching the Super Bowl or NASCAR we won't be thinking about the worsening financial and social inequities in our country.

My problem with "entertainment" is largely due to introversion exacerbated by a mild case of agoraphobia. Crowds are a horrible challenge for me. It isn't that I don't like engaging with people. I actually love a really good conversation with a smart and engaging person. I'll talk all night with someone who wants to talk about hopes and dreams, politics, religion, or economics. I did that all the time when I was in college.

The last time I had the glorious experience of engaging another mind for an all-night chat about really big issues was a number of years ago. I attended a workshop for lay teachers at a school of theology. The last-night party was boozy and loud. [Episcopalian theologians are allowed to drink; in fact, I think it might be a requirement.] Somehow I ended up in a corner with an Anglican priest who was just returning from a long, silent retreat. He was as freaked out by the crowd as I was, but he was also in the mood to talk. I asked a lot of questions. Everybody else went to bed, and the housekeeping staff put the wine away, but they left out a cooler of beer. We drank and talked all night. About 6:00 AM, we went to our rooms, showered and then went to meet the airport shuttle. There is nothing  I like better than an all-night conversation with someone who has an interesting point of view -- especially if it's very different from mine.

I guess after I quit going to church I have been moving in the wrong circles for meeting people like that. People tell me I need to get out more and socialize. I have tried that, and I hate it. I can't stand small talk or idle chatter.

Call me strange, but my idea of fun is not going to a ballgame or a concert or a bar, or even going on a vacation. My idea of fun is engaging with ideas. That is truly the most fun when it's with another person, one-on-one -- best of all if food and wine or good coffee are a part of the experience. If that is not possible, then I like to engage with others, either by reading their writing or listening to them speak. [See TED.com or BigThink.com.] I'd rather be alone than be in the company of people who bore me or passing the time being "entertained" by experiences that cost too much and rarely give me any real pleasure.  I can always find an interesting book to read. Sometimes, I choose to write my own.

Occasionally I get lonely, but I have discovered that going out for purely casual social interactions makes me more lonely and frustrated than staying home reading a good book, working on one of my stories or watching TED Talks.

A tiny voice wonders if that's really how I want to grow old. My Soul responds that it would be better than forcing myself to do things that don't make me happy now on the (highly unlikely) chance that I'll meet someone of interest in any of those places. The Universe is pretty good at managing to make sure I get what I need, so if it offers me a random gift, I'll consider it. However, I spend enough hours every week at my day job to waste any of my precious spare time or money on time sucks that don't nurture my soul.

The Cycle of Motherhood - Moving On

I missed a couple of weeks here because I have been busy moving to a new apartment and helping my daughter move to her first apartment, approximately 1000 miles away from here.  Not surprisingly, I've been doing a lot of reflecting on motherhood lately.

When I was young, I never wanted to have children.  I didn't see myself as the nurturing type.  That's because I'm not.

I hated every minute of pregnancy, except for the occasional times near the end when my baby and I would "play." She'd stick up a foot or a hand, and I'd push it down. She'd stick it up again someplace else. We played that game a lot. Typically it ended with her doing something like a back flip off my tailbone, landing on my bladder. That ended the fun.

The morning she was born, I looked into her eyes, and I fell in love with the kind of mother-bear love that can only be experienced and never described. She was my responsibility and I intended to care for her fiercely. I have never for one second felt that she "belonged" to me. She belongs to God alone. I always saw myself a God's nanny. I was responsible for her care and feeding. It was my job to get her from that Tuesday morning C-section to adulthood, intact and with the ability to read, write and (usually) play well with others.

For several years after her birth, I did not work for wages. Being a wife and mother was my full-time job. Even after I went back to work, I saw myself primarily as a wife and mother. Work was just something I did for extra money.

When her father and I divorced, I was no longer a wife, but my role as mother continued. For the last few years, my main purpose in life was to get her through college without racking up too much debt for either of us.  She is now a college graduate, and we have only one small loan remaining. Mission accomplished! Kudos to both of us.

