Hunting for Decisions

A good friend used to tell me: “You think too much.”
Meaning, I believe, that I think too much. I tend to mull over my choices like a Ruddy Turnstone flipping rocks on a beach, searching for the one with The Answer under it. Those birds flip stones to find food; I flip thoughts looking for the the right way to decide something. I know there are many ways to do that; a choice is merely a choice, but it can also set the course for the rest of your life.
Or not.
Unfortunately, many years ago, my friend who claimed I thought too much did not think enough when working as a groom at the Meadowlands Race Track and ducked under the stall guard of a horse she knew was a kicker. They found her dead in the aisle. She never knew what hit her, much less had time to think about it.
I think of her when climbing around my maze of life choices. I think about the process of making decisions, and how many we make in a day. I think about how we go about it and how we develop our own style of decision making.
How do you make decisions? Are you the kind who smiles at a corner of the room and blats out your choice without even knowing what came out of your mouth? Do you scurry around interviewing every human being on the planet before making up your mind? Or are you one of those who make the rest of us nuts by never really deciding anything at all, and stalls for time with excuse after excuse until the need to decide either disappears or is snatched away?
We make decisions for ourselves every day: What to eat for lunch, which route to drive to work or school to avoid the worst traffic, which pair of shoes goes with the new green outfit. We make decisions for others; will I let that guy cut in line in front of me, or how much do I discipline a child for disobeying. We decide hundreds of things every hour without even realizing it.
But then, there is the Big Stuff. Should I buy or lease a car and which deal is the best? Will marrying make my life better or worse (or both?) Do I want children (or cats?) How will they change my relationship with my partner?
When decisions are bigger than I am, I resort to subterfuge. If the struggle becomes too painful, I pretend I am not going to do something while all the while working toward it. I sneak around my anxieties and the paralyzing “whatifs” to get to where I need to be. Denial has its place in my life when used in small doses.
I am in the tailwinds of a decision that ultimately money and circumstance will determine, and realize the big decisions are probably made a little at a time. Small choices are shaved off until you see the shape of what the decision needs to be, like the Native American carvers “discovered” what they were creating by participating in the act itself.
So. There you are. I think I will think some more about it.

Skywatch Friday What Do You See?

As children, we would sprawl in the grass on a summer day and watch the shape shifters over head. What do you see?
TGISF!

