The 30%

I've been ruminating on life's statistics: the 99% vs the 1%, the  80-20 rule...then I remembered a blog my daughter wrote a couple of months ago about a lesser known statistic: schizophrenia is 70% hereditary and 30% evironmental.She is writing a novel that explores the legacy of mental illness. I asked her to be a guest blogger on Riddles on the Harp.  Reprinted with permission from My Wilderness Years.

April Trabucco

The Writer Magazine’s email newsletter this week was titled “Why we need pain to write.” I’m all over that, but not by choice. If that’s the key, I should be churning out chapters by the hour. There is the requisite time necessary for licking one’s wounds though and that turns out to be an involved process. There’s also work and children and house and said source of pain that require ample tending. So chapters are not churning as fast as I would like. Is it to my creative detriment that I'm an optimist and cherish the happy times that come when hope prevails?

George Clooney and the 10/30 window

When I get the witching hour wakeup call sometimes I reach for my latest copy of World Magazine. Not that it puts me to sleep, au contraire. The January 14^th issue is definitely not warm milk and wooly sheep.  One article that has stayed with me is a Mindy Belz essay on the 10/30 window.  According to Mindy there are 2.4 billion youth in the world that are in an extended state of adolescence.  They begin puberty around the age of 10 and are not fully formed adults until they are close to 30. That is 20 years of teenage angst!

Furthermore, your kid is more likely to find a kindred spirit in a Facebook friend from Kathmandu than she is from an older family member.  And as she and her brother will search the internet for advice before they will consult their wise elders, there’s not much opportunity for torch passing.  

Even in our Christian circles adults are no longer a treasury of wisdom and experience for children but a directory of services.

Old Family Bibles

Do you have a collection of old family Bibles?  Leaf through them and see what falls out.  Sadly, I did not pay attention to the roads my musty Bibles traveled before they checked themselves into odd spaces on my bookshelves.

I will never know which relative slipped a 4-page leaflet titled “Two died for me” into a 1913 New York American Bible Society translation. I surmise from a Google search that the tract that presents the story of Jim, who went to a watery grave to save the life of a shipmate, was published in the 1930s and is part of the Adventist archives.

This put me in mind of other flotsam that has floated from the pages of my old Bibles – a favorite poem, a rose-bordered memorial card, yellowed clippings of obituaries, the cryptic scribble of a graveyard row and lot number where an ancestor might be found if the scribbler had thought to include the name of the cemetery. There are more stories in an old family Bible than the parables these pages produce.

My favorite story is not my own, but my friend Barbara’s. After her mother died Barbara found a note in her mother’s handwriting tucked between the pages of her Bible.  The note was not addressed to anyone particular, it simply said “Do not worry.  I am just fine.”

We often think about family history.  We record the dates of births, marriages and deaths in family Bibles, or we used to before the advent of Ancestry.com. These records don’t say much about our spiritual history though.  The clues we find or leave, the passages we underline, the notes we take tell a bit more.

There is an advertisement that suggests that our success in life can be determined by an answer to the question, “what’s in your wallet?” Perhaps our hearts are revealed by the answer to a different question.  What’s in your Bible?  

Spontaneity

In a recent Wall Street Journal book review, Alexandra Mullen noted that blogging uniquely captures “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,” (Wordsworth). I guess I haven’t been feeling spontaneous lately, which is why halfway through April there are no blog titles listed for the month. My annoying sister pointed this out. Powerful feelings are just hard to conjure.


My daughter just emailed from Dreams Resort in Puerto Vallerta where she and her husband are celebrating their 10th anniversary:

Did water aerobics, played blackjack, learned card tricks, lounged by the pool, had a wonderful dinner on the ocean and now we're listening to a concert on the beach from our balcony.

We have moved into her house on overcast Bainbridge Island off the coast of Seattle for a week to ferry the grandkids to school, after school activities and birthday parties. Our other duties include:

Sorting fact from fiction

Her: Mommy lets me buy milk from school every day.

Me: How much money do you need for that?

Her: Three dollars.

Me: For a carton of milk? I don’t think so!

Finding homes for socks

Me: Whose socks are these?

Him: Not mine!

