January

January is the darkest, coldest month AND it is a full 31 days.  When I lived in Upstate New York I really dreaded January.  It seemed to last forever, and I could never get warm.  All the beautiful hills were gray and white.  Green was a memory, something to look forward to.  January was the month I had to "endure."

I know some people dislike February or March more than January. They are sick of winter by then. Cabin fever sets in and the continued cold and snow becomes unbearable. I understand that. I felt those feelings. However, I always thought February arrived with hope. February was what you earned for living through January. In my mind I had to get on the other side of January before I could begin to imagine spring might actually return.

I used to live in fear of snowstorms, not because I disliked the snow, but because I had to drive to work in it.  I do not miss white-knuckle driving.

The University was famous for never closing because of weather. In fact, I think it officially closed for a snow day only 3 or 4 times in the 37 years I worked there. A special breed of stoic, fearless, and hardy souls live in the frozen Northlands! If you can withstand a long, cold northern winter you can withstand just about anything.

In Florida there is no snow; however, we are having our "winter" right now.  It was in the low 50's all day yesterday.  We turned our heat on for the 3rd time in 2 years.  I went to the doctor and that is all anyone in the office could talk about, the chill.  Ha!  But I was right there with them, annoyed that I had to wear socks and a light jacket. 

One of the nurses, a woman who had already revealed to me that she was originally from the Bronx, winked at me and said "We are spoiled down here!"  We smiled, knowingly.  We continued to complain about the weather with the rest of them, but we knew better.

The best part of winter in Central Florida is the relentless sun, which shines bold and bright almost every day. I never take it for granted, and it never gets old.

And what kind of doctor did I go to?  A dermatologist, of course.  Too much sun and you get actinic keratoses that have to be removed.  Nothing and nowhere is perfect.

A walkway at Leu Gardens in Orlando, Florida - January 2016

Ch-ch-changes

I have been thinking about how different office work was when I started my first "real" job, as a secretary, in 1976.

We still used mimeograph machines and/or carbon paper to generate paper copies.  Photocopiers were just being introduced but they were still too expensive for most offices.

I used a massive IBM Selectric II typewriter. Thankfully, I was not in the workforce before electronic typewriters. I was never coordinated enough to type on those old manual cross-bar typewriters with any speed or accuracy, although I did have one at home. 

I worked in an academic office at a university and most of the faculty did not know how to type. That was the norm. Faculty members wrote papers and letters in longhand and brought their notes to secretaries to type. The handwritten text was often a mess, with corrections, arrows moving paragraphs around, additional text written on separate pieces of paper to be inserted elsewhere, coffee stains, etc. In my mid-20's, with few marketable skills and no office experience, I was hired for my first job because I was the only job candidate who could read the professor's handwriting. 

In 1976 I did not mind being called a “secretary.” If someone tried to refer to me back then as an “office professional” I would have laughed, thinking they were trying to patronize me. And the title "administrative assistant" would have sounded like a demotion. Now office workers bristle if you refer to them as a secretary. It is interesting how the job title "secretary" diminished in status over the years.

In the late 1970’s I started doing research fund accounting. All my account ledgers were done in pen and ink. I used red and black pens, and I had my favorite brands. I remember it was a great pleasure putting pen to paper.

I spent my days recording columns of data by hand and then adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing on my electronic calculator, an essential and well-loved machine that took up a good part of my desk. It was big and white and looked like you could jump in and drive it away. 

Cutting and pasting was actually that, except we used tape instead of paste. I imagine there was a time when paste was used, but not in my life time. I cut typed excerpts and pieced them together on a plain white sheet of paper. I took great care to fit and tape the pieces together so they looked like they had been typed to look that way.

If you made a typing mistake you used a covering liquid like "White-Out." That was a little tricky when using carbon paper, but we managed.  If it looked bad you simply started over again. We were touch typists; we were very fast.  Retyping a page did not seem like a big deal.

Before computers we communicated via paper or telephone. If you wanted to tell an individual something you picked up the telephone and called them. There were no answering machines, so you had to keep trying to catch the person at their desk through an elaborate game of telephone tag.

Communicating with large groups was labor intensive. We made copies of a memo to place in each faculty/staff/student mailbox. If you worked in the central administration you made copies, addressed and stuffed a zillion envelopes, and sent them in mass mailings via campus or USPS mail.

