Planning ahead

I have spent much of my life imprisoned by my plans.  In my drinking days, I stayed furious because the troops, i.e. husband and kids, didn’t toe the line.  Back then, the plans were generally in my head and nobody could read them except me.  I wrote them in invisible ink and they were often illegible.  Nonetheless, I expected the world to comply with them and stayed frustrated because they weren’t attending the mandatory meetings.  In my brain.

I wasn’t that pleased when I got sober and someone at a meeting said, “A good way to make God laugh is to make plans.”  Really?  Really??  Ha.  Back then, the God of MY understanding wanted me to make plans, to implement them, and to accept graciously the universe’s praise.  I worked hard to keep my sobriety in check, sponsoring, making coffee, and doing all the things that I believed were  necessary to keep God on my side, passing out the blessings, letting the world know who was Her #1 child.  Turns out God’s got about a 437 trillion #1 children and is always on their side, drunk or sober.  Always.  All ways.

Today, I make plans but I don’t plan the outcome of my plans.   I used to plan the party, decorate, and rigidly orchestrate reactions.  Most days, plans are a little looser, and I can accept that someone else might have an idea or change the plans.  If you know me personally, you know that’s not 100% accurate.  Truthfully, I often take a few deep, cleansing breaths to avoid heavy, disparaging sighs when there’s a wrinkle in the plan.  Although I rarely wear the frozen smile of doom when people aren’t as thrilled as I am with the plans, I occasionally mentally chant, “I am not responsible for their reaction, I am NOT responsible for their reaction, I AM NOT responsible for THEIR reaction.”

Last month, I got this dumb sinus-allergy-felt like asthma-bronchitisy yuck thing.  There was a 30 pound badger of phlegm parked on my chest.  I rarely am sick feeling for more than a couple of days, but this lasted over a week.  I’d feel better during the day and spend the night coughing.  Slept sitting up and kept Bob awake.   In the small hours of the morning, I’d think about my mortality.  I got a little morbid, writing my will and assembling life insurance policies in a binder.  At one point, I sent an inquiry out on pre-paid funeral plans.

I started feeling better, sleeping through the night, and got a call from Shary Perry who pimps for a local funeral home.  I’d almost forgotten the 3 a.m. funeral plan quest.  I listened to Shary’s soft voice and waited for her to gently tone, “The family thanks you for coming to this service.”   Instead, when prompted, I made a consultation appointment.

On Monday I told Max why I was leaving early.   “Why?!  You can’t die!?”  “Not planning to or at least not this week, but when I do…” and I proceeded to tell him who he can and can’t hire after I die.  So much for my grand “not making plans for other people” idea.  Max and I  laughed and I told him why I felt like I need to make these plans.

I don’t want GE to have to make the plans.  Don’t get me wrong.  I trust her to do anything that she’s called to do. My daughter has this granite cover on her emotions.   She does the work but a veneer of calm masks her pain.  I’ve seen that mask through my alcoholic parenting, divorces, deaths.  When her brother Jack died, I watched her erode internally while she sucked it up and persevered.  I know that she’ll have a standing army of family and friends there to help her, but I am not sure that she’ll be open to help.  She turns into Solitary Woman when she’s upset.

I am all about DIY; Walmart has free shipping with site to store coffin orders.  But since I will not be around to DIY the burial or funeral, I needed help.  Pre-need funeral planning seems like the best option.   I met Shary the Funeral Consultant who is a sweet woman on a mission to sell funerals.  She couldn’t restrain herself from telling me about the client who came in and 3 months later died or the couple who pre-purchased their funeral and both succumbed in a car accident 4 weeks after they paid for it.

She has a trunkload of such stories:  cancer diagnosis, heart attacks, accidental death.  All happening less than a year after they pre-planned their funeral.  How convenient, Shary.  When I listened to her tales, I wondered if (1) she’s warning me that my expiration date could be coming up soon or (2) she’s telling me to leave, leave now, run while I still have a chance.

