Güd wrtr

(for Georgann)

Pretend there’s a cup of water on the dashboard,
said the former ambulance driver,
and you must drive so carefully, so gently,
you don’t spill a drop.

I tried, I tried so hard after his surgery
to make the drive as gentle as a feather
drifting onto a cloud. But unexpected road
cracks, hidden bumps and train tracks—
even rumbled over so slowly—pained him.
I noted every wince crinkling his closed eyes.
I could not soften the blows enough.

Today, on the longest day of the year,
I drive you home from the hospital—
a thick strip of tape over your newest incision,
your belly chartreuse with four-day-old bruises,
clutching two pillows to your middle after
your second major surgery in a year
of near-constant pain.

Your pod of protectors wants it to stop—
we try to bump you to the surface for air,
we hover over and around you with
pills and puddings, sweet tea and toast,
books and distractions.
We are present; we are witnesses to your suffering.
But we are as helpless as the two new kittens
who await you at home—clueless, really,
stuck in our love.

We do not believe we are enough.

But you guide me through town as I gentle
the car around divots and cracks.
You direct me to the easiest onramp.
Mid-afternoon traffic parts, allows us
smooth passage over a typically bumpy sea.
We pull into the driveway, breathe,
look at each other across the stretch
of this long friendship.

You were perfect, you say.
You didn’t spill a drop.

I’m sitting here in my BF’s hospital room, one of the day’s trio of family members on watch. My BF had her gallbladder removed yesterday and is doing well, but, as she says about so many things, “It’s complicated.” Indeed, it is. She’s in great pain—as she was before the surgery—but now she’s got a nifty diagonal scar that intersects with the nifty vertical scar she earned last summer in this same hospital. She lifted her gown and showed me this afternoon. (She is not shy, my BF.) Her belly is beginning to look like a geometry book.

So today I had the great pleasure of getting to see both Andy, the oldest big kid, and Jena, the youngest big kid, at their mother’s bedside. I adore them both. If I could steal them away from their mom, I would, though now that they’re 36 and 34, I think it’s a little late for that.

Andy came to live with me in 1995 when his mother took in her first foster kid who became her second son. Andy was the first kid to occupy my back bedroom (which I still think of as Andy’s room, though Rebecca, R.G. and Lauren also took turns there), and I fell in love with the sweet big boy. We went through his first romance together—his mother and I distraught when his girlfriend dumped him—and while Andy lived with me and attended the sheriff’s academy, he met his future wife, Tiffany. They are now the parents of 5-year-old Evan and send me a Mother’s Day card every year, which always makes a little teary.

I met Jena when she was 12 and accompanied her mother to Wales. My BF had the opportunity to finish her bachelor’s degree in politics there and hauled her youngest child with her. (Andy stayed with his father in California.) I visited Jena and her mom shortly after they arrived in Swansea. Jena had just come home from her first day at school, very cute in her blue skirt and blue sweater with the blue and yellow tie, sashaying into the kitchen to announced, “Nigel fancies me.” I’m pretty sure I fell in love with her that day. I reminded her of this story the other day here in the hospital, and she laughed. “I remember him,” she said.

Jena sits here now, doing her trigonometry homework for her college summer school class. She is now a mom to Cine, who is 4. Jena hopes to be a physician’s assistant or a pediatrician someday. She will be a good one, whatever she decides. She has a huge heart, is a natural helper and so much her mother’s daughter that I could not do anything but adore her, too. She sits at her mother’s bedside for many hours every day.

The big kids are two of the best things my BF has ever produced. Her little kids are good people, too, though, as my BF says, their situation is complicated. So much is in life, it turns out. But Andy and Jena include me in the update phone calls about their mom’s status—as does the BF’s husband Ron, who is in Utah now with two of their younger kids. (It’s complicated.)

So I sit watching my BF sleep, one knee propped up high, her Harry Potter, round tortoise-shell glasses a little askew over her closed eyes, her hands resting just under her collarbone. She has much to recover from, but she will—surrounded by the love of her people, her big kids and family and husband, her many friends. Whether we are all at her bedside or not, we find it easy to be a mirror, to watch her sleep, to reflect back to her the love and devotion she has given each of us over so many years.

The challenge of these busy lives is that there’s not nearly enough time for naps. It’s hard to stop, say, of an afternoon, and put your bod down fully horizontical, as my guy Dick likes to say. Dick is a huge fan of naps, as was his mother, who faithfully took one every afternoon. She knew well how much naps restoreth the soul, and Dick agrees.

So we were delighted, a year and a half ago, while on vacation the Big Island (of Hawaii—as opposed to other big islands where we like to go—Vancouver Island, for example), to watch the napping honu of Kona Village. Here it is:

Lazy honu finds a good shelf for an afternoon nap at the Kona Village on the Big Island of Hawaii. (Photo/Dick Schmidt)

Every afternoon the honu (turtles) of the Kona Village haul out on the beach for their naps. They have it down. They are napping pros. They are fine inspiration. And Dick and I, so inspired, made sure to adhere to the local custom, though we found a softer place to nap.

Even so far away from the Kona Village, I continue to follow their custom of the afternoon nap whenever I can. Now I can—it’s summer. Nothing like a nap on a good bed, late afternoon light falling through the blinds in slants on the comforter, a cat or two on the bed.