In the early 1980's IBM Displaywriters replaced electric typewriters. They were word processors that allowed typists to digitally view a certain amount of text and correct errors before printing the page. Displaywriters also included a mail merge ability. It is hard to imagine how revolutionary these functions were. I was doing accounting then, so I did not get a Displaywriter. I remember being jealous of the office staff who did. Not to worry! Personal computers and spreadsheet software were just around the corner.

About 1985, personal computers were introduced and everything changed dramatically. Suddenly work became fun. At first not everyone had one on their desk. Instead, you went to the computer room to use a shared computer. There was a sign-up sheet and you signed up for a time slot to use a computer.

Computers did not yet have hard drives storing software or files. You inserted a “systems disk” to start the software from, and you saved your files on a separate floppy disk. I remember becoming confused at first and accidentally erased the software system disk. It was an embarrassing mistake. I quickly learned to pay closer attention.

I distinctly remember when email was introduced soon after computers. Suddenly you could communicate quickly and effectively without wasting time. However, at first you could not count on someone checking their email messages every day. 

I am out of the workforce now, but I wonder what changes the next 40 years will bring?  With future advancements in Artificial Intelligence I wonder if there will even be a need for human office workers in the future?  That is a sobering thought.

IBM Selectric Typewriter

Turn and face the strange

In October 1972, T and I went to see David Bowie perform as  Ziggy Stardust at the Auditorium Theater in Chicago. I had been obsessed with David Bowie ever since we discovered his UK album, The Man Who Sold the World.  I will leave it to the experts to extol his virtues and describe his many contributions to the history of rock and roll.

Now I am going to spend the afternoon listening to all his pre-Young Americans music.  For my money, everything he recorded prior to 1975 was pure gold.

He was such a fearlessly creative soul.  And that video he recently released (Lazarus)!  Wow.  Leave it to Bowie to show us how to die well.

"TheManWhoSoldtheWorld" by May be found at the following website: http://www.davidbowie.com. Licensed under Fair use via Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:TheManWhoSoldtheWorld.jpg#/media/File:TheManWhoSoldtheWorld.jpg

Bon Voyage!

When you work for a large organization you are expected to fit in. After a number of years of putting on your game face every workday morning you become accustomed to being less of an individual. It starts to feel normal being one of many, of being part of a team. Individuality can be problematic in the workplace. Sometimes I felt being "professional" actually meant being generic.

It took a while, but eventually I surrendered to my place in the larger scheme of things. I settled into a job skill that seemed creative to me.  I made it work.

I am not complaining. I enjoyed working and I was happy to be part of something bigger than myself. However, I am relieved to be done with that part of my life. I enjoy being retired. I can finally be myself everyday, all the time. That is a big change from being a worker bee.

I love the character “Seven of Nine” from Star Trek’s Voyager. Voyager ran for 7 seasons, but the first three were a bit clunky. Seven of Nine was introduced in season 4, and absolutely "made" the series from then on.

As a young child she and her human family had been forcibly and physically assimilated into the Borg, an alien cybernetic society representing the ultimate workforce collective: The Hive Mind.

The Borg Collective organized their technologically enhanced workforce into teams of 9 "drones." Borg do not have individuality or names, but her team designation was Seven of Nine. Eventually the all-too-human crew of the Starship Voyager captured her and liberated her from the collective.

Before liberation she was the perfect employee, absolutely without individual will or personal reflection. The Borg Collective was a monster of efficiency! The post-liberation Seven of Nine struggled to rediscover what it meant to be human, what it meant to think or act as an individual. Seven did not always approve of the lack of efficiency that arose when one acted alone, but she was intrigued by humanity. She thought she would give individuality a try.

A dear friend of mine retired last Friday. Yesterday was the first scheduled workday she did not get up and go to work outside her home. I just asked her how she was doing and she said she felt "undefined."  That is the perfect word to describe the early days/months/years of retirement: undefined.  After years of being part of a complex collective effort what are we when we stand alone?

If her experience of retirement is like mine, it will seem like vacation for a while. Retirement isn't a vacation, though. There is still work to be done. You need to redefine yourself, not as part of an organization but as an individual.

