The Last Leaf

 O'Henry is one of my favorite writers.  He wrote stories with a twist that you didn't see coming.  His story, "The Gift of the Magi," is a Christmas tradition.  His actual name was William Sydney Porter.  His nom de plume was O. Henry, or Oliver Henry, or Olivier Henry.  As a writer I understand that it can be entertaining to create new names to write with.  He did so, partially because he wrote some of his stories while he was in prison.  I'm getting ahead of the story, let me back up.

O'Henry was extremely prolific writing somewhere in the neighborhood of 400 short stories and poems.  He had an extremely colorful life working as a pharmacist, a bank worker, (he served three years in prison for embezzlement) a draftsman, a small business owner (he published satirical works, both his and other writers).  He was a musician, artist, pharmacist, and writer, it seems like an unlikely combination of skills. 

He married his first wife when she had tuberculosis.  They eloped because her mother was very much against the marriage.  Two children were born to their union but only one survived.  Another irony, his daughter died in 1927 of tuberculosis.  That miserable disease claimed both mother and daughter although years apart.  

One of his stories, "The Last Leaf is about a girl who is an invalid.  (In my youth that is what a disabled person was called).  She was stuck in her bed in a small apartment.  Day in and day out all that she experienced of the outside world was the view from her bed out the window.  (This story has become sharper in my memory because I have spent an inordinate amount of time during the pandemic staring straight ahead out of my windows).

In high school I was cast as this sickly girl.  She had a chest complaint.  That certainly resonated with me.  I could add my asthmatic bronchial cough to the realism of the character.  Here is an irony inside the story of an irony, I caught bronchitis.  I couldn't play the character because I was too sick.  

Back to the story, it is late autumn, moving towards winter.  There is ivy growing on a wall outside her window.  The leaves have turned a beautiful crimson.  The girl gains the morbid idea that when the last leaf falls she'll die.  The custodian of their apartment building is an old man.  He hears about this girl's belief.  He paints a leaf so that the last leaf will never fall.  He does this errand of mercy in inclement weather.  The girl is so heartened by the leaf that does not ever fall she gets better.  The custodian does not fare as well.  He sickens and dies.  

That story has been  at the forefront of my mind as I stare day in and day out at the luxuriant trees outside my window.  In spring they begin to bud, summer finds them verdant and green, autumn colors them a brilliant crimson, then they begin to dance away on the breezes.  Now?  There are very few hearty leaves left, still clinging to the mostly denuded branches.  

Here is where I differ.  I do not believe that those falling leaves are an image of death.  I heartily endorse a quote that says, "Anyone who believes that autumn leaves die has not watched them dancing in a breeze."  Well that might be paraphrased but the idea is there.  

Right now, the branches seem skeletal, scratching at an iron gray sky.  I will do my best to remember that the leaves dance away, but they return when spring comes.  I actually saw my neighbor in the building across the way a few days ago.  I can't see anything but a silhouette against the window but somehow for a brief moment I felt a sense of community that this pandemic has stripped away from me.  

Ahhh...The Wonders of Snurffle Day!

 It began with the great Christmas Tree Hunt of 1987.  My husband, bless his heart, would somehow find the closest locations to our home where you could purchase a Christmas tree permit and then meander into the mountains and find a tree to chop down.  He was very excited about this experience.  He had to get up early because the permits would often sell out by noon.  After his purchase and using a map they would provide up he would go into the mountains in our Suzuki Samarai.  We often referred to this small vehicle as a mountain goat.  I was often amazed at the places it could take us.  

This particular hunt got us a most remarkable tree.  It had three branches at the top.  My husband purchased three white angels.  He said that we had cherubim, seraphim, and an archangel singing hallelujah.  

As the years came and went new details were added to our holiday.  It was clearly defined as the Frdiay after Thanksgiving.  We would purchase matching pajamas for our two children.  They would wear these during the day as we would decorate for Christmas.  