Her: Not mine!

Me: Okay, you – go put these in your brother’s drawer.

Her: Okay, they’re mine.

The list goes on.

I wish I was the kind of grandmother who cultivated grandmaternal feelings with an outpouring of spontaneity. You know, the kind that takes the kids out of school and whisks them off to Canada to introduce them to Haida Indian culture, sparking a lifelong interest in anthropology.

We did take granddaughter to see Chief Seattle’s grave in Susquamish. Then we wandered into a curio shop owned by the delightful Rainey Daze (Is that an Indian name? I think I might have known a Rainey Daze at Berkeley in the sixties). Rainey recommended the local pub for the best food, assuring us it was a safe place to take a seven year old on Sundays. Granddaughter wrinkled her nose and shook her head, declaring her preference for “American food, like pizza.”

What happened to your adventuresome spirit, I asked her. I think it ebbed after Rainey showed her the skinned lynx heads the Indian children used to push their hands into to keep them warm on their three hour walk to school in zero degree weather.

Like granddaughter, I’m feeling uninspired. No font of powerful feelings to report. I do feel a spark of pleasure, though when I hear granddaughter say, “this is a very fun puzzle,” in response to the challenging jigsaw we packed and brought to encourage the children to focus on something they can’t finish in a day. It’s time well spent to hear grandson say, “it’s very hard, but look! I did it!”

At the other end of my mother’s dining room table that now graces my daughter’s front room I’m watching the five and seven-year-old work on a large puzzle together. “You know, practice does make perfect,” she tells him. “I’m not very good at this,” he says, popping in another piece.

This old house

My mother’s house is on the market. It was our family home for over 60 years, but I think of it as my mother’s house. She designed it to suit her needs. Sinks and counters were scaled to her tiny frame. It worked for me. Not so well for my father and my sister.


Her house was her refuge, protected all around by ten-foot fencing. The fence prevented automobile lights from shining in the windows of a house set into a cul-de-sac. It also discouraged human traffic. That’s why it was there.

A small house on a large lot, my mother found sanctuary in her backyard among the raised vegetable beds. There, the Early Girls, rainbow chard, lemon cucumbers and a bountiful cornucopia of their sisters slept and grew and came to our table.

She watered the birds and fed the squirrels until they got too rude. She disdained automatic sprinklers. For as long as I can remember, she was always moving a hose. She knew what wanted weekly deep watering and what required daily sprinkling. To her, watering was a meditation. To me, it was a chore.

Her main occupation was collecting recipes. She filled 60 binders with recipes – good ones. I threw them all away. I’m not proud of that. Binders rot and recipes, even the old ones, are all online. But I now I realize it was a life’s work. One of those occupations you can’t take with you.

Once in awhile, I open a book that belonged to her and a piece of memo paper drops out with a recipe copied on it in her beautiful handwriting. I wonder what this meant to her. She had beautiful serving dishes suited to every type of cuisine, but she and my father rarely entertained.

I think the beginning of the end was when my father could no longer help her in the kitchen. Meal preparation and enjoyment was their private worship.

Most of the fence has come down. The Japanese maple yanked from its place in antiquity; the dogwood tree leveled in favor of grass and bark; only the gardenia and camellia bushes survived the facelift.

I pray whoever buys my mother’s house will find sanctuary of their own sort.

Genie-ology

Like the genie, are some things better left bottled? I loaded Family TreeMaker last night and began to blow through the family legends.

The infamous half-aunt wasn’t born in Spokane, WA to a mother gone under the wing of her deceased young husband’s family, as we were told. No, L’s birthplace was in Illinois and there seems to be no trace of a father, deceased or otherwise. What was my maternal grandmother doing in Illinois, having a baby alone?

The paternal grandfather who took his origins to the grave out of hatred for his birth family admitted to being born in 1891 in Illinois on the 1920 census. (What is it with this Illinois connection?) True to character, he left two big blanks for the names of his mother and father but did own to the fact that they were from California.

This isn’t family history we are tracking, it should be called family mythology.

Some mistruths are literary license. My maternal great grandmother writes that she lost her husband and was left to support three penniless young children. In fact, she lost him in a divorce that she initiated.

