Memoria

Why the Starbucks cup at the beginning of a post on memory?  You see, once a week, at least, my dad and I have been hanging out at this well-known coffee shop and sharing our thoughts on the world, the past, and the future.  But you see, my dad is losing his memory.  Dads has the beginnings of dementia.  He has suffered small strokes and his short-term memory has been the victim of this.  A few nights ago a friend asked me how he was doing, and my reply was,"I cannot talk to you about this."  It's too much for me to discuss this subject with people, but I'd like to share about it here, through my writing - the humor, the pain, and the sadness.  It affects not only my father, but my children, my siblings, and especially my mom, who deals with it on a daily basis.

Dads walks very slow.  That's the first indication that something is amiss.  Am I used to this?  I'm getting there.  For someone like me who has the East Coast stride, walking slow takes a bit of adapting.  Perhaps slowing me down a bit is a good thing, seeing as most of the time I'm at 0-60.

The first wake up call was when he and I went to get salad. His assignment was to get mushrooms.

"What are those things you put on salad?"

"Mushrooms, Dads."

"You know?  Those things!  Those little things."

"Yes, Dads.  They're called mushrooms."

"Oh yeah.  Mushrooms."

I was in a panic.  Dads had forgotten the name for a simple item.  What scared me even more was the look on his face.  It was one of sadness, and fear.

How could I bridge the abyss? I can't.  I can only be there to help him along.  Dads can remember how to get to churches in Boston which he visited in his teens, yet he cannot remember why we need to buy his niece a card for her engagement.   But he is always, and forever will be, my Dads.  Our talks over coffee still bring forth his wisdom and hope, which I so need in a world which seems to change at lightning's pace.

I take Dads out for coffee and trips to the post office nearly every day.  My mom needs a break.  I know that people on the inside of it all can become tired, trying to cope with the care of someone with dementia.

I admire how she is handling it with humor.  Could I do it?  I don't know.  We are all trying - my mom, me, my brothers, their wives.  It's definitely a family effort.  And we do it because we love Dads so much.  

So the journey continues.  Each and every day is an adventure.  All I know is I'm glad Dads is along for the ride with me.  

xoxo MausiGal

Keep An Open Mind - Ride, She Said!

I eat crow.

Yes, let's start off this post where I confess what I said a year ago to not only my kidlets but my family and friends as I began dating again.  Oh yes...

As I flipped through profiles and emails on online dating sites I dinged people who owned motorcycles and dogs.  "No way will I ever go out with a guy who has a bike or owns a dog!" I would say to my kidlets.  "No flippin' way!"  My kidlets are twelve, and they would love to antagonize me as to who Mr. Date would be.  Would he drive a sports car?  Or a beat-up minivan?  Would he be a cat person?  Or would he be one who owned snakes?  The possibilities were endless.  However, I had my standards.

No motorcycles.  No dogs.

Why?  I kept stereotyping motorcycle guys to be overly macho, and dog owners to be, well, overly attached to their pets and wimpy.  For those of you who have done the online dating scene before, you know how it can go.  There are all these profiles - just TOO many - and to differentiate between the potential date can be tough.  The whole process is awful.  I hated it, and agonized over it.  How could one possibly know someone from a blurb on the Internet and a few pictures?

So what did I do?  I went to a psychic.  Yes, no logic rules when one is in the dating scene in one's 40-something years.  However, I received the best advice in a long time from the psychic that one could ask for.

Keep an open mind.

Creepy?  She said I would meet someone in October who worked with children.  I did.  But above all, she kept telling me that hot, August night, (gosh, sounds like some sort of Harlequin novel), "Keep an open mind."  What happened?  I met someone who adored motorcycles and had a dog.  My boys rolled their eyes and said, "Nice going, mom."

Keep an open mind.

I went for my first ride on a motorcycle since college a few years ago.

It was on a 1970 Harley.  How cool is that?  Even I was impressed, the girl who had refused to consider someone because they rode a bike and owned a dog.  For about six months I had spent hours with Breadman, the person who not only had a dog but loved bikes, and off we drove for over two hours through the countryside of New Hamsphire.

Today's trip took us off to Peterborough, New Hampshire.  Our original destination on the Kawasaki Z11 (I think I got that righ!) was King Arthur Flour Cafe and Bakery in Vermont.  Upon rethinking, we decided upon Burdick's Chocolates in Walpole, New Hampshire.  However, spring in New England can be a finicky beast.  It was cold!  For the ride up I kept thinking to myself, "Your hands will hold dark hot chocolate.  Your hands will hold dark hot chocolate"  as my fingers became more and more nimble, despite the gloves protecting them.  Instead we stopped at a cute little shop, Ava Marie Chocolates, and then had diner food, in Peterborough.  Perfect!  