An look inside the Apollo 14 Command Module at the Kennedy Space Center on Merritt Island, Florida

Time Enough

It is New Year's Eve and I guess I should review and evaluate the past year if for no other reason that it is an interesting ritual.  Plus, I am a big copycat.  Other bloggers are posting 2015 reviews today and I thought I might like to do the same.

If you had asked me last night what I thought about 2015 I would have grumpily replied that it was a hard year.

This morning I started the day by organizing my digital photos for 2015.  It took me all morning and by noon I began to see 2015 in a different light. Seeing the year documented in pictures was like a slap upside my head - you know, the kind that sharply implies "quit yer bitchin!" I was surprised to see how much fun I had in the previous 12 months. Why didn't I realize that in real time?

Perhaps 2015 was hard, but what year wasn't?  I appreciate 2015. I will respectfully put it to bed tonight. One never knows what might happen next, but perhaps there is still plenty of time.

Which brings me to my New Year's resolution: I am going to enjoy myself more in 2016.  I hope you do, too.

Sand Lake at Wekiwa Springs State Park, Central Florida

Out of my mindfulness

There is a lot of talk these days of living in or experiencing the moment, of being "mindful."  Unfortunately, words are cheapened when we overuse them. Then it takes a really long time before we can use them again with sincerity.  Okay, that phrase in itself sounds like a long buzz-phrase and means almost nothing like what I really meant. Let me try that again: Once a word becomes trendy it takes a long time before I can use it without the word sounding like meaningless crap to me. 

Of course the words themselves continue to mean what they mean. We are the ones who can no longer see or hear a word in its original context once it becomes trite.

For example, consider the first time you heard the phrase “thinking outside of the box.” It is one of those phrases that became over-popular 10-15 years ago in the workplace as a means to get people to re-evaluate a practice, to rethink a concept. The first time I heard it I thought, “That’s brilliant.” Then everyone used it, and used it, and used it.

When it was thrown out yet again by the millionth facilitator at still another focus group or workshop I could no longer even hear the original intention behind the phrase. I was too busy wanting a different facilitator, one who owned a thesaurus. One who thought their own thoughts and used their own words. I wanted to be facilitated by the first person who came up with that phrase.

I guess I am feeling more ornery than usual today; probably because I have been eating too much fruitcake.  And fudge.

But seriously...I find that being “mindful” actually does help alleviate anxiety.  I just need to come up with a new word for it.

A Ghost of Christmas Past

Will the sappiness never end?  Sorry, but it IS Christmas time which just turns me into a simpering wimp.  Or maybe a whimpering simp.  I can't help it.  Here is my most potent Christmas memory.

T and I have been together for a long time. In fact, this will be our 45^th Christmas together. The years provided many good Christmas memories for us, but I have a particularly warm and fuzzy memory of Christmas Eve 1978. That one holds special meaning to me not because of anything we received, we were young with limited resources, but because of the uniqueness of it; Christmas Eve 1978 had a nearly perfect Christmas “feel” to it.

Setting the Stage:

Our daughter, M, was 6 years old. T and I were both 26. T had spent the first half of 1978 living in in New York City where he and his band mates were trying to make a go of it. We were physically separated, but we were still together. I stayed put and kept the home fires burning where I had a job and where little M was attending kindergarten. T came home one weekend a month to visit. It was really hard on all of us. The idea was that if the band worked out then M and I would move there, too. Truthfully, it was a relief when the band broke up and T came home. He got a job at a record store after he came back.

Christmas Eve 1978:

He had to work on Christmas Eve. After the store closed at 5:30 p.m. there was a holiday party for the employees and their families. We lived about 10 city blocks away. That seemed like a comfortable walking distance back then. It must have been one of those periods where we did not have a car, or perhaps it had broken down? It is hard to remember. T had walked to work. M and I probably took the bus downtown to meet him at the party. The buses did not run late, so we intended to walk home together, which we did.

The party was great fun, very festive. It was dark and snowing by the time we left, but not bitter cold. The night sky was filled with big, heavy snowflakes. One of us was only 6 years-old, so as trite as it sounds we made a game of catching the snowflakes in our mouths. T hoisted N onto his shoulders and the three of us proceeded to walk home in the dark, in the midst of the most beautiful snowfall I can remember. Houses were decorated and multi-colored lights lit our way. 1978 had been a struggle, a crossroads, a difficult year for our little family. We were happy to be together. We laughed and talked all the way home. I will never forget how magical it felt to be the three of us against the world that Christmas Eve.

