That's what friends are for

The volunteer community here at the park is an amazing source of support. I've already written about how they stepped right in when I had the electrical problem with Grace. The neighbor who spent a hour with me trying to find the inverter is also the one who picked up the GFCI from the store when he was going to town for something else. I didn't have to ask; he volunteered and wouldn't take any money until he came back with it. Someone else returned the GFCI to the store for me to save a trip. Another one lent me a volt meter to test the circuit. (Melvin told me to get one and I hadn't. When I called him with my problem he asked if I'd ever gotten one as he said to do and I had to I hang my head in shame, but Amazon is sending me my very own even as we speak.)

On my first night here I heard a knock on my door. It was another neighbor telling me to come over; there was a get-together outside someone's motorhome, BYOB. This happened two or three nights in a row until the weather turned cold but when it warmed up again we're again sitting around in the evening. I have an invitation to come over any time, for any reason, from all of them. My next-door neighbors issued an invitation to come watch TV. I have another open invitation to ride into town when they go to church on Sunday. They don't expect me to attend with them; it's just an invitation for a ride. I meet another one for a walk nearly every night. They pick up groceries for me to save me a 20-mile drive to town. As seasoned volunteers they offer their wisdom on other good places to go and where to avoid. In the beginning I wasn't sure how I'd be received as the only single person here but I've never been made to feel as the odd woman out.

I've been kind of conditioned over the years to not ask for help and to keep to myself. It's outside my comfort zone and I don't like to feel beholden, but these people, these wonderful folks, have told me, "This is what we do. We take care of each other."

Today the first couple left. They weren't due to go until mid-June but the wife suddenly became ill and they're going home to Texas to her own doctors. When they came back from the hospital yesterday we all gathered to see how she was doing, and once again our little community came together to help with anything they needed done to be ready to go. Next week my walking buddy and her husband leave, and in a couple of weeks the last of the ones who were here when I arrived will head out. But a new family came in the other day and someone else arrives soon - an ever-changing community of more or less like-minded people, if we leave Obama out of it, who take care of each other. My life is richer for having known all of them and I look forward to paying their kindness forward and forward.

I get by with a little help from my friends

Grace blew a circuit the other day. The overhead fan quit for a second and the microwave beeped and then everything seemed ok. It wasn't until the middle of the night, when I got up to plug in the heater, that I found a dead outlet. I don't have an abundance of outlets and losing not just one, but two, was an inconvenience to say the least. So at 3 a.m. I was awake with the owner's manual and a flashlight and was able to figure out that the two were on the same circuit. I tested all the breakers and pulled the fuses and everything was all right. Now what? Go to the neighbors.

Within 10 minutes, tops, of asking one neighbor his opinion, everyone else up and down the volunteer line knew of my problem. I still don't know how it happened. Everyone pretty much suggested the things I'd already done. Now what?

I called Melvin, my all-around brilliant person. In the short time I've actually known him in person he's astounded me with the breadth and depth of his knowledge, to the point if I ask him something and he doesn't know the answer, I take it as a sign the apocalypse is upon us. The man knows ev-er-y-thing. He had me running in and out of Grace, plugging and unplugging, starting and stopping the generator, turning lights and fans on and off, turning the air conditioner on and off, running the engine, stopping the engine, and doing the hokey-pokey. He concluded several things, boiling it down to the inverter. The inverter changes 110 volts to 12 volts and vice versa, so if I'm plugged in, the AC power will charge the battery; likewise if I'm running the generator to charge the battery it will convert the battery power to 110. I had orders to call him if I got to a repair shop and they started getting shifty.

One of my great neighbors came over last night and crawled around on the floor with me, trying to find the thing. He must have spent an hour and we think we found it but it would have been behind a panel in a cabinet and I wasn't about to start tearing things out myself. I did try replacing the ground fault switch and that didn't solve the problem.

I juggled my work schedule so I could take Grace to a repair place in Show Low today. Melvin nailed it. It was the inverter and if I could have found it, which was under the bench/bed I sleep on, and could only be accessed by lifting the platform, I might have figured it out. Or my neighbor might have. Or Melvin would have for sure. All it needed was a little nudge of the switch from one position to another, and for this I paid $90 plus gas. Resetting the inverter also took care of the GFCI switch, so I can take its $16 replacement back to the store.

Now I know. And now I have a super duper deluxe whole-house surge protector on its way from Amazon. I ain't going through this again.

Within 15 minutes of my return from Show Low and talking to the first neighbor who spied me and came to ask, everyone knew, including park staff in a building down the road.  If only I could harness this speed to the Internet here. I'd have no complaints at all. 

Moon watch

Last night I sat outside and watched the moonset.



