Walking and talking

Somehow a full year had gone by since I’d last visited my college roommate at her beachside home, and it was time for us to have our annual catch-up.

We take our yearly catch-up visits seriously. With her four children and my two, plus our husbands’ work lives and other activities, plus our siblings and parents, plus our friends and our respective community projects, plus the books we’ve read, the vacations we’ve taken, and the crises we’ve endured  since we last got together, plus the fact that we simply have loads of interests in common, there’s always a lot to talk about. And we see each other only a couple of times a year. But the best catch-up is always our annual October Walk, when we take an eight-mile stroll on the beach, beginning outside her back door, down alongside the Atlantic to the village south of hers, where we stop for lunch, then around town and onto the cliff walk overlooking the water, and then back.

She has a daughter finishing college and another one just starting the application process. One daughter has learned to drive and the youngest competed in the Nationals track qualifiers this past summer. She didn’t qualify for the Nationals, but the family had a wonderful time in New York anyway, and as we walked I heard all about it. I talked plenty myself also – about Tim starting high school, Holly starting a second year on the cross-country team, my various freelance assignments, Rick’s enthusiasm for his job.

We could sit down for four hours and have the same conversation, but somehow it doesn’t seem like it would be quite the same. As my friend pointed out yesterday, there was one year that our plans were rained out and we went out for dinner without taking a walk, and that year was fun, but not quite the same as the years we walk. It’s just so exhilarating to cover so many miles on foot while we cover so much ground in our personal lives through our nonstop dialogue. We’re usually out about four hours. Then we end our walk, pause the conversation, take a deep breath, get ready to say goodbye.

Like all traditions, it can’t go on forever, but I’m so happy we’ve sustained it as many years as we have. The physical exertion of walking for miles on the beach feels so rewarding, and the emotional sustenance we take from our annual visit is equally so. It’s good to walk and good to talk. And best is to do both – walk and talk – together. An annual tradition, and something to look forward to every fall.

Writing About Other People

It’s been an interesting week of writing about other people.

I profiled a 68-year-old woman who has devoted the past few years to lobbying the FDA and Congress to require warning labels on antidepressants because she is concerned about the correlation between anti-depressant use and suicide – an issue she discovered for herself after her twenty-something daughter died.

And then, coincidentally, I profiled a former NFL player who battled bipolar disorder for years until a leading expert in the field of psychotropic drugs helped him find the right combination of medications, a drug regimen that he believes saved his life.

Over the weekend, I worked on a memoir project for a former Olympic pentathlon competitor who told me about what it was like to train for the horseback competition with taciturn cowboys in the Australian Outback when he was fifteen years old.

And for a community memoir project I’m doing in Newburyport, I interviewed an elderly man who described how after he served a two-year stint at Pearl Harbor, he was sent home to New Hampshire, and then pleaded with the U.S. Navy to send him back to Pearl Harbor for another two years. “But why did you want to go back?” I asked him three times while he repeatedly ignored the question. Finally, the fourth time, he answered: “Because I had a lot of girlfriends I really liked there. But don’t tell my wife.”

I had interviewed his wife the day before for the same community memoir project. Both of them are now in their nineties. She talked about waiting until she was thirty to get married because she didn’t want to have children and thought waiting a long time would eliminate the risk. She preferred tennis, boating and the country club to being a mother, and she got her wish.

Sometimes the stories blend in my mind and I can’t remember whether the boating story was in Newburyport or Concord, whether the Olympics story was for the newspaper or the book, whether the antidepressant issue was under discussion with the FDA or the NFL. But fortunately, I take good notes, and even if my mind can’t keep it all straight, my keyboard can.

And sometimes, truth be told, I wonder if what I’m doing now is any different from when I was in high school, hearing stories from the more popular kids about what they had been doing with their weekends and being glad that I got to hear the stories without committing any of the deeds. I’m not sorry that I don’t have to do naval duty, and I’m not sorry that I’m not training for the Olympics. I’m even sort of glad that I don’t have to attend a Congressional hearing.

