WHEEEW!

Three weeks before we were supposed to leave for our vacation to visit with my entire nuclear family on the East Coast, in order for them all to honor me with the celebration of my 70th birthday, I became seriously ill with a case of pneumonia that just didn’t want to quit. I am a follower of Louise Hay, and her little blue book that gives the metaphysical cause of an illness, and then an affirmation she creates for the sufferer to look at in order to stir their positive emotions and help recovery along, something which I ritually personally do meditate upon, while I also take the necessary antibiotics.

There on page 57, is the emotional or metaphysical disease definition for Pneumonia: “Desperate. Tired of life. Emotional wounds that are not allowed to heal.” The positive thought form, supplied by the genius of Louise? “I freely take in Divine ideas that are filled with the breath and the intelligence of life. This is a new moment.”

I am a Tibetan Buddhist. Wonder Woman and I attend a Monday night course in Advanced Meditation, that’s an ongoing class for serious practitioners. The night my illness started Sylvia, our teacher had instructed us to open our hearts to our fullest. We were studying the course of Compassion, and had been chanting the mantra for compassion for the benefit of all sentient beings for many weeks.

So now we were not just to open our hearts just 100%, but more…beyond reasonability to 200%, that’s when I had my first symptom of the illness, when I started coughing, was when we were urged to continue to open our hearts. Suffering for many of us is mainly about being caught in the trap of one’s own ego. A wicket that I found to be sticky, now I see my ego, now I don’t! An ongoing game of becoming awake. As soon as I become smug with having discovered all of my current negative energy, some new ‘treasure’ of negative energy strikes me, usually from behind!

Pneumonia is an old buddy of mine. I first had it when I was 6 weeks old. I had it almost every change of season during my childhood. I’ve had it several times as an adult, and had it once already this winter. I always before this time could trace the faulty thought patterns to ‘insults’ and old wounds suffered during my disturbed childhood. Lay my wounds at the feet of my damaging, and damaged mother. Find the positive energy within myself to conquer my demons, and then forgive my Mother, and recover. This time I was slow to realize that the source of this pneumonia came from sadness that I still carried from mistakes that I had made in my own role as Mother, not from the delusions of my Mother, from my own delusions as I practiced being a mother on my own children.

I am so good at comforting the children of others that come to me and Wonder Woman for healing. We have amassed a huge extended family of men and women who treat us like the parents they wished that they had been brought up by. It was my intention to be that kind of wise and all seeing mother for my own children, and the wounds from my own child hood only allowed me to keep myself together for them and their father for part of the job. Another failed intention, and one that as my heart opened more, appeared to become insurmountable. When my feelings of inadequacy and suffering about not having easy answers more and more entered the scene for me at the age of 40, I had to find a way to grow up, and in my searching my ego allowed me to disrupt the lives of my own children. My illusion was that I would grow myself up to be a better mother for them, their experience, was one of disruption and even abandonment. We had all suffered from my decision to leave my ‘known’ and secure life, and strike out on a new path, one that I hoped would lead me to become an even more enlightened parent. In my current stressed state, I looked mostly at the damage that I feared I had caused my own children.

I’ve hit the wall on several attempts to write this post. I don’t want to even count how many ‘false’ starts I’ve made since our return home just after midnight, on July 4th…I’m very self conscious as I write this. I’ve false started this so many times because I’m truly committed to this being the most realistic statement that I can make about myself, and my current intention. It is my intention, by writing postings on this Blog Space, to create a book. I hesitate to announce this intention.

My children and I both know that my best intentions are sometimes not the same as my completed results. I am a person who starts things, usually brilliantly, then drops them sometimes in the middle, before I’m finished. I might then take up a new and related challenge. I did this with my own children. I divorced their father (and I was the person who started the divorce process) when my oldest daughter was 17 and 1/2, my next daughter was about to be 16, my oldest son was 14, my youngest daughter was 13, and my youngest son was 10. I believed at that time that the solid and loving, and honest relationship that I seemed to have with each of my children as they were growing up was sufficient to carry them through whatever upset my behavior to now become independent would cause for them.

I believed that each of their foundations with loving parents would be strong enough to carry them through. I also believed that I would be able to take whoever wanted to risk the new life that I then sought to develop on the West Coast with me, would be supported by me, and would be safe and happy. It turned out that I was wrong, and that is also another portion that I will get into later on in my book.