Then there is the list her children – my grandmother O. N. Scott, my uncle J. W. (or H., depending on what record you believe) Scott, and Catherina L Stark...who is that? I was looking for the third sister who allegedly drank creek water when she was a young woman and died of typhoid. I expected her to be a Scott, though.

So, genie, here are my three questions: What are the names of my paternal great grandparents (and why were they so hated?); Who was half-aunt L’s father? And how about that legend that we are descended through the Carter line from Jacques Cartier and an Indian woman he married in Canada? All my research shows he had no offspring. No Indian wife to speak of, either. But that was a favorite story of my great-grandmother, who used “Cartier” as a pen name.

My husband will probably divorce me for staying up late at nights puzzling over all of this, but I have a strategy. I’m going to set him down in front of the computer with his notes and let him see how far he can get verifying that story about the silver mine in Arkansas.

Flash frame

When I’m on my yoga mat, my mind often flashes to other happy places: I see the sun squinting soft and friendly at me between pine tree branches as it sets outside the window where I used to do yoga in Los Gatos; I smell a pleasant glow of beeswax off the hardwood floor in a spacious studio in Traverse City, MI.; I feel the warm sun and welcome breeze on my skin on a grassy knoll near the Stanislaus River.

When I stand before our congregation with our small praise team leading worship songs, I try to focus on the meaning of the words we are singing. I try to pray those words: Yes, God, you are my King; Yes, Jesus, make me a servant; Yes Holy Spirit, give me a stronger heart.

In the pauses of my mind, images flash like the new Cozi screen saver I have installed on my computer. When my computer isn’t in use, a template of attractive frames pops up and randomly selects images from my picture file to display in rotation. My mind does this too. Pop! Pop! Pop! Here they come – an image of the island church where my daughter and her family worship. I see their musicians praising God with flute and violin; an image of my son and his wife worshiping in their church on the coast. I see their rapt faces; older images appear randomly. I see the hymn choir at the now defunct Christ the King Anglican church in Campbell – the faces of old friends – and the San Francisco Symphony Chorus at Christmastime. Then I feel angels step up to join us and my heart and my voice are stronger. I feel unity.

I do not believe that those who have passed are much involved with those who remain. I do wonder, though, if there might be a really big screen TV in heaven. I wonder if my mother and father glance at it occasionally, see our images rotating on the screen, remark to each other that we seem to be doing well and take pleasure in that. I believe we have a high-tech God, so why not?

Windows

I look out the window of our boutique hotel in Berkeley, across the commons to the windows of a U.C. Berkeley dormitory. Forty years ago, I walked past the front door of this same dormitory on my way to classes. I didn’t think about windows, I thought about doors. Behind the doors of that dorm I envisioned students plugged into dorm rooms like bees in a hive -- tightly packed, indistinguishable from each other, throbbing with activity. My dorm was WWII-era temporary housing on top of a hill -- smaller, cheaper, but rooms with a view of the Bay Bridge and San Francisco.

Tonight I see the students’ world through windows. A girl paces on a terrace, talking on her cell phone. Below, a boy skateboards alone at dusk, as students stroll in twos and threes toward the back entrance of the building carrying cartons of food, but no books. I see lights in the windows above them. It’s early in the academic year, and unseasonably hot. But I’m not here to wonder at a new crop of students. I’m here to wonder at the world I used to live in and how it’s changed.

Even though renovation excuses the absence of coziness in the Bear’s Lair, my personal landmarks are relatively unchanged – Wheeler Hall, still has no air conditioning and the hard stone staircases that took your breath away when you climbed to reach your classroom and counted it a privilege.

Privilege is the window I looked through this evening from our perch at Chez Panisse in North Berkeley. “Have you been here before?” the waiter asks? Not even in my dreams 40 years ago. Then, I didn’t attend to the larger community that surrounds the University. Now, the classroom experience only makes sense within the context of the larger community.

