It is finally cooler here, and drizzling rain, so I am sitting on the terrazzo (that's a balcony with a roof and a tile floor and curtains hanging all around.) The curtains are pulled back and all I can see is jungle and grey sky.
It has been hot as hell here since I got back in December, so this is fabulous. Almost as wonderful as a sunny day in the middle of May in Indiana would be. The rain birds are whistling, or calling, or whatever rain birds do. I have iced coffee and mango nectar and toast at my left hand. I managed to get them there without dumping coffee (again) or nectar into my keyboard. No class today so I am totally free to sit here and enjoy listening to the rain dripping on the palm fronds or whatever the giant fat leaves are called that reach the roof of my second story hideout.
So, anyway, I am sitting here, typing away, sipping my coffee, and enjoying life when an email notification pops up on the bottom right of my screen. I have a new "PERSONAL"message from Michele Obama. I'm pretty sure that when they pop up like that they are more important than regular email messages.
Well, I can't imagine how she knew about me, or what she might want me to do to help the cause.
Well, I can't imagine how she knew about me, or what she might want me to do to help the cause.
I click on email and sure enough, there it is, addressed to Alice Lee, which of course only my intimate friends and family know to call me, so I assume someone we know in common has given her my name. I think of Birch or Andy, but I think one or both of them may be dead.
I'm sure she probably wants me to participate in a fundraiser, share my enthusiasm about her husband (which, truthfully, has flagged somewhat since 2008), with my peers in Indy. Or maybe Georgia, since that's where I last voted. I feel... excited is not the word, dread is better. I'm just not cut out for those public things. I don't really have peers either. I know I will screw up the whole thing. I know she will be disappointed when she finds out how inept I really am at social stuff.
After struggling for an hour trying to make a guest list for this thing, I have only Glen, Melanie, Linda W. and whoever might still be alive from the old UAW gang, I give up. Too bad Pat Cory is dead. she would just love this. But I can't do it. My cursor hovers over the email line, my right index finger hesitating. I move the cursor to the left, select, delete. Done. I don't even read it.
I've let her down, but one must know one's limitations. I just can't do public and social. Once again, because of my inexperience and lack of social grace, fame, or at least notoriety, have passed me by.
After struggling for an hour trying to make a guest list for this thing, I have only Glen, Melanie, Linda W. and whoever might still be alive from the old UAW gang, I give up. Too bad Pat Cory is dead. she would just love this. But I can't do it. My cursor hovers over the email line, my right index finger hesitating. I move the cursor to the left, select, delete. Done. I don't even read it.
I've let her down, but one must know one's limitations. I just can't do public and social. Once again, because of my inexperience and lack of social grace, fame, or at least notoriety, have passed me by.
Feeling slightly guilty, but greatly relieved, I close my computer and crawl back under my rock, which, according to Kelly and Julia O'h F, is often the best place to be.
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Because of the cool and the rain I am at home when the maid comes to change the sheets and towels and take away the trash. I am working here on the laptop and she asks me a question, in Spanish. I hear the words you were and enfermera--which means nurse, but I take to mean ill or sick (enfermo) and I hear doctor. So I respond, in Spanish. No, I'm not sick I just stayed home today because it is so cool from the rain.
She laughs, comes to stand in front of me and says, in Spanish, "No no no I said were you a doctor or a nurse?" I'm wondering how often that happens and if that is the reason people sometimes look at me like quizzical dogs when I speak.
How will you use the time you have left?
By Mary Schmich, July 16, 2008
My mother put down her fork, picked up her glass of wine and took a sip. I had taken her out to dinner, and we were talking about nothing much.
"I keep wondering," she said, without preamble, "what I'm going to do with the time I have left."
In the length of a swallow, she had segued from nothing much to something huge.
"I could have a year," she went on. "Or 10. However long it is, I can't spend it all just sitting in the chair and staring at the yard."
A few months ago, it looked as if my mother, who is 85, might not last a few more weeks. But she got an extension on the deadline, which was great, except that the question now pesters her like a bill collector:
What are you going to do with the time you have left?
When my mother asked that question, I heard an echo of Mary Oliver's poem "The Summer Day." I quoted it here once before, and readers still write to ask about it. It's worth revisiting, especially this time of year.
Here are the last few lines:
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
However you phrase it -- as poetically as Mary Oliver, or as bluntly as my mother -- it's a question that doesn't pose itself only at 85. In old age, it may knock at the heart like a firefighter at the door, but at any age it's one of life's basic quandaries.
Every now and then, most of us imagine we have answered the question. Start a job, make a move, get married, have a kid, plant a garden, renovate the kitchen. Problem solved.
We construct our days to avoid having to answer the question again, jamming the hours with routines and obligations -- which, if we are lucky, add up to a sense of purpose -- that squeeze out space for the existential squirm.
But the question never goes away. It shifts, it hides. When those routines and obligations are disrupted, it pounces again.
You may lose a job, your health, your house, a pet, someone you love, which is to say you may lose your habits and a piece of who you think you are. Now what are you going to do with the time you have left?
The question gets tougher to answer even as it grows more pressing. When my mother considers what she will do with her remaining time, she works within the shrinking boundaries of her body.
Her fingers are so gnarled that she unpries them one by one, lifting the thumb off the index finger, the middle finger off the ring finger, opening her joints by pressing her palm on the arm of a chair.
So much for the hands that once flew through Chopin, easily gripped a pen to write. Those pastimes, gone. And even though she still goes out, to lunch, to church, to a book club, walking is a chore.
So she sits a lot.
"I'm counting the roses," she said when I found her in her chair a couple of days after our dinner conversation. She looked pleased. "I keep getting different answers."
And maybe that's the truth at any age: The answer keeps changing. You learn to find pleasure in pondering the question.
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