Sometimes I miss snow

Zig Zag

In one week it will be Christmas. I think I am ready. I believe all my purchases have been made and the packages are wrapped. The tree and decorations are up. Our Christmas cards are mailed and I made the fruitcake! My daughter makes most of the Christmas cookies now, so I do not have to worry about that. All that is left for me to do is make frosted cut-out butter cookies with my grandkids. Oh yeah, I also have to clean the house. Aaaack! There is still that.

I am kind of a quirky house cleaner. I like to clean a couple different rooms at the same time. If I only do one room I end up getting bored. If I run from one room to another, doing a little bit here and a little bit there, eventually it all gets done and I keep myself amused.

My husband is a different kind of animal. He also cleans, but in his true-to-form linear fashion he concentrates on one room at a time. He likes to move directly from point A to point B. I prefer to zig zag my way through life. We both get to the same place eventually. 

Nutty as a Fruitcake

I made fruitcake for the holidays. I know – Ick.  Many people hate it. I like my mother’s dark fruitcake recipe, which I make without the icky stuff she put in her version. I use dates, dried apricots, raisins and walnuts. No red or green candied cherries! As a result, I feel disgustingly superior and virtuous.

Only my daughter and I will eat fruitcake these days. I could easily skip it, but this is my first Christmas since Mom died. I miss her and I really wanted to make it. It will make my daughter happy. Maybe I can talk my granddaughter into trying it? Stranger things have happened.

Mom made fruitcake every Christmas I can remember until the slow progression of that hateful Parkinson’s Disease made it impossible for her to bake. Then I started making the Christmas fruitcake. I would send her one in the mail, just like she used to to do for me after I got married and moved far away. They weigh a ton, so the postage probably cost more than the ingredients; but it was my special gift to her. I felt I was honoring her in the making of it, and I knew she liked that I was carrying on her tradition. As a mother and a grandmother I understand that now.

Food-related holiday traditions are the legacy of the common woman. As long as someone is still making our recipes we have achieved some form of immortality.

Of course, as a daughter (or son), you have to make these things a little different than your mother did. We must put our own spin on it to reflect our uniqueness, our modernity, our necessary and never-ending rebellion. Who among us actually wants to BE their mother? Not many.  We adjust and tweak to insure we are different. How much we have to tweak depends on who our mothers were.

I must confess that I stopped making them a few years ago, in 2012 - that fateful year when the fruitcakes I made went moldy. It made me so mad, that mold.  I threw a big, stinkin’ fit and stopped making the effort in subsequent years.  I guess I showed them! Now I regret that and so many other things. I was not the best daughter I could have been.

I cannot go back and make my mother a fruitcake for 2013 and 2014. Instead, I made a memorial fruitcake in 2015. I am storing it in the fridge because in Florida I do not have a cool basement, or any basement for that matter. I am going wild with the brandy. If it gets moldy I am going to throw it out without saying a word. I am keeping my anger in check. This is now a ritual, a sacrifice, an act of love. From here on in it is the making of fruitcake that is important, not the eating of it.    

It occurs to me that she may not have liked my version of the fruitcake. As I shamelessly bragged above, my version does not include candied green and red cherries, and who knows what other carcinogenic or candied crap she used to put in her version. She never believed those things could be bad for you. She liked the bad stuff, my Mom. It used to drive me crazy.

She definitely did not soak her cheesecloth in brandy. She used apple juice and wrapped the cakes in muslin. I am quite sure she also liked thinking that her fruitcake was better than mine. And, of course, it was. To be completely honest I miss the red candied cherries. I probably should not admit it or the thought police might come and haul me away. Out of sheer orneriness, let me say it loud and proud: the red candied cherries were my favorite part. I was a fool for not realizing that earlier. Next year I will put them back in.

I just realized that instead of giving her the fruitcake she wanted, I gave her the fruitcake I thought she should have. Aaaack! It is a good thing she loved me, because I can be insufferable.

Mothers understand these things, though. At least I do when my daughter now makes many of "my" Christmas cookies just a little bit different than I did. To become our grown-up selves we must separate from our mothers.

