Red's Wrap
Happiness. It's relative.
The Lost Art of Dying and Closed Captioning Walk into a Bar
What I learned today is too depressing to talk about for very long. I sum it up by saying that I attended a fascinating and beautifully constructed presentation on “The Lost Art of Dying,” which included artists’ very detailed depictions of the plague in Europe in the Middle Ages. It was around that time that the Ars moriendi (The Art of Dying) became institutionalized in European culture. Ars moriendi provided a guide to death and dying that emphasized recognizing one’s finitude and preparing for death with the aid of one’s community.
The gist of the session was that we lost the art of dying because of the medicalization of death, weakening of community bonds, and a thousand other reasons and we need to get it back. How exactly that happens is unclear. The session left me feeling hopeless and doomed.
On a more positive note, I learned how to put closed captioning on the little videos I’m doing for my new venture, Jan’s Senior Corner on Facebook. I liked being mystified by this challenge and then finding out there’s a little button to push to get captioning. I also very much like not knowing what I’m doing making these videos and having no idea what I’m going to say until I start. It’s really super fun and so not like me.
Maybe that’s my preparation for death. Learning to wing it.
They’re Fine, All Good
“How are your kids?” This is always the check-in question with folks I’ve known a long time or, more specifically, folks who knew my kids when they were young.
“Oh, they’re fine. All good,” I always answer and then, if the mood strikes me, I add a few details. Who’s working where, how old their kids are, the last time they visited. But usually, I hit the ball back over the net. But not with a question about kids. I’ll say, “Tell me what’s new with you.”
I have four kids. One is a biological child of mine. The other three were adopted from Nicaragua. Those three, growing up, were always treated as novelties. They were different. They had absorbing stories, lives spent in orphanages, illnesses and deprivations of various kinds. They came to America and became pretty much regular children in a regular family, that is, until we left the house. What we didn’t see anymore, the rest of the world still did. We were fascinating, which was nice in the beginning but began to wear over time.
So, when I run into someone I’ve not seen for a while and they ask, “How are your kids?” I feel like the real question is “Did they turn out alright, you know, considering.” This is me being sensitive because I truly believe people are usually just being kind and interested. It’s not their fault I feel like I should have a checklist of success for each one hidden in the bottom of my purse. There’s more here than just filing a status report. Always, for every parent, adoptive or biological, how your children are doing is evidence of how you did.
So, they’re fine. All good. is my answer always. And it is almost always true.
Elegy Updated
Stand with 10,000 ghosts
Hear their last words
Hurrying to the river
Running into the trees
Shedding this life for new
Drop your envy and yearning on the ground
Nestle your love in the rocks’ mortar
Be part of the wall that stays behind
Shelter the lost and the growing
Reach your arms to the sun and the blue
_______________
Photo taken at Tuzigoot National Monument in Arizona
______________
I wrote this poem in 2016 the morning after I learned that the son of an old friend had died by suicide. He was Native American, as was she and her other children, and, by happenstance, I ended up at a national park in Arizona centered on an ancient Indian community excavated in the 1930’s. We visited again yesterday, March 2024. We walked all the paths but couldn’t find the arch in this photo. I worried that it had crumbled but, in the end, decided that I hadn’t looked hard enough. The wind was blowing hard, and it was cold. I was in a hurry to get to the warm side of the village.
In the poem, I aimed at timelessness, wanting to say that my friend’s beautiful son would be living in a place that was green and welcoming. It was a meager gift but all I had. My imagination and well wishes and naivete. Words. Scraps of paper. A photo of a place that was gone.
A Week of Shorts: See So Far
Today’s holy place – Tuzigoot National Monument in central Arizona.
A Week of Shorts: Loud Joy
One of the more fun things in the world is not knowing exactly what you’re doing.
The uncertainness of it makes you laugh. It’s a nervous laugh but still a laugh. Laughing is sweet and precious like a Hershey’s kiss buried in the bottom of a cavernous purse, waiting for you to arrive. Especially if you are by yourself in which case laughing becomes a lot like loud joy.
