Shelter

There's this bit in the middle of the book of Matthew that most people have heard before; it goes sort of like this:  Jesus is describing what God is going to say when he welcomes people into Heaven.  God says:  "For I was hungry and you gave me food; I was thirsty and you gave me drink . . . " and the people God is talking to scratch their heads and say, "when the heck did I do that?", and God says, "when you did it to the least of my peoples."

Most of the times I hear that passage, I think one of two things:  Possibly I think, "Oh, yeah; we're supposed to get out there and take care of other people".  It's a weird kind of an almighty God that I believe in, one who can't/doesn't/won't (I'm not sure which) just snap fingers and make everything perfect.  Instead, for some mysterious reason, He delegates His work to a bunch of very messed up and imperfect human beings, and for some reason I'm supposed to be part of that ad hoc Food-and-Water Task Force.

Another thing I often think when I hear that passage is that God comes at me through some of the most down-trodden people I meet.  Put aside all those saintly glowing images of Jesus in clean flowing robes with haloes of light around him; if He were in central Pennsylvania instead of in Galilee, He'd probably hang with other construction workers outside the 7-11 in his stained t-shirt and work jeans.  And that's Jesus; the Father peers out at me through the eyes those who are, for whatever reason, currently unable to help themselves.  I think of that when I'm around people who are annoyingly incompetent: I think, "God's watching me now".

But lately, when I think about this passage, I think of how God realizes that most of our volunteer work seems senseless or pointless once we're actually doing it.  Long, long ago I used to volunteer with our local Hospice; my job was to sit with patients so that their families could take a break.  Most of the time, my patients would be asleep the whole time I was there.  Sometimes, there would be a visiting nurse who would shoo me into another room for an hour so she could work with the patient, and I'd sit in some living room or nursing home lobby, grading my calculus papers.  I was completely superfluous, not a happy feeling for a hyper-efficient-wanna-be like me.  So I completely identify with those guys asking, "when the heck did I help you, Lord?"

At any rate, when our local emergency women's homeless shelter sent around an email begging for volunteers so they could keep their doors open this week -- this week that happens to be the last remaining week of break so I'm not tied down by teaching/committees/meetings -- I figured it was time for me to go.   I am one of the worst people I know at staying up late: I pop out of bed at 5:50 a.m. each morning and hit the ground running (sometimes literally), but by 9:00 p.m. at night, there's this giant cotton cloud wrapping itself around the neurons in my skull, and by 10:00 p.m. I'm an evil zombie.  So I'm not a great overnight helper.  Still, they asked for me, so I said yes.

I've done overnights with this Homeless Shelter before.   Several years ago, N-son came to "help", too, and he loved it so much that he begged to be allowed to stay at the homeless shelter again.  (Some kind of mom I am, huh?)  So I know a bit of the drill.  We check women in at 7:30; lights out at 9:30.  Before my first time volunteering here, I would have imagined lots of noise and drama, but the truth is that most people just want to get to sleep.  It's cold outside; it's warm in here.

The women are a mix of everything you might expect.  Donna is a sweet but also a bats-in-her-belfry kind of woman, who asks me about all the noises in her sensory deprivation chamber.  A mother-daughter team explain to me why they're going back and forth from the shelter to the laundromat: "We're homeless, but honey, we don't want to look like we're homeless!"  There's the very very smelly woman.  There's a woman pregnant with twins, and she walks around looking a bit scared.  There's a woman here for the first time ever, who had to leave a bad situation, who is looking for reassurance that somehow this is okay:  "you know, I thought this was going to be awful, but it's actually pretty nice.  I've got a job interview tomorrow, so hopefully this will just give me a time to get back on my feet."

At 9:00 p.m. we close the doors.  At 9:30, lights out.  Shayna, the woman in charge of the shelter looks at me, and I guess she sees the neuron-cloud-zombie phase overtaking me, so she says, "Why don't you get some sleep?  I can take it from here."   I am, as I feared, completely superfluous again.  I pull out my mat, roll up in my comforter, and go down for the count.

