As I was going to Virginny, I met a Mat who was quite skinny. Upon each hand, he wore a mitt. Upon each mitt, a mot* was writ. Within each mot, there was a mutt. Inside each mitt, a hand was put. Met. Mat. Mitt-mot-mutt. This may mean something; I know not what.
*My new word for the day — MOT (pronounced ˈmō ). It’s short for “Bon Mot” or a pithy saying.
Here’s a mot with a mutt in it:
A mutt is couture-it’s the only one like it in the world, made especially for you.
Isaac Mizrahi
I’m a little punchy after a long day of driving yesterday. I worked 5am – 11 am, then left my house a little after noon to drive to youngest-daughter’s college where I was meeting up with oldest-daughter who was driving with me to visit middle-daughter. Got that?
I think the sun was out when I left home. After collecting daughter #1, we drove off in the snow. “Winter Advisory” signs flashed at us all along I-81.
And I had opted to drive first. Ugh.
It was slushy sloppy slippery slow driving for about 4 hours. Shortly after she took over driving, the weather and the road cleared.
This morning I received a notification — “You have a new memory.” I laugh at those notifications. They seem so silly.
New memories — pshaw. Memories are, by their very nature, sort of oldish.
This morning, though, I paused to look at my “new” memory.
Two years ago today, I was in Normandy.
Two years ago today, I first heard the story of British gliders landing in Normandy to take the Pegasus Bridge — gliders whose pilots used stopwatches and compasses to navigate, some landing a mere 47 yards from their objective. I’m still amazed at that feat.
Two years ago today, I stood in the Canadian cemetery in Normandy, France, and grieved for those young men whose names were carved in the stones there. So brave. So young. But such a beautiful place.
Five years ago today, I was watching Karl play tennis. He and his partner, Michael, were killing it.
Five years ago today, at about the same time, 1400 miles away, my first grandson was born.
I didn’t need a photo app on my phone or Facebook to remind me of that memory. I woke up thinking of him. (HAPPY BIRTHDAY, HENRY!!)
On the other hand, my father needed the memory prompts.
“Remember our trip to Normandy,” I asked him.
“When was that?” he replied.
“Two years ago today we went on our first tour.”
I handed him the photo book and memorabilia I had put together from that trip.
His eyes grew misty as he leafed through it all. He carefully unfolded the maps of the cemeteries and of Paris, studied them, and then folded and placed them back in the pocket of the book. I couldn’t tell if he remembered or not.
“That was a good trip,” he said.
It was a good trip.
As we travel down this other road of forgetting who, what, and how, I often think, We’ll always have Normandy (and Paris, I suppose).
Top five books —Les Miserables, The Hate U Give, Imitation of Christ, Conscience, and the whole series of The Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place.
Top five places I visited — Ales Stenar (the sun-ship in Sweden), Troldhaugen (Edvard Grieg’s home in Bergen, Norway), kayaking in a fjord (Gudvangen, Norway), Laity Lodge (with my husband!), and Charleston, SC (with Mary).
Ales Stenar
Edvard Grieg’s composing house
Kayaking in a fjord
Threshold at Laity Lodge
Mary and her French toast at Toast! in Charleston
Top five encouraging moments. (I want 2019 to be the year where I practice encouragement, so I’m trying to learn from looking back.)
1. Andrew Peterson — at Laity Lodge (which is the nearest place to heaven I know in the United States). After insulting Andrew (I think I told him that he looked nerdy in his glasses — and then I wondered why on earth I said such a thing), I finally bolstered the courage (thanks in large part to my friend, Kim) to ask him about the possibility of a caregiving session at Hutchmoot.
“I think that’s a great idea,” he said. “Check in with Pete (his brother) in a couple of months when we’re starting to plan out the sessions.”
I’m an idea person — and I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had ideas shut down right from the start. It can be crushing. Even if an idea is totally wacky, encouragers can see the glimmer of good in it and water the seed a little. Andrew did that for me.
I already knew that Andrew was an encourager. At my very first retreat at Laity Lodge, when I was saying my good-byes, Andrew touched my arm and said, “You have important things to say. Don’t ever doubt that.”