I steadfastly refused her offers of Serene, Luxuriant, and Heaven’s Best packages, settling on Standard.  I am creeped out by embalming.  Cremation’s not much better.  If we had a green cemetary in south Texas, I’d want to be wrapped in a muslim cloth and buried.  We don’t and my meager soul cringes at the cost for hauling my dead self to the nearest Ethician cemetary in Georgetown or Houston.  So, cremation it is.

At least in the state of Texas, you have to be cremated in a rigid container.  Shary showed me the architecturally simple oak casket for $2,900, the simple but attractive oak casket for $944, and the plain but sturdy pine casket for $450.  I opted for the cardboard box for $50.  She looked a little disapproving but had to concede that it was going up in flames anyway.  “And since you are opting out of our special plan that permits a viewing before the service, I’m sure the faux mahogany casket will be fine.” she said brightly.

The funeral pre-plan took almost 2 hours.  There was no derailing the Shary train once she started telling me about the virtues of her company’s plans.  She said something about the lifetime guarantee for a particular coffin and I broke out in a loud laugh.  Whose lifetime, Shary!  She looked startled for a moment, blinked twice, and started where she left off.   Energizer Bunny of Funeral Planning.

“There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.”
― George Santayana

Spring fever

It’s spring fever.  That is what the name of it is.  And when you’ve got it, you want – oh, you don’t quite know what it is you do want, but it just fairly makes your heart ache, you want it so!  ~Mark Twain

Bob watering our produce. We planted on Feb 22 this year. No chance for a freeze

We’ve had spring in south Texas for a couple of months now.  Spring weather, really.  We celebrate the season on the calendar concurrent with the rest of the earth.  The weather wasn’t all that hot, but it was dry and didn’t act very wintry.  Low’s in the 50′s and high’s in the 70′s.  We planted our baby garden just after Valentine’s Day: tomatoes, eggplant, zucchini, cucumbers.  Replenished our herb garden.  There’s something decadent about walking outside and cutting rosemary or basil for the stew pot.

Cilantro and sage

I was just thinking about using the word decadent for fresh herbs.  Maybe if I wore my imaginary diamonds with my Kors gown, dropping 24 ct. gold dust from my Delafee chocolates as I swirled to the front door.  I guess it’s all in what you think is luxury and fresh herbs are pretty indulgent to me.  I love watching the garden, seeing new blooms on the plants, tracking tomato growth a millimeter at a time.  I feel like Farmer Maggie when I water the plants in the evening, waiting for Bob to come from work.

That’s as close to red as it gets. Plucked it amid squirrel groans

We’re still having a little squirrel action on the cherry tomatoes.  It doesn’t take much CSI to notice the toothy bite out of individual tomatoes.  They watch the garden as well as I do and we, the squirrels and I, scrutinize the fruit to see how long it can ripen on the vine.  I imagine a chorus of “Oh, rats!” when I pick it in the morning.  They were probably disappointed when I realized we’d planted an heirloom tomato that is bright yellow when it’s ripe.  They got away with the first 5-6 until I read the tomato tag.

My ichiban eggplant

We have lots of beautiful purple eggplants.  The type is ‘ichiban’ which my then-college age daughter GE says is Japanese for ‘best of all.’  She named a grey tabby Ichiban; the cat was a contender for the My Cat from Hell television show.  Best of all HELL cats!  I’m looking up Japanese eggplant recipes since it looks like eggplant produces like okra.  One plant=muchmillion okra.

The spider’s herd of dead flies

I’ve turned into a spider watcher.  There are webs at each of the tomato supports spanning the full width of the Earth Boxes.  Our spider pets are orb weavers, I think, which would be helpful for us during mosquito season.  Orb weavers are party animals after dark and trap flies and mosquitos.  The Orkin man thinks they are nuisances but he doesn’t have to do the ‘no me moleste mosquito’ dance while he’s unlocking his front door.  I do.  It’s not as cute as the chicken dance.  Looks a lot more like the ‘oh my goodness there’s only ONE bathroom stall’ dance.