And now, my daughter is moving on. She is ready to build her own life apart from me. She is nervous and a little scared, as perhaps she should be.  I, however, am excited for her. I have no doubt that she will do well in life.  She's lovely and vivacious, smart and funny. She has great people skills.  In short, she's got everything it takes to be happy if she can manage to resist the cultural pressure to always want more.  She is on the threshold of a new adventure.  I'm happily standing on the sidelines, cheering her on.

I am happy and excited for me as well. I'm moving on, too.  I'll always be a mom, but it's not my full-time job anymore. Thanks to texting and email, we'll be able to keep in close touch no matter where she is. Now, I can focus on building a new life for myself.

If the cycle of a woman's life is Maiden-Mother-Crone, I'm transitioning to the third phase. And (somewhat surprisingly) I'm loving it!

Course Correction and Moving On

I have been watching my stats lately and discovered that my most popular posts are the ones that are the most personal. Somehow that doesn't surprise me. I think people like to read writers who speak from the heart.  My initial purpose in setting up this blog was to sell my novels. I suck at that, because I really don't want to "do" marketing. Now they say that marketing books doesn't work anyway, so what's the point of doing it?

I like blogging, though.  Blogging is a different experience than writing fiction. I like writing about my Journey, not just my Journey as a writer but my Journey as a person.

I'm at a transitional place in my life right now: feathering my now-empty nest. I'm not writing much fiction these days, I'm too busy navigating a new leg of my Journey.  It's a time of introspection and reflection.  I'm pretty sure some new stories are percolating through my subconscious even as I write this, but I'm not ready to write them yet. I have to live the process first -- then I'll write fictional stories about what I learned. (This is sort of a reversal of my previous technique of writing stories about things I feared. Interestingly, I realize that I'm not afraid of this new, unknown life I'm moving toward.)

There are a whole lot of other Boomers navigating the same waters. For me, blogging is about sharing a Journey. This is not a blog for writers. It's a blog by a writer who's an empty-nested Baby Boomer. [That sounds like a bird.]  I find pleasure, comfort and inspiration in reading blogs by people going through similar transitions. I hope that others will find the same thing here.

As long as I still have my day job, I am not going to step out from behind the pseudonym.  I am, however, going to write more personal stories here.

I guess even when I'm not writing fiction, I still need to tell stories.

This chapter involves moving to a new apartment that I picked out and rented all by myself, without even consulting anyone else.  It involves helping my daughter move into her first apartment, more than 1000 miles away, and then returning to my own little corner to figure out what to do next.

"In My Own Little Corner"

This post by Jurgen Wolff came into my email at the end of May. I have saved and savored it.  At this time in my life I am contemplating the third act of my life.  How shall I live? To what shall I devote my time? Where will I live?

There is a small part of me that loves the idea of going adventuring. I love to visit beautiful places. A little corner of my heart would love to travel and experience new and different people, food, music and (most of all) beautiful scenery. Truth be told, I like the "idea" of traveling far better than the reality. I think some culturally brainwashed part of me believes that I should want to travel and go on adventures, as opposed to any real wanderlust burning in my heart. 

I have been blessed to have traveled a lot when I was young. I've been to a some incredible places and had some wonderful (and a few far from wonderful) travel adventures. I have to be honest and admit that I'd rather sleep in my own bed at night. I like my own cooking. Even when I was young my stomach never adapted well to changes in water, and it hasn't got any more adaptable with age. I have always been an adventurous diner, but I like to try new things when I'm close to home -- just in case.  I'm afraid of heights, so traveling in the mountainous places is such a challenge that I am more or less committed to avoid that. I don't like cold weather. I am fastidious about bathroom privacy, which has always created problems for me when travelling.

I'm too much of a chicken to go trekking off the beaten path alone. I don't have the money (or the personality) for organized tours.  I might trek off the beaten path with a pal (male or female), but I don't know anyone who would be interested in doing that right now. If I meet a potential travel pal, I'll reconsider.