2. Rachel Speer Donahue — Well, I did the session at Hutchmoot.
I was so full of doubt about my tiny portion of it. I had sent the written text of it to my friend, Alyssa, who also is an encourager. Her words helped me go through with the whole thing. (Seriously — up to the last minute, I considered politely bowing out.) Afterwards, my mental replays of my portion were all of me babbling. (Side note: I saw a book recently called, “Your Inner Critic is a Big Jerk” and I wished I had read the book before Hutchmoot.)
Enter Rachel. After Hutchmoot, the guy who puts together the photo book put out a call for quotes. Rachel was an early responder — and she quoted ME. I was horrified and honored at the same time. The horror has long since subsided, and I go back to that moment over and over. Rachel sat in on my session and valued what I said enough to quote me. It was a HUGE encouragement.
3. Jonathan Rogers — I’ve taken a number of writing classes from Jonathan Rogers. The best thing about his classes are the critiques he gives to the submitted assignments. He is blunt and honest. Jonathan has told me when things I have written are unclear or, worse, boring. He’s always right on the money.
Jonathan recently started a subscription website of writing advice called Field Notes for Writers. I HIGHLY recommend it.
He asked me if he could use one of my pieces for an exercise he calls “Line Edits.” With great fear and trepidation, I gave permission, but when I watched the video of his edits of my piece, “Old Porch,” I was so touched. Seeing my writing through his eyes was such an encouragement.
4. Elizabeth Dunn — We’ve been attending Methodist churches for five or six years now (maybe more). I am NOT a cradle Methodist and honestly don’t understand the inner workings of the Methodist Church. I had never been to a “Charge Conference” until this year.
At the Charge Conference, Bishop Webb came and heard the reports from the various committees in the church. Then he asked for people to share what good things were going on in the Cooperstown Methodist Church. The first person to speak was Elizabeth. She said, “Sally Zaengle has been playing her flute during church and it really adds something special.”
Let me back up to say, yes, I play the flute, but not terribly well. It’s something I do for fun — and more, it’s something that helps me worship. I believe music is a language God speaks.
When Elizabeth acknowledged my playing and that it blessed her — that was so encouraging. Even with all my bloopers, it adds something positive to the worship.
5.Lisa Birdsall and Kristen Griger — My role changed with the swim team this year. With my father declining, I couldn’t commit to coaching again. It made me a little sad, but Lisa (the Aquatics Director) and Kristen (the head coach) found a new role for me — team registrar. As team registrar, I handle all the athlete registrations as well as all the meet entries.
I love my new job! I love learning new things and I can do much of the work from home. Additionally, I’ve been working to educate the new parents on the ins and outs of swimming by holding informational meetings and sending out regular newsletters.
Lisa arranged for me to have an email address with the facility. While that sounds like a small thing, it really isn’t. I’m the only part-time person with a Clark Sports Center email and the recipient of the last email address available on their server.
Not only that, but Lisa started referring to an empty office there as my office. My office. Of course, it’s not my office yet. Someone else needs it while some work is being done outside her office. But I’ve never had an office before. I may still never have the office. You never know.
But the thought of an office is an encouragement. And the email address is a reality — a real work email.
You really never know where encouragement will come from.
In 2019, I hope a little encouragement will come from me.
I was sitting at the train station in Charleston, South Carolina.
The evening was a balmy 60-something — balmy in comparison with the 30-something I left behind in New York that morning. The station was clean, well-lit, and sparsely populated. I sat on a blue bench playing word games on my phone while waiting for Mary’s train to arrive.
“Last time I rode this train, it was an hour and a half late,” a man said. I looked up to see a wiry African-American man with gray bristle-y hair poking out from the edges of his Kufi. “Folks waiting for me in Savannah had to change their plans all around because of this train.”
I just smiled at him. My train experience is pretty close to nil.
A few minutes later my daughter texted me from the train. “Conductor says we should be in Charleston around 8 – 8:15.” Over an hour late.
North Charleston train station, photo from abcnews4.com
The man was pacing the train station. On his next pass near me I told him what Mary had said.
He shook his head and sat down beside me. “This train never runs on time,” he said.
How we got from there to where our nearly hour-long conversation took us, I don’t know. Before I knew it, he was telling me about “Mama.”