Next, we began to go to a Christmas tree farm.  We got free hot cocoa, and a family picture with Santa.  We got a ride up a steep hill.  We would meander about searching for that most perfect of trees.  It became apparent that my husband preferred Noble Christmas trees, while I preferred Douglas.  In the spirit of Democracy we took turns, every other year.  Somewhere along the way I became converted to Noble trees.

After a few years of joyous celebration my husband gave our family holiday a name, Snurffle Day.  I have not one single idea how he came to this name?  He was an extremely creative soul.  To me it still sounds like a holiday that Dr. Seuss would invent if he were as adorable as my husband.

As the years moved forward I began to wear matching jammies with our kids.  Nyle did not get matching jammies.  I've felt badly about that in retrospect.  He acted as though he didn't care, but maybe he was just being nice?  Regardless, the jammies went from very Christmas themed, snowflakes, snowmen, reindeer, etc. etc. to this year's rendition, velvet palazzo pants, and an adorable tee shirt that says, "Roll With It."  This theme seems extremely important during 2020 since a pandemic has become our new normal.  

We adore Snurffle Day.  It's much more fun than simply stuffing scads of edibles into our mouths.  Oh, I enjoy the gratitude attitude that Thanksgiving promotes, and I do love good food, but a day that is personal to our family?  Magical.  

By the way, Snurffle Day is not copyrighted.  If you should feel a need for Snurffleing with your family we heartily endorse this day.  You make it personal by adding your own special family touches.  I would love it if as a tribute to the creativity of my honeybunch, Snurffle Day became celebrated around the globe.  Happy Snurffle Day to one and all!

Pollyanna, A Bad Rap?

 Pollyanna.  It is a name that I've been called on multiple occasions.  It was not given as a compliment.  No, the thought was that Pollyanna, was sickening sweet.

Pollyanna, a book written by Eleanor Hodgeman Porter is a book about an orphaned girl  Her parents are both killed in an accident.  An only child, she is foisted upon an unmarried aunt.  The aunt is extremely wealthy.  She is also cold and distant.  She does not want to be disturbed by the noises of childhood so she give Pollyanna a bedroom as far away from her as possible.  Pollyanna is isolated to only a few servants. 

A strange things happens. Pollyanna introduces them all to "The Glad Game."  Her deceased father was a minister.  He does research into the "Glad" verses in the Bible.  There are many.  He decides that this is the Lord's way of encouraging people to be positive.  The game is looking for the good, even in the bad.  

Some folks feel that this attitude of gratitude makes Pollyanna shallow and saccharine.  I disagree heartily.  If you were orphaned at such a tender age, and sent to live with a emotionally distant aunt, it would make much more sense to become cold and distant, negative and disconsolate.  Instead Pollyanna inspires the community around her to better ways of looking at life.  

I'm often stuck in my bedroom due to our current pandemic.  I am immunocompromised and I live in a large apartment complex.  There are many good folks living here who do not see the need for protective face masks.  Covid19 is spread through the air.  Somebody could think they had a cold and walk through the halls unmasked.  Sometimes I do feel as though cabin fever will eat me alive.  So, I play the glad game.  I'm VERY glad that I have a warm bedroom.  I have a smart phone, and a computer.  I can reach out and connect with loved ones through these means.  My room is cozy, and in it I have things that bring me satisfaction.  As I start adding up the positives, the negatives do not go away, but those ideas simply shrink in importance. 

In one scene in the movie Pollyanna, there is a lady who has poor health.  She has decided that she's dying.  She just stays in bed all the time.  She has samples brought to her that help her choose the type of coffin she wishes to be buried in.  Pollyanna reminds her that she should focus on living, not dying.  Sometimes in little ways life seems too difficult, especially right now.  Yet life is intrinsically precious.  This life is an educational process.  It is a journey of growth.  I love the quote that says, "This life is backwards.  You get the test first, and then the lesson."