But at 5:00 a.m the next morning, I pop awake.  There are loud sounds of snoring all around me.  I get up and start the coffee.  I put out donuts.  At 5:30 we start waking the women; they all have to leave the building by 6:45.  As they wake up, I stand behind food counter.  My job is to hand out sugar, but not too much sugar because apparently that can be a problem.  Yeah.

One woman needs help finding her Lithium and other meds.  Another one needs an outlet to charge her cell phone.  Two women ask for socks, which I find in a drawer next to mittens.  Another woman really really needs a tampon and some pads.  The woman with the job interview, she just wants to talk to someone who believes she's still okay.  And then one woman holds up her empty cup to me.

"You want coffee?" I ask her, pointing to the pots on the counter.  
"No, tea." She motions to the water cooler/heater behind me.  "Could you give me a cup of hot water?"

And that's it; the one moment I'd been waiting for all night.  Because to her, this was maybe just a cup of hot water; but for me, a tad wonky from lack of sleep and inclined toward the mystical, this was a Holy moment.

I know that spending one night at the shelter doesn't make me a hero; it didn't transform lives or stop homelessness or heal the lame.  Last night, I slept again in my own bed.  This morning, I popped awake to see the snow coming down outside my windows.  It's probably snowing on Donna in her noisy sensory deprivation chamber right now.   The night I spent at the shelter might not actually make any difference at all, but I'm glad I did it anyway.

******

Now that we're entering the coldest months of the year, emergency homeless shelters around the country are looking for help:  donations of toiletries and sanitary items, but also people willing to hang out and help, even for just one night.  See http://www.homelessshelterdirectory.org/ 

Bicycle Menopause

This is how cold it's been outside lately: I walked to our nearby blood bank to give blood, and I was almost deferred because my temperature was only 93 degrees.

To me, my temperature reading says something curious both about oral thermometers and also about how few people normally walk to the blood bank.  I waited two or three minutes, and my temperature (as registered by the thermometer I carefully cradled in the back of my cheeks and tongue) rose to 96 degrees, so I got to give blood.  But it goes to say, even though there's no ice on the roads or frost in the skies, the weather is brisk enough that breathing through my mouth during a 20-minute outdoor walk can frighten phlebotomists.

If it's so cold outside that the mere act of walking can frighten phlebotomists, what does this mean about riding bikes?  (Because now that I've written that phrase, I've fallen in love with it.  Frightened Phlebotomists.  Frightened Phlebotomists.  Say it Phive times Phast!  The phlebotomists are frightened.  Hah.)

Biking, it turns out, is another adventure entirely.  Because, okay, yes, it's cold.  When I started doing serious biking last winter, I pretty much expected that.

But also, biking is HOT!  As in, embarrassingly, Take-Off-All-My-Clothes-and-Sweat-in-Front-of-Strangers kind of hot.  And I wasn't expecting that.

Here's what I've learned about running errands on my bike.  (I'm going to preface this by saying I really love my bike nowadays, and winter biking adventures are just one part of this love).  So, everybody says that it's a good idea to dress in layers, and I do.  I have grown particularly fond of these cylinder thingies ("fleece headbands", I think they're called?) that go over my ears:  I put one around my ears and one around my neck, like a scarf.  Hands and toes are vital, so I've got honking warm gloves and I wear boots that are sort of like Uggs, but trash-picked or yard-saled.  I pay careful attention to the far reaches of my body; and as for the middle of my body, I just layer up a bit.

And then biking through Siberia, it's cold.  There's this wind that cuts to the bone, which is sort of exciting but also sort of gives me the feeling that if I crashed right now, I might freeze and stick to the road and the paramedics would need to use a crow-bar to pry my stiff icy body off the tarmac.  The wind zips past and sends icy needles into me, kind of like a Polar Acupuncture which is both painful and also incredibly healing.

And then at some point I come to the red light.  And I stop, and so the wind stops, and all of a sudden this furnace inside my body goes wild and I'm like one of those Chocolate Gateau cakes that looks sort of normal on the outside but has all this molten delicious stuff oozing out of every pore.

