Fleeting beauty

Posted on June 1, 2010 | 8 comments

My husband and I visit with family in southern Vermont frequently throughout the year, and that’s where we were for Memorial Day weekend. The house has an extensive garden and it was blooming like crazy with purple and pink flowers that I’d never seen before. “Those are beautiful,” I said. “Did you plant them this year?” The answer was no, the lupins (which is what they turned out to be) had been blooming at this same time of year, every year, for many years.

How could we have missed them, I thought? We’ve seen the garden in bloom before, many, many times. I realized that we must not have visited in late May or early June which is, apparently, when the lupin are in bloom. Every year this beautiful display happens, and depending on the family’s various schedules, there are some years when no one sees it.

I understand the fleeting beauty of flowers. My own house has a wisteria vine that runs the length of our front porch, trained along a metal rod that was hung for just that purpose. For a couple of weeks in May, when the wisteria is in full bloom, I feel like I live in a chateau in the Loire Valley. The bright yellow forsythia bushes that border our property seem to bloom and disappear within days. They come and go so fast that some years I doubt that I saw them at all. And our apple tree, old and tired and broken down as it is, still manages to produce flowers every other year, presaging the small crop of apples that I’ll have to pick up before mowing in the late summer.

Also in bloom at the house in Vermont, but with some evidence that their days were already numbered, were the lilac bushes. They were alive with so much activity that I was content to watch, inhaling their perfume, for long stretches at a time. The most colorful visitors were the yellow and black monarch butterflies. They would land with their wings spread open and stick a long thin proboscis down the lilac, pull it out covered with yellow pollen, and immediately poke it into the next flower. One of the butterflies was missing half of its left wing, and yet it didn’t seem deterred. It performed just as the others did, and flew off when it was done. Later we saw another butterfly missing half of the opposite wing. It must be a dangerous business, being a butterfly.

Before we left Vermont I stood in the yard where I could smell the lilacs and admire the lupins at the same time. The sun was perfect, just warm enough to warrant the shorts and tank top I was wearing, but not so warm as to risk driving me back inside. For a few moments I was in my idea of heaven. I wondered how I could keep that feeling with me; the sights, the sounds, the smells.

Maybe if I try very hard, I’ll be able to find something fleeting to appreciate every day, and in that way, I’ll be able to keep the spirit of that feeling alive. After all, flowers are not the only things with short seasons; in the grand scheme of things, ours are short as well.

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Posted in June

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Why not give it a shot?

Posted on May 24, 2010 | 2 comments

I went to an acupuncturist for the first time last week. I’ll understand if you’re skeptical; I am too. Nonetheless, I plan on returning for three more visits to see if it will help the pain in my elbow. I have tendonitis, tennis elbow to use the vernacular, and two weeks of Ibuprofen, three times a day, did nothing to alleviate the pain. When I realized that this condition could be with me for months, I decided I had to try to find something to make it bearable.

The acupuncturist is a nice enough woman. A Caucasian, she reinvented herself after giving up a stressful career in high tech. Her bedside manner is a bit lacking, but if she’s successful I’ll happily forgive her. Apparently there isn’t a prescribed pattern of needles for tendonitis, so she opted to treat me for my auto-immune disease, anxiety, and arm pain. Based on the results, she’ll tweak the needle placement on subsequent visits.

I slept better that night than I had in a while. Was it the acupuncture or a coincidence?

This weekend I watched a Chinese film called Farewell My Concubine. Set in Beijing, the story follows two opera singers from1924 through 1977. We see their lives under the rule of warlords, during the Japanese occupation, and through the Cultural Revolution; each era more alien and unfathomable to my Western sensibilities than the one before. But I understand and accept that these things happened, even if I can draw no parallels to my own experience.

To put things in a lighter perspective, if, when I weigh myself, the scale shows that I’ve gained weight, I curse my lack of self-control, and immediately begin plotting how to lose the weight. If, however, the scale says I’ve lost weight, I weigh myself again in disbelief. Why is one accepted without question, and the other subject to scrutiny?

My very limited understanding of acupuncture is that it stimulates the body to release steroids and endorphins. A Western doctor might give me a shot of cortisone, a steroid. If my body can be coaxed to produce its own, why not let it? And if it’s widely accepted that exercise causes your body to produce endorphins, which “react with opiate receptors to reduce our perception of pain,” isn’t it good to be able to do that without half an hour on the elliptical?

There are many things we learn to accept as truth without experiencing them on our own. Here’s one I can try for myself. I’ll let you know how it works.