I don’t want my book to just be a book about myself. I want this book to reflect the political, social, and familial history and immense changes of the past amazing 70 years, as it has evolved for all of humanity, not just for me. Not just anecdotes about my experience, but a book that reflects the stories of the many women and men for that matter, that grew up like me, too young to serve in the 2nd World War, scared to death by the Cold War, and too old to fight in the Viet Nam war, and certainly too old for the current mess in Iraq. We guys who were just before the Baby Boomers. I want to make a difference by writing about us characters who managed to slip through some cracks but were influenced nonetheless by the hippie generation, the civil rights movement, the feminist movement, and the 60’s, the 60’s, the 60’s, we who lived through it all, came out the other side of it, and remained active participants in this crap shoot called life.

Although we were too young to serve in the 2nd World War, many of us were trained by our families and our communities from almost toddler age to be aware of what was happening on the global stage. We were ‘hometown’ boys and girls whose milk teeth were being cut on vast changes and life altering inventions…Inventions that took us from gas lights to neon glitz…from black and white movies to Technicolor…from manual typewriters to electric typewriters to word processors to laptops…from broadcast radio to black and white TV, to full spectrum color TV, to portable DVD players, to handheld phones that talk, record, transmit, take pictures, make movies, text messages, and deliver your email.

When I was a 4 years old, if a woman drove a car down our tree lined street, the gang of neighborhood kids would run after her and in front of her calling for everyone to get off the road, because there was a woman driving! The milkman would still deliver milk and cream to the entire neighborhood every day, the ice man would give us kids chips of ice to suck so we could relieve the heat of a summer’s day, and no one hardly ever moved out of the neighborhood!

On the night and morning of the 3rd and 4th of July, I was traveling home to San Francisco, having flown into Newark, New Jersey, just 10 Days earlier. In those 10 days, I stayed in Ridgefield, New Jersey, traveled in a car with the voice of a female ‘God’ as my navigator, reading traffic directions beamed to our car from a satellite orbiting the earth and correcting each of our deviations from her door-to-door directions, with my son-in-law and female partner Wonder Woman as co-drivers, to Takoma Park, Maryland…Ate dinner that night at a great Chinese restaurant with 18 family members, 12 of whom who had also driven that day into the Washington, DC area from, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New Jersey.

During that dinner I checked in with each of my children and grand children and discovered that not only did they love me, they also seemed to respect me. They were each kind and loving and really happy to be together with me and Wonder Woman, and with each other. The traces of pneumonia that still were clinging on seemed to totally dissipate during that delicious, rollicking, and happiest reunion of us all. At the end of the dinner, the wait staff brought out 2 giant birthday scoops of vanilla ice cream, each with a single candle, and placed them each on the 2 adjacent tables that were holding us all. One scoop in front of me, and the other scoop in front of my grandson who had turned 10 that very day of June 23, 2006. Everyone sang, “Happy Birthday” to both of us as we made our wishes and blew out our single candles and then passed the vanilla ice cream around for each of us to have a taste.

Wonder Woman and I slept that Friday night in the Queen sized bed of my son and his male spouse, partied that Saturday night with my 5 children, their 5 spouses, and my 6 grand children, in the house of my gay youngest son. There was one more guest, the mother of my son’s partner, a woman that we had grown to love in the years that we have known her, and who was greeted and made to feel at home by each of my children and grand children. She brought our number up to 19, my particular beloved, ‘lucky’, number.

We ate incredible food catered in the main by Whole Food Markets, were regaled all night with a loop of snapshots projected on a wall from a laptop computer that featured photos of my children from baby hood up, and my grand children likewise, me as a bride, my ex husband, his current wife, my current female spouse, and all of us growing up together during the various stages of our various and totally related, although frequently separated lives. The cake which I had help blowing the candles out to celebrate my 70th birthday, also celebrated my youngest sons and his partners 40th birthdays, the 16th birthdays of my 2 oldest (female and male) grand children and the 10th birthday of my grandson who had just moved to this country from Tokyo with his Mom and Dad, and younger brother.

On the birthday card that was part of the gift that my children home in this country now from getting their start as a family in Tokyo, gave me was this message written by my 10 year old grand son, “Happy birthday grandma. You are the most positive grandma, that I can recall”.

On Sunday, most of the family left to drive back to their homes in Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New Jersey, and we and my oldest daughter and son-in-law, who had flown in from Oregon, rested and played with my youngest son and his spouse, and left again navigated by she God, for Connecticut and the home of my youngest daughter, her 2 children, and her husband. Thus began a holy journey from one child’s house to another’s.