The most amazing version of the volcano effect is when I actually get to where I'm going.  Because once I stop AND I go into a warm building with no wind blowing me, it's like I'm having the mother of all hot flashes.  Last January I rode my bike two miles (a mere two miles) to get my mammogram, and it was like 20 degrees outside.  Yes, the ride was a tad nippy.  But by the time I got into the office, I was tearing my clothes off at a furious pace.  All the other women sitting in the office were huddled up in their Christmas sweaters, coats draped over their shoulders or possibly lying on their laps.  And I was stripped down to a t-shirt, standing in the middle of a giant pile of shirts and jackets and windbreakers heaped up around me, sweating up a storm.  And the women around me asked, "Isn't biking on a day like today cold?" but I was in my t-shirt with the steam just sizzling off of me.  Wonder Woman on Fire.

The cold part of biking, I expected that.  The hot part, that's the surprise and delight.  It's like that t-shirt says, "They're not hot flashes; they're power surges".  And they make me feel a bit like a ninja warrior, a force to be reckoned with.

I'm the woman who frightens phlebotomists. Be warned.

The Trash Man Cometh (2014)

Here it is, a picture of our 19th trash can of the year.

Last year, we put 17 cans at the curb, so this is two cans to the worse for us.  Sigh.

******
Garbage-wise, I have become of a bit of a caricature of myself.   Even though I try to go trash-less (or less-trash) without being obnoxious or preachy, I'm sure I fail.  I fail both in the sense that I still create a lot of trash, and also in that I'm probably pretty preachy.

Even without my trying to be the Guru of Garbage, though, other people have come to know me as a No-Bag-Lady.  I stop at the pharmacy where we pick up our monthly supply of meds for the boys, and Richard, the head pharmacist, bustles over to the cashier ringing me up and says, "no, no, she doesn't need a bag!"

I head to market to pick up my Thanksgiving turkey, and the Turkey Lady shoos back the guy lifting my turkey:  "she doesn't need a carry bag."  Then she asks with a wink, "do you need help getting this to your vehicle?"  Even though I don't actually need help, she likes to walk the turkey out to my bike trailer with me.  It's becoming a yearly ritual.

There is a guy who works at my college who, like me, now carries a ceramic plate when he goes to campus events that serve food, so he doesn't have to use paper plates (or worse! plastic ones).

And a few weeks back, I went to a lunch discussion at our faculty center and was delighted to see that the menu featured chili in bread bowls.  I said something cheery about this and the director said, "Oh, yeah, we knew you were coming so we decided to order something that you could eat with no trash."  I laughed a bit ("ha, ha, the idea of planning a whole menu for 20 people around ME"), but the director said, "no, REALLY.  We ordered this because of you."   Well, that was a bit humbling.  And flattering.  Shucks.

My husband tells me that when he tells people that I'm frugal, they often respond by claiming they are, too:  "I clip coupons," or "I shop at discount stores".  It's hard for him to explain that his wife doesn't really shop at stores at all.  He says that the one-sentence explanation that seems to sink in the most is, "My wife doesn't use paper towels."   That alone, he says, is enough to convey the sense of my oddity, to convince people that my frugality is a tad out of the ordinary.

So.  Nineteen trash cans at the curb.  Nineteen demonstrations of evidence that I am fortunate to have more-than-enough, that I have so much that I have to send the excess away, that I can package up that excess by the barrel-full.

But a new year waits just around the corner.  And for now, my trash cans are empty.

Moving beyond "no gifts, please"

Here's what I know about parenting:  I know you can't just say to your kids, "Don't do X".    Kids just aren't smart enough to know what to do when they're not

• picking their nose;
• hitting their friends;
• leaving clothes on the floor.

Instead, kids have to know what the alternatives are.  They have to be told about Y.  It's much better to know that they should

• use a hankie (or at least go in the bathroom and then wash hands);
• walk away and count to ten, then ask a grown-up for help;
• use the laundry chute.

After two dozen years of parenting kids -- half my life, for gosh sake! -- I've gotten much better at the "do this instead" commands instead of the "don't do that" commands.

And so . . . well, so I didn't say "No gifts, please" this past Christmas.  I said, "We'll do gingerbread and eggnog on Christmas!"  And it was a FABULOUS Christmas, can I say?!

My step-daughter L (the younger) made this beautiful creation . . .