Good folks everywhere, sometimes it IS OK not to be OK.  There are times when life seems to pile challenge on challenge on challenge.  The older I get the more challenging my challenges seem to become.  I think about Olympic athletes. Did they become exceptional athletes by sticking to a short exercise program and then sitting on the couch eating bon bons?  No!  They pushed, and pushed, and pushed their limits.  They stretched and progressed.  It is up to each and everyone of us to do the same.

Your challenge for today?  Play the glad game.  Even if it is only a small thing.  Count that as a win, and move on to other positive ideas.  Maybe somebody will call you a Pollyanna.  If they do, say thank you, it's what Pollyanna would do.    

I'm Just Happy to be Stuck With You!

We had only been married a few weeks.  We were moving into a new apartment together.  Well the apartment was almost a hundred years old.  It was new to us.  I finally saw all of his possession's that had been in his mother's storage.  I was startled by one item.  It was a round piece of poster board.  It had a pen and ink sketch of him a few years younger with his flourishing signature underneath.

Why was this image so startling to me?  I queried him, "Did you play the drums in the band my dear friend sang lead in?"  Now he was startled, "Yes, but how did you know?" was his question.

I was going to college several years before I met my husband.  I had all the arrangements made.  It was to be my second year in college.  For reasons that I thought were good at the time I didn't go.  I withdrew from school.  

I did go visit my dear friend.  She and I had performed in summer stock theater the summer before.  She was incredibly talented.  She could sing, dance, and act like a professional.  She was singing lead in a band.  I went to their performance.  During a break I said to her, "That big guy who is playing drums, is the best drummer that I've ever heard.  (I LOVE drums).  He is also really handsome.  On the other hand, what a huge ego that man has!  I've never seen a drum set with a pen and ink sketch of the drummer with a huge flourishing signature across the bottom.

It had been about ten years since I had seen the drummer and his sign.  Obviously he had made a large impression on me.  Imagine that seeing that drum front I remembered him.  I hadn't realized that he was THAT drummer until then.  It definitely made me even more certain that we belonged together.  

I fell in love with one of the most creative humans I had ever met.  He could sing, dance, act, write, direct, produce, play the drums and the guitar.  We sang together every chance that we got.  

We faced many, many hard things together.  Somehow he could make frightening and awful an adventure.  Things were sometimes turbulent in our relationship.  We both had gigantic egos, I mean, we were both performers!  We were also both the youngest in our families.  We actually came close to divorce at one point along our twenty-seven year journey together.  It was during one of our rough times that he told me our song was, "Happy to be stuck with you."  I felt rather badly about it at the time.  Then I listened to the lyrics more closely.  He loved me, he loved our children, the family that we created together.  He truly was grateful that we were stuck together.  He appreciated the years of shared experience, the love that becomes stronger as times relentless march continues.  

Twenty seven years was not nearly long enough.  He passed away at the age of fifty-four.  It has been ten years tomorrow.  Gratefully, I still feel him close.  I know that his spirit is still watching over this family that he so lovingly helped to create.  I am certain that I will continue to love him forever and always. 

My Other Mother

 One of the first things that I noticed about my new mother-in law to be was her beautiful red hair.  Her skin was fair, her eyes were the azure blue of a summer sky.  She was in her sixties when I met her.  She was still a beauty.  It soon became apparent that her beauty was far deeper than her skin.  I fell in love with her almost as soon as I fell in love with her son.  My love for her son deepened after I met his mother.

Through the years my admiration and love for her continued to grow.  After twenty something years of marriage, her husband developed alcoholism.  He was ashamed and so he would stay away when he was drinking.  His absences became longer and longer.  He wasn't working regularly.  She had not worked outside of her home since her marriage.  Now she was desperately trying to find ways to keep a roof over their heads, and food in their stomachs.  She had five sons.  The oldest was about to join the military.  My husband, the youngest was not quite ten as it began to unfold.  