“I was the lucky one,” he told me. “I took care of Mama. They was eleven of us, and I was lucky number nine.”
He shook his head and smiled, a gesture he repeated often as he remembered his mother.
“Mama was smart. She got her degree in journalism. You better believe we learned how to write. She and Daddy sent us to parochial school in New York — all eleven of us.”
I thought of how my parents valued education. My grandfather, my father’s father, never went to high school, but each of his children went to college and graduate school.
“Mama worked for Richard Nixon. She helped with his campaigns in New Jersey and he gave her a job with the federal prisons there.”
My father loves to tell people how he met Haile Selassie. Rubbing shoulders with the mighty.
“When my daddy was dying, he called me to his bedside. ‘Ali,’ he says, ‘Ali, you take care of your mama.’ I said to him, ‘Daddy, of course I’ll take care of Mama.’ But he says, ‘No, I mean it — you really take care of Mama.'”
He shook his head and smiled. “I was the lucky one.”
My father outlived my mother — but I watched him take care of her and I helped where I could. Making sure my mother was well-cared-for was a priority.
“I moved in with Mama.”
I moved in with my father.
“Mama fell and broke her femur. The doctors wouldn’t operate. They said nobody would operate on her. She was too frail. 90 years old. 90 pounds. All they give her was morphine to ease her pain. That was her last month alive. I kept her in her own home.”
We aren’t there yet. I try not to think about my father’s last days.
“I give the eulogy at Mama’s funeral. I look over at my brothers and sisters boohooing, and I said, ‘What you boohooing about? You didn’t come see her. You didn’t take care of her. You just feeling sorry for yourself.’ I said that to them. And they was mad. Hoo-boy! They was mad.”
He chuckled a little to himself. “But, you see, I was the lucky one. I got to care for my mama. When she died, I didn’t cry. I had given her everything I had.”
No regrets living — I could relate to that, too.
I’m thankful that my family pulls together. My siblings help — but I know that I’m the lucky one, too.
The train pulled in to the station and we both stood.
“Been real nice talking to you,” he said, and he extended his hand to me. “I’m Ali.”
Lest anyone think we’re independently wealthy and that’s how we travel the world, two things:
International travel is not much more expensive than travel within the USA. In fact, I honestly think it could be less, depending on the country. Food and lodging can be pretty cheap in some parts of the world.
Each of my children received some money from my mother’s estate in the same way her mother gave money to each of her grandchildren. My money from my grandmother was used to purchase my first car – a 1970 VW bug. Some of my children used their money towards a car, too. Mary and Karl both expressed a desire to travel.
Why Norway? I asked Karl on our way home. Norway wasn’t on my radar at all.
If someone asked me, I would say Israel — but that’s not a trip that can be safely done on a whim. It’s my dream, though, to go to Jerusalem. I want to pray with my hands on the Western Wall. I’d like to go to the Temple Mount, the Mount of Olives, the Garden Tomb. I want to visit Yad Vashem and I want to eat fish on the shore of the Sea of Galilee.
Instead I ate fish soup on the wharf in Bryggen. (It was amazing.)
Karl’s reason? “The pictures looked cool.”
I guess that’s reason enough.
In retrospect I can see how much I needed Norway.
My father’s world shrank significantly while I was away. He’s afraid to go into rooms, and when he enters, the door must be closed behind him. He throws his hands up in fear or anxiety when I open the door to leave.
“Sally! Don’t DO that!” and he grabs my arm if I’m close enough. “Don’t go out there! You don’t understand!”
He’s right. I don’t understand.
And he can’t explain it.
So we stay in stuffy rooms watching Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy.
And I think about the vistas of Norway.
Fløyen, above Bergen
The view from our Airbnb
The mind can be so fragile. While I was gone, the fragile balance was upset, and I don’t know how to put it back.
So I think about the piles of rocks I saw along the river, and the raging waters that were so close, and how we all teeter at times.
On the way from Berekvam to Flåm
I drove in Norway — not something I recommend. The roads can be narrow and winding. My father would have remarked on the switchbacks that we saw from the train.
Switchbacks
When I drove, I was too busy worrying about running into another car to try to imagine the switchbacks. I drove roads barely wide enough for the VW Golf I rented, and would come around the corner and meet another car going in the opposite direction.
