X's

It's hard to wash the X out of your clothes.

Here you are, divorced, and you feel as if a big X is marked across your chest. You go to church, to the grocery store, to work and that X is flashing in a neon sort of way letting the world know that you failed.

Big time.

You feel that even your license plate transforms into an “X” so that those driving in your vicinity can keep their distance as if you were in a Student Driver car situation and didn't know the rules of the road.

Great.

You hear everyone say, “It wasn't your fault. You're better off without him/her.” Etcetera, etcetera. Blah, blah, blah.

Uh-huh. Right.

But you know that your children would be better off with their family intact because then they may not have felt as if they were tossed out of a boat during a storm and no one threw them a life raft. You know that they probably felt as if they were treading water for no fault of their own and the sharks in the dark were circling. But you were in no shape to help them because you were in the shark's teeth trying to save your own life . . . such as it was.

Somehow or other you were able to swim to shore and gasp for breath on dry land. Exhausted. But now what do you do?

You look around. This doesn't look the same. You're on a different island and you have nothing. What to do? What to do?

Think Swiss Family Robinson.

Okay, so they had their whole family dashed together on shore and were able to rebuild their lives as a whole. And lookey there . . . God even brought a girl to the island to answer the dilemma of, “How are we going to survive and extend our existence on this land?” Not only were they able to rescue an organ for music, clothes, and sails to make clothes, foodstuff, books, an ostrich, but also a donkey! Who knew?

So . . . hang in there.

 Sooner or later the sun will shine and fade that big 'ol X on your shirt. It may not fade it completely. You may have to physically cut it out of your life, I mean your T-shirt, with a pair of scissors.

But it's easier to wash or cut out an X off your clothes than bleach the emotions out of your heart.

© nancy 9.14.2009

NINE ELEVEN

Today we are all remembering where we were the instant we heard.
How can we forget?
We shouldn't.

My children were safely sent off to school and I was preparing for my day when my mother called me and told me to turn on my TV.

I barely left it for the next two to three weeks.

My husband and I had been to Switzerland on a two-week vacation. We had been separated but had gotten back together, so this trip was special to me. The first week was with a hiking group that my husband liked to do with a friend. While the group hiked for 4-6 hours per day, I hung out at the Haus and took pictures of the beautiful little village of S-charl where we stayed every night. The next week we took off by ourselves seeing wonderful places aboard the trains. One stop was Zermatt which fascinated me since seeing a Disney movie called 'Third Man on the Mountain' when I was younger. It is not as well known as some of the other Disney movies but one of my favorites nonetheless.

With my mind full of scenic visions and my floor scattered with memorabilia and photos, I was about to put together a scrapbook of our venture across the ocean. Later, I began to see just how lucky we were to have been on a plane coming back to America on the 30th of August.

But right then the phone rang and all I could do was sit in front of the TV with my mouth open, my eyes wide, and pray, barely able to think of anything else. All else paled in comparison and life was reduced down to its simplest form.

Life and death.

Every day I prayed for survivors to be rescued and prayed they would hang on until someone, who was brave, risked their own life to go in all the rubble and find them. I never want to see anyone jump out of a building again. My tears were nothing compared to those who lost loved ones.

I pray for the children left without parents.
I pray for wives left without their husbands.
I pray for husbands left without their wives.
I pray for parents who lost their children and who are now taking care of their grandchildren.
I pray for families who were ripped apart when all they wanted to do was to be together.

It's not fair.


© nancy 9.11.2009

SUPERMAN

I used to watch a show on T.V. on Sunday nights. It was called “Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman”. I came back to it week after week for the romance. I was hooked. (Teri Hatcher and Dean Cain really put on a show and let the sparks fly . . . not to mention the rest of the crew.) And God bless you, Deborah Joy LeVine, for a wonderful script.

After all, what woman wouldn't want to BE Lois? I pictured myself in her shoes as she was being constantly rescued by Superman. The dumb-dumb didn't know that he was really Clark Kent. Duh!!! Take off his glasses and put some on, Lois!

But Clark was the real deal. He did what every woman with a romantic soul wanted . . . he listened.

He gave Lois his undivided attention and actually looked into her eyes while he listened. Yum.

And he said all the right words. Melt.

And he let Lois be Lois and fell in love with her in spite of herself. Mmmmmm. Triple Yum Yum.

Finally, her eyes were opened after years of steady Clarkdom and she realized that her hero lived within her best friend.

So. all you guys out there, go out and rent all the seasons of 'Lois and Clark', absorb every episode (the ones before they got different writers and it began to fall apart), and get your Superman on.

Better yet . . . get your Clark on. If you watch closely he'll give you some clues, ideas, pointers, on how to be the Superman to your Lois in a real Clark world.

Believe it or not, just about every woman, in this politically correct equal opportunity world, still desires a man who can sweep her off her feet and fly her to the moon.