Brilliant, charming, she began baking.  This was her short term way of coping with hardship.  She would have her sons travel door to door to sell her wares.  Her cakes sold like, well like hotcakes as the saying goes.  I can affirm that her cake baking knew no match.  On the other hand, there is a family joke that the bread that she made is still used as a football. 

 The ultimate irony?  She had adored her father when she was a small child.  He apparently also adored her in return.  He became an alcoholic and disappeared from their family life.  So cruel that her husband also followed that path.  Most remarkable of all?  I never heard her say a negative word about her father or husband.  It was abundantly clear that their struggles with alcohol were not allowed to dim the love that she felt for them. Hers was not the love of denial.  She knew far too well the challenges that they had.  She made the conscious choice to remember the positive.

Reaching a very precarious position financially, she packed up the family and moved several states away.  My father-in law had gotten a job. Ever positive and hopeful she packed up their tired old family car with kids, and the few belongings that could be squeezed in around the kids.  Unfortunately, it became apparent fairly soon that divorce would be the option she needed.  She was abandoned with children to raise.

Again she packed up the even more tired vehicle, and loaded in kids, and even fewer possessions.  Now she moved even more states away to be closer to her family.  It was the 1960's and divorce was still considered a scourge as though somehow it was contagious, or that only poor quality people would be involved.  Now they bounced about from teeny, tiny apartment, to even teenier, tinier apartments. 

 Mom got a job as a secretary-receptionist.  It had been decades since her previous job.  A brilliant human being mom not only thrived, within a few years she had been promoted from secretary/receptionist to the first women detective for consumer fraud in that state.  She managed to climb up the ladder by being extremely observant, and making herself necessary in all of the cases.  

Things did improve a bit financially.  The unfortunate reality was that she was told, "We can't make your salary commensurate with our male detectives.  They have families to support."  WHAT?  Not only did that continue to lower her families financial future, it later lessened substantially the retirement income that she received.  

Never one to dwell on the negative she proceeded to close some landmark cases.  She looked like a lovely grandma.  She would act as though she didn't quite understand the falsehoods they were telling her.  Then she expertly gathered evidence. She would come back and shut down the organization.

At six foot four inches two hundred sixty pounds, my husband was quite imposing.  Mom had officers that could come with her as back up.  She often preferred having my husband come instead.  He said that he would stand behind her looking as mean and tough as he could.  

This description will not be understood by those under fifty.  You can google these people if you're curious.  This was my husband and my favorite description of her work, "She looks like Edith Bunker, and has the mind of Remington Steele."  That was part of her gift.  She looked so sweet and loving that often people would underestimate her.  

I was honored to name our first child after my other mother.  She always treated me with love and support.  I did not realize, however, that this first child would grow up to be like her namesake in far more than name alone.  

 I'm eternally grateful for my other mother.  She was a gift, an inspiration in my life.  My husband was the brilliant, charismatic, funny man that he was because she was his mother. 

Who are you? Who do you want to be?

 I LOVE modern technology that affords me the ability to connect with beloved family and friends all around the globe!  Sometimes I post my less than stellar personal moments on Facebook.  Afterwards I think, now why would I share that part of me that is flawed?  An easy answer; the affirmations that come flooding in help me feel appreciated, loved, and understood.

One of my friends put it rather humorously to me in my struggling teen years.  "If you quit telling people that you're ugly, maybe they wouldn't notice!"  Do you notice though that she didn't AFFIRM that I WAS ugly.  She affirmed that I BELIEVED that I was ugly.

What kind of things do you project in your life in your daily interaction with others?  Do you feel weak, unable to live up to the standards that you desire?  Do you feel ugly, or fat?  Do you feel hopeless, that there simply is no way to attain what you would like to?

I believe that all of us have felt all of those things at some point in our lives.  If you haven't CONGRATULATIONS...and please tell me how you managed to dodge all of those miserable bullets!

Recently I re-connected with a beloved friend from my childhood.  I haven't seen her in THIRTY years.  I was stunned when I looked at her because she's only a few inches taller than me.  That makes her about five foot eightISH.  The reason that stunned me was because of the memory I had of her.  My memory made her a GIANT!  Tall, skinny, and coltish.

