I’m over at Word-Whores, talking about when to ditch long-term plans and telling the story of how this happened.
Life, Death, and Long-Term Planning
//Tag: David
//Please Speak Ill of the Dead
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The other day, David (aka “The Man”) said to me that he thought he wasn’t as good of a man as his father had been. His father died nearly two years ago now, and there were thoughts from the family on Memorial Day (he was a Marine in the South Pacific in WWII) and photos of visits to the cemetery. So I wasn’t at all surprised this was on David’s mind, nor that he felt that way.
Instead, I thought, “yep, right on schedule.”
Longtime readers of this blog likely know that my own father died when I was very young – three years old. That’s me with him above. He was an Air Force fighter pilot who went down in his F-4. I have two memories of him – and those are vague, brief snippets. Otherwise I grew up with the knowledge that he’d died and I hadn’t really known him.
Which means most everything I know about my father came from other people and what they told me about him. When I was a little girl, I thought of my dad as this amazing, saintly, superheroic man who could do not wrong. Smart, handsome, loving, shining integrity, brave… Flawless. As I got older, it became clear to me that he could not have been flawless. No human being is. The fault lay in the people who told me about him, because they gave me a relentlessly sanitized version of who he’d been.
You know the old saw – “Don’t speak ill of the dead.”
Once I figured this out, I got better at asking the right questions. I asked my mother and my dad’s brother what they hadn’t liked about my dad. What habits had driven them crazy. What was the biggest fight they ever had. My grandmother stubbornly refused to answer anything like this. My father had been an angel on earth and that’s all there was to it. But the other answers – once people got over their hesitation to be critical of a man who’d died tragically, much too young – those were the stories who fleshed out his character. For the first time in my life, I felt like I had a real sense of my father as a person.
It meant so much to me.
So, now, nearly two years later, I’m not at all surprised that David’s dad is looming large in his mind. A man of great character and accomplishments, who we all loved and miss greatly. But he wasn’t perfect. I reminded David of that and we talked about the things his dad did that drove him crazy, mistakes he’d made, the biggest fights they’d had. And that helped put things back in perspective.
In some ways we always measure ourselves in comparison to our parents. A difficult thing because that’s so difficult to do with any objectivity. Especially once a parent is gone and the cheerful whitewashing begins.
But I know I’m no saint – and neither was my father. I love him all the better for it.
Fighting the Trolls
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I love this pic of David as a pirate, from a few years ago. He’s the one channeling Johnny Depp.
Yesterday, David went to sell one of his guns. He has a number of them, that he’s collected over the years. Having grown up in northern Wyoming, he learned to hunt and fish and shoot guns as a matter of course. He has fun with them and is very knowledgeable, very skilled. However, since we moved to Santa Fe, NM, he never hunts and rarely has the opportunity for target practice. So he decided to sell a gun he really only kept for interest, one he enjoyed but never shoots – an automatic rifle.
He took it, in its case, to a gun store that offers consignment in town. Reputable place that follows all the laws for holding times, etc. It happens to be located in a mall.
It hit him, as he walked into the mall, carrying the rifle in its case that not one person looked at him sideways. No security guards stopped him to ask why he was carrying a gun. People, he figured, rightly assumed that he was headed to the gun store.
And yet.
It was funny, he told me, having a different perspective now than the one he grew up with, to realize that he could have stopped, taken the gun out, loaded and fired at the people shopping. We know this kind of thing has happened, right? Yet there would have been absolutely nothing to stop him.
Now, David is one of the gentlest, most nurturing men I’ve ever known – he’s a healer, a Doctor of Oriental Medicine – and so he would never do such a thing. It bothered him quite a bit, that no one questioned him walking into the mall with a rifle.
I’m not sure what the answer is here. David and I are both children of the Rocky Mountain West. We’re accustomed to open spaces, people who smile easily, a laid-back lifestyle. I don’t want security guards in the malls.