(P.S. I usually take all the pictures that feature in my Blog but Dean was busy so I used a picture of him from my DVD's. Please don't sue me all you folks who made up and produced the DVDs. I won't do it again.)


© nancy 9.8.2009

HUMPTY DUMPTY

She couldn’t put it off any longer. All Tatti ever knew was the daily raising of her three children, the PTA meetings, Sunday school, laundry, cleaning up after her family, Garden Club, Book Club, dinner parties for her husband’s partners, taking care of her own parents and everything else in between.

Now she found herself without her husband, her children graduated from college and her parents in and out of the Emergency Room . She was no longer in a beautiful 3000 square foot house with a well manicured yard that she landscaped and sweated in to achieve. No. She was existing in a 500 square foot apartment with door slamming neighbors.

People had the nerve to ask her, “How are you doing?”

She decided to have the guts to answer truthfully, “Not so good.”

Tatti found it interesting to see people’s responses to this truth. They normally heard, “Fine” to this enquiry but they did not know how to respond to the negative truth. So Tatti kept telling people the truth and let the responses fall as they may. She was tired of faking fine when she wasn’t fine. Tired of smiling when she didn’t feel like smiling. Tired of putting on a good Southern face to save face. To really fake it she would need plastic surgery to lift the bags under her eyes from the ten billion tears she had cried at night which seeped under her skin to lodge in the morning in two sagging pouches. Maybe, she wondered, if she looked “Fine” she could fake her own self out and begin to actually believe she was “Fine”. Nothing like a little denial to lift one’s spirits.

Fine. The question was, “Would her insurance cover cosmetic procedures?” The bags under her eyes weren’t life-threatening, but maybe if she had a letter from her therapist sent to the insurance company saying she needed it for her emotional and mental uplifting?

No?

Fine.

Tatti looked the word up in the dictionary and realized it had many variations.
#15. healthy; well:
#6. delicate in texture; filmy:
#13. delicate or subtle:
#14. bright or clear:
#22. in nautical terms...as close as possible to the wind:
#1. of superior or best quality: of high or highest grade
#2. choice, excellent, or admirable:
#8. highly skilled or accomplished:

Maybe she was looking at it all wrong. Maybe she was fine but in a different definition sort of way.

Perhaps she was delicate and filmy and as close to the wind as was possible but she wasn’t going to blow away. She could be #6 and #22 and strive to reach #1 even though she was tarnished.
Perhaps all she needed to work on was #26, "to make fine or finer, esp. by pulverizing"or #28 “by filtration”.

If she could pulverize her thoughts and emotions and put them through some sort of filtration system, then would she come out “fine”? Or crushed into so many pieces that she could never be put back together again like Humpty Dumpty? After all, the original drawing for that Mother Goose Rhyme was never a fragile egg sitting on a wall. But if the egg fell off the wall and cracked open leaving the yolk separated from the white, then how could it ever be put back together again?

Tatti wondered if her marriage was like an egg . . . two people of different colors encased in a shell. Only her shell fell off the 'til-death-do-us-part wall and she found herself broken in tiny pieces with her guts split wide open. Could her marriage still exist in a scrambled mess? After all, an egg was an egg whether it was sunny side up, boiled, or scrambled, right?

Yes . . . but it doesn't look the same . . . feel the same.

© nancy 9.1.2009

BREATHE
If I could tell someone, who is going through difficulties, just one thing, it would be to

BREATHE.

In the year 2000, which BTW sounds so futuristic yet is now the past, I breathed a lot.

I also cried a lot.

I began listening to the one Spanish radio channel because all the others kept playing 

somebody-done-somebody-wrong songs,

 or songs that brought memories up in my head like Shania Twain's

"You're The One".

I would be at a stoplight, crying in my car, and I knew that the person in the Honda next to me might be thinking in their southern head, “Bless her heart. I bet her cat just died or her mom, dad, husband . . . "” They'd be right, in a sense. My marriage had died, and I was grieving. So I decided to only listen to the upbeat rhythms of espanol which I could let kookaracha through my heart without effect. I could pretend that they were singing about spicy dishes or dancing in the streets even though they were probably covering the same relationship break-ups.

 

Denial was the name of my new best friend.

At any rate, when the tears would begin to well up in the corner of my eyes while watching a movie in the theater, I realized that if I took a slow, deep breath and let it out slowly that the tears in my eyes would recede. A few more slow breaths and I could sit there and not make a complete fool of myself crying out loud. I began using this technique at the very onset of a thought of a tear and it would work even better. The bags under my eyes could begin to recede. 

You might be going through something right now that makes T.V. watching, Hallmark commercials, puppies, and life, in general, bring on a wave of emotion to which I am saying,

breathe. 

When you feel the emotional tsunami coming , take a slow, calculated breath and let it out slowly.

Tell yourself,

breathe,

and keep breathing. If you talk to yourself you'll realize that there is a daughter, a son, a cat . . . who

needs
you
 to

breathe

even though you just want to jump off the nearest Empire State Building. That's messy.