I think I’ll take that advice right now…

My friend John Crandall signs his emails, “At your service,” which always makes me smile. He truly is a man in service to others—no, he is not a minister or chaplain or doctor, though he informally ministers to others all the time… not in a religious sense, but as a verb: “to give service, care or aid; attend, as to wants or necessities: to minister to the needs of the hungry” (dictionary.com).

He gives away so much of himself—as a writer and writing group facilitator, as a blacksmith, as a psychologist leading an anger management group, as cook/caterer, as husband to one and friend to so many others. And yet John would tell you, without a trace of irony, that this is what makes him happy, what fuels him, that in serving others he serves himself, too.

Some time ago I came across this quote by Jennifer Hoffman from “Uriel Heals”:

You are here to serve others, to be a light for them, to participate in their lessons and to help heal humanity. You are also here to serve yourself, to heal your karma, to enable your soul’s growth and reconnect to the Source. Your challenge is to find a balance between serving others and yourself so that you can accomplish the tasks that you established for yourself in this lifetime and even go beyond that. How you view your role in serving others is an important part of this process.

Neale Donald Walsch, author of the Conversations With God books, sends free daily inspirations (sign up at http://www.nealedonaldwalsch.com), and I saved this one:

On this day of your life, dear friend, I believe God wants you to know that your job, your invitation from the Universe, is to give people back to themselves.

You can do this every day, in a hundred ways. Why not practice it with the first three people you encounter after reading this?

It is really a very easy thing to do, yet it can affect a person mightily. All you have to do is look for the best in that person, and then show it to him or her, right then and there. Describe it. Admire it. Thank him or her for it.

Do this for three people every day and watch how your whole life can change. At last you will realize what you are doing here. All the rest will be just stuff and nonsense.

This is the essence of what my friend John does—and what so many others do, too. Be a light for others. Give people back to themselves, as well as serving ourselves and healing our own karma. No small tasks. But really not difficult either.

Let’s try that, shall we? Let’s put it out there. Let’s ask every day: How may I serve? How can I find balance in serving others and myself? The ways will appear. I promise.

I just wanna say this is all my BF’s fault. I have read and enjoyed others’ blogs, but I was truly not thinking of doing my own until my BF started hers.

This is a woman who does not consider herself a writer, though in 1993 when she and I were wandering the California State Fair, she composed a personalized plate for my car: GUD WRTR. I protested, “I can’t put that on my car. People will think I’m bragging.” And she said, “Not spelled like that.” It’s still on my car.

She’s a hoot, my BF.

My BF and I became BFs in the late 1980s when she went off to college in Swansea, Wales, and asked me to write to her. “I’ll be your best friend,” she said, which made me laugh. I had no idea she was serious. Then the little thin, folded blue letters began arriving regularly, I began responding regularly, and we did, indeed, become best friends because of putting words on paper. In ink.

My BF started her blog because she’s been writing regularly with a writing group I host on Saturday mornings. Several people in that group have blogs, and though they are younger and way more hip than my 50-something BF and myself, it made sense to encourage writers to put their writing out into the ether.

My good friend Gina Spadafori, a nationally syndicated pet columnist, has an amazing blog (www.petconnection.com/blog) that covers everything from puppy mills to the best cars for dog hauling.  She and her colleagues—all volunteers—broke the huge story about the pet food recall in 2007. She dazzles me with her writing output and passion for writing about companion animals.

So I am coming late and somewhat reluctantly to this party, and I don’t know what to wear, much less what to say.  This is embarrassing for a professor of journalism at a community collage to admit. My journalism colleague at Sacramento City College, Dianne Heimer, is of a similar vintage, and she has her newswriting students blogging like mad. I don’t have a Facebook page, and I don’t text much on my old-fashioned flip cell phone. It takes too long, among other things. A phone call is much faster. I do have a Twitter account, but I don’t use it, really. All this social media frankly befuddles me.

But I will be 52 at the end of July, and I hope to live a long life, so I figure that even someone with a half century under her belt can start to embrace these newfangled things.  I own a laptop, for heaven’s sake. Sure, it’s a five-year-old iBook G4, but I love it.

The Macs were not my idea originally, either. My late husband, Cliff Polland, talked me into spending $3,000 on a 512K Macintosh computer in 1984. We had just married a few months earlier, and we did not have an extra $3,000 in our lives. “I gotta typewriter,” I said.

And Cliff said, with such prescience it stunned me, “Toots, this is gonna change your life.” He was right. He set up a digital darkroom at his small-town newspaper before the Big Paper in the Big City Nearby did. He died before papers began using digital cameras every day, but he’d love that they do. New technology did not scare him a bit. And it didn’t take long before I was a huge champion of all things Apple. I still am. (iPhones intimidate me, but I have to say that from what I’ve seen of them, they look way cool.)

So thank you, Georgann, for urging me to Get With It and start my own blog. Thank you for helping me create this one. (You might want to check out my BF’s blog: emmaswan.wordpress.com. It has recipes and good photos, too.)

I can’t imagine that even six people will want to read any of this, but it’s time to practice what I preach to writing students again and again: Write it. Don’t fight it. Put it out there. See what happens. You never know. If nothing else, the blog will inspire you to keep you writing, if you’re lucky.

And anything to keep writing our art out is a good, good thing.