What Really Matters

  

Dear Friends,

Here we are again smack in the middle of the holiday season which seems to have begun … Oh, I don’t know, around August 1^st?

I admit it. I’m a huge sucker for the holidays. I love getting out the holiday

decorations we’ve collected over the years (the best ones made by our kids

as they were growing up), lighting a zillion candles, and snuggling with my husband and our cat Lucy as we watch an endless succession of made-for-television holiday movies. The cornier and the more predictable, the better! It’s the season where I can never seem to get enough of those “happily ever after” endings, preferably wrapped up in a scene with snow falling.

This is also the season where I find myself doing a lot of reflecting about what really matters. My principal dance mentor, the late Gay Delanghe, had a holiday tradition that meant a lot to the succession of dancers, choreographers, and students who became her friends as well as colleagues. Every December, we looked forward to getting a phone call from her. We’d talk for hours and catch up on our lives, families, and careers. 

It’s so easy to lose touch with the people who really matter. E-mail and social media are great ways to remain connected, but nothing beats hearing the sound of a loved one’s voice.

I miss those phone calls, but I know a piece of Gay lives on in me and all the dancers and friends whose lives she touched. This holiday season, I plan to spend less time worrying about getting my holiday cards out on time and more time making phone calls that matter. 

Wishing you a blessed and meaningful holiday season!

              

There’s No Hallmark Card for This

     My husband teases me that I should own stock in Hallmark. I admit it. I’m a definite schmaltz. I love going to my local Hallmark shop and finding just the right card for a special event in the life of someone I care about. Cards for anniversaries, milestone birthdays, first homes, new babies abound. And yes, there are sympathy cards for life’s biggest and most inevitable losses—the deaths of our loved ones.


     The thing is, though, that a lot of mini-deaths take place along the path to our ultimate demise. And for a lot of them, there’s no card section to pore through. I’m not going to find a card to send to my ninety-something mom that says, “Gee, sorry, about your dementia.” And if there were one, I don’t think she’d appreciate receiving it. She knows perfectly well her short term memory has taken a hike, and she hates living in that nether-world where she can’t retrieve what happened earlier in her day, let alone what she talked about two minutes ago. Friends tell me it will be easier once she’s no longer aware of what she’s lost cognitively. Somehow, that doesn't feel all that comforting.

     Perhaps my own grief is more intense right now than it will be when my mom actually dies. It’s not fun to see your mother know she’s losing it, or to lose her by inches. I miss our daily chats about our favorite authors, politics, and what’s happening in the grandchildren’s lives. I miss her, and I know my mom misses who she used to be.

     It’s made me reflective about how much in life we simply can’t control, including how well our minds will hold up in our later years. My mother did all the recommended things to age well—she exercised, read voraciously, did crossword puzzles, was active in her church, had strong social connections—but for whatever reason, parts of her brain simply wore out.

     Nothing, including our brains, lasts forever. Our only choice is to savor all the tiny moments of wonder and goodness and kindness we encounter in the world while we’re still lucky enough to be aware of them. These last weeks, as my sisters and I helped our mom make a move to assisted living, we met so many wonderful people and experienced moments of grace—the kindness and loving care of Tina, our mom’s caregiver; visits from dear church friends who knitted her a shawl to take to her new home in Boston; and longtime neighbors and friends who dropped by to let her know she’d made a difference in their lives.

     Many years ago, my mom said to me: “Every night before I go to sleep, I ask myself if I did anything that day to make someone else’s life better. If I did, then I know it’s been a good day.” We were blessed to meet people who’d had very good days indeed.

     Fortunately, there’s a card for that. Hallmark has lots of them. They all say: “Thank you.”

In Praise of Snail Mail

 

     No writer is everyone’s cup of tea, but I’ve been blessed to have my share of fans for my debut young adult novel, While I Danced. In emails, reviews on the web, and phone calls, folks have told me that reading my story moved them emotionally. They cared about these characters. Me too!