And yet…
Cancer the Crab
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I’m over at Word Whores today, talking about my childhood confusion with Cancer as a Zodiac sign – and the most delightful Cancer I know.
Being the Good Example (for once) and Making a Difference
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Looky! The covers for my Master of the Opera e-serial are starting to appear! The first two are on my website. I actually have the next two, but those will remain SEKRIT until Bookpushers reveals them on August 15. After that, there will be two more! Very exciting. There will be six episodes in all, released about every two weeks starting December 31. (At least, that’s the current word.) Here’s the blurb for Act I: Passionate Overture.
In the first tantalizing installment of Jeffe Kennedy’s ravishing serial novel Master of the Opera, an innocent young woman is initiated into a sensual world of music, mystery, passion–and one man’s private obsession. . .
Fresh out of college, Christine Davis is thrilled to begin a summer internship at the prestigious Sante Fe Opera House. But on her first day, she discovers that her dream job has a dark side. Beneath the theater, a sprawling maze of passageways are rumored to be haunted. Ghostly music echoes through the halls at night. And Christy’s predecessor has mysteriously disappeared. Luckily, Christy finds a friend and admirer in Roman Sanclaro, the theater’s wealthy and handsome patron. He convinces her there’s nothing to fear–until she hears the phantom’s voice for herself. Echoing in the labrynths. Singing of a lost love. Whispering her name: Christine.
At first, Christy thinks she’s hearing things. But when a tall masked man steps out of the shadows–and into her arms–she knows he’s not a phantom of her imagination. He is the master of her desire. . .
Didn’t they make it sound awesome? Even *I* want to read it…
So, I mentioned on Twitter that I was the subject of a priest’s sermon – and I was the GOOD example. Now, I’m trying not to be hurt that none of you believed me and I *did* promise to tell the story today, so….
Back in July, as some of you may or may not know, David and I made the journey up to northern Wyoming to bury his father. We’d been expecting it as his dad, GF, had moved into hospice a week or two before he died. Still, it was wrenching. GF was the head of a large and happy family, a courageous and warm-hearted person and we’ll miss him greatly. For us this was a three-day event, because Buffalo, Wyoming is one of those “you can’t get there from here” places. We spent Wednesday driving an hour from Santa Fe to Albuquerque, flying to Denver, taking a 19-seat prop airplane to Casper, Wyoming, renting a car and driving another two hours to Buffalo. Then we turned around and did it in reverse on Friday.
The rosary was Wednesday night and the service Thursday morning. If any of you are Catholics – or have the misfortune to be connected to Catholics – then you’ll know these were not brief services. The full Catholic Mass funeral and graveside service on Thursday took 3 1/2 hours. After that we returned to the church to eat, then hung out at David’s parents’ house for the rest of the day and evening.
It ended up being good, because it slowed us down. There was nothing to be done, but hang out, eat food, drink wine (this is the up-side of the Catholics!) and talk.
Driving back down to Casper on Friday morning, we were emotionally exhausted. We talked about the family and related conversations we’d had without each other. David was driving and I glanced down, noticing something between my seat and the center console. I dug it out and discovered it was an American passport. The owner hadn’t filled out his contact information (Bad!), but I had his name, birthday and general location.
So I searched on my smart phone and found a guy his age living in the right area. I called the number and got an anonymous voice mail, so I left a message. I really hoped he wasn’t traveling somewhere and stuck without his passport. We debated what to do then. David suggested leaving it with TSA at Casper airport. I thought TSA would likely destroy it or it would disappear into the vast depths that suck up all the stuff TSA confiscates. When we returned the rental car, I asked the very young workers at the counter if anyone had called looking for the passport. They said no. I didn’t really want to leave it with them either, because, well… they seemed sweet but not terribly conscientious.
I took it with me.
During our layover in the Denver airport, my cell phone rang and it was him! Turns out this guy is a priest, lives in Buffalo, New York, and had missed the passport but had no idea how to go about dealing with it. He’d flown out to Wyoming the week before to help another priest struggling with a problem in his community.