Wow!  I notice so much more when on a motorcycle versus in a car.  Granted, while on a motorcycle I am a passenger, and have the opportunity to observe.  When I'm a passenger in a car I usually sleep, I result of being carsick so much when I was younger.  Today I saw so much that I wanted to whip out my iPhone and photograph.  I saw a store that bore the name of one of the kidlets - both first and last name. 

There was the religious bumper sticker worn off that was so telling.  It was suppose to read, "Got eternal life?"  Instead, it now read, "Got eternal li e?" Oh, how to photograph that would have been a gem!  

There are the mom and pop stores throughout the New Hampshire countryside that make me realize that all is well with the world.  Why? The small, the familiar, where one can enter and know that they will be greeted as if they were a local, even if they drove seventy-five miles from Boston.   Breadman and I talked this weekend about where we'd eventually like to be when we retire.  I think I'd like to be in a small, Vermont town, as long as it has a good library.  But upon discovering New Hampshire today, I was surprised.  I always thought of New Hampshire as being the Pheasant Lane Mall.  Oh, does my suburban upbringing ring loud and true.  

Keep an open mind.

From motorcycles to guys with dogs to small towns in New Hamsphire, never stop learning.  Keep an open mind. 

Ride on!

xoxo MausiGal

A Tale of Two Twins

Thirteen years ago on April 19th at 4:25 and 4:26 my life changed forever.  Into my world entered twelve pounds of babies - two to be exact.  Kidlet A and Kidlet B  arrived on a rainy Wednesday afternoon, of which I had been denied a latte just hours before by my doctor, as I was going in for an emergency C-section.

That's how I knew they were going to be born.  After months of being disgusted by coffee, I had this intense craving for the bean on the morning of April 19th.  And at Sally Ann's Bakery in Concord, I ordered up that latte and was ready for my weekly visit to the hospital.  As Dads drove to the hospital with me for my weekly twin checkup, I got ready for yet another day of lying in bed and being checked.

Little did I know April 19th would be the day that Kidlet A and Kidlet B would arrive.  At that point I didn't know if they were boys, girls, or one of each.  We didn't even have two girls names picked out.  Should they have been girls, one would have definitely been Dagney, after the character in Ayn Rand's book.  Gosh, how I loved the name Dagney!  But I also adored the names I had chosen for Kidlet A and Kidlet B.

And so thirteen years have passed.  With twins, life is different.  Yes, parenting is a pleasure and a pain, we'll all admit that.  But I'm going to be full of myself and say being a mom to a dynamic duo brings situations like no other.  The kidlets are fraternal twins which look nothing alike.  Over the years we've had bizarre encounters.  I've been asked such things as, "Are you sure they're twins?"  There was also the time in the supermarket checkout line when a foreign person's son began to lick one of the kidlet's cheeks upon hearing they were twins.  Why?  I don't know.  All I do know is the minute I got to the almighty Volvo I smeared Kidlet (I won't reveal to them which one was affected) with cleansing wipes.  Weirdness.

We celebrated their birthday with a family party on Sunday, the day before the horrific attack in Boston.  When I received the call from Mama about the Boston bombing the kidlets and I were in Old Navy.  My first reaction was to go on with normalcy - keep shopping then onto Barnes and Noble and not tell them their beautiful city had been marred.  But I didn't chose that option.  I told them there had been a terrorist attack, that we needed to stay informed, and life needed to go on.

My sons were to visit Washington, D.C. later in the week, and I'll admit I was nervous.  But what do I want for my kidlets?  I want the world to be a place that they can explore, learn, and meet people who expand their minds.  I want them to see the things that I have seen - the Andes mountains at sunset, the stars from the Amazon jungle, Lapland in the summertime.  And yes, I want them to go back to downtown Boston with me on a summer day and stroll those very same streets we have walked prior to April 15th, relaxing afterwards on Boston Common with a ride in the Swan Boats.  Life is meant to be lived.

I remember reading Richard Rohr a few years ago about how we live in a culture of hate.  We can no longer do this.  We need to live in a culture of love and acceptance, and this must be built for our children.  In order to do that, we cannot live behind closed walls, behind computers, and texting on iPhones.  To see humanity, interact with one another, and gather the human experience is essential.

Define yourself by what you love, not what you hate.  A promise to my twins.

Poet's Statement

(This was an assignment for my Poetry Workshop.  I really enjoyed writing it, and thought I would publish it here.  Enjoy.  -xoxo MausiGal)

I saw myself as a poet long before I envisioned myself a writer of fiction.  In high school and college I was well-known for crafting verse rather than my literary works.  So, when the opportunity arose this semester to return to the writing of poetry, I welcomed the opportunity.  For years the busy-ness business of life has left me without the time to think about poetry - both in writing and reading, other than those wonderful poems that appear in The New Yorker each week, which leave me pondering for the few moments I have before I drift off to sleep.