Such a lovely evening tonight,
the sky a darkening cobalt.
The air is mild,
the breeze - gone soft.
Hanging low in the sky
is a sliver of a moon ~
the merest golden light cupped upward,
waiting for the evening star,
poised above it, 
to fall.

=======

Thought of the day:

When I admire the wonders of a sunset or the beauty of the moon, my soul expands in the worship of the creator. (Mahatma Ghandi)

Walk the walk

Life is full of paradoxes, isn't it? Yin and yang. On the one hand, but on the other hand. I wrote a few days ago of being so furious with the ex-husband and at the same time grateful he's finding whatever peace he'll allow in his life. The only way I can explain this dichotomy is to say there cannot be just black and white, that life's episodes are on a continuum from bad to good. Or maybe it's finally dawning on me that narrow-minded thinking, a byproduct of fear and hate, just takes too much energy that is better used on improving the quality of my life.

About a year ago I got into a downward spiral toward a depression that I know from experience would be a long haul out of. Six months before, we'd closed the magnificent failure of the family business, blame was being cast hither and yon, and most of us weren't speaking to the other most of us. After working an exhausting 60-70 hours a week on my feet, I suddenly had nothing to do. For someone who likes and needs structure, I was destined for The Pit. 

There were weeks I didn't leave the house; when I did it was a major event I had to hold my breath and unthinkingly charge into to accomplish. I started running looping tapes in my head about what a failure I was. In a massive demonstration of self-flagellation I began searching online for people I knew from high school, excuse me, more than 40 years ago, to see what successes they were, so I could add some grease to the spiral. Of course everyone I found was a success! None of them appeared to be criminals so I made the highly logical assumption that if they were Googleable, they were successful.

I still had enough sense to know I'd better stop this martyrdom sooner rather than later so I saw a psychiatrist. He heard my tale of woe and made a small dosage change in my antidepressant, but it's what he said that has really stuck with me. He said to ask myself, "How is this helping me?" That's it. Five words I've said to myself a thousand times. Five words that are a reality check, words that bring me back to the paradoxes my sister's death has stirred up.

It would be so easy to feel nothing but sorrow and loss. How can anything good be dredged up from losing a sibling? Just dive into the awareness of one's own mortality, look at positive proof that life isn't fair, or acknowledge the long-ago waste of her potential and try to find the good in any of this. I asked myself, how is being lost in this darkness helping me?

Well, here it is: Know, really know, that life is short and its end can be unexpected, and you'd better do something with that knowledge. Take advantage of every opportunity to tell those who matter to you that they do - never let a phone call or email end without saying, "I love you." Call the sister you haven't spoken to in years, not out of bad feelings but just because you haven't. Mend fences. Say thank you. Believe in something. Stand up for something. See beauty everywhere. Don't imagine slights. Allow events only the importance they deserve. Cultivate perspective as a sixth sense. The crisis of Mary's death put the ex-husband out of my head for the first time and when he slunk back in I had kind of a "who cares" feeling about it. Even if I have to continue to battle his demon, I KNOW this new feeling exists, it is real, and it will return.

There is a continuum from sorrow to joy, from hate to love, from craving to giving, from denial to acceptance. Find your place on your line and open yourself to ways of nudging yourself from darkness to the light because that is what helps you.


Thought of the day:

“Life is an opportunity, benefit from it.
Life is beauty, admire it.
Life is a dream, realize it.
Life is a challenge, meet it.
Life is a duty, complete it.
Life is a game, play it.
Life is a promise, fulfill it.
Life is sorrow, overcome it.
Life is a song, sing it.
Life is a struggle, accept it.
Life is a tragedy, confront it.
Life is an adventure, dare it.
Life is luck, make it.
Life is too precious, do not destroy it.
Life is life, fight for it.” 
 Mother Teresa

Give 'em hell, Mary

My sister Mary died Wednesday night. She was four years older than I and had fought diabetes since she was 25 years old.

One of the things I remember most from our childhood was her escape from doing the dishes. When there were dishes to wash and dry, what a coincidence, Mary had to go to the bathroom every time and, wow, her exit from the bathroom coincided perfectly with the last dish being pulled out of the rack by someone else. For years I called an excuse to be somewhere else when there was work to be done, "Pulling a Mary." Another sister remembers Mary being the first in line at the doctor's office when we kids were lined up to get shots. Because she could be counted on to pass out or throw up, the rest of us could have our turn with the needle while Mary was being seen to. What an irony; the one with the most fear of the doctor's office was the one who spent her adult life in and out of them and the hospital.

She was eventually disabled by the diabetes and hypertension and had to leave her job as a social worker for the state. By 1997 her kidneys had failed to the point she was finally able to qualify for a transplant. I remember her saying they had to be functioning at just 10% before she could get on the list, and of course she'd been on dialysis for years. When she died she had one of my kidneys inside her. It too failed her at the end but it worked very well for 16 years, getting her off dialysis, for which I was very grateful. 