. . . that she loved so much she photographed . . .

. . . until it got destroyed in an earthquake, alas:

K-daughter, the gingerbread house veteran, created a much more sturdy (well, at least it's still standing now) house with moat and spire.  Her new husband helped.

There were many people in and out of the house. It was a wonderful time.

There were even gifts, albeit minimal ones.  K-daughter made homemade fudge; L-daughter (the elder) bought me re-usable whiskey rocks; L-daughter (the younger) got me mittens.  This was perfect for me -- reusable or consumable, unobtrusive objects.  In fact, my favorite line from all of the season came from L-daughter (the  younger), who reassured me:  "the mittens: they look like they're new, but really they're not.  I got them at a yard sale!"  Perfect.

The boys opened scads of their own gifts.  The girls got useful gifts (LED lightbulbs, or Misto sprayer, plus a few rolls of dollar coins).  But the gifts weren't the center of the celebration; the people and the conversations were, instead.  Gingerbread-construction on Christmas is a keeper of a tradition, as far as I'm concerned.

An Un-acquired wisdom

I've become fonder and fonder of the financial musings of Jonathan Clements, whose articles appear in our Sunday newspaper.  Two weekends ago, he wrote an article entitled, "Money can also buy you unhappiness".  The bumper-sticker version of his argument?  Money begets buyer's remorse; we buy more things that in turn begin to weigh us down.

Here was one little three-sentence synopsis that I particularly liked:

As folks grow older, they often stop accumulating possessions and instead start giving stuff away.  You might view that as a rational strategy for those approaching the end of their life.  But I view it as acquired wisdom:  All those possessions start to seem like a burden that distracts us from life's pleasures.

Case in point is family heirlooms.  When I was in my early 20's, my then-husband and I toured the country, interviewing our elderly relatives about our family tree.  We helped them catalog photographs that had long remained unlabeled.  We wrote down stories about scandalous matches, eccentric aunts, persons with personality.  We cooked up family recipes.  We rescued some quilts, some photos, army medals, infant outfits.  It was a fabulous and timely road trip, because the keepers of these heirlooms -- our elderly grandmothers and fragile great aunts -- had amazing stories, and my then-husband and I were the last people to hear these stories and write them down.

And then we went back to our lives -- got our advanced degrees, our divorce, our first jobs.  But the stories we collected, those stayed with us.  As did many of the photos and other heirlooms.  I have carried these with me from home to home for two dozen years now, preserving them for . . . well, I wasn't sure for what.  Posterity, whatever that means.  

Now, with my children growing and moving out of the home, with my nieces and nephews likewise turning from larvae into human adult-like objects, I figured it makes sense to share all these beautiful objects that I just Do Not Want Anymore.   The acquired wisdom I have accumulated is that I want to un-acquire all these heirlooms.

A month or two ago, I gathered the photos/etc into groupings that seemed reasonable to me, and I took them all to a nearby frame shop.  I asked the owner to do with them what she will.  

Believe it or not, these photos look better when they're framed properly than they do in my old wrinkly plastic bags.  I like how great-grandpa's sharp-shooter medals came out.  And I like how grandma's cape, made by her mother a century ago, looks a lot snazzier ironed and framed than when it's wadded up in a ball.

 I have a nifty collage of photos of my dad as a toddler/child/teenager; this will be a gift for his new wife.

Did I mention great-grandpa?  He died in 1902, less than a year after my grandfather was born.  He died of an ear infection (can you imagine??), and left a widow to raise three children on her own.  Here is a little montage of photos of him from before he met my great-grandma.

I knew I'd be plunking down some serious money for all these frames.  It turns out I saved a bunch of money through my own indifference.  I told the framer just to be creative and to take her time.  She ended up using  her left-over materials from previous projects, and because she was in no hurry she could try out various ideas without having to commit to buying supplies.  Altogether, this cost about a thousand dollars less than I thought it would.

It was still pricey -- it's an expensive way to get rid of stuff I don't want.  But dang, does it look nice!

I am really happy to feel like I've preserved something worth preserving, and also to be giving my family a piece of their history.  But most of all, a la Clement's observation, I think that investing a bit of money to divest myself of a few possessions is evidence of an acquired wisdom.