The coffeeness of my life

Behind every successful woman is a substantial amount of coffee. Stephanie Piro

I quit coffee for Lent.  It’s been 18 days since I started back drinking my beloved beverage and I am about fully awake.

I am one of those folks who can drink coffee from early morning until bedtime.  I usually make a nightcap of fully leaded coffee.  It’s the way I go to sleep.  I had as hard a time falling asleep without coffee as I did waking.

I wore my coffee sacrifice pretty well.  I prayed for the suffering and abandoned souls in purgatory when I made Bob’s morning coffee or fixed coffee before the AA meeting.  I’m not sure that there is a purgatory, but I like the idea of springing someone from semi-eternal quasi damnation.  I gave faint smiles to those who offered to pour me a cup of coffee at meetings.  The first few days of Lent, I poured myself a cup of coffee automatically when I walked into the meeting, then gave it away.

“Even bad coffee is better than no coffee at all.”
― David Lynch

Coffee’s so much in the fabric of my life that I get, and appreciate, coffee cups for most birthdays and holidays.  When friends and family go out-of-town, my gift is usually a coffee mug.  They get used.

I have multiple flavors of coffee in my pantry as well as several types of coffee pots and espresso makers.  I say I don’t understand the stockpiling of guns, but here I am with enough coffee paraphernalia to caffeinate to Armageddon and back.

While I was obsessing over my separation from coffee, I researched the Bean which is not a bean at all.  It’s a cherry looking berry.  The coffee legend is that an Ethiopian shepherd, Kaldi, noticed his sheep got crazy happy and couldn’t sleep after eating the berries off a certain bush.  He passed that information to the abbot of a local monastery who found that a drink brewed with the berries kept him awake through early morning prayer.

“I’d rather take coffee than compliments just now.”
― Louisa May Alcott, Little Women

Coffee’s been called the ‘wine of Arabi’ by visitors to Mecca and the ‘bitter invention of Satan’ by clergy in Venice who condemned it in 1615.  The pope intervened; after drinking a cup, he gave it Papal approval.

When I got home, made my first pot of coffee, and took the first sip, I noticed that it didn’t taste as great as I remembered.  I replaced the coffee that Bob had been slowly, slowly drinking over the previous 6-1/2 weeks and thoroughly cleaned the coffee pot, cycling vinegar through it a couple of times.  It was better.  Absence had made my standards higher.  For a day or two.

Small moments

“We’re conditioned to think that our lives revolve around great moments. But great moments often catch us unaware – beautifully wrapped in what others may consider a small one.”
― Kent Nerburn, Make Me an Instrument of Your Peace: Living in the Spirit of the Prayer of St. Francis

This is one of my favorite pictures of my sisters and me.  It was a tiny, tiny moment in a family Christmas celebration.  I was pregnant with GE, not quite ready to pop but GE decided otherwise.  She was born 2 days later.  Great moments followed:  labor, the birth of my 1st child.   I look at this picture and see all the silliness of the three of us.  Nearly 40 years later, I still smile when I think of that small moment when an ex-husband snapped the picture.

I’m thinking of those small moments because it’s our mom’s birthday today.  I don’t have a feeling of intense sadness; Mother’s been gone since 1993.  Our Aunt Louise said that she had never stopped looking for her mother on the porch of the old Montell house when she drove up there.  And her mother had died more than 40 years before.   Small moments.  Looking at the porch to see a mother waiting.  Picking up the phone at 11 p.m. to call her.

My birthday after Mother died was odd.  Like I’d misplaced something.  I had.  I’d misplaced my mother’s death. She always called at 6:30 in the morning to retell the story of my birth.  She did that for each of us.  After I moved away from home, I was determined to be the very first person to wish her “Happy Birthday” on her birthday.  I was.  I called her a day early, sang the birthday song,  and got her belly laugh in response.  I miss that laugh.  And her scent:  a mixture of Blue Grass cologne and cigarette smoke.

How many moments become great when viewed in retrospect, their importance uncovered like treasure?  There are times when I gasp with the intensity of a small moment remembered.  Remembered and missed.