But I love hearing the firsthand accounts of people who have done all these things, and I embrace the challenge of getting it all down on paper for them – something the popular kids in high school definitely would not have wanted me to do. I may not have much aptitude for fast living, but I can keep striving for ever more compelling narrative. And so with every interview, every anecdote, and every discussion, I’m learning a little more about how to tell a good story – one that matters, one that informs, and one that lasts.

The up-side to housework (and laundry, and cooking, and errands....)

Whenever Rick or I complains about work, the other one says “Yeah, that’s the down side of having a job. The work.”

I was thinking about that this past weekend as I tried not to feel overwhelmed with household tasks. I’d had an especially busy work week – normally I’m at home mornings and on site with a client in the afternoons, but for the past week I’d been working on a project that had me leaving the house first thing in the morning and gone for eight or ten hours every day – and had that busy-mom feeling of the house falling down around me.

But then I reminded myself: No, the house is not falling down around you. It could use some vacuuming. It could use some dusting. Emptying the wastebaskets wouldn’t be a bad idea, and everyone would benefit from a load or two of clean laundry. But the house isn’t falling down.

And that brought me back to thinking about what Rick and I say about work. The down side of having a house is the housework, but conversely, the up side of housework is that it means you have a house. I thought about various people we know in Colorado, none of whom have lost their own homes but several of whom have seen their neighbors lose theirs, and some of the people we know can’t access their homes reliably even if their houses are still standing, so they have to temporarily move out. If your house washed away in a flood, I reminded myself, you wouldn’t have housework. Better to have the house….and the housework.

And then the same message seemed so easy to extrapolate to other things. Yes, there’s cooking to do… because we have access to healthy appealing ingredients with which we can make all kinds of things. And yes, I have a long list of errands….but I wouldn’t have any errands if I had no money to spend on things we needed.

This wasn’t just trite Pollyanna-isms. Thinking about the Colorado flood victims reminded me of what it’s like every winter when at some point we lose power for a day or two, or more: how all I want to do once the electricity has been off for a couple of days is wash dishes, even though washing dishes is never a high priority when the house is running smoothly.

Just as Rick and I say with work, the down side of having a materially comfortable life is having to take care of all those material goods. It’s reassuring to have a home, and food, and cars, and clothes. Taking decent care of them doesn’t seem like such a chore when I hold on to the perspective that these material blessings require a certain amount of maintenance. Pollyanna-ish or not, in that light, a Saturday filled with housekeeping, cooking and errands feels more like a blessing than a hassle.

Lives like snowflakes

It’s fun to be immersed in other people’s long lives once again.

My new company, Concord River Publishing, recently signed on to write a community memoir at a nursing home in Newburyport. Last week I did the interviews – twenty in all – and this week I’m drafting the stories.

It’s my second full-scale community memoir, and I wondered as I approached the project if the stories might start to sound familiar. Last year I wrote about 47 people in their eighties and nineties at a continuing care community in Bedford; now I’m talking with twenty people at a very similar facility on the North Shore. Demographically, the two groups have much in common: their age, their educational and professional backgrounds, their predominantly East Coast roots.

But as I dove into the interviews, I was reminded once again of how no two stories end up being alike. This set of seniors includes military veterans and scientists, professors and doctors, homemakers and gardeners and boaters, people widowed young and couples celebrating sixty or more years of marriage. Some had children and some didn’t; some lost children.

So yes, of course there are commonalities. But just as each participant has a different name and face and history, each story manifests differently, because people recall different details from their lives, impute importance to different aspects of their experiences, and react to twists of fate with different attitudes.

It’s only our second project, but I don’t anticipate this work ever growing dull. “Everyone has a story to tell,” my colleagues and I say when we approach potential clients. And perhaps this task on which I’ve set out is a little like collecting snowflakes. Many are similar….and yet each is ultimately unique. My mission is to catch each story like a snowflake and examine it until I can extract the essence of how it is different from every single other story out there.

Friendships that flourish, thanks to our kids

Sunday was Tim's birthday. On his first birthday, I think I received as many congratulatory notes as he did, but now that he's fifteen, less of a deal is made even among other moms about the "mom-birthday." This year I heard from just one mom wishing me a happy Tim's-birthday. It was the mother who shared a hospital room with me during the two-day stay after Tim was born.