I found it difficult to write on demand - I’ll be honest about that.  In the past I could compose poetry on a whim: by Lake Champlain in Vermont, at my desk in school in between classes, and in the checkout line at the supermarket on the back on an old receipt.  But this semester?  I was forced to go beyond my limits and explore topics which I would not necessarily consider on my own.  I missed the freedom of being able to compose when I wanted to, and to which subject I wanted to address.  But what did this do for me?

It became the catalyst for the writing of more poetry...outside of the assignments.

This morning as I drove through the public library parking lot at 6:30 am an idea struck me, and I whipped out the iPhone and began to write a poem.  I was inspired by my hometown local diner at such an early hour.  The rush of getting that idea out in a unique manner through words was alive!  

I’ll admit I’ve had my frustrations as a poet this semester.  I prefer free verse.  I am an over-achiever, and so fear that the use of free verse makes me appear lazy.  I have so tried to write in iambic pentameter.  Oh, how I fail!  For the life of me I cannot do syllables in English.  Give me Spanish - no hay problema.  ¿Pero inglés?  Hay problema.  I so hate making my poems into cutesy pictures as well.  Who wants to see a poem in the shape of something?  My snarky side comes out and scoffs.  Sorry, but I find it so kitsch.  I wrote a poem about a pinup girl.  Would anyone really want to see boobs and hips in a poetic form?  (Well, probably, dare I ask!)  For me free verse is accessible to all.  It is unpretentious.  When formed correctly, with the right breaks among lines and stanzas it has amazing impact upon the reader.  

The poem which had the greatest impact on me this semester was One Art by Elizabeth Bishop (Vendler, p. 175).  I have this poem photocopied and posted in my office next to my computer.  In addition, I have highlighted the lines, “Write it!”  Every now and then we, as readers, find a poem which speaks directly to us.  This was my poem.  I have dealt with huge loss over the past few years, primarily my divorce after fifteen years of marriage.  I worry about the loss of my father, who suffers from CLL (chronic lymphocytic leukemia).  He was given three years to live six years ago.  I have yet to compose a poem about him.  But when I do write, I try to make him proud.

Like Elizabeth Bishop, I see myself writing about everyday emotions in the future, perhaps even loss.  However, as she does with keys, a house, and continents, I also wish to combine everyday items into my works so that the reader may view the ordinary into the extraordinary.  I want my readers to be taken to new emotional heights with my poems, to undergo a paradigm shift in their way of thinking.  Hours, days, months, maybe even years after reading my works I want them to have a moment where they exclaim, “Wow!  I need those words by my computer!”  For the reader to grow, transform from my words would be the ultimate honor.  

Poetry is a glimpse, for me, into the madness and wonders of the world.  A poem can capture you up in a matter of minutes with just words, then stay with you and never leave.  This semester I’ve tried to explore such topics as mania, alcoholism, and self-identity.  Where will my fountain pen go next?  One can never know.  I’ll have to go take a drive and see...

Procrastination Liberation

I've blogged again and again about what a busy person I am, to the point where people may think I'm bragging.  But upon thinking this morning, I wonder how much of it I just bring upon myself with procrastination.  Truly, could I do a lot more if I budgeted my time differently? 

Ah, the Type A overachiever in me!  If I stop eating and found a more efficient way to shower could I possibly have time to blog every day and write out more postcards?

So not logical.  But is there any logic when a mania sets in?  Definitely not.  Unfortunately I'm not in a manic state right now to get through the projects I need to get through - a huge lesson plan for Spanish class, the need to view "Death in Granada" for Saturday (sounds so upbeat), type a reflection for Tuesday for my mentor class, create a poet's statement (yeah, about my life as a poet) for Tuesday, and redo my poetry portfolio for Tuesday.

All this pretty much on the Hotbox computer which dies on a whim from overheating, and has a keyboard that sticks and doesn't like to type A, Y, and refuses to do Spanish accents so I have to cut and paste them.  Oh, and let's add that I can no longer cut and paste - I have to go up to the tool bar and do it from there.

/scene.  Enough kvetching for one blog post.  I'm done in twenty-seven days with this madness that I've imposed upon myself.  Then I'm sure I'll find another madness.  That's MausiGal.  I need to have activity in my life - whether that be just reading a book on a Friday night.  I am never bored. 

But instead of working on my lesson plan, right now I'm blogging, and listening to music on Pandora.  I want to bake cookies.  I want to catch up on scanning postcards.  I want to organize my lingerie drawer.  I want to chat with Sis in the Netherlands.  I want, I want, I want!  But I can't. 

I suppose to put out a quality product I do need these breaks of thought.  This past weekend I went for my first motorcyle ride since college and had an amazing time. Could I have been working on my projects?  Of course.  But I was so relaxed and happy after this weekend that I feel like I am ready to get these next twenty seven days conquered. 