This was a two-way road.
I quickly learned to throw the car into reverse and back up to a broader area where the other car could get past me.
Or be grateful when the other car did that for me.
Life has been like that for me, too. I can’t see what’s ahead and I don’t have much wiggle room.
But I have Norway, and it was beautiful.
So I’ll cautiously proceed.
When my father tells another switchback story, I’ll have some of my own now.
The place we used to stay in Myrtle Beach had no phones in the rooms. This was back in the 70s, when phones that fit in your pockets weren’t even a twinkle in a computer chip’s eye. Phones had dials and cords.
In those first few years in Myrtle Beach, if someone needed to reach my father at The Teakwood, they had to call the motel office. Someone from the office would find my father and he would have to go to the office to take the call or return the call. Things really advanced when they got a phone with a portable handset.
At the Teakwood
I asked my mother about the lack of phones. Somehow it made The Teakwood seem inferior to its phoned competitors.
“It helps Dad relax to get away from the telephone,” she said. I hadn’t thought about the tyranny of the telephone until that conversation.
I recently heard on a podcast that the presence of a phone at a meal — even if it’s facedown on the table — causes the conversation to be more shallow.
But this isn’t about phones.
It’s about why I went to Norway.
Last year I traveled to Europe for the first time since I was 5 years old. Twice.
The first trip was to take my father to Normandy, something he had longed to do for many years. I was excited for my father, but ambivalent for myself. I knew that I should be excited. I just couldn’t muster up the excitement on my own.
Then we went to Normandy and I loved it. I think I could live in Bayeux and be quite content there. The cathedral, the farmers’ market, the patisseries, the narrow streets, the old buildings — all of it lovely. I didn’t think anything could top Normandy.
Until Bosnia two months later. The land, the people, the hospitality. I came home from that trip quite full.
So when I was feeling depleted this year, and so many people kept reminding me that caregivers need to be sure to take care of themselves, I thought about what had pressed a reset button in my soul and given me rest and strength for the days ahead. Travel. Like the phoneless Teakwood did for my dad.
I applied and was accepted to a writer’s workshop with Ann Voskamp — but it was in the wilds of Alaska. When I realized how remote the workshop was, and how, if something happened at home, I would have a hard time making an emergency trip back, I asked to postpone my attendance for another year.
Then I considered a trip back to Bosnia, but nothing seem to fall into place with that.
Finally, I asked Karl — who had been saying that he wanted to travel — where he wanted to go.
“Norway,” he said.
So Karl, Mary, and I traveled to Norway. And Denmark. And Sweden.
If an emergency had come up, I was always near an airport.
Except for the day we kayaked in the fjords. But truthfully, that was the most renewing day of all.
I can still see the woman’s face as she said the words to me.
She started off saying, “It’s such a good thing you’re doing — keeping your father home.” But then she stopped smiling and looked me in the eye, “You can’t do this forever, you know. There’s going to come a point when you have to place him somewhere that can take care of him.”
My dander rose a little when she said that. I thought, That day will never come.
It nearly came last night.
Ten days ago I took a trip with two of my children. Something changed with my father in the week that I was away. He started fearing certain doorways and needing certain doors to be closed. He started refusing to go down hallways in the house where he has lived for 50 years.
“You don’t understand, Sally,” he’ll say to me, gripping my arm and pulling me close to hear his words. “You don’t want to go there.” He’s emphatic. His words have an urgency evidenced by his tight grip as he says them.
When I tell him that I don’t understand, he says, “How can I explain this to you?” After a long pause during which he’s unable to come up with an explanation, he’ll simply say, “Please don’t open that door.”
Last night he turned off the baseball game and headed to the dining room, announcing that he was going to bed.
“Where are you going to sleep?” I asked.
“Here,” he said, and he pointed to his heart.
“Will you walk with me to your bedroom?” I asked, slipping my arm under his to support and guide him at the same time.
He planted his feet. “You don’t understand.”
After a bit of coaxing, loud arguing, pleading, and everything else I could think of, Bud and I, one on either side of him, forced him to take the steps he clearly didn’t want to take. Once he saw his room and his bed, he was fine (more or less). For a few minutes, though, it was ugly.
