Last Monday did not go well for me. I had spent the morning walking shelter dogs in cold and driving rain, and by the time I got home, I was soaked to the skin and miserable. I changed to dry clothes, but decided to eat a hot lunch before showering. That turned out to be a big mistake, since our power went out as soon as I was done eating, meaning there was no way I could dry my hair after a shower. And since I was still chilled to the bone, the last thing I wanted to do was sit in my rapidly cooling house with a headful of wet hair.
The rain finally stopped, but the sky was so grey and gloomy that it was dark in our house even though it was still midday. As the afternoon wore on, the house got steadily colder and darker, so I hauled out our stash of flashlights and candles, only to discover that half the flashlights didn’t work, most of the batteries had expired, and one of them had leaked some nasty looking stuff all over the candles. To make matters worse, we were expected for dinner at a friend’s house, and I still had to make the salad I was supposed to bring. Overwhelmed, I sat huddled in a blanket on the couch, deeply unhappy, and thinking dark thoughts about our electric company.
But the thing about pity parties is that they grow boring rather quickly. Faced with the choice of sitting at home in a dark and cold house, trying to read by the light of a Coleman lantern, or going to a dinner party with friends at a house that had both light and heat, I figured out a way to cope. I showered at home, then drove to a nearby friend’s house to dry my hair and get ready for dinner. My husband and I stopped at a grocery store to get salad supplies and I simply made the salad when we got to the dinner party, with my friend who was hosting providing the dishes and a much appreciated glass of wine. We ended up having a wonderful evening with good friends, and returned later that night to a house that had its power restored. Life was, once again, worth living.
In the past week, my home town of St. Louis has been hit with steady, torrential rain and record flooding in many areas. People have lost their homes, their businesses, their treasured personal possessions, and as anyone who has dealt with the aftermath of a natural disaster knows, their pain and suffering will continue for quite some time. We will all do what we can to help, but it’s still a life-changing tragedy for many, many people.
I know that my brief afternoon of cold and wet discomfort is nothing compared to what the flood victims are going through. I’m not apologizing for how I felt that afternoon, as I don’t believe in apologizing for emotions. Emotions are like those obnoxious distant relatives we all seem to have: they just show up, uninvited and often amazingly inappropriate. But I do hope that I can remember, the next time life is inconvenient and uncomfortable, that this difficult time will soon pass and that, in the grand scheme of things, I have very little to complain about.
My hope for this coming year is that I will finally be wise enough to put my troubles into perspective, to not get dragged down by the temporary and manageable problems that are a normal part of life. And I hope that I will remember how I felt when I was discouraged and overwhelmed, not as an excuse for self-pity, but as a way to be even more empathetic to the people in this world who are experiencing real tragedy. Because the more I understand their pain, the more I’m willing to lend a much needed helping hand.
Happy New Year!
Which is why I am always surprised when the Christmas season rolls around and I inevitably find myself wanting more….of just about everything. I have so many antique Christmas ornaments that they don’t even fit on the two trees (three, if you count my little ornament tree) that I put up every year, but I still buy more. I buy my family a reasonable amount of gifts, and then, at the last minute, I find myself buying just a few more. The lights we hang outside our house look just fine, but I’m always trying to figure out where we can hang another strand..or two.
I don’t pretent to understand why the holidays effect me this way, I only know that they do. It’s the only time of year when I eat so many sweets that I have an almost continual stomach-ache, and yet still find myself reaching into the cookie jar for just one more snicker doodle. It’s the only time of the year when I will stay up long after I am tired, just so I can sit in the living room a little bit longer, looking at the Christmas tree and listening to Nat King Cole sing carols. And Christmas Eve is the only day of the entire year when I think I would go to church twice if I could talk my husband into it…I like the candle light service that much.
I have never known a dog who enjoys Christmas quite as much as my dog Lucy. I believe if she could figure out a way to write a letter to Santa Claus (or in her case, Santa Dog) she would. Because she not only receives a couple of Christmas presents each year, she makes it quite clear that expects them.
Sadly for Lucy, she has to wait until Christmas morning before the presents from Santa Dog arrive. (And they can’t be put under the tree until that actual morning, usually when she’s out in the back yard for a potty break, or she will open them before we want her to. We found that one out the hard way.) But when the big morning finally comes and everyone is assembled in the living room to open gifts, Lucy is always the first one at the tree, joyously nosing through the stack of presents until she finds the two that are hers. She always opens first, plunging her face right in the gift bag to get at her toy, then settles down to a happy morning of destuffing her toy squirrel while the rest of us open our gifts.