"I Love My MAC..." But Not Quite Yet

How I long to quote that Apple mantra. But I’m not feeling the love just yet.
I wonder if purchasing a MAC has been a good choice. There have been multiple set-up issues; so many in fact, that I have almost longed for the familiarity of Microsoft, which is a little like wanting to listen to Fran Drescher when you were expecting Anthony Pavarotti.
Unfortunately, email set-up issues halted my progress within minutes of pulling it out of the box, so I called tech support, which was unable to help and suggested an escalation. I said no, that I would return it to the Apple store at Paramus NJ, and have them resolve the issue and transfer the data from my Windows laptop to the MAC. I wanted to move forward and continue with the work I had purchased the MAC to do.
The data transfer will take three days, they said. Okay, as long as I have it back by the weekend, which is when I spend a lot of time working on personal projects.
They called me to pick it up Thursday. When I arrived, a young man carried the MAC out and set it up. “All you have to do is put in your password for your email,” he smiled, and turned the machine on.
I typed in my password. Not accepted.
We tried again. No go. The Apple tech deleted the account and set it up again. Still nothing. He turned to a colleague. Nope. More screens, more tries.
They pulled the store manager in. It would not accept even his authority and superior knowledge. After a storefront huddle, they decided to replace the machine, which meant I would have to leave the laptop for another data transfer. Not much of a choice here, so I agreed.
Returned to pick it up the next day. A different Apple tech carried the equipment out. “All done,” he crowed. “Take it home and enjoy!”
I hesitated, then asked: “Could we set it up here to be sure it works?”
He rolled his eyes a little, but yanked the cord from the box, jammed it in to the plug on the wall, turned the machine on and went to the email screen.
“Go ahead and type in your password.”
It didn’t work.
He stood up straighter, eyes riveted to the screen. He repeated the tricks of the day before, and then in frustration, called on another tech. After another 45 minutes, she finally figured it out. I brought it home, but my problems were far from over.
Since then, I have been blocked from saving downloaded files (“You do not have appropriate access privileges”). More tech support calls, disk repairs, password resets. I been not even been able to save new documents written in Pages, which is Apple’s version of Word. I just received frustrating messages: “Cannot create file.”
Last Sunday, during a beautiful afternoon when I should have been at the hawk watch, I called tech support AGAIN. Forty-five minutes later, the tech confessed that he could not solve the problem, and escalated it to the next level. I started over with yet another technician. Forty minutes after that, and deep in the bowels of the machine’s software, the line went dead.
Do tech support lines have time limits? Is that why the techs ask you right away for your phone number, “in case we get cut off?” In this case, the first technician I had spoken to had my number, NOT the one I was talking to when the line went dead.
Incensed, I did not dare call back right away, but went outside and mowed the lawn in half the time it usually takes. Then tried again.
“Look,” I said to the women who answered my call. “I don’t want to start over with you only to go through the same routine. Will you please give me directly to a supervisor?”
“Sure,” she said, and transferred me to Joe from Texas.
Joe was very apologetic. Let me say here that every technician I spoke to was unfailingly courteous. I heard over and over how sorry they were that I was having so many problems, and they all guaranteed they would help and resolve the issues.
Joe and I went at it. After several tries, I finally had to take a break but Joe gave me his contact number and times to call back so I would not have to start over with another tech.
I called back the next evening after work and left him a message. To his credit, he called back after I knew his shift was over, and stayed on the phone with me to resolve the issue of not being able to create a file in Pages. After several “Get Its,” permissions, mirror images and file transfers later, I could finally drag a document from the desktop to its appropriate folder. What a relief. It only took eight Apple technicians, two MAC machines and about 20 hours of my own time to get to a place where I can finally learn how to use the darn thing. That does not count the call made because ITunes would not transfer all the songs from the MAC to my Ipod, or the call to my internet provider to get the machine included on my wireless network. These are separate issues; however, they added to my ocean of frustration.
Will keep you updated. I am still hearing Fran Drescher’s voice.

They're My Cats, Not My Children

My husband and I are "childless," or "child free", depending upon how you look at it. I never decided not to have children; I just reached an age when I was not sure I was up to the challenge of raising one.

Well, people say; you have cats instead. Which is true. We have six of them, all rescues. And while I appreciate the clumsy attempts at comforting me for the twinge of missed experience, I find the reference to cats and children disconcerting. I know the difference between a cat and a kid.

Nevertheless, the need to nurture runs strong, and husbands can only get you so far. There is something to be said for a purring cat on your lap on a cold winter’s night.

Let me introduce you to our little family:

Simba

The oldest, Simba (“Bean”): Weighed 4 ounces when I found him on the streets of an urban sidewalk over 14 years ago. He was a nasty little cat until we stopped unconsciously feeding into his aggressive behavior by playing too much with him. Since changing how we responded to his biting and scratching, he has become a sweet and social little cat. He still has a temper; however, so we give him a wide berth if he has his “mad face” on.

Sparkle

Sparkle (“Miss Malarkle”) is everyone’s favorite. She is bright, articulate in her trills and purrs, wraps her front legs around your neck when you pick her up and snuggles under your chin. She is Top Cat among the pride, and can often bring order to a brewing cat argument by pinning them with a stare.

Willow, Scooter and MaceyGray

Willow (“The Pillow”): Was adopted as an adult cat from the local animal shelter after our beloved older cat, Ashley, died of old age. Not the brightest bulb in the box but she makes up for it with her affectionate personality.