I felt this way today recording a short video about my hat and ballet dancing and saguaro cacti at the visitors’ center at a national park when forty people on a tour stopped in their tracks to watch me.
I could’ve been the kid pretending to be an Olympic ice skater on a pond near her house and having kids from school show up to gawk.
I laughed at my misstep and started over somewhere else. Loud joy is so fine.
A Week of Shorts: Age and Tallness
The cacti at the Phoenix Desert Botanical Garden are robust and tall. Majestic. Yesterday, driving west of Phoenix, out in the desert, we saw saguaros with their arms drooping. I wanted to pull over and make them slings.
This extraordinary work of art was created by a woman who is now 96. Probably created a long time ago, right? Nope. 2017. Rotraut. That’s it – that’s her name. One word like Cher. She is lasting as long. So should we all.
A Week of Shorts: Roadside Lunch
I remember those days on road trips, those baloney sandwiches with mayonnaise, so much mayonnaise, and, if it was breakfast time, I remember my dad lighting the Coleman stove and opening a can of potatoes to dump in a cast iron frying pan before cracking five eggs, one for each of us, and using his pocket knife to cut chunks of cheese to add.
I remember the tablecloth with antique cars around the edge and the picnic table set with paper plates and forks from the silverware drawer at home. And how my dad would wipe out the frying pan with a wet cloth and then rinse the cloth out with water from a blue water jug with a white spigot.
We made all our meals this way, eating hash and beans and many whole cooked chickens in a jar, always with a tablecloth and a set table like the roadside was our dining room. I remember this and it was fine. We never thought any different. We envied no one.
A Week of Shorts: Anniversary Haiku
Seasoned frying pan
Riches, trouble, coffee black
Scrambled eggs with cheese
A Week of Shorts: In the TSA Line
He was a tall guy, older, hefty, wearing khaki pants and a baseball cap. She was small and so thin and spare that it looked like someone had dressed a Halloween skeleton in jeans and a plaid shirt for fun, cinching a leather belt tight around her doll’s waist.
He pulled a large rolling suitcase. She had one hand on the handle and the other on the cloth tape TSA puts up to keep people in the right lane. Each step was shaky, a risk, but he trudged on ever so slowly, gently pulling her along.
She stumbled and dragged like a child who had spent hours crying in her room alone. Halting and unsure but trusting the suitcase handle and the man in the khaki pants. He would take care of her. She seemed to know that.
I turned to my husband after watching the couple for a while. “Old people have a lot of true love.” He nodded and then we checked in for our flight.
It’s Not All about Genes: DIY
I really thought at my age I would know how to do more things.
My parents could do anything. My dad built a house, starting with getting a team of horses and some kind of shovel thing to dig out a basement. That is no lie. There were actual horses involved! The house was a five-bedroom, two-story Cape Cod-looking house with a breezeway and an attached garage built in Hastings, Michigan in about 1950 or so.
My mother could turn a little girl’s dress into curtains for a basement window and vice versa. Once I told her, the night before the dress rehearsal, that I was in a play at school that required that I have a Pilgrim costume. She created a pattern out of newspaper, found gray cloth somewhere (from the sail of a nearby ship?) and created a Pilgrim costume complete with a dainty white collar and cuffs on the sleeves.
My biggest DIY project was painting the office where I am writing this blog post. I am an enthusiastic painter but very sloppy. I get paint on my hands and my shoes and then track paint across the rug. I tape everything so as not to besmirch the trim, but I leave little marks, like sparrow footprints in the snow.
Nonetheless, I love painting. It signifies taking matters into your own hands. It’s probably how my parents felt with their house building and Pilgrim costume-making. Not absolutely comparable, but you get the idea.
Snow Door | wisconsinacademy.org
Listen to Jan read her essay “Billy” presented on WUWM’s Lake Effect
Jan’s essay “At the Breakfast Bar” on WUWM Lake Effect
Jan’s essay “The Parish Hall,” on WUWM Lake Effect
“Fury Cannot Touch Me,” Modern Love, NYT, 9/29/11
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