She was a fierce advocate for her health.She had to be because she was in and out of the hospital many times over the years, but boy, did she know the system. I was counting on her to guide me through Medicare. Now I'll have to wade those waters alone. She remained in control of her care to the end, spelling out on a board several times her wish to have life support removed. She had fought all her adult life but she was done and made her choice.

We were seven but our oldest brother, Tom, was a Detroit policeman who died in the line of duty in 1972. We miss him still. And now we are five. Rest in peace and good health, Mary, and give 'em hell, whoever gets in your way. It won't be the same here without you.

Work! (Remember Maynard G. Krebs?)

The work I'm doing at the park is plentiful. I'm happy to say there's a lot to do. I wouldn't mind if it were more of a challenge but I know I'm helping because it's work that's been piling up since time began.

I'm almost embarrassed to say how simple it is. They didn't need a librarian, just someone fairly bright with some library experience. One thing I'm happy I don't have to do is catalog because they, like the entire National Park Service, use cryptic and complicated Library of Congress catalog numbers. Unlike Dewey Decimal Numbers that can be as simple as 123 ABC (just think of the shelves at your library), LC numbers look like $(87@\|fGY. Not really, but almost. If I had to catalog I'd spend my entire day thumbing through books, trying to figure it out. I had a very good cataloging class in my masters program, taught by the supervisory cataloger at the National Library of Medicine, but it's like learning a language; you'd better have plenty of practice and I didn't once the class was over.

My work includes converting VHS tapes to DVD; inventorying all the periodicals at the issue level and moving/boxing/purging them; and scanning and converting to PDF their entire holdings of research papers on the Triassic era; I'm going to say at least several hundred papers and manuscripts if not into the thousands. I'm also updating the shelf list, another name for the book inventory, organized by catalog number, by comparing the books on the shelf to the list generated by the catalog. This lets you know what's missing, whether mis-shelved or gone, and forces you to look at every book to assess its condition and if you even want to keep it. While I'm at it, I'm moving all the books that are on one wall of the library to another. Yay!

It's hard to say which of these tasks is the most mind-numbing, but it's necessary library work and they don't have anyone to do it. I've also taken it on myself to create a spreadsheet of their accessions book, a handwritten register of supposedly every book that's come into the library since 1950. Line by line, book by book, handwritten scribbled note by whited-out mark, all transcribed to Excel. I can't believe it's still being done by hand or that they even keep a book like this. All of the information in it should be part of the catalog record in the computer, but mine is not to wonder why.

Are you asleep yet?  

What I'm salivating over is the possibility of working with the collections manager on his records. It will be more like the archives work I did at the museum in DC (no, not the Smithsonian). The collections are the "stuff" held for the museum: pottery, arrowheads, taxidermied critters, skeletons, fossils, petrified wood, everything having been found in the park. The collections manager gave me a tour of his lair, opening cabinets and pulling out drawers, and using long Latin words to describe it all. I kept saying, Oh! Oh! and wanted to touch everything but of course you can't do that. I didn't realize how much I missed museum work until I was crouching in front of those open doors. I'm taking my camera the next time I go but what with the poor excuse for the Internet here it's doubtful there will be enough bandwidth to upload anything.

I look at the grunt work in the library the same as having to eat canned peas as a kid before I could get any dessert, so I'm choking it down posthaste to keep time available, before I leave in the fall, for the collections. I'd love to breathe museum air again for a while.

=======
Far and away the best prize that life has to offer is the chance to work hard at work worth doing. (Theodore Roosevelt)

Moving on

In January, when the ex-husband announced he was filing for divorce, a month after dumping the PTSD claim on me, I sat in the living room and wrote. Not much, and I didn't continue writing until I started cruisingat60, but I wrote a little of what was in my heart. This must have been a short time after I'd had a chance to think about what I was going to do, because the few things I wrote speak of my belief in his claim that he was setting me free to live the life I deserved to have and one which he wasn't able to give me. I know now that he was honest about one thing at least: I do deserve this better life.

When I saw them on the iPad I cringed a bit because I hoped they weren't dreadful, full of drama. I think they're ok. They show an insight into the failure my marriage was, an insight I lost as other pain overtook it. It was good to see that my first instincts about the path my life should take, even though they lay dormant for a while, proved to be right. 

This is the first, written as I looked out at my beloved canal.


Ripples, gentle in my wake, move smoothly, steadily, 
away from me.
I move on. 
I struggle against the tide, against the wind, against all odds,
leaving memories and dreams dissolving behind me.
The longer I travel, the more distant and ephemeral they become.
It's sad to leave these things behind.
But I also leave the anger and the disappointments,
the sorrows and broken dreams
that had become such a part of me,
as I'm borne along a now-changing tide.