Scooter ( “ScooterPie”) is named after what he does best. He scoots under the bed whenever visitors arrive, when there are strange noises in or around the house, if we get up too quickly or for no reason at all. Scooter was one of the “unlikely to be adopted adult feral cats” when I volunteered at the animal shelter a few years ago. Every week, he would follow me around while I cleaned the cattery, where over 35 cats roamed through two adjoining rooms. Whenever I stopped to take a break, he would appear and sit on my foot. One day, after disinfecting and hosing down the floor (which was when all the cats disappeared into the adjacent room) I thought, “If that cat comes in now with the floor all wet, I am going to bring him home.” Two minutes later, he walked across the dripping floor and sat down next to me. I brought him home.

Macy Gray: Lived in her owner’s yard and was cared for only when the guy remembered to feed her. Thin and frightened, a neighbor swooped in to the rescue and brought her to the vet. We already had 4 cats at the time, and I had promised my husband “no more cats” but when I turned down the vet’s offer to adopt her, my husband said, "What? You’re not going to give her a chance?"

I went back and got her.

Little Bear

Little Bear (“Booboo”): After mourning the untimely death of a beloved long-haired black cat named Bear whose health had been compromised from birth, Ken happened to look into the cage of an adoptive kitten that a shelter group had brought to a cat show five years later. A long-haired black kitten played with an orange stick but at seeing Ken, bounced over and looked into his eyes.

Ken glanced up at the name of the cage. The kitten’s name was Bear.

What else could we do? We had been asking for Bear to come back into our lives, and here he was. Bear came back, and now sleeps on our bed once again.

Maybe when all is said and done, there are some similarities between cats and children. We love them both, unconditionally and completely. I wouldn't give them up for all the world's riches.

Skywatch Friday (better late than never)

Sileage rainbow!

Thirty Six Good People

A favorite excerpt from a must-read book, "My Grandfather's Blessings," by Rachel Naomi Remen, MD:

The story (my grandfather) told me is very old and dates from the time of the prophet Isaiah. It is the legend of the Lamed-Vow. In this story, God tells us that He will allow the world to continue as long as at any given time there is a minimum of thirty-six good people in the human race. People who are capable of responding to the suffering that is a part of the human condition. These thirty-six are called the Lamed-Vow. If at any time, there are fewer than thirty-six such people alive, the world will come to an end.
"Do you know who these people are, Grandpa? I asked, certain that he would say "Yes," But he shook his head. "No, Neshume-le," he told me. "Only God knows who the Lamed-Vovniks are. Even the Lamed-Vovniks themselves do not know for sure the role they have in the continuation of the world, and no one else knows it either. They respond to suffering, not in order to save the world but simply because the suffering of others touches them and matters to them."
It turned out that Lamed-Vovniks could be tailors or college professors, millionaires or paupers, powerful leaders or powerless victims. These things were not important. What mattered was only their capacity to feel the collective suffering of the human race and to respond to the suffering around them. "And because no one knows who they are, Neshume-le, anyone you meet might be one of the thirty-six for whom God preserves the world," my grandfather said. "It is important to treat everyone as if this might be so.'"

Kind of makes me think twice at flipping the bird at the next guy who accidentally cuts me off on the highway....

Riverkeeper

This is Bill Sheehan, Riverkeeper.

Yesterday, my friend of Behind the Bins and I attended the 2008 Meadowlands Festival of Birding, and were shepherded by the Hackensack Riverkeeper, Bill Sheehan, in one of the pontoon boats used for touring and education of this once maligned river. It was about birds but was also about the big picture of habitat, politics, people, our past, our future, and about keeping a river and all life sacred.

Bill is the environmental steward for the Hackensack River, formerly one of New Jersey's industrial waste toilet bowls. Through his untiring efforts, and those of his staff, volunteers and supporters, chunks of river habitat, the NJ Meadowlands, has been pulled out of the hands of developers and placed back where it belongs. The Riverkeeper is returning the Hackensack River to itself.