Erasure

I get daily blogging prompts from the WordPress people to help with writer’s block, I suppose.  They are usually interesting and even when I don’t have time to write something, I often turn the prompt over in my head a few times.  The one on Monday or Tuesday said this:  You have the choice to erase one incident from your past, as though it never happened. What would you erase and why?

I sat frozen because the consideration was too big.  I looked up the word “erase” and the definition is “to rub or scrape out; to obliterate; to eliminate entirely.”  Erase.  I had to move quickly, get dressed, make my to-go cup of tea, and hurry out the door.  I wasn’t late.  I just couldn’t sit with that thought for very long.

If I could erase something, it would be my son Jack’s death.  And the thought of being able to do that was uncomfortable.  Not that it isn’t part of every mother who has lost a child’s dream to do.  To wake up and find out this was all a nightmare.  I can change the ending of my nightmares.  I usually startle awake and sit terrified for a few minutes, then re-write the scenario, find a gun in my pocket and shoot the attacker in the foot.  Always in the foot so I can run away.  Then, I can go back to sleep.

But the death of a child is different.  Clawing myself awake in those early months after he died, there was no re-write.  No escape at all.  Just the reality which has taken me 4 years, 1 month, 3 weeks and 6 days to accept.  Not to like.  To accept.

My mind lurched back to an interview I heard on Fresh Air.  Terry Gross had a resuscitation researcher on her radio show, a man named Sam Parnia who wrote a book called Erasing Death.  He said, ““Contrary to popular belief, death is not a moment in time, such as when the heart stops beating, respiration ceases, or the brain stops functioning.  Death, rather, is a process—a process that can be interrupted well after it has begun.”

What if I had waken earlier?  Could I have saved Jack then?  What if I had been able to interrupt his death, keep him alive?  Wistful thinking is dangerous for an alkie like me, but I couldn’t seem to shake those thoughts.  And now, here was a topic inviting me to think about that premise.

Hemingway said that any writer worth his salt could write a story in 6 words.  He bet his friends and wrote these words:  Baby shoes for sale.  Never worn.  He said it was his best work and his colleagues paid off their bets.  Since I read that, I for whom brevity has never been an attribute have been summing up meetings and situations in 6 words.  Just 6.  There they were.  The 6 words I’d give anything to erase:  Woke too late to save him.

I can’t erase anything that’s happened in my life, however attractive the thought is to do so.  I am the sum of all that’s happened these past 60 years.  One of the promises of AA is that I will not regret the past.  I can’t erase it either.  It’s one of my strengths.  A few weeks ago, I went to a women’s AA meeting and, through sharing, I found that there were at least 3 of us who had lost sons while we were sober and who had remained sober.  Their shares helped me as I believe my shares can help others like me who have lost children and want to stay clean and sober.  Six words to describe that?  Hope replaced despair.  Grace restores me.

When’s the best time to hunt ducks?

When’s the best time to hunt ducks? At the quack of dawn!

The year before John died, a friend gave us some ducks.  Dead ducks.  We took them out and laid them on the kitchen counter.  They smelled kind of fishy.  We thought about cooking them for Thanksgiving dinner.  I’d heard that ducks were good eating.  When I passed along my plan to a friend as we drove to a church board meeting, she laughed and said that ducks are terrible to eat.  (“Mud ducks! That’s probably what they are.  And that’s what they’ll taste like.  Mud!”)

Discouraged, we moved the duck corpses to the big freezer where they rested for a few years until I finally threw them away.  Over the years, I heard about turducken.  I sometimes saw ducks in the freezer section at HEB.  I never thought about cooking them until Bob’s son, Bobby, shot some ducks and brought them home for us to cook.

What says “Quick, Quick!”? A duck with the hiccups

He called them “red heads” and “teals” and “widgeons” and “pintails.”  He didn’t call any of them “mud ducks” which I’ve since discovered usually refers to gadwalls, a common looking grey duck.   A mud duck is also slang for an unattractive woman according to the Urban Dictionary which is just the kind of information you get when you google the words “mud duck.”