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Posted in May

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Everybody’s a critic

Posted on May 17, 2010 | 2 comments

Last night my husband, Andrew, and I saw Prelude to a Kiss, at the Huntington Theater. The play debuted in the late ‘80s, and was subsequently made into a movie starring Alec Baldwin and Meg Ryan, none of which I knew when we sat down in the theater. Andrew, it turned out, was familiar with the movie, but was kind enough to keep what he knew to himself so as not to spoil the experience for me.

The first act was wonderful. I was totally engaged and spent intermission happily speculating about what would happen next. The second act was a little bumpy, but I was riveted nonetheless. When it was over I was fully satisfied, satiated; the way I feel after a holiday meal of my mother’s brisket, and a good bottle of wine. As we made our way slowly up the aisle, a disembodied voice reminded the audience that we were welcome to stay for a post-show conversation with a staff member from the theater.

Andrew and I sat in the lobby and watched the rest of the audience file out while we toyed with the idea of staying. We decided to give it a shot and when the stream of people leaving petered out we went back in and claimed seats in the orchestra. Roughly fifty others joined us, the majority of them old enough to be our parents, if not grandparents.

What ensued was as entertaining as the play itself. The representative from the theater solicited feedback from his small audience and they pulled no punches. A pompous, bald man in the front row criticized the lead actress for having a voice that grated. Someone suggested that the playwright had missed the mark entirely. An elderly woman asked mournfully, “Can you give me a synopsis of the play? I don’t know what was going on.” And one elderly gentleman, who had chosen to sit several rows further back than everyone else, complained peevishly, and often, that he couldn’t hear the conversation.

I don’t want to spoil the play for you in case you decide to go see it, but I will tell you that it requires that you suspend disbelief in order to fully appreciate it. Similarly, it proved more entertaining to view the post-show conversation as a unique third act to our evening than a serious discussion of the play.

I highly recommend that you go see Prelude to a Kiss; however, I suggest you see the traditional two act version and skip the third.

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Posted in May

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Call your dad

Posted on May 10, 2010 | 2 comments

Another Mother’s Day has come and gone. Hallmark and its ilk made out like bandits; FTD is still recovering from the onslaught of last-minute, guilt-ridden orders for flowers; and even restaurants that don’t normally offer Sunday brunch are licking their chops over the land office business they did. But what of the mothers, I ask? Are the recipients as pleased with the attention as the businesses are with the cash infusions?

Mother’s Day too often functions like a maternal Yom Kippur. On that Jewish holiday you’re either deemed worthy of being sealed into the Book of Life for the following year, or not. Once you’re in, you can pretty much relax for another year until it’s time to take stock and atone for your sins just in time for the next round of the Days of Awe. Taking Mom out for brunch once a year, however, doesn’t mean you’re off the hook for the next 364 days.

There’s a generally accepted rule in business that there should be nothing in an employee’s annual review that will come as a surprise to them. If you manage someone who does not perform to your expectations it behooves you to meet with them regularly to try to help them improve. If they’re not making the desired changes at least they’re not surprised when you tell them that something drastic may have to happen.

If you are in the habit of telling your mom you love her, and showing it in little ways throughout the year, I’ll bet she’d excuse you for not contributing to Hallmark’s coffers on Mother’s Day. Conversely, if you treat your mom badly all year, do you honestly think that one gesture is going to make up for it?

And what of the mother who is also a daughter, and a daughter-in-law? Which title takes precedence? As a daughter, are you obligated to spend time with your mother rather than taking your rightful place as Queen-for-a-day within your nuclear family? Is it acceptable to be the honoree at brunch while your own mother sits alone in the dark saying, “No, no, don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine here all by myself.”

As a daughter, I could do without one more obligation on my calendar to worry about. I could probably ignore Mother’s Day and not lose my place in her affections; my mother knows I love her. I would, however, like my daughter to make at least one positive gesture in my general direction each year and if Mother’s Day facilitates that, count me in.

And just when we mothers have successfully navigated the emotional waters of Mother’s Day, it’s time to pass the baton to dad for Father’s Day. I think I’ll call mine today and tell him I love him, just to get a jump on the holiday.

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Posted in May

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Water, water, everywhere…

Posted on May 3, 2010 | 6 comments

First a volcano in Iceland erupts and causes us to cancel our trip to Paris. Painful as that experience was, it served to remind us that there’s no place like home. Now a broken water main makes the simple act of brushing ones teeth onerous enough that home isn’t looking too attractive anymore either.