I am beginning to understand why a mother will always love her children more than her children will love her. Otherwise, none of us would ever leave her and no one would ever grow up.  It is as it should be.

Seeing and Not Seeing

I love Christmas. I love everything about it except for the rampant materialism. I DO like giving and receiving presents, though. I am not the kind of person who is against giving Christmas presents. I am absolutely, 100% FOR presents.  What I am against is wanton excess - unless, of course, it is displayed on the front of your house for the world to see.

Most of our neighbors started putting up the outside Christmas decorations the weekend after Thanksgiving. I really want to bitch and moan in a self-righteous, disapproving way about how early they get their Christmas on; I certainly feel cranky about that issue. But I think not. Not this time, anyway. I get tired of being self-righteous and judgmental. Today I am going to take a break.

In fact, I love seeing normal, everyday people decorating their houses. We could all benefit from using our imaginations occasionally. I am encouraged when the Average Joe is inspired to spend a few precious hours on his/her day off decorating the house. I think of outside Christmas decorations as legitimate folk art.

I have this wacky idea that most people have a need to express themselves creatively. I first experienced the "public display variety" of self-expression when I was a child, back in the 1950’s. On June 14 (Flag Day) all us neighbor kids would take rolls of red, white, and blue crepe paper and decorate our bikes. I lived in one of those post-WWII housing developments where all the parents were the same age and each house was filled with rambunctious baby booming children. My friends and I would then get on our fabulous patriotic bikes and parade our handiwork around the block in a proud and colorful parade. We were so freakin' cute!

When my mother was in the assisted living home each resident decorated the outside of her or his door with signs, dried flowers, wreaths, and more. Each door was different and decorations changed with the seasons.

The residents clearly wanted us to see their doors. But you know, there is a little bit of Miss Havisham in all of us as we age. At first glance those doors seemed super damn creepy to me! I have an overactive imagination. Crocheted Santas seemed to be staring blankly into my eyes as if trying to steal my soul. Wildly perky dancing reindeer invited me to come hither. And that was just at Christmas. At Easter there were ratty birds nests affixed to some doors. Crazy felt and wire birds challenged me to look deep into their googly eyes. And the signs said things like, "Come In!"

Honestly, it was hard not to look the other way and not see them at all. I made a sincere effort to fight that urge. I could easily have looked at each door with a critical eye and been put off because I was not really looking at the doors with a mind to see them. I was blinded by my fear of aging, my fear of sickness and of death.

What a coward I was. I was only visiting that place. Those old folks were living their final days and facing those fears head on. They were trying to let their light shine in the Valley of the Shadow of Death. The least I could do was look at their parade of handiwork.

I tried to enjoy those doors and really "see" what the residents were showing me, because in a real and tangible way they were presenting me with a gift. Being judgmental is unseemly at best. In the context of receiving a gift it is always bad manners.

I was an art student back in the day. I had a professor who tried to teach us there is no such thing as bad art, there is only art you do not understand. He was trying to introduce us to abstraction at the time. Making us rethink our perceptions was a helpful exercise in that context. It challenged us to take a deeper look and get beyond our knee-jerk expectations of what art is "supposed" to be. I am not sure if he was right about there being no bad art, but I liked the sound of it. I still do.

His concept freed me from some youthful conceits and those stubborn literary hang-ups that were keeping me from really "seeing" the purely visual. Art doesn't have to tell a story. It is more than simply illustration. It can stand alone, without context. Once I surrendered to the visual I suddenly started seeing art everywhere. And I was drug free, dammit! Well, most of the time. :)

So…I like nothing better than driving through our usually homogeneous subdivision streets during this time of the year, oohing and aahhing my way down each block. I silently thank each householder for taking the time to entertain me, for wowing me, for strutting their creative stuff.  

Everyone does it differently. Some houses are garish, some are beautiful. Most of these houses shine in living color, others are resplendent in snowy white. A few VERY special ones are ridiculously over-the-top and I would drive ten miles to see one of those - with or without my grandchildren.

Standards and good taste be damned! You may not decorate as I do, but if you choose to decorate your house (or your door...) for the holidays you simply cannot do it wrong in my book. I approve! Go wild! Because if not now, when?"

Not the least bit creepy, right?