Like most people who are on the “wrong side of fifty,” I’ve reached a stage in my life where time has become a precious thing. I know that I have more years behind me that I do ahead of me, which means I have to be more intentional about how I use the time I have left. And this time of year, with its ever-shortening days, can make it particularly hard to find time for all the extra activities that Christmas brings for those of us who celebrate it. I love all the baking, wrapping, decorating and parties that Christmas brings, but I really wish it came with a few extra hours each day just to deal with it all.
There are times when I find the shorter days of early winter a bit depressing, and the chaos of the holiday season a little overwhelming. But then I realize that those things can also be a gift, because they help me remember that I must always be careful to choose how I spend the time I still have, and how important it is that I always choose wisely.
While I was still in college, I volunteered at a nearby humane society, and although I learned a lot, I also found the experience so stressful that I developed the beginnings of an ulcer. It took me years to decide to try it again, but I finally did shortly after we adopted our beloved dog Sandy from the local humane society. That was thirteen years ago, and although volunteering at a large, open-admission animal shelter can sometimes be very hard, (both physically and emotionally) I’ve stuck with it. I can’t tell you how much I’ve learned about dogs, how good it feels to see a dog I’ve worked with get adopted, or how much I’ve grown as a person just from my volunteer experience down there. Although I signed up only because I wanted to help the shelter dogs, I’ve also had the added benefit of becoming close friends with many of the other volunteers. I’m talking about real friends, the kind who stick by you no matter what, who know what you’re thinking before you even say it, and the kind who will let you cry or curse when you need to, and then do their best to cheer you up afterwards. There’s a lot to be said for people who have seen you at your worst but still like you anyway.
When I was a child, I was taught that there was only one correct way to decorate a Christmas tree. We always got a real tree, and it had to be a fir and it could not be put up before December 10th. We used the big, old-fashioned colored lights and we always put a white light at the top of the tree, and the ornaments were hung according to size, starting with the littlest at the very top of the tree and ending with the largest at the very bottom. We used mostly glass ornaments, but a few homemade ones were also acceptable. Finally, we covered the tree with tinsel (the old fashioned aluminum kind which I’m pretty sure contained lead), and that was hung with exactly one strand per branch, starting with the top of the tree and working down. Of course I saw trees that were decorated differently at my friends’ houses, but secretly, I always thought those trees weren’t quite “right.”
Then I married a man who had grown up with pine Christmas trees, often flocked (sprayed with fake snow, for those who aren’t old enough to remember). He also hated tinsel and thought that mini lights looked best, even though they had pink bulbs along with the traditional red, blue, green and white ones. I thought it was borderline sacrilegious to put pink bulbs on a Christmas tree, and as far as I was concerned, pine trees didn’t smell like Christmas. Compromise was slow, but inevitable, and eventually I stopped hanging ornaments by size, bought an artificial tree so it could go up shortly after Thanksgiving, and gave up on the need for tinsel. I still cling to my old-fashioned lights and glass ornaments, and no tree of mine has ever been “flocked.” We now have trees (two: a real tree in the basement and an artificial tree in the living room) that we both like.
I think the problem for those of us on the upper end of middle age is that we don’t have any real term for what comes next other than “senior citizen.” And while I have the utmost respect for senior citizens (my 85 year-old mother truly rocks the whole “cute little old lady” thing), I know that it will be many more years before I am ready to be one. So that creates the whole question of, if I’m too old to be middle aged, but still too young to be a senior citizen, then what exactly am I?
The Christmas season has begun, and that’s just fine with me. I’m one of those people who loves listening to Christmas music (yes, even in the grocery store), who puts up two Christmas trees and covers her house with Christmas decorations that are more tacky than tasteful, who enjoys baking Christmas cookies and even wrapping the presents. If I could figure out a way to get out of actually having to shop (and pay for) those presents, I would be a completely happy camper this time of the year.
Every new venture brings results we didn’t predict, and this blog is no exception. It’s helped me reconnect with old friends and distant family. It’s introduced me to a world of wonderful blogs written by smart, caring people who now feel like friends. This blog has me writing regularly again, on a real schedule, which has reminded me that I truly am a writer, despite my file cabinet full of rejection letters. Most of all, it’s taught me that, even in my late middle-age, I am not too old to try something new. This blog has helped me find my way at a time in my life when I was just a little bit lost.
Muddling Through My Middle Age 