What that means is that Egrets and Great Blue Herons fish along its banks, Ospreys dive from the blue skies for carp, diamondback terrapins doze in the sediment.

Riverkeeper means you don't sleep much. Riverkeeper means you tell the story of your river over and over, no matter how tired you get of saying the same words, because every human ear must hear and understand that our rivers need all of us to keep them whole. Riverkeeper means that we all steward of the earth and have rivers running through us, connecting us to the past, present and future.

Skywatch Friday

Southwest Florida, August 2008: This is the outside curl what was then Hurricane Hanna but was downgraded to a trickle by the time I met it in my back yard in Jersey days later. The beauty can be deceptive; there was thunder and lightening in them there clouds....

My Daily Miracle

(Photo by hrutherford; photobucket)

I didn’t feel much like walking yesterday but pulled my shorts on anyway without letting myself think too much about it, then was gone for over three hours. The great thing about these mornings is the aimless wandering involved. There is no time limit; I am never too far from home at any point, and keeping most of my weekends open frees me from the tyranny of social obligation. I was free to stand as long as I wanted to at the root-ridden bank of the little pond just inside Skylands’ “back door.” The bellow of a bullfrog had attracted me to the spot.

You just never know what is going to happen on these little sojourns. The earth turned, the sunlight slipped behind a shrub and illuminated the dark water. I gazed at the flat surface and felt a breeze caress my face when suddenly, a small black head popped to the surface in the middle of the pond. It seemed to be looking at me. I stood still. The head remained motionless for a minute, and then, to my astonishment, it started moving toward me. Every few inches, it would stop and submerge, leaving a series of concentric circles rippling in its wake. The head popped up again a few seconds later, looked at me again and resumed its swim toward me once more.

This was unbelievable. I make a point of being quiet in the woods. I slip silently past herons dozing on rocks, not wanting them to waste energy flying away. Squirrels, deer, chipmunks all scamper away at a human presence, but whatever was attached to this little head was doing the opposite.

In a few moments, I could see it for what I had already guessed it to be; a painted turtle, an animal indigenous to New Jersey and increasingly rare. It stopped swimming and looked up at me, dangling its legs in the cool water before slipping under again. As it glided to the left, I noticed half a dozen other little black heads popping up, only to submerge, creating a kaleidoscope of circles rippling out over the surface of the pond. If someone had been feeding them, they would have climbed out of the water, or collected at the bank, but they just circled nearby, then slowly disappeared. Were they as curious about me as I was about them? Did we meet somehow, in some amazing and unexpected way, on some blank page of innocence?

I remained motionless. The frogs, which had gone silent at my approach, started to call again, a chorus of croaks and bellows and trills that I could not only hear, but feel in my core. I felt I was one of them, the wet, spinning circles of the turtles, the vibrating grunts of frog song. It was a gift freely given and freely received, no questions asked. It was my daily miracle.

The Cone of Uncertainty

(Photo: Dad plotting hurricanes)

While in Florida recently, I watched the predictions and preparations for Hurricanes Gustav and Hanna. There is a pull of memories everywhere as people recalled Hurricane Charley of 2004 that zigzagged past its landing zone in Tampa and pounced instead on the unsuspecting heads of Port Charlotte's residents, turning the community into a wasteland of smashed homes and broken lives.

The newspapers use a term I have never heard before: The "cone of uncertainty,” referring to the best guess at where the effects of a hurricane will be felt, sort of a professional hedging on the radar bets to cover the potential embarrassment at giving a hurricane the wrong address. As soon as I read that phrase, I knew I was on to something.

Why a cone and not a square or a trapezoid? Are hurricanes really round, like the spinning galaxies with their fiery cores shown on the weather news? Or are they more like amoebas, who have nothing, much less a cone, to contain their fury?