I felt kind of emotional about it. The time we’d spent doing the rosary, mass and funeral was easily the most time I’d been in a church in years, maybe decades. I’m not a religious person – this likely comes as no shock to you all – but I did major in religious studies in college. More, I associate the church with my family. I often joke that I’m Catholic the same way that I’m Irish – it’s in the genes, whether I observe anything or not. GF died on July 4. David and I were in Denver at the time, helping my mom and Stepdad Dave clear out the house I grew up in. My stepfather Leo, a former Catholic priest, had married my mother a year after we moved in and died there 35 years later. His brother, my uncle who is still Catholic priest, was heavy on my mind. He’s living in an assisted living/retirement community and had really dropped contact with us after Leo passed away. While I was in Denver, I called the place, as my uncle canceled his cell phone, and got his mailing address. I tried to call him on his room phone, but got his voice mail.
The Monday after we got home, I took the passport to the post office and mailed it to Father Sam. With it I included a note where I talked about some of these same things. I wasn’t sure what it all meant, but it felt like it did mean something.
This week, a big box arrived for me. Turns out Father Sam of Buffalo, New York, also runs a bakery! This story can’t get any better. He sent me pita bread, amazingly delicious olive oil, salsa and these thin nacho chips that are out of this world. He also enclosed a note:
Dear Jeffe Kennedy,
Thank you! It is always good to be at the other end of a nice action. I have already used what you did as an example in my sermon this past Sunday. It often is a “pain in the neck” to go out of our way esp. when we are about hard stuff in our own lives.
You have made a difference and I preach a lot that God calls us to make a difference not save the world. He will do that!
God Bless you and your family,
Father A Sam
I want you all to know that I wept a little bit, even transcribing that. I’m not sure I can explain why. Maybe because I struggle sometimes with feeling like I’m not always the best person I can be. I dwell sometimes on friendships and connections I’ve lost, why some seem to end for no reason at all – except that I suspect it’s my fault, somehow. Maybe part of the take-home message is that making a difference for someone else doesn’t have to be a grand action. Even the little things count.
At any rate, I didn’t mean to make this a sad story – or such a long one! You all have a lovely weekend. Carien and Amy, you won books from Tuesday’s post, so let me know which ones you want!
First Day Disaster
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Snapped this pic with my phone on the way to St. Thomas. Sunsets from above can be great, too.
We landed after dark and stayed at a semi-skeezy hotel near the airport, because we couldn’t check into the timeshare until the next afternoon. In the morning, we ate breakfast at a restaurant on the beach, which was lovely and warm. Then we loaded up the car and headed to the timeshare hotel. Stepdad Dave asked for early check-in, but that still wouldn’t be until about 1 or 2. But the hotel stored our bags and we got to walk around and see the premises.
After this pic, my mom took my phone and tried to take one with me in it. Somehow she hit the button to make it into a video. I think it’s so funny to watch – turn on your speakers, too. Sorry it’s so huge. If anyone knows how I can reduce the size (decrease resolution maybe?) with Windows Live Movie Maker, let me know!
So, then we traipse off to find a restaurant David and I ate at when we were on St. Thomas years ago. It was part of this hotel of individual condos, with these great walking trails that switch back and forth down the hillside to the beach. The steps are natural rock and my mom tells Stepdad Dave to watch his footing. He complains that my mother thinks he’s clumsy, but that was one trip to Mexico and it was because his glasses were bad.
We find the place. Have a fun lunch with beers. (I’ve been asked to add that Stepdad Dave wants it known that HE did not have anything to drink – only Diet Coke.)
All is well.
See the happy fun?
Well!
So, Stepdad Dave gets a call from the hotel that our rooms are ready. He’s all excited to go check in. We head up the first hill and we’re all kind of dragging rear. I jokingly say that the climb back up is the price we pay for all the beers. We cross the little asphalt road and Stepdad Dave is huffing a bit. He tells us to go ahead. My mom is perkily climbing away. David, behind me, asks Stepdad Dave if he needs to rest. Or, I say, over my shoulder, we can bring the car down to pick him up.