Duck season in south Texas ran for most of November and again from early December to late January.  Every morning when Bobby wasn’t working, he was out the door and on the duck hunt.  He was up before the crack of dawn no matter how foul the weather.  Pun intended.

Duck with bacon wrapped venison, risotto, and salad. We think we are epi-curious cooks.

I worried about cooking the ducks.  Bobby’s always proud of his donations to the family dinner table and I try to make sure that the food turns out better than edible.  I’ve watched enough episodes of Top Chef to know that duck can be over-cooked. Bob had heard about frying them, but I lucked into a recipe at the Epicurious.com website.  Adjusted, it turns out really well.  This is our adjusted recipe.

Duck Breast with Balsamic
2 crushed garlic cloves
1 tbsp ginger
2 tsp Emeril’s Essence (recipe at http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/emeril-lagasse/emerils-essence-recipe/index.html)
1 tsp salt
1/2 tsp pepper
4 single duck breasts
1 tbsp extra-virgin olive oil
1/2 cup apple juice
2-3 tbsp balsamic vinegar

In a gallon zipper  bag, combine the garlic, ginger, Essence, salt, and pepper. Add the duck breasts, seal, and refrigerate for at least 1 hour or up to 24 hours. Remove from the refrigerator 1 hour before cooking.

Preheat the oven to 400°F. In a large cast iron skillet, heat the olive oil over medium-high heat.  Sear the duck breast for 2-3 minutes; turn and sear for 2-3 minutes on the other side.  Transfer the pan to the oven and roast for 3 minutes for medium-rare. Transfer the duck breasts to a plate and cover.

To make a balsamic jus, return the pan to medium-high heat, add the apple juice, and stir to scrape up the browned bits from the bottom of the pan.  Cook until the juice reduces. Add the balsamic vinegar and cook to reduce for a couple more minutes.

Cut the duck breasts into diagonal slices and serve drizzled with the balsamic jus.

The original recipe (which you can find at http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/369209) calls for fresh ginger which we don’t usually have so I used the spice rack variety.  Chinese 5 spice powder is used in the original recipe instead of the Emeril Essence.  I didn’t have it at the time but have since found it.  It wasn’t hard to find; it’s in HEB’s.  I tend to think if I haven’t heard of something, it must be exotic and expensive.  It is neither and it tastes good, too, but I prefer using Emeril’s Essence.

Also, we don’t have alcohol in the house so although the original recipe calls for white wine, I’ve found apple juice is a fair sub.  Oh!  And I think this is the most important thing.  I don’t know if we have midget ducks or what, but the Epicurious.com recipe calls for 5 minutes each side and 5 minutes in the oven.  That’s too long for our duck breasts.  It took less time.

A duck walks into a pharmacy and says, “Do you have any chapstick?” When the pharmacist hands it to him, the duck replies, “Thanks, just put it on my bill.” (My favorite duck joke of all time.)

Holidays, hollow days, hallowed days

Joe Btfsplk, the world’s worst jinx, in this excerpt from the March 20, 1947 strip (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I took a sabbatical from writing.  I’m not sure if an itinerant blogger can take a sabbatical.  I think it takes gainfully employment to sabbat yourself away from your job.  I am employed but I can’t afford to take a sabbatical away from work.  I did stop writing for a while.  It took too much to energy to string letters into words.

Starting at Thanksgiving and plodding through all the events until January 15, the anniversary of Jack’s death, I couldn’t write much more than “I am sad.”   I felt like Joe Btfsplk, the fellow in Lil Abner cartoons who sauntered around with the cloud over his head.  Just say his name in a loud voice.  “Btfsplk!”  That sound describes the way I’ve been feeling.

I don’t think I was a drag on the moods of those around me.  I have been sober long enough to know that acting as if I am happy will generally cheer me up.  I thought I was a functional alcoholic for a long time and I was wrong for most of that time.  I am pretty sure I was a functional sad woman.  Sitting in front of the computer, looking at a blank WordPress page, I just couldn’t put together the words.  My holidays became hollow days.  Looking back, hallowed is the right word.  They weren’t hollow at all.