When the water main that serves our area broke, the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority (MWRA), started feeding us water from alternate sources; bodies of water that are not normally purified. The MWRA began to treat that water right away but it wasn’t enough to guarantee that some nasty germs didn’t sneak in. To be sure that the water was safe to consume, the Department of Health issued a ‘boil water’ order.

At first I wasn’t all that concerned. I don’t drink much water and I figured if I was thirsty Fresca would do the trick. It didn’t take long, however, for the magnitude of the problem to become apparent. We use clean water for a whole lot more than drinking, and even I would balk at brushing my teeth with Fresca.

So boil water we did. We boiled big pots of water and when they cooled we transferred the water to pitchers and boiled some more. We put pitchers of boiled water in the bathrooms so we could fill and re-fill glasses to brush our teeth and rinse our toothbrushes. We finessed the hand-washing problem with liquid hand sanitizer. But we couldn’t reach a consensus on how to handle dishes.

Modern-day dishwashers have a ‘sanitize cycle’ that goes up to 150 degrees. But don’t let the word sanitize fool you. You have to hit 170 degrees to actually kill some of the bacteria we’re fretting about. To paraphrase The Princess Bride, at 150 degrees your dishes would be “mostly clean.” The public health folks suggest you avoid the issue altogether and use disposable dishes and cutlery. Sadly, that doesn’t square with our desire to minimize the amount of garbage we contribute to the landfill.

For now, we’re using our dishes and putting them in the dishwasher. We’re not running the dishwasher, mind you, we’re just staging the dishes there while we wait for the MWRA to pronounce the water good to go. If we don’t do any cooking, and we eat dinner out, I think we can hold out for another couple of days. After that, if the water’s not clean, we’ll just have to move.

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Posted in May

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Laid low by a volcano

Posted on April 26, 2010 | 2 comments

Who would of thunk that a volcano could put the kibosh on hundreds of thousands of travel plans? Terrorists, maybe, but a volcano?

I was diligently wrapping up my obligations prior to a family vacation in Paris that was scheduled to depart the following day, oblivious to what was going on in the outside world, when my husband emailed me a link to a French newspaper. My French doesn’t even qualify as rudimentary but there was no mistaking the headline which, loosely translated, said, ‘you are about to be severely disappointed.’

We watched anxiously as flights were canceled and airports closed. But our Friday afternoon flight to Paris, via Philadelphia, was still showing an on-time departure. We were already packed so when the time came to go to the airport we figured we might as well; maybe we’d be able to fly in spite of the mounting evidence to the contrary. At the check-in counter the less-than-gracious US Airways employee informed us that yes, the flight was still scheduled and no, she couldn’t advise us as to the best course of action; we could check in or not, it was no skin off her nose. We had an hour or so to decide.

“What happens to our luggage if we check in now, and then the flight’s canceled?” we asked.

“You try to get it back,” she said with a shrug of her shoulders.

Since most of my underwear was in my suitcase, and it would be inconvenient to be without it for an unspecified amount of time, I suggested we not check in quite yet, but instead go have lunch and see if anything definitive transpired in the next hour.

Just as we finished ordering, we got an automated message that our flight had been canceled. I waved the waiter back and ordered a drink.

We were, of course, extremely disappointed that our trip had been canceled, but we knew right away that we were luckier than many. From an inconvenience perspective we suffered not one whit. We were grounded, but we were on home turf with all our underwear. One friend from the UK was stuck here while her valiant husband wrangled their two young daughters on his own for an extra week. Another friend was stuck in Germany while his wife tried to hold onto her sanity as a single parent here. Another friend in the UK had a scaled down wedding party because her European friends were unable to travel, and another wedding was canceled altogether. Those are just a few of the stories that I’ve heard from people I know. Imagine how many other plans were ruined, and lives disrupted, by that pesky natural phenomenon.

I’m sorry that my daughter’s school vacation did not work out as planned; that she didn’t get to go to the top of the Eiffel Tower, or visit Versailles, or practice her French. But we got to participate in a moment in history that will not soon be forgotten.

C’est la vie.

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Posted in April

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Networking is not a dirty word

Posted on April 19, 2010 | Leave a comment

[This post was written before the start of our ill-fated vacation so my readers wouldn’t miss a week while I was away. More on that another time.]

Last week I said I’d write a bit more about networking, so as promised (or threatened, depending on your perspective) that’s where I’ll start. Lots of people find the thought of networking distasteful, but that just indicates that they don’t really understand how it works. Whenever I hear someone say, “I can’t network; I’m not good at it,” I point out that they network every day.