I lay in bed afterwards feeling discouraged and thinking, What would Penelope Lumley do?
Penelope Lumley is the plucky governess in The Incorrigible Children Of Ashton Place series (by Maryrose Wood). The motto for the school she attended, The Swanburne Academy for Poor Bright Females, was, “No hopeless case is truly without hope.”
I pictured the woman saying, “You can’t do this forever,” and I pictured the fictional Penelope Lumley reminding me that “No hopeless case is truly without hope.”
There has to be a solution.
In Norway (that’s where I went on my trip) we saw a house set up high overlooking a fjord.
Our guide told us that it has no road access. The old farmhouse had fallen into disrepair until a couple bought it and turned it into successful guest accommodations. Visitors arrive by boat at the base. They climb ladders and hike steep trails with switchbacks to reach Stigen Gard. It takes over an hour to make the ascent.
Some would have said the rundown farmhouse was hopeless, but no hopeless case is truly without hope.
The view at the bottom was beautiful.
I’m sure the view at the top is even better.
My May 2017 trip to France was amazing. My father had long wanted to visit Normandy, so my husband, my brother, my sister and her husband, and I all made it happen last May. The family time alone made it very special.
In France, Normandy stole my heart. The sacred ground —
And its rural charm —
But Croatia was also lovely.
How can I forget walking the city wall in Dubrovnik?
Or swimming in the Adriatic where the water was so cold it took my breath away?
If Bosnia-Herzegovina was in the mix, the people would make a pretty strong case. Golly, I love them.
But it’s France vs Croatia.
It will be decided by a bunch of men kicking a ball around on a field.
For years I had heard my father talk about wanting to go to Normandy.
I don’t think my mother was particularly interested. She had humored him on his stops at Civil War battlefields on their way to Myrtle Beach. I had been with them on one of those visits and, I’m sorry to say, my eyes glazed over a little as he pointed to this place and that on the field in front of us. I’m not a student of the Civil War.
I’m not a student of war. While I have read any number of books about WWII, they have not been battle descriptions but concentration camp stories, or smuggling-the-Jews-to-safety stories. But that’s beside the point.
My father wanted to go to Normandy.
The year after my mother died was a rough year. She died in November. In the months immediately following, my father was diagnosed with Normal Pressure Hydrocephalus (NPH, for short). The next summer, he had surgery that involved putting a shunt in his brain that emptied into his abdominal cavity.
After his recovery from the surgery, I decided that we needed to get him to France because if we didn’t do it soon, we would lose the opportunity.
I talked to my husband and my siblings. My husband wanted to go. My sister and her husband were on board with the trip. One of my brothers cleared a week in his schedule so he could go, too.
I planned and I planned. I booked places, cancelled them, and booked others as I learned that I needed to make sure the hotel we stayed in had an elevator – aka lift. (Apparently, not all places have them, plus the first floor in France is what we call the 2nd floor.) I found a private guide. My sister helped book transportation from Paris to Bayeux and back again. She found a wonderful hotel in Paris (that had a lift).
When the time came, we flew to Paris, traveled to Normandy, and had an amazing time.
I even appreciated seeing the battlefield sites, the dimpled earth, the bunker at Pointe du Hoc, the cliffs.
I’m not talking about the food, which, of course, was amazing.
My food pictures leave something to be desired — not the food, my pictures.
Like this dessert — I don’t remember what it was, but it was delicious.
Or these crepes — which looked so wonderful that I started to eat them and then remembered to take a picture.
I took a picture of these meringues on Day 1 because I had never seen such large meringues. The patisserie was closed but I wanted to remember to buy some later. Unfortunately I forgot.
This pastry with apricots was really good but I can’t remember the name.
The sweetest thing about that pastry, though, was that my siblings and I sat outside on a bench to enjoy our selections from the patisserie together. We talked and enjoyed the morning sun before heading back to our hotel.
For years, I had heard my father say that he really wanted to see the beaches of Normandy — so we made it happen.
He probably doesn’t remember the trip today — at least not without the aid of the photo book we put together.
But we remember.
For one week last May, we fulfilled one of my father’s dreams — and had a good time doing it.
Hot Dogs and Marmalade 
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