So this is my most expensive Christmas yet: giving my heirs their looms, and giving me a bit more room.  A great gift all around.

Eating the elephant-mother-chair

About a dozen or so years ago, my husband and I "inherited" a giant recliner chair from his mom.

My husband's mom was a woman with all sorts of psychological problems; when he and I got married, I'd tell people:  "We both idolize our fathers and analyze our mothers".  She was a bitterly unhappy woman; his childhood memories are of her lying on the couch, complaining about the neighbors and threatening to kill herself.  He feared our family dinners at first, because his childhood dinners meant listening to his mom carping ceaselessly at his father, who bent his head and accepted it until he could escape from the table.

She was deeply suspicious of anyone unlike her (or anyone like her, for that matter).  When we were getting ready to adopt, the social workers tried to prepare us for negative comments and snubs.  To our surprise, I heard one and only one derogatory comment about adopting a brown son: my husband's mom asked, horrified,  "Couldn't you at least have gotten a Chinese one?"

Recovering from your own mother; there are so many stories there.  For my husband, the big-tough-army-guy, there were a few years of counseling.  There were the years he had to avoid riding his bike by himself, because her voice would fill his head.  There was a conscious effort to be unlike her in every way, both in good ways (avoiding racism) and in harmful ones (fearing family dinners).  When my daughter was in kindergarden, I wrote a note to her future self about my own parenting, saying something to the effect that I hoped to do the "least possible amount of damage."

We recover from bad parenting the same way we eat the metaphorical elephant: one bite at a time.  We share big elephant recipes with our imperfectly-mothered friends.  We chew on the gristle.  Occasionally, we find strong bones.  We gain strength.  We go slowly, thinking that this hulking beast will always looming over us; but one day, if we're lucky, we'll realize the elephant is almost gone.  If we're very lucky, we keep the best parts.

This recliner chair, like my husband's mom, took up more than its fair share of space in our living room.  And after years of hard use from my highly energetic, ADHD, and yes, brown sons, it started falling apart.

This past weekend, I decided to take the chair apart.  I used staple-removers, screwdrivers, and needle-nose pliers to pull out the staples holding the upholstery onto the frame.  There were hundreds of these staples, and I spent many hours focusing on staple, after staple, after staple.  Underneath the fabric was the wood-and-metal frame, and with more screwdrivers and wrenches, I carefully disassembled the skeleton of the chair into various pieces.

When I was done, I had a pile of scrap wood for use in future projects, a second pile of metal pieces that I will donate to Paul D. (who recycles scrap metal as a way of earning some money), and two garbage cans full of foam and fabric.  I'm feeling pretty guilty about those two garbage cans, actually, but I know it could have been worse.

It was wonderfully therapeutic, taking apart a chair.  At every single stage I had no idea what lay ahead; but the next immediate step was always obvious:  remove this staple, this staple, this staple.  Take out this screw, this bolt, that bolt.  One thing at a time, always a small sense of accomplishment, even as the chair loomed over me, seemingly unchanged.

Until suddenly, the chair lay in pieces at my feet, sorted into piles.  All that remained for me to do was to share the pieces I thought were worth sharing, toss the things I didn't want, keep the things I thought I could use.  And then to vacuum up the dirt.

Pre-travel toothpaste prep

Sometimes you gotta uglify something before you can pretty it up.  I felt a little obnoxious about putting a nasty, tsk-tsk sign in our shared bathroom.  But it was only there for a week.

The boys, they leave toothpaste blobs in the sink.  It yucks me out, but while we're home it's just me that gets yucked out, so I feel petty to be constantly carping about this.  In a few weeks, though, we'll be traveling.  We'll stay at other people's houses.  And in the past, some of them have gotten yucked out, just like I do.

Nagging is ugly, too, and besides feeling petty, it's proved singularly ineffective.  One problem is that nagging happens long after the fact, not at the moment of toothpaste yuck-ification.  But a sign right at the place of the dreadful act?  Would "pre-nagging" work?

The answer one week later:  yes.  We have a beautiful sink now.  I took the ugly sign down.  We're ready to travel.