Carol:
Sentimental Journey
Things aren’t very different this morning than they were a week ago. I’m sitting at the computer trying to pull ideas out of my head at six a.m. I’m cold. The dog is asleep, everybody is still asleep. Except that I am not in my house. The dog belongs to my brother, the computer to my sister-in-law, and the view from the window is a southern California swimming pool. Things feel a bit strange, and yet...I have been coming to this home since I was a teen-ager and I know it as almost as well as my own.
My brother Hugh and his family moved into the house in 1967 when my nieces were about 7, 5 and 3, little tow-headed steppingstones. I was already in college in another state, so I would come for a week or more at a time. I would play on the floor with the girls for hours as we laid out their collection of Barbie Dolls, accessories and a Ken doll companion or two.
I watched my nieces grow up in this house as I did the same: visits with my boyfriend became visits with my husband, the teen-agers on the floor became my nieces playing with my toddler daughter and her collection of Cabbage Patch Kids. The sweet little dachshund Lady who would tunnel down under the covers of my bed at night in 1967 has morphed into Lucky the Chihuahua who greeted me at the door last night in a Lakers tee-shirt. And the teen-ager who gave me a hug was the son of that little 3-year-old from 1967.
The flood of family memories is counter-pointed by the history-in-the-making I watched from this house. In 1968, the morning after I arrived from college in Missouri, my brother woke me up to the news that Robert F. Kennedy had been shot. In 1973, we spent hours watching John Dean’s testimony and the unfolding of the Watergate scandal. In 1995, huddled in front of the TV with Hugh and Jean watching the O.J. Simpson trial with its parade of witnesses, the testimony about the fancy shoes and the glove that didn’t fit. Not that we just watched any of this—we are talkers, arguers, debaters in this family, so all that history-in-the-making was pulled apart, chewed at, and spit back at the dinner table or sitting by the pool.
The house is beginning to wake up, and the sun is rising above the ivy-covered hill in the backyard. Hugh is making coffee with a machine whose built-in bean grinder sounds like a helicopter taking off. Megan just wandered in to announce she can’t find the power cord for her lap-top to start her essay for topic #84. I want to say something profound about self-discovery, the “aha” moments and large events that shaped me into who I am.
For the most part, who I am and what I have become is more about the lifelong “collection” of little moments, a string of tiny pearls rather than a huge diamond on a chain that says “Here I am.” As I pass through my sixties, my life is more about re-discovery. When I come to this house, I get to take a sentimental journey backwards and meet the me I was at 18 playing with my nieces, the me I was at 28 arguing politics with my brother, the me I was at 38 with my own children playing in the backyard. And the me that is 62 wants nothing more right now than to sit down with a cup of coffee and the Los Angeles Times’ Crossword puzzle, a little ritual I have practiced in this house for more than 40 years, another of those little tiny pearls that have helped me discover, and rediscover who I am and who I want to be.
Megan:
On Discovering Myself
I may owe Eckhart Tolle an apology. I haven’t decided yet. I still fall asleep if I read more than 3 pages of The Power of Now at a time but the dreams, they are peaceful. I’m kidding (sort of), but people I respect recommend this book – people who have opened their hearts and minds to new ideas that I have shared so maybe I owe them, and maybe I’ll learn something, if I can just shed my automatic and cynical revulsion towards New Age vocabulary. I’m not sure why, but I resist terms like “self-actualisation” and the expression “inner peace” creates for me an inner storm of bitter and sarcastic retorts. Yet, I envy the lifestyle and secretly want for myself the calm these crazies claim to have achieved.
For Christmas this year, I received Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love. I had already seen the movie and didn’t find Julia Roberts’ character to be particularly likeable. And I felt the same about the book really, except again for the envy and attraction to the lifestyle that this woman experimented with for a year. How nice for you, I thought, that you could take a year off to run away from everything you had screwed up for yourself and a publisher was basically going to pay for your pursuit of pleasure and … see the bitter, jealous side of me bursting out? I wish someone would pay ME to do that. I want to hang out in Bali and learn how to meditate in an Ashram in India. I would even settle for a weekend retreat at the Buddhist center near my house.
So, at the same time I’m thinking about all of this, I’ve just come from the ALA’s Midwinter Meeting in San Diego where I did not find a job, but got a lot of useful advice about job hunting. I’ve even come up with a quarter-of-a-million dollar idea, that I don’t think will make me rich, but might take my career in a new direction assuming I don’t lose interest.
The key-note speaker at this conference was, of all people, Ted Danson (promoting his book Oceana) and he summed up his interview with a brief explanation of his belief in the Law of Attraction (another theory I have both dismissed and secretly been drawn to) and how any changes we might want to see in the world or in ourselves must be approached from a positive angle, from a place of joy and delight instead of fear or disgust. Fear and Disgust have always fueled my sense of humor (in which I take joy and delight) but I recognize truth in Mr. Danson’s words. And Mr. Tolle said (just before I fell asleep) something about how he wasn’t saying anything new in his books, instead was just reminding us of truths we had forgotten.
What surprises me is that I am actually open to these ideas. Maybe it’s a developmental stage. In both Tolle and Gilbert’s books they were roughly my age when the desire to make a profound, spiritual change came over them. Maybe that explains why I felt drawn back to Church. I’m not looking for God really, I just need to calm the hell down and learn to sit quietly by myself. That’s the appeal: To learn something about myself that I’ve forgotten that I always knew.
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| I'm including this picture because I have it on my phone. |
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