Now she's not all that tall, nicely built, and very gracious and poised.  So, was my memory wrong?  Had my perception of her been completely skewed?  (One of my favorite things about being 65 is perception.  That 3-D ability to view the present with lessons from the past.)  The answer is NO...my memory was that she and I were two of the tallest girls in the class for a very long time.  That was because, in fact, we were.  I was five foot five by the age of twelve, and she was five foot seven or eight by the age of twelve.  We then had to wait a very, VERY long time for the other children around us to get their growth spurts and catch up to us.  They DID catch up, and now we are both just a tiny bit above average height.  Yet in my memory she still is incredibly tall!

Why do I use this little analogy?  Before I explain I wish to use another example.  A lovely girl that I know is not any fun to shop with.  The reason?  She does NOT see what is actually looking back at her from the mirror.  She sees all the negative ideas and perceptions of herself that she has developed over a very short life span.  It doesn't matter if an outfit makes her look beautiful to everyone else.  There are almost NO outfits that make her look beautiful to herself.

WHY?  Why do so many of us carry around wounds from the past in our hearts and souls?  Wouldn't it be easier, and happier to see ourselves as beautiful, with all kinds of potential and possibilities?

Back to MY youth again.  I learned a song that changed much of my negative thought patterns.  It was called "Please Pass the Possibles to Me."  The ideas of the song encouraged the value of positive possibilities for each one of us.  WHAT?  There could be a time in my life that I felt wanted, loved, beautiful?  There could be a time when I would believe enough in my gifts and talents to write novels, or positive attitude ideas to share with the world?

I adored a little movie that came out a while back.  The title was unfortunate to my way of thinking.  It was something like, "What the BLEEP Are You Doing?"  I just paraphrased that title as close to the original as I could remember.  The title did NOT do the movie justice.  The movie was about the idea that REALITY is fluid.  It IS NOT, solid, and completely unable to flex or change.  It promoted that idea that we can in fact create our very own reality!  WHAT?

So...today, what is your reality?  Do you enjoy your own reality?  Is there anything within it that you can change?  Are you limited by your own perspectives?  Or are you limited by necessity (little things like feeding your family).  Can you create your own reality?  Sometimes, at points in your life that may be impossible...but just for a measured time.  So, if you are stuck for awhile, find ways and means to make that reality more positive.

I worked at a job that I HATED!  The work was mostly about numbers and statistics, while I'm a people sort of a person.  I HAD to keep the job.  It gave our family health insurance, AND it paid for my husband's Law School (at $15,000.00 a year that's a pretty real motivation).  So, I found ways and means to make the job work for me.  I did my best to strengthen the weaker part of me, dealing with math and statistics.  I focused on the people part of my job, and used that enjoyment to tide me over on long stretches of the things that I did NOT want to do.

Oh it didn't make my reality suddenly magical.  Yet it did a lot to make my reality MORE magical.  Viktor Frankl found ways to make living (and living with the possibility of death) in a Concentration Camp more positive.  Oh please, he didn't start skipping and singing happy songs.  That isn't called reality, that's called Psychosis, or the inability to recognize reality.  He did rise to a higher level of reality where he could bear his limited, horrendous existence.

Can you create your own reality?  The answer is YES...no equivocations.  It WILL involve some work inside yourself.  Take a journal, find a quiet corner and investigate.  List all the things you do like about your current reality, it may be small places where you can focus like, I love my parents, or I love my children, and the possibilities I see within each of them.  Or you may realize that YOU are your own dam...the kind that stops water, not the other kind (see, I shifted reality for a moment, and you can too...hee hee).  You may be the one stopping or damming the incredible possibilities that lie within YOU!

Most importantly, BELIEVE!  YOU CAN CHANGE...YOU CAN BELIEVE IN YOUR OWN POTENTIAL!  Class dismissed!