7ToF: my heart hurts

1. Andrea's memorial service was today (Thursday). It was a lovely mix of memorable and heartwarming and absurd. And sad. But also joyful. At the reception, there was lots of sharing of memories and wishing that the pre-cancer, wickedly funny Andrea--who loved a party and threw some of the best parties I've ever been to-- could have been there. And maybe she was. The whole thing made me ache. But you know, one of the things that has been brought home to me this week is that life goes on, even when it's not fair and you really wish it would just stop for a few minutes, or at least slow down.

2. Here is the Piano Guys video that they played at the end of the service.




3. I'm a little embarrassed to admit that when I wrote that last post about Andrea, I had forgotten that her mom sometimes reads here. Muriel, who is one of the wittiest, most interesting people I know, lived here several times for weeks and even months to help out while Andrea was going through treatment. We had some great conversations about books and life. She even took a couple of my Jane Austen classes. So special love and hugs to Muriel, Andrea's siblings, her husband and kids, and all of Andrea's family who are so especially feeling her loss right now.

*deep breath*

4. So, really, I got nothin'. But I've already done the thing where I end the Seven Things on Friday before I get to seven, so I'm determined to come up with something here. Hmm. OK, I will pass on a couple of links I enjoyed this week. First: Don't turn away from the art of life - a literature professor ruminates on the humanities.

5. Even if you're not a Broncos fan, it's fun to read this interview, with Super Bowl MVP Von Miller talking to three of his lifelong friends, all of whom have ended up playing in the NFL. We had a bit of an extra attachment to the Broncos this year because their backup quarterback, who kept them in the running while Manning was sidelined with injuries, is from our town and was a year behind our daughter in school (we don't know him personally, but you know, hometown kid).

6. I told you a long time ago that my favorite phone game is Seven Little Words. I'm still playing a year later. It's a great game for word geeks. Sometimes I know the answer because it's something I know (French writer Hugo = Victor, German diacritic = umlaut), sometimes I figure it out because word geeks know how words are put together, sometimes it's purely a matter of mixing the syllables around until I come up with the right combination. Sometimes the clues are amusing (one after another = eleven, a place to find gunpowder = tearoom, manual essential = gearshift, emphatic type = italic). Occasionally the clues make no sense. But I do love it. This is the longest I've ever played a game in my life.

7. This week's Montana Short Story trivia: the iconic western movie The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, starring Jimmy Stewart and John Wayne, is based on a short story but Dorothy M. Johnson, who lived much of her life in Whitefish, Montana. It's a good story if you can find it online, and the movie is pretty fun, too. Check it out sometime--lots of classic John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart moments.

And that's it. Have a good weekend.

tiny brief update

I'm trying to get back into the habit of posting on Tuesdays and Fridays, but it's not going very well, is it? Not helped any by the fact that the class I'm teaching is on Tuesdays, and I need to prepare for it. So for the next bit, I will probably only be posting on Fridays.

Andrea passed away Sunday morning. If you pray, please say a prayer for her family as they adjust to life without her.

7ToF: End of Winter drag

1. I spent last weekend in Texas for my amazing mom's 80th birthday. The weather wasn't all that great--by some odd meteorological coincidence, it was only about ten degrees warmer there than it was here--but it was nice to get out of town for a few days. Had a great time with my sisters and got to visit with some of my mom's friends that I've known for years. Make that decades.

2. We're to the part of winter that gets to me every year. I don't really mind snow--especially not when it's coming down-- and I don't really mind cold --unless it gets below zero, which is not often-- so early winter doesn't bug me much. But by now, the snow is dirty and the roads are a mess and I am a pale, pasty, mushroomy sort of white so I look like something that crawled out from under a rock. A few days in Texas were not enough to fix that, dangit. My car looks like one of those Jeep commercials where they've been 4-wheelin' it through hubcap-deep mud, but all I've done is drive around on paved roads. Well, slush covered paved roads. Come, spring.

3. FAFSA. If you know what that is, I know you feel my pain. If you don't know, you don't want to know. (It's the enormous, bloody complicated financial inventory you have to fill out for your child to qualify for financial aid of any type.)

4. I've seen several recipes for cauliflower couscous around, but having been bitterly disappointed by the whole hoax that was Cauliflower Mashed Potatoes, hadn't tried any of them. But I finally got around to testing it out this week, and can report favorably. They don't taste remotely like couscous, but it is a great way to fix cauliflower, especially if--like me-- you're not a huge cauliflower fan. One more veggie recipe I can eat happily. It's simple--toss raw cauliflower florets into a food processor, then saute in a little olive oil for 6-8 minutes--but if you want detailed instructions, just google cauliflower coucous and there are approximately four hundred and ninety-eight food bloggers out there who can describe it better than me.

5. (I KNOW it's supposed to be "better than I" but that always just sounds wrong to me, even though it's correct.)

6. The Montana short stories class I'm teaching this semester started this week. So I have been madly reading short stories. D'Arcy McNickle and Grace Stone Coates get a definite thumbs up if you run across their work. Will pass along more names later as we work our way through the twentieth century.

7. Nothing like spending time with Andrea to realize that while I've been angst-ing about midlife transitions, some would be thrilled to go through this stuff. Message received. Thanks for your kind thoughts, all. And in case you missed my reply in the comments, I don't by any means want to make it sound like I'm one of Andrea's main caretakers-- she has many friends, some of whom have spent considerably more time with her than I have. She is much beloved and will be missed.

a placeholder for Andrea

Insert here a beautifully written, elegiac post for my dear friend Andrea, who has battled brain cancer for four+ years. No one ever knows for sure, but she seems to be entering the home stretch. All of us who love her are torn between wanting her to stay and being ready for her sake for her long, torturous battle to be over. I tried to write a post that would do justice to her wicked sense of humor, her insanely detailed-oriented competence at every thing she did, her aliveness. But there are no words. Everything I tried came out maudlin, which she would hate.