Privilege is a right or immunity granted as a particular benefit, advantage or favor. I was given the right to an education. Over the years, I have taken time to gaze through many windows: from my ESL classroom in Germany, across the square to a gargoyle’s gothic posture on a cathedral spire high above the streets of Ulm; from a Left Bank pensione in Paris across the boulevard to an apartment window where young Parisians entertained friends in an elegant dining room – taking time to look out your window and appreciate other worlds, past, present or yet to come, with some measure of understanding is a benefit of education.

“Do the students look different to you,” a Venezuelan woman at our hotel asks me? Yes and no. Behind the doors, I imagine they are different in their study habits, less interested in changing the world than making their way in it. Through the windows, they look not much different, reaching for connection, for recreation, for respite from dorm food.

Those were good years. I would not go back.

Learning to Learn

This essay has been published on the AARP website.

Home ownership has always been the traditional American dream, dating back to the early settlers whose first actions were to form community and build shelter. Creating space where they were free to pursue their own endeavors fueled westward and immigration movements. Although I cherish the home that I own, my American dream is different. My dream was lit in my heart by my Kansas-born grandmother.

Opal Nellie Wolff left home at 16 to become a dancer in New York. A widow in her twenties with a young child to support she established a dance studio in Oregon, weathered depression and war, and fought poverty much of her life.

In her tiny cottage in Northern California she entertained me with stories of her life in New York, but always ended them with a caution. “The one thing I regret,” she said, “is that I did not get my education. There is so much to know in life. Promise me that no matter what you do, you will get your education.”

I grew up in the shadow of Stanford University and attended school with children whose parents were professors and founders of tech companies. It was assumed that they would go to college, but no one had that expectation of me, except Nana. When I told my father I planned to go to college, he told said, “That will ruin you for being a wife and a mother.” Then he got me a summer job in his office and helped me open a savings account. If I were going to college, I would need to pay for it on my own.

Two things made my days at U.C. Berkeley valuable. I realized that I was buying a degree, so I had to make the most of my time, but the thrill was getting an education. I didn’t know what I would do with my education, but that didn’t matter.

In college or university, you learn how to learn. Life-long learning helps you build on experience, figure things out for yourself and appreciate every stage of life. I have used everything I learned in my career in communications and my multiple roles as wife, mother, volunteer and grandmother.

The American part of this dream is that, despite dire headlines, education is available to all. A house can be repossessed but no one can take away your education. Nana told me that.

Letting Go

To live in this world
you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it
against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go.

by Mary Oliver

My friend Sharon sent me this poem. I’m thinking about the process of letting my mother go. It’s time. My sister, husband and children, in the company of our pastor and his wife, buried my mother on Friday. Words of appreciation for her legacy were spoken. Strums on a guitar provided comfort, accompaniment for her journey.

The earthly tether of daughter to mother, mother to daughter, now is broken and we are both free. When the mortal coil is shuffled off, love doesn’t leave but the constraints of relationships – the responsibility of parent to child, child to parent, fall away. I do not believe that my mother any longer concerns herself with what I am thinking, nor is she privy to my thoughts. Maybe the biggest adjustment is that she is no longer “mom,” she is Shirley.

It comforts me to realize that she is no longer stuck at the end of a life she increasingly lost interest in because it was consumed by pain and loss. I believe she is now at the beginning of a new life that compels her entire focus. No looking back, and so I will live the rest of my mortal life without looking over my shoulder for her. That is, as soon as I can break the habit of reaching for phone to “call mom” to check in and keep her up to date.

Landfill

These days I feel as if my biggest contribution in life is to the landfill. I have thrown a lifetime of my mom’s stuff into the dumpster. As I heave and toss, I calculate the number of boomers who are doing the same thing times the number of bags they are tossing and my body starts to feel like ... garbage.

A sympathizer asked my sister and I yesterday if we had any of the symptoms of anxiety my mother has always shown. Shocked and speechless, we looked at each other. Later my sister told me that counting is a symptom.

I go home and survey my house, trying to look at it through the eyes of my children who will one day have to go through this same exercise. I get a roll of garbage bags and start filling them up. My sister follows me through the house, picking things off of shelves (a carved wooded frog, a toastmaster trophy, a bronze pineapple) and I hold out the bag. I argue for some of the detritus – the cute made-in-China, vacationing moose couple holding cameras and maps that we bought at the iMax theatre outside Yellowstone. “Oh puh-leeze,” she says. And we’re done for the night.

