Coaching Up

Pick a little, talk a little, pick a little, talk a little
Cheep cheep cheep, talk a lot, pick a little more
Pick a little, talk a little, pick a little, talk a little
Cheep cheep cheep, talk a lot, pick a little more

Remember those song lyrics from Music Man? I think about this refrain (I think that’s the right musical word?) whenever I just feel exhausted from all the talk. This is not a complaint about any one group or a particular individual. But have you listened to the news lately? Do you really hear what people are saying to each other in the grocery store? The sidebar conversations at meetings are just as bad. Pick, pick, pick.

It seems everyone has a solution for the world’s problems. Some of those solutions have become frightening. Very few of them appear to have any merit at really solving the root of our problems.

Except one.

Is anyone listening? Can you even hear your own voice? Have you reflected on what certainly could be the only solution? Do you sit in quiet and try to hear that still, small voice? There are a million love songs, but I’m afraid they have become just more talk. Let’s stop talking and start loving more. Let’s do something everyday to make at least one person feel wrapped in sweet love. An act of kindness. A paying it forward. A tender note, maybe anonymously. A bill paid. Dishes washed.

Let’s just stop talking about it.

Loss, in the many ways it comes to us, causes us grief. 

I’ve been thinking a bit about what grief is lately.  Into a life a little rain must fall.  This describes my otherwise blessed life.  The holidays brought new family (in-laws) and pronouncements of a new baby, and time spent really, really being present with those we love.  Unfortunately, it was also the end of a year that my husband and I were blessed to have our youngest daughter live with us.  She didn’t just move out; she moved an ocean away.

The holidays seem to be a time for marathon movie watching.  This year it was the Harry Potter movies.  It was in one of those as I passively watched, I learned what a horcrux was.  I don’t consider myself a dark wizard or witch, but I began to turn this concept of leaving a piece of yourself in another in my mind.  I thought about how our children have a piece of us in them.  Well, of course, they have our DNA, but more than that.  They seem to have in them, us and the generations before us, pieces of ourselves in their character, their talents, and even their “hardwiring” toward the world at large.

When we lose a child, even just to the many miles across continents and oceans, we lose a piece of ourselves – a horcrux, if you will.  No wonder we grieve.

A piece of us is lost.  Why wouldn’t that hurt?  We lose a grip on our hopes and dreams, maybe.  For me, I lost my muse.  I lost the part of me that might have been.  The artist, the risk-taker, and the fixer/tool maven.  All of these are things that I thought I had a capacity for, but for whatever reason were not nurtured.  I’m amazed at her talents.  I try to emulate that risk taking.  Fixing things and figuring things out for myself rather than just letting my husband figure it out for me.  It is empowering.  Now I feel a little out on the edge about to teeter off.  And, I don’t like it.

So, why does this loss hurt so much?  I was reminded by a wise young person (Thanks, David Haigh) of a quote by C. S. Lewis: “It’s the cost of love.”

What isn’t treasured, loved, wanted and needed does not cost us.  It’s nothing to us.  So, this grief…. It’s the toll one pays for love.  And, I’d rather love.  This messy, chaotic, needy feeling that hurts like all of Hell in one pin prick.  So it hurts; at least I feel something.  How empty this life would be without love.  So, a piece of me lives in Bonn.  Pieces of me are in Heaven, but also in the wastelands of broken dreams and relationships, wasted moments and lost opportunities.  All own a piece of me in this amazing universe. Strangely, this moves me forward knowing I may meet myself again and again in others, connecting with those fragments perhaps not as lost as I thought.

In postscript, I learned today that a former colleague has left this earth.  She was way too young and far too impactful to be gone to us.  I grieve for the loss of her as well.  To Megan, and all the others – to Jeannie, to Geri, to Renee – who taught me to be passionate, to live life boldly, but lovingly – to my Aunt Charlotte and my father who taught me to live with high standards and integrity, and my mother who help me understand forgiveness and mercy – to all those who left a piece of themselves in me, I do grieve for the loss of you. 