She can't really speak anymore but she's still Andrea, she's still in there, inside her battered body. But I don't think she will be much longer. I sat with her for a couple of hours this afternoon. When I arrived I thought I was doing it for her, but it turned out the gift was for me. She is radiating herself. Sorry I can't explain it any better than that.

Pass gently, my dear friend.

7ToF: my kid likes pride and prejudice

1. My eighteen-year-old would rather ski or hunt or play golf or stick needles under his fingernails than read these days, although he enjoyed reading when he was younger. But Jane Austen has won him over. He's reading P&P for AP English and he sheepishly confessed at dinner last night that he kind of likes it. Mic drop.

2. Politics. LA LA LA LA LA *fingers in my ears*

3. So everybody knows that mom jeans are totally lame (even though we all wore them back in the 80s before we had kids, so they weren't mom jeans then). Nobody wears them anymore. They're embarrassing. Except you know what? I bought a pair by accident about a month ago (bought them online, didn't read the description very carefully) and omg I had forgotten what comfortable jeans feel like. They are awesome. I've never worn low-rise jeans, because hello two pregnancies and menopause, but I had made the switch to mid-rise. Not anymore. I have returned to my roots. 

4. I re-read A River Runs Through It this week as background for my Montana Short Stories class. It's too long to read as one of our stories, but it's the gold standard for Montana literature, so I thought it would be good to have it fresh in my mind. It was both better and worse than I remembered from the last time I read it a dozen years ago. I remembered it as more of a fable or a morality tale than anything else, with not much to say beyond setting up the metaphor of fishing and life. But it is more than that: the love of a wayward brother you cannot save, the mix of honorable and dishonorable traits in the same young man, the play of  the narrator's life, lived within the lines, against his borther's wreckless life, inevitably gone too soon. And of course there are some breathtakingly lovely descriptions of rivers and fishing. But it has the annoying problem (shared by Guthrie's The Big Sky, Montana's other literary claim to fame) of a view of women that is so dated as to be almost unreadable. The old dichotomy between the angel in the home and the whore at the bar is blatant. Still, definitely worth reading.

5. Over the winter, our seven chickens were averaging two eggs a day, which is about perfect for the amount of eggs we eat. Then several days this past week there were five eggs. Maybe because the days are longer? (although not much longer, sunset was at 5:40 today.) Who knows. They're tough little things. There's still quite a bit of snow on the ground and they get out and scratch around in it every day.

6. We watched way too much Big Bang Theory a few years ago and got heartily sick of it. We didn't watch it for about a year and a half. But we've been catching up on the episodes we missed over the past few weeks, and they really do have an amazing team of writers. They've done some pretty creative stuff to keep it interesting. If they would just ditch the laugh track it might be my favorite sitcom ever. We've also been watching lots of movies (see previous statement about sunset at 5:40). Most of them were just a way to pass an evening, but if you haven't seen Once, it's really good. Kind of slowly paced, character-driven, with lots of music. 

7. Weight Watchers update: still doing it. Still slowly losing weight. I may not adore it like some do but it's working, so I'm not complaining.

Have a great weekend.

mid-life transitions: the cog feeling

I've talked to two women in the past few days about being in our mid-fifties. Each of us is in a unique situation, but I'm not sure anyone is getting through this lightly. There are physical changes and life transitions and readjustments of expectations.

Since we're all unique, I suspect we feel alone, like we're each the only one going through this. But some things seem consistent. I keep hearing the same things: I thought I would feel different/better/more accomplished. More adult. I thought I would have done something significant by now. I thought I would feel more useful. I thought all this effort, all the gazillions hours of my self that I've poured into my kids, my job, my volunteer work, my music/writing/dance, whatever, would feel more worth it.

Instead, at least for me, I find myself feeling more and more like a cog in an enormous machine. Like everything I've done has mainly served to just move things along, keep the wheels turning. When I was studying theory in grad school, I read Althusser, who proposed that there is no such thing as individual identity. Instead, he thought we all occupy predefined roles (subject positions) in the massive machine that is our culture (the hegemony). When I first read that, I thought it was absurd, but now I wonder if he developed that theory in his mid-fifties, because that's how this feels some days.

(aside: it's entirely possible that was Gramsci and not Althusser. My brain is dying, and I don't care enough to go back and figure it out.)

I've been thinking about this a lot the last few days. This isn't depression-- as you know, I've been through that, and this feels different. Depression is like an endless well of blackness inside me. This doesn't have that black hole feeling, it's just ended up with me re-evaluating the things I do and jettisoning quite a few. I'm reconsidering what's really important to me at this stage of life, and aligning my activities to match.

Maybe the cog feeling only happens to those of us who were dreamers, who fantasized that we would really help change the world, that we would be part of something big. I believed that wholeheartedly when I was younger. But I've told you before, I'm convinced now that the only way we change the world is in the small things, the little ways that we connect with the people around us, the way we carry ourselves in the world.

So the only thing I've come up with so far to work on this is to adopt a defiantly positive attitude-- yeah, well, my life may be a boring and insignificant cog in a machine, but it's my cog, damn it, and I'm going to do the best I can with it.

As with all of these posts, I know this doesn't apply to everybody. There are plenty of people who hit their fifties at full stride and never look back (I see them on Facebook and I sigh with a tiny bit of friendly envy). But I suspect there are more of us uncertain ones out there than are admitting to it.

(This has been sitting in my draft folder for a couple of weeks now. I've re-written it at least three times. Maybe part of the re-evaluation thing is wondering if there's any point in posting stuff like this. But it's late, and I've missed posting on Tuesday for the past several weeks, so here you go.)