Is this a project I can ever finish?

Fox News killed my mother

Ha! Made you look! Mom isn’t dead (yet), but she has declared that this is the end of the line for her and taken to her bed permanently. A steady diet of Fox News has so depressed her that she can think and speak of little else but “that evil man” who has ruined our country, and it’s killing her.

In its unrelenting quest to “make us look,” Fox News pundits and other alarmists pump out doom and gloom messages that, bookended with the mute video of oil spilling ceaselessly into the Gulf, is most depressing. For a generation of people who thought they would never have to go through the hell of watching the world fall apart again it is too much to bear.

Of course, there are other channels and a power switch. Mom chooses to swill a poisonous dose of tainted information. That is giving “that evil man” way too much control over her life, I point out. She believes that the government is set on confiscating the house she owns free and clear, emptying out her bank account and cancelling her health insurance. She will die first.

Sadly, I have no argument that things aren’t bad, probably worse than we know. Focusing blame in one direction doesn’t seem productive and my pleas to her to consider the lilies of the field or think about whatever is true, noble, right, pure, lovely, admirable, excellent or praiseworthy fall on deaf ears.

“You raised us to take pleasure in the simple things in life,” I say, but pleasure seems to her a poor aspiration -- Nero fiddling while Rome burns. She feels bankrupt, although in fact she has a family who loves her and a pension my father worked all his life to provide for her.

She is convinced that I just don’t understand what we are losing. I am deeply aware that I have had the privilege of living through one of the most prosperous periods of time the world has ever witnessed, and that men died to make it so. But clever riposte won’t save us. While my mother finishes her days watching the thrust and parry of self-appointed talk show titulars, I mourn her loss of hope. That is an even greater thing to lose.

Milestones

An interesting exercise is to write yourself a birthday greeting. Today I stumbled on the one I wrote myself on my 50th birthday. Here's an excerpt:
Happy Birthday girlfriend! You are happy at 50 and happy to be happy at 50. You suspect there's a lot more ahead, and you're right. You can't imagine how many people are yet to enter your life, grandchildren and great grandchildren. You can't imagine the pain you will feel as people you love leave your life, can't imagine allowing yourself to go so deep down that well of pain that you will finally have to push yourself hard to resurface and gasp for air. That's the price you pay for living so long. Perhaps though, you'll be rewarded for being awkward in youth with a graceful old age.
Of course, I wasn't happy at 50. At 50 I realized that my life was half over (I'm an optimist) and that anything I wanted to change about my situation, I'd better start changing. Fifty is a good time to revisit the mortgage and renegotiate the contracts on relationships.
I've discovered other milestones related to age. At 20, anything you don't like about yourself you'd better work on changing because when you reach 40 those character traits are pretty set. At 60, it's time to take stock of all the things you said you would do when you had the time, the money, the freedom...the time is now, the money is what it is and you have all the freedom you grant yourself to do now what you've left for later.
Are there dreams you need to let go of with a clear conscience? There's power in making that decision yourself before life makes it for you.
Can you now be the child you never were? No do overs in life, but we sometimes can move ahead with a passion we've long held and reimagine it.
Even if it's not your birthday, write yourself a greeting.

Generations

Butterflies pass through stages much like people do. Each stage involves a transformation, a becoming. Maturity is perhaps the most beautiful stage of a butterfly's brief time on earth. After much struggle, a lovely winged creature emerges and graces our world with transient beauty. Bittersweet, its time is short, its beauty fragile and soon gone.
I too am nearing the end of my winged cycle, aware of how short it is -- this time to gather all my energy and fly.
Butterflies appear to flit more than fly. Flowers that offer sweet sustenance are their destination. The struggle on the ground is over. They take to the air for a brief period, beat their wings a prescribed number of times and then beat them no longer.
Butterflies are solitary creatures, choosing the society of flowers. They are polinators, ensuring the next generation of fields and orchards. Each generation of butterfly moves the species forward. Butterflies are pro-growth.
Choose carefully the flowers you visit. They will be the ones you help perpetuate.