P52 Week 4 - Sign of the Times

A word or a phrase will often bring a lyric to mind and it’s hard for me to keep from singing. My kids can attest to this, for as they were growing up, they reacted to my frequent bursting into song with groans of, “Not again, Mom.” And so, with this week’s title for Project 52, my mind immediately chugged into gear with the strains of Petula Clark’s 1966 hit: It’s a Sign of the Times.

The assignment was to think of things we see/use routinely today that in 10 to 20 years might have changed/disappeared.

I’m not a techy or gadget kind of person and so, thinking of objects becoming obsolete is quite a creative stretch for me. I’ve used my Mr. Coffee drip coffee maker for years– might it go the way of the fifties electric percolator in a decade? Will I ever replace my simple wristwatch with a futuristic smart-watch that might monitor everything from fitness to finances to flatulence?

And then I get into imagining what really huge things I would like to see disappear in the next decades. Wouldn’t it be lovely to see the billions of dollars and the ridiculous amount of time focused on political campaigns becoming obsolete and the energy and money thus saved being channeled into prenatal and early childhood development, the arts, education, and the environment? Wouldn’t it be lovely to have most diseases become obsolete by redirecting the billions of dollars currently spent treating them towards funding healthy community and work environments that prevent these same diseases in the first place? I’m just getting warmed up…and I imagine that you, too, could add to my list of huge things you would like to see disappear in the next decades. Yes?

But then the simple lyrics of Petula’s sweet song play again in my head:

It's a sign of the times
That your love for me is getting so much stronger
It's a sign of the times
And I know that I won't have to wait much longer

You've changed a lot somehow
From the one I used to know
For when you hold me now
I feel like you never want to let me go…

I'll never understand
The way you treated me
But when I hold your hand
I know you couldn't be the way you used to be

Maybe my lucky star
At last decided to shine
Maybe somebody knows
How long I've waited to make you mine

It's a sign of the times
That you kiss me now as if you really mean it
It's a sign of the times
And a year ago I never could have seen it…..

It's a sign of the times

And I wonder. What would it be like for it to be a sign of the times that love in the world is getting stronger; that we become more genuine and communicative; that we really mean what we say? And wouldn’t it be lovely to know that we didn’t have to wait much longer for these loving signs of the times to appear?

Maybe I am a ‘Pollyanna pessimist’ as one of my friends so aptly suggested just the other day, but there is much in the world that I hope will be obsolete in twenty years. Can I do more to bring that about?

P52 Week 3 - My Favorite

Hands down, my favorite place is the beach.

Here’s an excerpt from my memoir that I hope to publish soon:

I was fourteen the first time it happened. Usually, I would stay with my family in the grassy area above the sandy [Queenscliff in Sydney] beach. This particular day, for some reason, I decided not to. Perhaps I wanted to hang out with the younger hip crowd, or to escape after some family member’s teasing remark. I don’t recall. But I remember grabbing my towel, finding a spot amidst hundreds of others, and sandwiching myself into a small space in the sand.

I dozed as a cacophony of sounds roiled around me: the ocean roared, transistor radios blared, and kids yelled and laughed and hooted. The sun warmed me. The breeze kissed my skin and cooled my burning back. I welcomed the brief shade each time a wispy cloud skimmed by. The hot sand radiated underneath and around me, and was occasionally flicked on me as thoughtless types scurried by. The scent of coconut Coppertone oil was everywhere. The tang of salt and sea tickled my tongue.

That glut of heightened senses catapulted me into a transformed state. My boundaries loosened. My skin no longer contained me. I became the sun, the sand, the breeze, the ocean roar, the Elvis song, the dim and the strident voices. An inexpressible joy swelled in my chest and throat. A glittering thrum and glow pulsed through every cell in my body. The beach welcomed and caressed me. My tears flowed as I silently sobbed into my beach towel.

People nearby were not privy to my sensuous dance with the beach. I looked like just another pudgy Aussie teenager sprawled out on a towel sunbathing. At first, I had no idea what to make of my experience. I thought my brush with the ocean might have been a fluky sensory rush, but it felt like so much more. I couldn’t dismiss it. It wasn’t trivial. Quite the contrary, it felt really important. I wondered if it might be a spiritual experience, but my only context of God was what I’d learned in my religious indoctrination from the Catholic Church – that of God as Father, Son and Holy Ghost. The possibility of God as nature was not on my radar….