What I know is that pieces of you are left in all of us, so when I look around I am truly surrounded by you.  The best parts of you remain in all of us. 

And, may that be true now, that I can be as warm and engaging, interesting and smart, and always the learner searching to understand.  RIP Megan McConnell

Along about January, I think I began talking about having a garage sale. If you know me, that doesn’t happen in this household very often. I hate them! But, I was getting desperate to deal with our growing piles of stuff. Newly retired and recuperating from surgery – a little fix-me-up on the shoulder – meant that I was spend way too much time thinking about all the “stuff” we had that we just didn’t need.

I subscribe to a feed on Facebook call the Minimalist. It speaks to my heart and makes me yearn to get this thing about life right. Prior to marriage and children, I was fine with the basics. I really didn’t have that much to pack up any time the Navy decided it was time for a move. However, after marriage brought two households together nearing my 30’s, then the subsequent moves of my mother and his father leaving us with many of their belonging, followed by the Barbie houses, toys, books and other paraphernalia of raising children, our house began to look like a Goodwill Store.

Claustrophobia set in and I knew that we had to thin things out. We’ve had two maybe three other garage sales in the 29 years we have been here. But this one was BIG. I was pretty sure we could entice lots of people with the myriad of interesting things offered even if there were no longer baby clothes and strollers to be had. And, I felt we had a fighting chance with more than just a few signs and an ad in the paper. I had the Internet to help!

I enjoyed cleaning out rooms, closets, drawers, and boxes of forgotten collections. I spent more than three months attacking nearly every corner of the house, the garage, the cellar, and finally even Ben spent a good long time in the barn. Just before Easter, my husband and daughter emptied the storage unit and brought all of it to the garage where there was hardly a path to walk around all the stuff.

Keep in mind that we outfitted two apartments for college-going girls with full kitchens and all the basics without buying hardly a thing.

How do four people accumulate so much? There were some lessons to learn here. Some obvious ones and others that were almost so subtle as to miss them.