So we were driven after spending a few days with each of my children in New England, back and forth from Connecticut to Massachusetts and then back to Connecticut to visit for one last round all together except for my son and his spouse who were still recovering from their masterful hosting in Takoma Park, and my son and his family who were getting ready to host us in their home in New Jersey. We all congregated in the brand new just moved into home of my ex husband, and his wife, in a small Connecticut Sea Port town.

Now this man and I had been married for 19 years. Together we produced the 3 daughters and 2 sons who as adults are miraculously healthy, successful, happy, brilliant, loving and kind people. We are on the same pages all of us, politically, and socially conscious-wise. As a family and as an extended family, we all constitute a miracle. My ex husband and I met and celebrated that reality, humbled and awe struck, in brief intimate conversations that we continued to have together for that entire day.

On my 65th birthday, Wonder Woman gave me the gift of several amazing ‘experiences’…One of them was to have my palm read by Margy Henderson, a Shaman, Sound Healer, and Palm Reader extraordinaire. She gazed at my palm and exclaimed, “Wow! Your hand says right here that you have the ability to fall in love at first sight not just once, but twice!” That in fact was true for me, and it happened in this life, the first time that I laid eyes on my ex-husband, and the first time, that I laid eyes on Wonder Woman! Two times in this lifetime I have fallen in love with a man, then a woman at first sight!

I was sitting on a stone fence in Cold Spring Harbor, New York, in June 1954. I had just completed my first year of college, and I had just turned 18 years old. I was working for the first time ever at a Children’s Summer Camp. It was the YMHA’s New York City Summer Camp for underprivileged children, called in those days, The Eddie Cantor Camp. The staff had traveled up for training one week before the kids were to arrive, and one of the busses had broken down at the foot of the long and steep hill that was almost a mile from the entrance of the camp. We were waiting for the passengers on the broken down bus to trudge up that hill on this warm sunny June day. I watched the first of these weary walkers complainingly straggle in, and then this tall, dark, gorgeous hunk with a steamer trunk balanced on his shoulder came striding up the hill right in front of me. He was smiling, his hair was jet black, his eyes were huge and dark, dark brown, he was tanned, he was barely winded, and he was wearing an NYU sweatshirt, just like the one I had in my trunk! On the spot I decided what I was going to wear to the first meal in the dining room we were all scheduled to have together, and who I was going to manage to sit next to, and it totally worked out.

We had our first breakfast together the next morning, and we were an item from that first summer until our last summer working at that same camp two more consecutive summers. The third Spring that we knew each other, we got married on my 21st Birthday, the day before I graduated from NYU, another entirely different story to be told later.

That tall dark handsome young man was now a bald and totally stooped over, head unable to be lifted from his chest, shambling, hesitant speaker, suffering from advanced Parkinson Disease. He had to lift his eyes from under his prominent brow, large dark soulful eyes still, in order to make eye contact. His voice was soft and hesitant, words coming so slowly, manner so solemn and so sincere, and so pained, and so vulnerable. I knew that he was being on his best behavior. Because I also knew that he could be a demanding and maddening impatient, patient…Even so at this time what was most prominent was his openness and pleasure for this gathering.

His wife and I stole some alone time in the kitchen. I held out my arms and she came into them. We talked about a jar of preserved mangoes she told me she always had in case I needed them again. We were recalling with gleeful sentiment the first time when I had been in a kitchen of hers before, many Thanksgivings ago, and I was in charge of making the gravy for the Turkey. I had asked in this Rhode Island, country kitchen if there were any mangoes, and several of my kids just wanting an excuse to run out in the car together went fruitlessly looking for one. Now she was going to be always prepared for my arcane West Coast ‘needs’, mango jarred, and at the ready for whatever my next unreasonable requests re mangoes might be.

That’s when I had laughed and held my arms out to her, and she quickly came inside my embrace. I asked her how hard things were being, and she replied that I knew how difficult he could be from time to time, and then how sweet also. We held each other, and I thanked her for being a good friend to me. We were both surprised at my words, and then together found the truth in them. We rejoiced at the wonder of our mutual children, they had arrived to be in her care, in various numbers, at various times, disturbed by the divorce and the separations, wounded, angry, confused, hurt, troubled, and needy, and she and her family (she was childless) had gathered them in. They all called her father, “Gramps”, and her mother, “Grams”…We giggled together projecting our grand children into adult hood and imagining ourselves in our ‘70’s and ‘80’s being great grandma’s together, along with Wonder Woman who all the children adore, also being part of the picture, too. What is obvious is how the possibility of family has changed from 1936, to now. What has stayed constant is that elusive and transitory wonder, unconditional love. This was our new moment.