In computer parlance, a network is a collection of computers that can communicate with each other. If we apply that to people, your network comprises the people you communicate with, co-workers, classmates, family, friends, even the cashiers you see every week at Trader Joe’s.

If your letter carrier sees you sitting on your front lawn and says, “Beautiful day. Hey, I love your earrings,” and you reply, “Thanks my friend’s sister made them,” you’re networking. You may not have your letter carrier over for drinks but she might just remember your earrings and ask you for the name of the designer someday. It’s true you don’t benefit directly from that interaction but networking is about all of those little interactions that connect us to others. Somewhere in your network, someone else is having a casual conversation that will benefit you.

When it’s time to look for a job, you need to use the network you already have to expand it further. Now when your letter carrier comes by and says, “Beautiful day,” you can reply, “Yes, but I’d rather not have the time to enjoy it. Know anyone who needs a crack marketing director?” I guarantee the letter carrier will take the time to express her sympathy (because after all, it’s a beautiful day and she’s in no rush, she’s a letter carrier) giving you the opening to say, “ACME Software looks like a great company? Do you by any chance know anyone who works there?”

If you don’t know where you might like to work, or even if you want to go back to doing what you were doing, you might consider hiring a life/career coach. Even before I was laid off, I knew that I needed someone to help me figure out what I wanted to be when I grew up; someone who was not a therapist. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a huge fan of therapy (and we can talk about that some other time) but this was less a case of “how did my family of origin influence my behavior” than “how do I change my situation?”

I started seeing (well, I never actually saw her, we talked on the phone) Rosie Reardon. She has a website, if you want to learn more about her but I’ll share a little here for those of you who are interested. Working with Rosie was a bit like having my own personal self-help book; her advice was accessible and actionable. She helped me realize how much I was, or could be, in control, so I wouldn’t feel as if I was at the mercy of the powers that be. I learned a lot from Rosie and graduated from our sessions with a degree of self-confidence and drive that had been in scant supply. I’ll miss my conversations with Rosie, but I decided it was time to free her up for one of you.

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Posted in April

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First you cry

Posted on April 12, 2010 | 1 comment

A classmate from elementary school (you’ve got to love Facebook) just pinged me to say that he’d been laid off, and knowing that I had gone through that recently as well, wondered if I had any advice for him. I decided to use this week’s post to answer him.

Sadly, as a high tech marketing person, I have become something of an expert at being laid off. As a matter of fact, I’ve been laid off twice by the same company, and let me tell you, I don’t care how much they beg, I am never going back there. You know what they say, ‘fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, what the hell was I thinking?’

The first thing to do after you’ve been laid off is to have a good cry. If you’d rather yell and scream, that’s okay too. The point here is that it hurts to be let go, even if you saw it coming. It hurts like being dumped, or having your best friend move away, or losing a pet. It’s one of those gaping wounds that no one can see, but that doesn’t make it hurt any less. Give yourself as much time as you need to mourn your loss, but not so much that you have to switch to the next season’s wardrobe.

When you’re ready to start looking you need to get your resume in order. It’s an onerous project and no one likes to do it, but you’ve got to. As much as possible, recast everything you’ve done in quantifiable terms. Take credit for anything you had a hand in; everyone else does. For instance, if the development team you managed built a product that earned the company $10 million – claim it as your success. This sort of self-aggrandizement may not come easily to you, particularly if you’re not a sales or marketing person, but believe me, you’ve got to do it.

The next step is to network. The step after that is to network. And yes, you guessed it, the step after that is to network some more. The upside to being out of work these days is that there’s social networking. Look how it’s working for my friend from sixth grade! LinkedIn.com is the place to be if you want to connect with the business world. LinkedIn has monetized the game, Six Degrees of Separation. From there you can see who you know who knows someone at the company you’re interested in. And the only way you’re going to break into that company is to have someone introduce you. You can answer ads on Monster and HotJobs but if that’s your strategy for finding a job, you’re going nowhere fast. By all means, look at what’s available on the job boards, but then go to LinkedIn and try to find a connection that can carry your resume to the hiring manager.

I’m going to make this my first two-part blog post. Next week I’ll talk more about how to network, and also share my thoughts on hiring a life coach. I’ll leave you with this thought, we live in a time when there is no stigma attached to losing your job; it happens to the best of us. And there’s an army of sympathetic folks waiting to help. All you have to do is ask.

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Posted in April

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Sometimes fat is good

Posted on April 5, 2010 | 3 comments

Passover and Easter were earlier than usual this spring but like clockwork colleges all over the country sent out their admission’s decision letters right on time. This annual rite of spring doesn’t affect my house this year, we have four years to go, but it’s easy to get caught up in the drama when you know someone whose child has been wrestling them to be first at the mailbox for the past week.