Don’t we all live in a cone of uncertainty? Living in the cone can offer you hell or hope, as you cannot know what to expect beyond the present moment in which we always find ourselves. The cone of uncertainty is blind to social status and deaf to language. Like a raging hurricane, it is the great leveler of our lives.

On the other hand, there is something crazy hopeful about the cone of uncertainty. If anything bad can happen, it follows that anything good can happen too, even if it is unplotted on your personal map. You win the lottery, someone who is sick gets well, a promising new career appears.

The cone shifts with the winds of time and politics and beliefs. It does not remain the same, but searches for the next light to join as it marches up the future to change the landscape of our lives. The cone of uncertainty is our own potential, our own personal hurricanes.

The Intimacy of Strangers

Mom is home from the hospital. My sister, Barbara, flew down to stay awhile. Barbara got off the plane; I got on the same one to fly home.

The mortality bullet was dodged. This time. I am aware.

It was an uneventful flight back to NJ. With only an hour to go, the cabin grew too chilly, then too warm. It was like being baked in an oven.

“This is why I don’t live in Florida,” I joked to the two women sitting next to me.

They smiled. The passenger in the aisle seat was a polished, attractive woman with shoulder-length silver hair pulled back with a clip of pearls. She wore an expensive red and gray blouse that accented her creamy skin.

“It’s good for getting away though,” she said, and then added, “I was there for two weeks after my parents died within 30 days of each other.”

“Oh! I’m so sorry….”

The woman in the middle seat looked thoughtful but said nothing.

I thought of my own parents, whose home I had just left after a week of being present through a sudden and severe illness that had hospitalized my 84 year-old mother. She is okay now; but we all wonder, for how long?

The gray-haired woman told her story, then added:

“You do what you think is right at the time. But I don’t think I would make some of those same choices now.”

The woman in the middle seat nodded. Her faded blond hair was pulled into a bun. Like the gray-haired woman, she also wore a pearl, a single stone of palest pink held in place by a gold chain around her neck. She looked up at the ceiling of the plane and said:

“My father is dying. I am on my way to Dublin, Ireland, where he lives with my mother. The hospice is trying to keep him alive until I get there.”

“My mother is upset that they took him from the house, but he was climbing over the bed rails and falling. She couldn’t handle him anymore, so the hospice staff insisted he be admitted to their facility to protect her. But she had promised my dad that she would not let that happen.”

Her face crumpled. She did not cry.

“Your father would not have wanted that for her,” I offered.

“No. Absolutely not.”

She sat back and closed her eyes.

“I am a three-time cancer survivor myself.”

The gray-haired woman on the aisle and I glanced at each other, then leaned forward, instantly forming the intuitive bond of support women can be so good at.

She continued.

“When I was sick, my father sat by my bed and told me he wished he could take the cancer away from me; that he would be sick if he could, instead of me. Now he is dying of esophageal cancer. It makes me wonder.”

It makes me wonder. I kept looking for the guy behind the camera that prepared this organized scene. It was so tidy. Three women, strangers to one another, sitting in a row: Gone through it, going through it, and looking at going through it.

“How did you, uh, get yourself through all of this?” I asked them.

The gray-haired woman responded immediately:

“You know that picture of the single set of footprints in the sand? I knew I was being held up by something beyond myself, and that same something is part of the place where my mother and father are now. I still know I am being carried.”

I nodded. I had just installed that very picture as the wallpaper of my new cell phone 12 hours before.

“I believe that too,” the woman in the middle seat agreed. “With my whole heart, now more than ever.”

I sat back against the narrow seat of the plane. During the last half hour of an anonymous flight that I have taken dozens of times, three strangers were talking about illness and death and faith. There was no messing around, no nervous jokes, no apologies for discussing topics that are usually taboo among people unless they have known each other for a long time. We were each on the same scale of the intimacies of the heart.

I will hold them in the Light.

For Audrey: May your father rest in peace.