Later that day, I visited with a friend I hadn't seen in a while. Well, really only a few weeks, but it was that critical first-few-weeks-of-school, and we had a lot to catch up on: how high school was going so far for her son and for mine; a landscaping project she had tackled Labor Day weekend; what was new at her workplace. We became friends after our sons bonded in a fourth grade reading circle.

Last week I worked on a feature story about apple picking. Fishing around for a clever lead, I put the word out to a circle of contacts that I needed an apple-picking anecdote. The first person I heard back from was a mom I met in the mother-baby group that Tim and I started attending when he was three weeks old.

It all reminded me of how many friends of my own have come to me through my children: from the woman I shared a hospital room with through those mother-infant groups and into preschool and elementary school, from friendships forged while watching our kids play baseball to friendships forged over school volunteer projects.

When our children are born, it's fun to imagine them having friends of their own someday, but I don't think I realized how much of an effect Tim would eventually have on my own social life. His friends' parents are our friends. So are the parents of his teammates and classmates. We've met people we never would have crossed paths with if our kids hadn't enjoyed hanging out together.

This wasn't something I expected as a perk of parenthood. I thought I had enough friends earlier in adulthood, before kids were part of the picture. But I'm so grateful for all the new faces the kids have indirectly brought to our circle. It's a benefit of parenthood I didn't anticipate.

Later in the evening, during Tim's birthday party, I took a picture of him and his three guests. Then I emailed it to each of the kids' mothers. They all wrote back within the hour to thank me.

It was a picture of kids celebrating Tim's birthday. But to me, there was a subtext to the photo as well. It was a celebration of my own friendships: some of the ones I'm most grateful to have, and friendships I wouldn't have without Tim.

A new school means a clean slate -- for me!

I expected that my predominant emotion when I drove up to Concord-Carlisle Regional High School to drop Tim off the first time would be apprehension.

Instead, to my surprise, it was liberation.

I didn’t know this place, true, and that was unnerving. But the up side to being a stranger suddenly became obvious: I didn’t have any pre-existing commitments here. I wouldn’t be likely to recognize people if I were to walk into one of the buildings on campus. I didn’t have any projects under way that needed attention.

All of this may sound more like I’m the one going off to high school rather than Tim, but I’m afraid after nine years as a parent volunteer at my kids’ school, this is how I think. At our local K-8 school, from which Tim graduated last June and Holly just started sixth grade, the campus is full of reminders of tasks I’ve undertaken. Seeing the school library reminds me that I’m in charge of scheduling volunteers once again this year. The lunchroom reminds me that I need to make a vegetarian entrée for next week’s teacher appreciation luncheon. The playground reminds me that it’s time to sign up for recess duty. The familiar faces of staff and other parents remind me of dozens of pre-existing relationships that I try hard to maintain.

At CCHS, I have none of those associations. Last summer, a woman in her eighties whom I was interviewing for a memoir project told me about what it was like when she moved from a suburban community where she’d raised her family to an apartment on Beacon Hill. “It was wonderful,” she said. “I didn’t owe anyone anything. I hadn’t served on their committees and they hadn’t served on mine.”

For some reason, her turn of phrase amused me. It doesn’t exactly have the poetic eloquence of an ancient Native American proverb, but those words were echoing in my mind as I dropped Tim off for school: “I haven’t served on their committees and they haven’t served on mine.” It’s impossible to go through nine years at our local school without taking on myriad tasks and responsibilities as a parent volunteer. Most of the time, they’re a lot of fun; it’s wonderful to have the opportunity to get involved in so many child-related events and projects.

But the high school gives me the irresistible sense of a clean slate. I don’t know the reputations of Tim’s teachers or the distance between his classrooms. I don’t have opinions about his schedule. I don’t know anything about any of it, and best of all, I’m not on any committees yet. I have yet to make a single misstep as a parent here.

The time will come, no doubt: for committee work and for missteps as well as for good memories of presentations, student productions, football games. There are new people to meet and there will eventually be new tasks to undertake; I don’t know of a single school, public or private, that doesn’t draw heavily on parental participation these days. But so far I haven’t taken on a thing. And so instead of the expected feeling of strangeness, I approach this new phase with a sense of relief.