On the occasions when I would later recall my beach encounter, my body responded with a similar glow and the reliving became a secret pleasure. It wasn’t until years later that I learned the true significance of what I had experienced: nature in the form of beaches and oceans were one of my sacred portals, a way for me to access the holy and the divine. I have since begun to visit the ocean regularly to commune and to find counsel and consolation.

P52 Week 2 - House on Fire

The prompt this week is to tell what items you would take from your house in the event of a disaster such as a fire – after first making sure that all your living loved ones are safe.

My first thought flies in with a warm flush: grab my passport for it would be a huge pain to replace it! Good lord, how would I find my birth certificate half a world away in Australia in the tiny town of Greta, New South Wales? Have the ancient birth registers from the refugee camp where I was born even survived? Other realizations flood in: I have no idea where my U.S. Naturalization papers are. I’ve had name changes. Where’s my first marriage certificate? Where are my divorce papers? Where’s my second marriage certificate? Why did I even decide to change my name – twice! Good grief, I’d have to redo the whole flamin’ passport application process!

Hold on mind afire! I already have a U.S. passport. It has to be a much easier process to replace an existing one. It’s only in the heat of the moment that my first impulse is to fetch it.

All right then, what other items would I retrieve in the event of a fire? Ah, my laptop – devoted keeper of my ‘in progress’ memoir that I have been working on in fits and starts for the past five years. I keep questioning my sanity in embarking on this project for I have no formal writing experience, but I have an inner prompter, a gremlin that regularly re-ignites my resolve to keep at it – to get my story out there.

What else would I take as the smoke swirls about? I would grab my purse and keys and run down to the bottom floor garage. There I would collect a few photo albums. I would scorchingly admonish myself muttering idiot, stupid procrastinator, for I should have long ago scanned all those boxes of photo albums filled with warm memories. There’s no way I’d be able to save them all! I’d huff in disgust, throwing my few precious items in the car. I would drive, clearing the garage in a burst of burning rubber.

How prepared am I for a natural disaster? What kind of order are my affairs in? Hmmm….

P52 Week 1 - Self Portrait

I was born with a brown smudge on my cheek that is now furrowed with
wrinkles. My eyes are brown as is my hair – now dyed. My teeth remain
steadfastly crooked despite the orthodontic attempts of my childhood dentist.

That’s surface stuff.

The social portrait goes superficially deeper. I am an emigrant, of Hungarian
stock, raised Down Under. I am twice married, once divorced, once
widowed, and am now single. I am the mother of two amazing children and
the doting grandmother of an amazing granddaughter. I am an internist
physician who, with the help of friends, has transitioned into life coaching
and spiritual direction work. I am an aspiring writer.

That’s still surface stuff.

I am an introvert and an inveterate procrastinator who nevertheless manages
to make deadlines and is nearly always exactly on time. I am a music and
nature lover and I have conversations with oceans, mountains and trees.  I
seek the sacred in all things. I yearn to commune on tropical beaches and to
find a lover who appreciates me.

Even all that is surface stuff.

Closer to my core are the struggles to find and accept love in myself and to
allow – really allow – love in from others, from the universe.

I do experience snatches of that love: in a sigh; in a meditation; in my heart
welling when my almost two year old granddaughter rests her tiny head on
my chest; when I watch my children amicably banter with each other; when
I listen to Mozart’s 21st piano concerto; when I watch a sacred sunrise. These
are the moments that I catch a glimpse of the love that infuses the sacred. In
these moments my self-portrait feels whole and complete.

Intro to Project 52

P 52 is a project that my daughter and I have embarked on. Stephanie is a professional photographer http://www.stephanieelizabethimages.com/. She belongs to an organization called Clickin Moms that has created a program in which they send out a theme a week for a year and participant photographers submit a single shot incorporating that theme.

Stephanie invited me to participate with her. She’s well aware that I am an aspiring writer, attempting to finish and publish my memoir – I whinge enough about my struggles that it’s hard for her not to be aware! So she put out the challenge: “I’ll take the photo, Mom, and you write a page about the same theme. We won’t look at each other’s work until we have finished each week.”

OK. The gauntlet has been thrown! She even helped me to set up a blog to record my weekly musings. I’ve been wanting to write a blog for some time, figuring I have perspectives to share that a broader audience might be interested in hearing about. I haven’t taken the steps to get one going, even after I realized that agents and publishers look for author exposure – they only want to take on writers that already have significant market coverage, which I don’t.

So, thank you Stephanie, awesome and amazing daughter, for giving me the nudge to finally get that blog dream going.