1. Save your money. Those ads for Pier One and the cute ideas on Pinterest? They are spending your retirement faster than you can make it because you think you need what they advertise. I’m pretty sure that I’ll never remember a table setting during a holiday event with family. My memories are about conversations, food and activities – not the cute lanterns hanging from the apple tree on a summer afternoon.
2. Once you have found that ONE picture from the event that says it all. Print it and frame it. Do you need 100 pictures of band camp – each day? They take up space and sit either on your digital devices or in boxes where no one sees them or remembers them. Just one.
3. Same goes for clothing. I get it that you found a pair of pants that fit you perfectly so you bought 3 more pairs. Wear them and wear them out, because if you’re the norm, that perfect fit won’t be so perfect if a few years. Moreover, you didn’t need them in every color offered. Trust me.
4. I remember as a kid playing with the pots and wooden spoons in the kitchen at my mom’s feet. My children did, too. In spite of the Made-in-China, bright pink paraphernalia of the world of the little girls, the most fun was the cheapest fun. Save your money.
5. There were two moments during the sale that were emotional. Selling the girl’s Barbie house and giving away a tattered dog igloo. The Barbie house was big. It was in the barn for more than a dozen years and needed a good scrubbing and a repainting. But I remember all the good times watching the girls and their friends act out the drama of their life with Ken and Barbie. The house went to one the first students of mine who now is 36 and has an 8-year-old daughter. I knew the old house would get good use and couldn’t think of a better family to give it too. This young woman represented a part of me – the best of my efforts in the classroom – and in some ways “my kid”, too. It was an emotional moment to see her all grown up and doing so well. But it was cool to know we would be sharing a common experience. (My, I’m getting old and mushy!!)
6. The other moment: sometimes you just have to give things away. It’s a largess that has been shown to me time and time again. It takes so little to be kind. This guy drove up in a beat up small sized pick up. A happy dude, just out enjoying the beautiful day… I had just taken a picture of the igloo with the intent to put it on the Facebook garage sale site for free if someone would just come pick it up…and there he was before I even hit enter. Look, buddy, you need this more than I need your 5 bucks. He told me that I was a blessing to him. Nope. Got that wrong. You blessed me. “Now, you need help getting’ that thing in your truck??”
7. My husband and I had way too many of those moments discussing the value of objects – whether or not to keep or let go, and how much it would take monetarily speaking to let go. Things have come to represent our memories. A kind of place marking, and a way to not forget what we treasure. Things also represent what we believe we have accomplished in the course of our lives. For some, letting go of the “thing” is tantamount to giving permission to forget the memory or dismiss the value of its attribution in our lives. For those of us who desperately wish to be minimalists, it is necessary to remember that that “piece of junk” is someone else’s diamond in the rough. Dismissing what you deem as junk is in effect dismissing the value of your loved one’s life, too. I’ve talked to numerous couples this spring who seemed to be paired in opposites: one a keeper, one a cleaner-outer. Perhaps this should be one of those questions during pre-marital counseling….how will you handle a garage sale situation? For us, we were stretch painfully acknowledging our differences.
8. And back to that ultimate issue: what do we really need? I guess in some ways I don’t regret the things that have accumulated. As I walked the garage sale during the quiet moments, I realized that we are rich in memories because of some of these things. Now they are off to enjoy a second life and many memories for someone else. I don’t need to hang on to the things, but in writing and talking about those memories, we preserve them. I am the keeper of my mother’s diaries. Many journals, books and letters that I haven’t even opened yet. Even after 4 years, I just haven’t been ready to open that door yet. What will my children read after I’m gone? I want them to read about how much fun we had. I’ll keep those diaries and who knows, maybe I’ll actually read them, too, but these words are for my kids. We did have a lot of stuff, but it wasn’t the stuff I loved; it was the memories we made with them. I have room to keep my memories, but not necessarily the three-story dollhouse.

In Indianapolis, they are running their 99th race. Folks are camping out this weekend lighting fires for the hotdogs and s’mores; many are enjoying family gatherings. It’s surely a nice weekend for all this. However, Memorial Day is a reverent day. A time to remember American men and women who have fallen in foreign wars.

Since the Revolutionary War, men and women have died for an ideal, a set of values particular to the masses who clamor to our borders: the pursuit of freedom. Free to pursue a life as we wish, free to worship as we choose. The idea that all human beings are due certain inalienable rights.

There are those who criticize war or certain war efforts. To do so is stomping treacherously over the legacy of those who believed in this freedom. Right or wrong, Americans for more than 200 years have donned uniforms to defend our rights. Right or wrong, we have entered foreign lands to protect the rights of other individuals against tyranny, fascism, and unimaginable human rights violations. To call these efforts wrong is tantamount to saying that freedom isn’t worth it, or that human life isn’t worth fighting for.

Tell that to John Hancock, to Benjamin Franklin, to Paul Revere, to Patrick Henry. Tell that to the mother whose son will never see homeland soil again because an IED exploded under his Hummer. Are you prepared to tell them that their deaths are in vain?

Admittedly, these issues of patriotism, love of country, and love of God our Creator run deep within me. So it is an offense to me when I hear that we were puppets in Vietnam or we shouldn’t have gone to Iraq because we had “bad intel”. Each man and woman goes because we believe in fighting for something dear to us. There will always be bad politics and stupid politicians – regrettably putting our young in harm’s way. But this is not an enscripted armed forces – we put that uniform on willingly. If we die, let it NOT be said that it was for nothing.

Irene Dunne popularized a quote you are likely familiar with: If you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything.

Enjoy the race. Eat up that potato salad. Hug your momma. But remember that you do these things as members of a free country – for better or worse – and do so because men and women died so you could.

Happy Memorial Day!