Don't do it.

KEEP BREATHING

I am learning that the moment I wake up in the morning is a good time to do just that and I've added 'praying for others'. If you wake up in the morning and start praying or thinking of others rather than "poor little me", it will help you get your mind off yourself. Give twenty dollars out of your wallet, purse, pant's pocket to that person carrying a cardboard sign at the corner of the busy street you drive by and be thankful it's not you 'cause in this economy, it very well could be any one of us out there begging to live.

If they want to

keep breathing,

you should too.

As long as you keep breathing there's the chance that you will wake up one morning and the sun will be shining and everything you've ever wanted is right there in front of your eyes. You're worth it.

Don't give up.

BREATHE

© nancy 8.28.2009

FLOWER
I was wondering what I could write about this afternoon and came up with the word 'flower'. Why? Because I love flowers and I love taking pictures of flowers. I like planting them and watching them grow and bloom. They're fascinating.

When I bought a macro lens, I got deeper into the blooms and saw how intricate and sensuous they can be which made me think about God and His creations. You are always hearing people say, “Write about what you know” and I know a little about flowers. 

I looked up the word 'flower' in Webster's and the definition reads : 1. the blossom of a plant.

I looked up 'blossom' to see if further details would unfold: 1. the flower of a plant.

Hmm . . . not much help. It smacked of the chalked equation on blackboards in math class: if A equals B and B equals C, then A equals C. See?

Perhaps the next definition of 'flower' would be more helpful: 2.a the part of a seed plant comprising the reproductive organs and their envelopes if any, esp. when such envelopes are more or less conspicuous in form and color.

First of all, you have to wonder about the minds who wrote this stuff because it is devoid of emotion, elation, excitement, anything. You can hear the guy in Ferris Bueller's class drone on . . . Anyone? . . . Anyone? . . . Bueller?

Huh? Wiping the drool off the mental desk of my mind I had to realize that the second definition was more graphic than I expected or wanted, but it does define some of those macro shots I took, I must admit. Webster's then offered a complete diagram of a flower in cross-section with all of its body parts named. I know flowers aren't human, but the names of its parts sure sound male/female. The diagram should have a rating on it like 'NC17' or 'Parent's Discretion Advised for 13 or Below' because your progeny, of whom you are so proud of at the I-can-read age of 5, will deftly peruse definition number 2a, then ask you in their sweet, innocent voice, 'what's an ovary'? You may not be comfortable or ready to discuss that word yet because it's hard for you to even let it blossom out of your own mouth.

So, take them by their pudgy, little hands, smile and suggest going out in the garden instead. Smell the roses. When they are sixteen, you can let them look through your macro lens and get a glimpse of a blossom in all its exposed glory.

(c) nancy 8.6.2009

THE SEVEN SECOND RULE

In 2000 I made up The Seven Second Rule.

A friend of mine and I found ourselves separated from long term marraiges so we stuck together like glue to help each other get through the days. We were High School friends but had not seen each other since graduation. I learned from another High School friend that my other friend was going through the same thing I was, and she suggested I call her, so I took seven seconds out of my day to 'dial' her number and connect. It was seven seconds that would prove to give me hours/years of friendship.

And that's all about the Seven Second Rule . . . taking seven seconds out of your day/life to connect. (I may have to rename it The Ten Second Rule because now you have to include the area code when dialing someone on your cell phone.)

We began discussing the fact that, if someone really cared about you, was seven seconds too much to ask?

Our answer was always a resounding, “No!”

Yet some folks consider seven seconds to be too much.

Really?

Because we can take our phones with us wherever we go, then “I couldn't find the time/I have been so busy” becomes a non-issue. Just be honest and say, “I didn't want to talk to/with you”. That would be better than side-clicking someone, which is the new thing you can do to the caller, throwing them directly into voicemail, breaking their train of thought to the point they end up stuttering, “Hey . . .  um . . . ” and are left hanging in mid-air with the phone raised in front of their faces in confused silence.

Cell phones were still new to some people in 2000. But if your girlfriend/boyfriend had a cell phone, and gave that number to you, then it was deemed even more personal. “Yea, let me give you my cell phone number” and you were instantly special. Giving that number to someone implied you were there for that person 24/7. And you would return their calls as soon as possible, (no lie), if you truly were in a board meeting. And if they were super special, you could put them on speed dial.

Now we use our cell phones as our primary phones because some of us do not have a landline. Cell phones these days are so small that they can go silently into the movie theater with you, rest in your pants pocket while you tee up or, should I delicately say, go into the bathroom with you. So while you're sitting there (girls) or standing there (guys) for more than ten seconds off and on all day, you could use The Seven/Ten Second Rule. (I can hold the phone in one hand and punch in the numbers and, with practice, you can too, so there's no excuse). Remember to flush, but don't flush your friends down the commode. Call them.

Aren't they worth more than seven/ten seconds of your precious day?

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out the answer.

(c) nancy 8.4.2009