Cell Phones in the Park

Last week I went for a walk in Lincoln Park in West Seattle. It was a glorious summer day – one Seattle is renown for and which makes up for many a dreary winter’s day. The parking angels were with me and I found a spot right by the trail entrance. I ventured into a welcoming old growth forest, shady, fragrant pine, soft breeze. I strolled along the upper ridge overlooking Puget Sound with the hazy outlines of the Olympic Mountains in the distance. I was mostly alone, but did pass a few couples, looking down at their cell phones. Hmm, look what they’re missing.

I trudge down the gentle incline to the beach. Oh my! What a view. I dip my fingers and taste the salt water. My nostrils fill with the pungent smell of the sea. I am in the hallowed presence of Mother Ocean. I walk along the shore, drinking in as much as I can of the beauty and majesty and magic of this sacred place.

I pass by many more people, of all ages: singles, twosomes, groups. They are scrutinizing their smart phones, thumbs busily tapping. Even couples are glued to their devices, alone in the company of their widgets. They are not interacting with each other. They are not speaking, not holding hands. I gaze further along the beach trail. I am astonished! It can’t be true! But even more people are bent over their cell phones. They’re not even using their devices to take photos or to talk. They are gawking at god knows what and poking away.

What an eerie sight: a sea of humans walking along a gorgeous beach, eyes downcast, staring at little oblong boxes. My stomach lurches.

Only the score or so of people walking sans phones look at me, smile, and say hello. The rest are in their virtual smart phone worlds.

It’s a struggle to move beyond this disturbing sight and the implications for what this means in our society.

I focus on the energizing walk and the sensations in my body, the throbbing of my heart, the warmth of the sun caressing my face, the sparkles that twinkle on the waves, the joy in my soul that connects me with the water, the mountains, and the trees.

I begin the steep climb back up to the ridge, my chest pounding happily with the effort. At the top, I have completed the circle – a mini circle of life. I want to blog about this and look about for a place to take an accompanying snapshot.

A couple sitting on a nearby bench say hello. I smile and return the greeting. They tell me that a group just passed by and didn’t respond to their hello. “Do we look dangerous?” they ask. Of course not, I reassure them. “Enjoy the rest of your evening,” they say as I walk away. I turn back and with a huge smile say thank you, you too.

What Is It About Body Image?

I have been scanning photos of my teens and twenties and am amazed at how svelte and frankly gorgeous I looked. Why didn’t I ever think that at the time?

I’ve always thought myself to be just a little too fat, my legs stubby like piano legs, my stomach poochy as if a baguette lay within – and so on and so on. I’ve rarely been comfortable in my body. I have never thought myself “the right shape.” If only my ankles were slimmer. If only my knees were less padded, more knobby . . .

In my twenties and thirties, I don’t remember being complimented by my husband. I don’t recall comments like “you look beautiful in that dress” or “you look sexy tonight.” He may in fact have complimented me, but it didn’t happen often enough to make a lasting impression.

It didn’t make an impression because when it comes down to it, what was lacking all those years was my own appreciation. I could never tell myself: “you are perfect, just as you are.”

And now, in my sixties, I am thirty pounds heavier. The blemishes, wrinkles, flab, and cellulite have taken up permanent residence.

I grieve for what I squandered! I didn’t appreciate the beauty of youth, the sheer joy of being comfortable and relishing a lovely body – not perfect by societal standards – but lovely nonetheless.

Am I still playing the same self-deprecating game? Am I looking at all the flaws and not appreciating that I still have a pleasant silhouette that is strong and limber, eyes that sparkle, and a smile that lifts my face and hides the jowls?

When will I be in sync and come to rest in the beauty of who I am at this moment?

The Art of Scanning Photos

I have been scanning pictures. It’s been on my to do list for years. I have boxes of photo albums languishing in the garage, gazing at me forlornly every time I park the car, wanting attention, wanting to be immortalized in the ethereal spaces of the magic box – the computer.

The impetus that prompted me to begin the horrendous process of scanning hundreds – no thousands of pictures – has been to find old snapshots to illustrate my memoir. I have no other pressing tasks to do with the book. The dozens of agent queries I sent out are dead in the water. I have no desire to even look at the manuscript, let alone initiate any more editing.

First, I bought a disc player attachment for my MacBook Pro and downloaded the old childhood family photos that my brother had painstakingly scanned and gifted in CD form to all the family members. That was laborious. It took forever. The disc player kept stalling. Oh, I don’t even want to recall that pain – but I did it.

Next I decided to scan a pristine picture album: my own photo collection from when I first came to Seattle as a teenager in 1966. I began with loading one snapshot at a time onto my geriatric printer/scanner. Each scan took over two minutes – an initial “preview,” and then the actual scan. And then I found an option to scan several photos at a time, and the dear machine actually identifies them as separate photos. Eureka! I became more efficient, pulling the next batch of photos out of the albums as the last ones were loading. Ouch! Hard on the cuticles as my thumbs got shoved into the edges of the plastic slip covers over and over. But I made progress.

Oh no! The scanner jammed. Damn! Unplug the scanner, boot up and hope it works. It does! It chugs along and captures another dozen or so photos. I baby the scanner, petting it and cooing sweet nothings: “You can do it babe. You got this sweetheart!”

As I crop and rotate the pictures in the iPhoto app, lo and behold, I discover the info function! I can edit the time – change it from the current day to that sweet day long ago – and it tells me exactly how many years, days, minutes – and, for crying out loud, seconds – ago that photo was taken. Forty-five years, three days, sixteen hours, five minutes and forty-two seconds? Really? Woo hoo! And not only can I load the date, but I can enter exactly where the shot was taken – it locates using GPS. So I can tell the computer that this photo was taken at the Seattle Community College campus – or St John, Virgin Islands – or even the Miller Brewery in Milwaukee – no kidding!