Mose with GE, Sophia, Claire and MA

We, my sisters and I, have one remaining relative from our parents’ generation:  Mose.  Mose celebrated her 88th birthday in 2012 and will mark her 62nd anniversary of being a nun in the order of Incarnate Word Sisters of Charity in May.  She’s remarkably healthy with the exception of some heart trouble that’s gotten worse over these past few years.  It doesn’t seem to slow her, though.  She was doing a jig at Travis’ Brackenridge Park birthday party last December.

Christmas Eve we got word that Mose suffered a heart attack in Galveston which left her and another sister stranded at a strange town in a strange hospital.  The Galveston doctor recommended surgery.  (Not here! I want my doctor to do surgery if I need it.) (You can’t wait. YOU NEED TO HAVE THE SURGERY HERE.) (No.  I’m going back to San Antonio.) After the doctor told her she needed an ambulance to transport her, she replied that her convent couldn’t afford such extravagance and said her family would come get her.  She signed herself out of the hospital AMA; Bob and I picked the two nuns up in Galveston and drove them back to S.A.

Mose was more fragile than I’ve ever seen her.  She rarely weeps from sadness; her tears come from frustration and anger born out of situations that she can’t control.  They don’t come often.  To see her crying as we loaded her luggage into the car was frightening.  Would we be able to get her back to San Antonio?  Bob’s mother got us a GPS for Christmas and I identified hospital ER’s on the route.  Mose rested in the backseat while her friend and I watched her breathing.

Serenity prayer

We got her home without visiting an emergency room.  When we were leaving, Mose handed me a wrapped gift.  (Take this.  There’s a funny story to it that I’ll tell you later.)  The gift was a Serenity prayer sun catcher which is special because I am a member of AA and we say that prayer at just about every meeting.  I couldn’t imagine what might be funny about the prayer or the suncatcher, but I set it in the window.  The story behind it, when she felt well enough to tell it to me, heightened its value to me:

The year I celebrated my 25th anniversary of taking my vows, I went to a retreat that centered around Reinhold Niebuhr’s prayer.  God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.  It was after I’d had that terrible car wreck and I couldn’t get past the pain in my shattered leg.  That prayer was such a comfort that I used it on the prayer cards which were in the invitations I sent to family and friends.  Because of the prayer cards, someone gave me that Serenity prayer sun catcher.  At the reception following Mass, I kept getting the question, “Are you a friend of Bill, Sister?”  I smiled and nodded until someone exclaimed, “I didn’t know you were a friend of Bill W, Sister!  Curiosity got the best of me and I asked, “Bill who?”  That was when I found out that Alcoholics Anonymous likes the Serenity prayer, too!

Betsy

A few days after New Year’s, GE and the kids came for a late Christmas.  While they were there, Betsy the Blind Bosty died.  She had been fading for a few months and it wasn’t a surprise, but she was a sweet little old dog.  I found her on the Crosstown Expressway after traffic stopped to let the old blind girl stagger across to the median.  I never found her owner, but I believe she’d spent her first 14 or 15 years with an elderly person who passed.  Perhaps she got out of the yard looking for him.  That’s the story I told the other dogs, anyway.

Bob and the kids had dug a grave in my backyard, GE bought a bouquet of flowers.  Bobby had wrapped her in a floral sheet like a shroud.  We had a funeral service.  I told them that I imagined Betsy in heaven, now a young and healthy puppy girl, bounding across the fields to her owner, himself a young and healthy man.  Sophia exclaimed, “Betsy.  I loved you!”  GE said a few words.  Bob, who is the softest hearted person I know, had tears streaming down his face. Travis, at 3, wasn’t sure what was happening or what we were doing, but knew that it was his turn to speak.  Peering into the open grave, he said in a soft, gentle voice:  Betsy.  You are dead.

I’ve been smiling as I think about Serenity prayers, old nuns, heavenly dog and owner reunions, and small children.

Hallowed be my life.