We hear a funny noise.
I look back and Stepdad Dave has fallen off the path, rolled down the hill and is clinging to a root at the edge of the drop-off. David is already running down the path to get to him from below. I’m wondering how the hell we’ll do this, that maybe David can push from below and I can get to him from above.
Then the root breaks and he drops over the side. Of this.
That’s looking up from below.
My mom didn’t see any of this, but she’s coming back down. I yell at her to go slow (very helpful of me, I know) and I’m running down, thinking he could be dead, with his skull cracked open. I’m wondering mainly how I’ll explain to stepsister Hope that I got her dad killed on St. Thomas.
Fortunately, he didn’t die. He came down that embankment, rolled over the retaining wall and landed on the road. The ambulance came to get him. We spent most of the rest of the day at the hospital. The doctor on duty was fortuitously a guy who’d trained in the Los Angeles Trauma Center. After multiple x-rays, it turns out that Stepdad Dave broke his shoulder blade. An amazingly minor injury, all things considered.
No surgery. No vacation cut short. Just an immobilization sling and pain meds.
Here he is a few days later, looking jaunty with the carved walking stick we found for him. We’re hoping he’ll get in the habit of using it, just to stabilize himself. He didn’t get to snorkel, alas, but we had a great time anyway.
Reading Stagnation
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Spring seems to be officially here! Isn’t it lovely to see the flowers again?
Over the weekend, I was catching David up on some of the discussions during the week about whether reading “literary” fiction is better for you. I told him about my blog posts on Careless Conclusions in Genre Reading and whether suffering is a human virtue.
Okay, I might have been ranting. This is the public service that David performs for you all. He listens to my ranting so YOU don’t have to! He’s a loving and selfless human being this way.
At any rate, I was telling him about the essay that set me off on the Careless Conclusions post, how she proposed a “slow books movement,” comparable to the Slow Food ideas. And he, being the one who’s finishing his degree in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM = acupuncture, herbs, nutrition, body work – for those of you not in the know), said that slow food causes stagnation and obstruction.
He’s like that these days. You mention one thing and he gives you a list of causes, symptoms and remedies. It’s like living with the TCM Magic 8 Ball.
So, I start to explain that’s not what the Slow Food people are about – that it’s in opposition to fast food, that you make food from scratch, from raw sources and take time to prepare it carefully. But then I realized: he has a really good point. Because, really, the Slow Books analogy is not a good parallel at all. It’s not about books that take longer to write. (Though I know the literary aficionados think this is true, making the classic mistake of believing that a fast read means a fast write. Heavens to Betsy, we only wish!)
No, by Slow Books, she really means books that take a long time to READ.
We’ve all been there, right? That weighty tome we’re required to read, for class or because we decide we should. And you sit there and wade through it, trying to keep your focus on it, failing. You set it down at the least excuse and find ten thousand reasons not to pick it up again. For me this is Great Expectations. I bet I’ve tried to read it five times. I can’t. I just can’t. Don’t make me slide into Gollum-speak to explain my feelings.
These books take a long time to read and digest – so David’s analogy is actually spot on. They are like food that sits in our stomachs and takes forever to break down for nutrition. If you’re starving, maybe this is a good thing. “Stick to your ribs” was a positive attribute in a world where you might not see another meal for a couple of days. But usually, stagnation and obstruction is a negative. That enormous Thanksgiving meal? The Prime Rib special at the local steakhouse? That triple-bacon-cheeseburger that looked liked such a good idea on the billboard?
Yeah, we’ve pretty much all experienced the stagnation and obstruction thing.