I have now scanned three albums – up until the time my son was born thirty-six years ago. You can imagine how many albums I have yet to work on. Zot!

“Make sure you have backup,” my daughter says as I happily and proudly tell her what I have achieved. She knows of what she speaks for she lost thousands of photos when her computer crashed three years ago. No problem, I say. I have backup.

However, my backup hard drive is testy. Sometimes when I plug it in to the USB port, it doesn’t read as being plugged in. Good grief! I play cha cha cha, in and out with the plug. I wait a while and try plugging it in again. Ah – I get it to back up – finally – and just to make sure, I open the hard drive and look for my photos. Where the heck are they? Nowhere to be found! I open every part of the hard drive time machine. Nooooo!

I have an appointment at the Apple Store Genius Bar this afternoon.

St John, Virgin Islands, December 1972

Illness

We’re not broken, just bent . . .

                                    . . . Pink

I’m coming out of a four-week-long tunnel filled with the flu. Yes I suffered the usual symptoms: aches, fevers, malaise, cough, congestion and fatigue, but even more prominent and disturbing was a sense of dullness, ennui, and just not caring about anything.

There was also fear, seeing my granddaughter ill: couch bound, listless, barely responding for hours at a time.

I stopped most activities: no emails, no writing, no bill paying. My life suspended.

I fell into watching TV series: Death in Paradise and Rosemary and Thyme, and I needlepointed, listening to Maisie Dobbs and Inspector Gamache mysteries on tape. I got lost in fantasy for hours on end.

Not even journaling or meditating. Pissed at God.

In the midst of it all came a sense of ending. Was this the end of my life? Was this how people die? Do they lose interest in life, get lost in the pablums of TV shows and novels? Are they are no longer able to come up with one single new, creative idea or activity, and is there no urge to peek out of the quagmire of dullness?

A frisson of fear came as I remembered my mother’s later years, spookily like my own in that she was stuck on her favorite TV shows – General Hospital, Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy – and Sidney Sheldon novels. Had I become my mother?

And the self-loathing – I berated myself for not being able to pull myself up by my bootstraps. Why can’t you get out of your funk, get out of your rut, get your ass in gear? Do something, for Christ’s sake!

And then I began to feel better, but the detached behaviors had taken hold and it was hard to reverse the numbness, the darkness. I struggled to climb out of the pit I’d allowed myself to fall into.

I took up journaling again – and meditating. I went to the gym for a ten-minute workout and came home worn out, but mollified – a little. I noticed the spring blossoms. I updated my bank accounts. I cleaned under my kitchen sink – instigated by a liquid soap spill. I felt a frisson of pleasure – barely noticeable. I had to focus on celebrating and being grateful for these tasks in order to pierce the shadowy bubble that obscured my soul.

So now I am close to being back to health. It almost feels like I had a near death experience – it’s like I was giving up on life, giving up on myself, who I am, what I want, what I dream.

For a while I hadn’t dared to dream. Zot! That is sobering.

We’re not broken, just bent

And we can learn to love again . . .

Indeed!

Needlepointing

I recently finished a needlepoint canvas – a Hopi Indian girl that was gifted to me by my friend, Adrienne. Her mother, a needlepointer, had left her a pile of canvases and threads. Adrienne thought the Hopi girl canvas from her mother’s stash would be a great gift for my granddaughter, Ada, and I agreed.

Then, my friend and I discovered The Needlepointer in Everett. What a fabulous store with such helpful and knowledgeable staff. Adrienne helped me choose the threads for the canvas – and it was her idea to use beads – “It’s such a native Indian thing to do.” The tiny wobbly beads were a challenge, requiring an extra slim needle that rendered the thread practically impossible to poke through its microscopic eye. But with advice from the store staff and persistence, I got the hang of it.

I began to needlepoint in my twenties. I learned it from my mother who always had some kind of handwork project going, whether knitting, crocheting, macraméing or needlepointing. I tried the other crafts, but felt most at home with needlepointing – despite my mother’s quip that it was hülye le föl le föl – idiot down up down up – work. It helped that I was fascinated with the intricate gorgeous medieval tapestries that I ogled in the Cluny Museum in Paris. I still have a dream of stitching a complex project like that some day.

I stopped doing any handwork for thirty years while raising my family and living life. Adrienne pulled me back in with her yen to take up where her mother had left off. I unearthed a canvas of poppies I’d begun to work on thirty years ago and finished stitching it as a gift for my daughter, Stephanie.

On my first outing to The Needlepointer I found a beach canvas and completed it in no time. On my most recent trip to the store for additional thread for the Hopi girl canvas, I fell in love with another beach scene – this one in vibrant oranges, purples, aquas and greens. Gorgeous! I had to have it.

I can spend hours stitching, looking like an alien wearing magnifying goggles over my reading glasses. I love stitching with friends. I’ve also gotten into listening to audio books while I work. I’ve “read” Brideshead Revisited narrated by Jeremy Irons – brilliant – and To Kill a Mockingbird with Sissy Spacek – marvelous. I’ve also listened to countless Michael Connelly crime novels, Maisie Dobbs mystery novels, on and on.

After two or three hours at the needle, I see double. The night I finished the Hopi Girl was nail biting as I barely had enough thread to complete the background. But I couldn’t stop with that canvas – I had to begin my vibrant beach scene. I had to keep at it . . . until bleary eyed, I finally gave it a rest at 2 a.m.

Most every day, I can’t wait to get back to the stitching. Can’t wait!