For the next twenty minutes I will write out postcards instead of about immigration and how seventh graders may view it.  The fountain pen is mightier than the sticky keyboard.  Music playing, cat sitting right next to the HotBox (for the heat, of course), I am ready to be rejuveniated before digging in for the final stretch.

My Favorite Things!

I'm trying to make today a good day.  I truly am.  It started off with my usual waking up at 4am, and then getting the java brewing in the Keuring.  After, I race downstairs to throw a load of laundry in.  All is good.

What did I do next?  I make the mistake of checking my work email.  A scathing electronic correspondence greeted me at my screen, and then another with a question that will leave me unnerved throughout the weekend.

Note to self - stop checking work email over the flippin' weekend!  It does me NO GOOD!  I need to take the weekends to just relax and escape from it all.  I truly do.

So, to refresh myself I'd like to list some of my favorite things.  Yes, I need to improve my mood.  I used to make lists when I was younger.  Here goes things that I love, albeit it's a materialistic list.  Of course I adore my family, friends, and pets.  Isn't that a given?  Presented below are the those items that make me smile, perk me up, and just get me out of a funk.

-venti caramel macchiatos with whipped cream
-young adult books
-Volvos
-moonstones
-happy text messages (I actually save them and re-read them like letters)
-postcards
-fountain pens
-stuffed animals, especially mice!
-gnomes
-good luck charms
-bread with butter and jam/marmalade
-Burdick's chocolates and dark hot chocolate
-Ticonderoga pencils
-my Chromebook baby, which I miss :(
-my Gama-Go wallet.  Love Gama-Go!
-iPhone (I've become such an addict to the CrackBox)
-cookie cutters (ah, see above the new additions to my collection!)
-my cobalt blue Kitchen Aid mixer
-Pandora radio

So, the list could go on and on, I'm sure.  Tell me what you love.  Share!  Please do!  Make me happy!

xoxo MausiGal

The End Is Near

Right now people are starting to wonder.  I have an apocalyptic title to this entry, and then above my banner seems Biblical.

No worries.  I'm jamming out to Kei$a, drinking my second cup of coffee at 5:23 am, and was just chasing my cat, Avi, to see him run up the wall.  Life is good.

So what's the scoop?  I have a month left of the intense life I've been living for the past year of graduate classes.  I decided last February to dive into completing a Master's +30 program to move up the teacher's ladder at my school.  Most people do this over a period of years.

I decided to do it in about a year.

Far be it for MausiGal to do anything half way, right?  I began last February with a course in dealing with difficult parents.  Right away I loved being back in the classroom as a student.  But I discovered one thing about myself.  As an adult learner I strive for perfection.  I need that 4.0.  I was the same in graduate school when I finished my master's degree five years ago.

I am currently in two graduate classes - a Spanish one at Merrimack College and a poetry workshop at Rivier University.  Both places have amazing professors whom I enjoy.  In one class at Rivier I did not score my blessed 4.0.  And that killed me.  That class - Contemporary Drama -  was probably the toughest class I've taken in my academic career.  My final project involved a Finnish play in which a psychologist dressed up like a dog and gave therapeutic sessions.  Hmmm...  And then he walked around naked.

Last summer I took three courses, during which I had one intensive week that I had to finish two major projects.  Luckily my boys were with their dad, as they didn't have to witness that madness that ensued when my neighbors were playing music and I was trying to write about a Midsummer Night's Dream at 7am on a Sunday.

Yes, and then autumn came.  I had a therapist tell me not to do this, but I didn't listen.  I worked full time.  I was a single mom.  I took three classes.  And a part-time class on being a mentor in school.  I was assigned to Mentee.  I ran two clubs at school.  I kept dating.

Oh my gawd.

Is it any wonder I'm addicted to caffeine?  The only life I've known for the past year is getting up at 4am, studying, coming home, doing more work on either school or grad school, taking little breaks here and there to either blog or send out a few postcards.  My weekends tend to be like this, unless I escape.  Escaping is good for me; it allows me to become the person I am and get a reality check when I'm not working on all this stuff.  I do need to step away from it all to gain perspective, even if it's just watching a movie or going out for Pelligrino with a friend (thank you, Preppy Girl, for the night we had a few weeks ago - you were just what the doctor ordered).

But on April 30th it's over.  My classes have a royal send off with a poetry reading at Rivier.  I'm a bit nervous, as I feel my poetry this semester is so adolescent.  It's as if I'm channeling Taylor Swift in rhyme.

So why the banner?  It's been my motto that I've kept with me all these months, all these years.  The words are from my dad - "Keep the faith."  I don't think he has any idea how strong these words are to me.  And "Just know?"  My own addition, for everyone else.  Just know it all comes together in the end.