It’s interesting to contemplate. Maybe non-literary fiction isn’t the junk food of the mind, but rather the whole grains and fresh fruit. A light, fast read that leaves us optimistic and full of fun, new ideas might be cleansing. Just enough to nourish without overwhelming the system. After all, it’s not like we need more input for our brains. Our modern American society is as information-rich as it is food-rich.
Discovering what’s truly good for us, so that we operate as healthy and happy people – that’s the key.
Not Running
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I didn’t get good photos of the moonrise last night, but fortunately she hung around until I woke up this morning for a little repeat performance.
I haven’t been getting to run on the treadmill this week.
Yes, I know, I know, at one time in my life – hell, for a good chunk of my life so far – I would have embraced any excuse that prevented me from exercising, especially running.
(As a total aside, one of my all time movie scenes is from The Big Easy, when Dennis Quaid gets his cop cousins to “arrest” Ellen Barkin while she’s out jogging and bring her to a family party. Ellen is in her jogging shorts and sports bra, all sweaty in the New Orleans humidity and his mother looks her up and down, drawling “did he get you out of the bathtub, sugar?” Ellen says, “No, I was running.” And the mother, played by New Orleans native, Grace Zabriskie, gives her this LOOK and repeats “Running.” It’s a brilliant moment, how much incomprehension and pity for the dumb yankee Grace packs into one word.)
At any rate, I messed up my back a teensy bit – I think I compressed my sacrum and pinched a nerve while sea kayaking on the Bioluminescent Bay (still totally worth it) – and my in-house physician (David) says it would be better for me not to run for a few days. I have to admit he’s right. Running usually loosens up my back, but after doing a very low-key run on Monday, my lower back tightened up so much I couldn’t bend over. Which, I’m pretty sure, is a Bad Sign.
(I was also instructed not to wear heels of any sort, but that’s just too painful to discuss.)
(I’m clearly feeling quite parenthetical today.)
So he’s been treating me and that helps a bunch. But it’s interesting to note how much I miss my morning workout. No running. No weight-lifting. It’s not like I’m ahead of schedule without it either. I get up at the same time, but apparently I just blog more slowly or something.
Alas.
Maybe I can run tomorrow.
Running. Heh.
Lucky Me
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The Happy Whacker
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This is David happily using his new super-duper weed-whacker.
See, we had a weed-whacker that we brought with us from Wyoming, but it was meant for stuff like, well, grass. Soft stuff. Not desert stuff. Desert stuff is all impenetrable woody stems and thorny exteriors. The plants guard their precious water stores by making it exceedingly difficult for anything to munch them. Turns out this also goes for being chopped down.
Now, I am not the one who thought the chopping needed to happen. I think this is one of those male/female things. Just as he doesn’t notice his bank statements sitting on the counter for weeks on end, I don’t look out over our property and say “Curses! Look at those bushes. It offends my eye to see them!”
(Okay, he might not have used that exact phrasing, but he did say that it bugged him to see it. He said this in a way that invited me to agree that I could barely sit on the patio for the irritation of seeing all those bushes just growing out there.)
He pulled out the trump card, though, by pointing out predators could use the overgrowth for easy cover to stalk the kitties.
I agreed something needed to be done and he happily settled in to research the ideal chopper-downer tool. Boy, did he find some. Did you know you can easily spend $2K on a big bushwhacker? Finally he picked out a bushwhacking lawnmower that was “only” $329. I balked. He mentioned predators again. I whined about the expense for something we use once a year. He agreed to look at attachments for the weed-whacker.
I’m a cruel, cruel woman.
Finally we went to Home Depot and perused the weed-whacking options. We found the ideal solution in this kind of cool Ryobi Brush Cutter. (You may not care that much, but for those who like to ogle power tools, and you know who you are, there it is.) It’s nice because it has a manly big blade that cuts through woody interlopers like butter. And you can get other attachments for it, which pleases me, for the next time we discover there’s some power tool missing from our lives, leaving a big black hole of aching despair.
He spend the rest of the long weekend happily trimming down the ugly shrubs and dead cholla.
It does look much better now.