I remember my own experience like it was yesterday (and in my case this yesterday was over thirty years ago). I know firsthand that the failures and triumphs of admission’s week will trail these seniors for the rest of their lives (or until they’ve completed twenty years of therapy). I was a lack-luster high school student (as you may recall from last week’s post, Memory lane is a lonely road) and my father despaired of me getting in anywhere respectable. While my friends were grudgingly adding UMass as a “safety school” just in case there was an act of G-d and they didn’t get into the more prestigious universities, my dad was strongly advising me not to waste his money applying to anywhere other than UMass. I ignored him and applied to half a dozen or more schools, none of which was UMass.

I knew from all the seniors that had come before me that a thin envelope was not even worth opening since it signaled defeat; you wanted the fat ones. On April 9th, my father’s birthday, I got my first envelope, and it was fat. I’m sure I was happy that I was now assured a college education, but that paled next to the pleasure I took in waving that big, fat letter in my dad’s face and saying, “So there!”

The real victory that week was that I was accepted by a school that had rejected my straight-A, over-achieving, older sister. (In deference to her, since I’m sure this must still be a painful memory, being bested by her academically inferior little sister, I won’t name the school here but do email me if you’re curious.)

At the gym today, my neighbor on the next elliptical was shaking her head over the fact that her daughter had gotten into Oberlin, but not Tufts, but that her daughter’s friend had gotten into Tufts and not Oberlin. We agreed that there must be a capricious element to the whole process that no amount of extra-curricular activities could defend against. That knowledge, however, does nothing to take the sting out of receiving a thin envelope from the school you have your heart set on.

Even though I know it’s long past time for me to define myself by which colleges I was accepted by, I won’t be giving that up anytime soon. My other sister, also a straight-A, over-achiever, tells me that there’s no way we’d get into those colleges today. I say that’s the opinion of someone who didn’t have to buck the odds in the first place.

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Posted in April

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Memory lane is a lonely road

Posted on March 29, 2010 | 3 comments

My parents finally kicked me out of the house. Okay, technically they kicked my stuff out of the house. It’s true that I bought my first house over twenty years ago but I’ve happily continued to use theirs as my off-site storage facility. The recent rain flooded their basement which in turn prompted them to start throwing things out. Years of experience has taught them that it’s unwise to pitch things that belong to me without asking first so they skipped that step and appeared at my house with a large box which they unceremoniously dumped on the floor. Dad said, “This is yours. You decide what to do with it.”

The box was labeled ‘Judy’s school stuff.’ I left it where it had landed in my front hall for a couple of weeks while I worked up the energy for a long trip down memory lane. The smell of the box, which had spent multiple decades in a musty basement, finally compelled me to explore the contents so I could decide what to do with them and air out my hallway.

As labeled, the box contained school papers and other treasures from elementary school through high school. A selection of notable finds included a ticket to a production of ‘Lil’ Abner’ that we did in Jr. High that had a bit of Mark V.’s fake mustache taped to it; a letter I wrote to NBC in 1973 protesting the cancelation of Bonanza which, along with letters to Save the Children and the local Board of Selectman, was apparently a school project not evidence of my precociousness as I originally thought; a tenth grade World Civilization paper marked ‘C-, barely’; and a paper where the teacher wrote, ‘Where’s the argument? I know you like controversy. I see it in class all the time.’ I was surprised to discover that I was not as bad at math as I remembered, or as good at everything else.

Over the course of several days (memory lane is a long road) I tried to engage my daughter in the review of my early years but she was singularly uninterested. I had her intrigued for a minute when I undertook an explanation of mimeograph machines but she wandered off when it became clear that I didn’t actually know how they worked. My husband lit up briefly when I gave him a printout from an early computer which we were teaching to play blackjack (or maybe it was teaching us) but mostly he nodded and said, “That’s nice, dear,” sounding exactly like his own father. I finally resigned myself to the fact that my cherished mementos are never going to become anyone else’s. Down the road when my daughter is cleaning out my basement she’s not going to stop and read my old papers, she’s going to toss them out. I guess I’ll save her the trouble. I kept a few representative things (all the papers that got A’s) and recycled the rest. I’ll have to remember to tell my parents that if they come across any of their school papers while they’re cleaning they should feel free to throw them out.

Mind you, this applies only to items found in the basement. When it’s time to clean out my room I’d prefer they not touch anything without asking me first.

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Posted in March

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