     As a writer who’s had plenty of practice coping with rejections and “thumbs down” on my work, these comments have meant more to me than I can possibly say.

     A letter from a fan this past week was especially meaningful. It’s one I will save and treasure for years to come.  Not only was the letter beautifully written, but it came via snail mail, buried between the bills and requests for money that arrive in our mailbox with alarming regularity.

     What a thrill to open a personal letter written in cursive in which a 90-year-old  reader talked about how the book reminded her of “being fifteen, being in love for the first time, and most especially dancing.” She went on to share her own delightful memories of dancing as a child and teenager.

     Whether it’s the tactile experience of opening a handwritten letter and fingering the pages, or the knowledge that the writer took time to make this thoughtful gesture—all I can say is it feels different.

     In fact, it feels quite wonderful. I’m not a big resolution maker, but this lovely reader has inspired me to resolve to send more handwritten notes to folks I care about and who’ve made a difference in my life.

     Long live snail mail!

    

An Early Valentine from My Adult Son

     When my husband and I decided to incur significant debt to send our 28-year old son to the NOLS School for mountaineering training in the Himalayas for 40 days, the judgments from our friends, family, and co-workers were unanimous. We were right up there with the parenting idiots of the decade, members of the Enablers’ Hall of Fame—still trying to pour money into a son who had definite “failure to launch” issues.

     Are we guilty as charged? We are. Then again, in this case, maybe we aren’t. When our son became a father in high school and then again at age 23, we started down a long path of helping him not only learn to parent, but to do so while earning a college degree and then a master’s in teaching. And when he was devastated after losing his teaching job and ended up severely under-employed delivering pizzas, we tried again to help emotionally and financially.

     Concerned that he was dragging his heels in finding a better job and draining us, his exhausted parents, we gave him an ultimatum. We wanted out of the business of helping support him. He needed to look for a better job. His concerned older brother got into the act too, offering to pay for career counseling.

     The counselor helped my son identify that he was best suited to have his own business, and that his passion was mountaineering. But clearly, he needed much more experience and training if he wanted to start a mountain guiding business. When research indicated the best programs for doing so were run by NOLS, we decided to give our son one last major financial gift—attending this program.

    Are we crazy? Don’t three out of four startups fail? Why aren’t we pushing our son to get a decent job this minute and forget these crazy dreams of his?

    I guess the jury is out on this one. All my husband and I know is that we raised a family and pursued our impractical dream of careers in dance and somehow made it work. We want our adult children to have that opportunity as well.

     Yesterday, my son said something to me that felt like a lovely Valentine one day early: “I’ll never be able to thank you guys enough. What I hope is that one day, I can give my children the opportunity to pursue their passions the way you and Dad have for me.”

    It just doesn’t get any better than that. Happy Valentine’s Day.   

   

    

     The other day, I ran into a friend who told me she’d been reading While I Danced and was amazed to discover that my mother was French! I had to explain that my novel wasn’t autobiographical. My mother was a California girl who played the piano.

 

     In fact, the details of my life story and dance career are very different from Cass’s, the protagonist of the novel. For starters, the blisters on my feet were the kind you get from years of dancing barefoot as a modern dancer, not from pointe shoes! Of course, like all pros, I studied ballet intensively for years and have a great love and reverence for classical dance as well.

     But there is a sense in which as a fiction writer, whatever characters I make up will always reflect my own life and experiences. Authentic fiction comes from mining the emotional terrain of our own lives. Like Cass, I’m familiar with betrayal and lack of support on the home front. I too grew up with an absent mother I wasn’t supposed to talk about. And my dad was so concerned that I might pursue a career in dance that I was not permitted to take dance classes my senior year in high school! Decades later, that still stings, despite the long and happy career I went on to have in the field.

    So yes, While I Danced does draw upon some of the painful stuff I experienced growing up. But it also draws upon the joy, exhilaration, and ecstasy that I experienced as a dancer, not to mention the wonder of falling in love. And those are pretty cool things to be able to mine for my fiction as well.