For now, I am quite content with my small life by the sea. I fill my need for beauty with daily sunrise walks by the ocean. The clouds and birds and the very ocean itself nurture my spirit. My walks on the beach fill both my body's need for exercise and my soul's need for beauty.  Why should I visit faraway places when I can experience the magnificence of the ocean outside my door? (Besides, through the magic of the Internet, I can visit anywhere in the world in pictures, movies, or on Google Maps, without leaving my chair.)

The Rogers and Hammerstein musical, Cinderella, features a song that resonated with me the first time I heard it as a teenager. I remember part of the lyrics even though I haven't seen the play in years. (I NEVER remember the words to songs.) In part it says:

In my own little corner in my own little chair, I can be whatever I want to be.  On the wings of my fancy I can fly anywhere and the world will open its arms to me.

 The truth is that I've always been more of a spiritual adventurer than a physical adventurer. I love to read books and watch movies about people and places from faraway times and lands -- and even totally imaginary times and places. While sitting on my living room couch, my mind and my soul can travel to distant places, experience wild things, and be back in time for supper.

When I'm not reading, I make up my own stories. Characters emerge from the mists of my imagination. I build imaginary homes, businesses, schools and entire worlds. It sometimes gets very busy inside my head. I am a person who lives a very circumscribed life, physically, but I live a life of big ideas. The truth is, I'd be totally happy if I never again had to travel more than a few miles from my house, as long as I can live at the beach and have a some disposable money to pay for WiFi and e-books.

On the 50th Anniversary of "The Feminine Mystique"

This article on the 50th Anniversary of the publication of The Feminine Mystique got my attention because it's a worthy anniversary to celebrate. The article annoyed me. I got part way down the comments before I lost my temper altogether.

Like so much of contemporary journalism, the article is oversimplified to the point of being downright inaccurate. Friedan's book ignited flames, on both sides of the issue. Many women identified with the "Mystique" and joined together to resurrect the Women's Movement that gave women suffrage in the 1920's, and then lay fallow during the awful years of Depression and War. By the early 1960's the Civil Rights Movement was gaining momentum. Women participated at nearly every level, except in decision-making. Middle class white women were supposed to wait until racial equality was achieved before advancing their issues. After that, they were supposed to wait until the Peace Movement ended the War. 

Betty Friedan's book hit the bookshelves at the perfect moment to attract the attention of many educated women of all ages who believed their contributions to their families and communities were both undervalued and underutilized. They were smart, articulate and capable of doing so much more with their lives than the Cold War culture would allow. So, at first a few at a time and later in droves, they put down their aprons and got busy working for Women's Liberation -- which they were often quick to point out is really about Human Transformation. The Sisters wanted the Brothers to be liberated from their rigid gender roles, too. 

After I read the first sentence of this article, I thought it was going to be a satire. But by the time I got half way through, I realized that the author was actually (incredibly) serious when she wrote: In the 50 years since Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique, women’s lives have been transformed, almost entirely for the better. Seriously?  On what planet would that be?  Yes, in the past 50 years our lives have transformed in ways that were unimaginable even in the world of the Jetsons.  Much of it has been good, but not all of it has been even close to "for the better."  

A lot of young women today write about the Feminist Movement as though it were over. Like President Bush standing on that aircraft carrier, they declare victory and prepare to move on.  It doesn't work that way. The war in Iraq wasn't over because our president declared victory, as we know nearly ten years later.

The movement toward gender equality isn't over, either.  Maybe equality, like freedom, is something so precious we will always have to guard it carefully, and be prepared to defend it when necessary. I would argue that, in recent years -- and I think largely due to the complacency of the women and men who think that the "strife is o're and the battle won" -- the movements for civil rights for women and men of all races have lost ground. A lot of ground.  

Women's rights are under attack on all fronts. We have popular religious figures and a few Republican office holders who advocate for the return of patriarchal marriage.  "Wives, be obedient to your husbands."  Our reproductive rights are under attack in many legislative bodies, including Congress. Sex education is virtually absent from our schools. Some forms of popular music and alleged "humor" are all about denigrating women.  

While some research seems to indicate young men are stepping up somewhat (good on them!), working women are still responsible for most of the care and feeding of their families. They are responsible for lining up babysitters, doctor appointments, doing the shopping and the cooking, helping with the homework, doing the laundry and doing the lion's share of the housework. In many households the wife/mother is doing everything that a full-time homemaker would do, plus holding down a full-time job.  This is better for her and her family? How?

Friedan lived in a world where smart, educated women were kept in a pink ghetto, baking cookies and waiting for their husbands to come home, so they could serve him a martini and dinner. I love Frank Sinatra's music, but to this day, I hear the first few notes of Hey, Little Girl and I want to break something. That was truly the attitude at the time. My dad once (jokingly - ?) asked my mother why she didn't run the sweeper in pearls and heels like June Cleever. He lived to tell about it, but he never asked that question again. 

Friedan and her contemporaries, the founders of NOW and other prominent feminists of the era, including the incomparable Gloria Steinem and Marlo Thomas (whose tone was less strident but whose commitment was and remains as deep), offered both women and men a new way of looking at gender relationships.  They invited both men and women to step out and be more, do more, and offer more to one another than traditional gender roles allowed.

Their courage in the face of ridicule and threats of physical violence gave women of my generation opportunities to learn, grow and participate in our communities in ways that were not possible for our mothers. Our daughters take those opportunities totally for granted. 

Unfortunately, the progress that men and women have made in the last fifty years is under attack on many fronts. 

Betty Friedan didn't "start" the Women's Movement. She gave women a vocabulary with which to discuss the "problem that had no name" that plagued women in the Cold War culture of the early 1960's. In so doing she helped to reawaken the yearnings that created the Women's Suffrage Movement a hundred years before. Friedan then lived the rest of her life devoted to furthering the cause of women. She has gone to her rest, but the struggle is not over. 

If you want proof, scroll down to the Comments at the bottom of the article.  I couldn't stomach all of them, but the ones I saw were enough to affirm my opinion that we have a lot of work to do. 

Does an e-reader change the way we read?

 This post made me think. [Which is the whole idea of Big Think. Duh]

The author blames e-readers for causing people to race through a book rather than lingering and savoring the experience of reading.  She's right about the fact that's evidently how most people read these days. I'm not sure that I agree that e-readers are at fault, however.  I think the "scanning" phenomenon is a function of the way the Internet works, compounded by the Information Overload that permeates the world we live in and our culture's obsession with productivity over enjoyment.

For the last eight years, I have spent hours every week reading websites and books about writing fiction. I have often been frustrated by the emphasis on paring the story down to the bare plot and ratcheting up the tension as much as possible -- and then when you think your character can't take one more crisis, throw her under a new bus. Characters are still important, but what matters is what they do, not who they are or how they got to be that way. Back story is a bad word. Beautiful language is fine provided it is plain and simple. Long sentences and paragraphs are to be avoided. No three-syllable words where a one- or two-syllable word will do, even if the big word is the perfect word.  Every page should have a lot of white space. The whole idea seems to be to write books that people can skim.

The rules for non-fiction are even worse.  Short articles are supposed to consist of bullet-points. No paragraph should contain more than four (short) sentences.  I quit taking the newspaper years ago because too many articles appear to be lists of one-sentence "paragraphs" with no narrative flow whatsoever.

What this new style basically amounts to is dumbing down the process of reading.

I don't blame e-Readers for this phenomenon, however. In fact, I find that my first Kindle (the last model before the Kindle Fire came out) is actually sort of a haven from distraction. It has 3G access for the purpose of downloading and synching e-books, but it is useless for shopping or browsing. I shop for Kindle books on a computer, and download them to my Kindle using its 3G connection. Now that I have a Kindle Fire HD, I shop on it, but I still like to do my marathon-reading on my original Kindle because (a) it's easier on my eyes and (b) I am not tempted to click over and check my email, see what my friends are doing on Facebook or watch a TED talk.

I agree with Pamela Haag that an awful lot of people have very poor reading habits. I disagree with her about the reason for that.

What do you think?

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