Cooperstown · photography

Lakefront Park

Sally3 Comments

I clearly remember that morning.

I had tossed and turned all night. My thoughts were a twisting turning knot of turmoil.

Before dawn, I left the house and drove to the lake.

Water soothes me.

If I lived near the ocean, I’m sure I would have been at the beach, digging my toes into the sand. Instead, I was at Lakefront Park in Cooperstown, walking in dew-laden grass, looking out into the heavy fog that rested on the lake.

As the invisible sun rose and lent a little light, I took a few pictures. The lush green of summer was accentuated by the grayness of the fog.

The fog obscured the distance, but it helped me appreciate what was closest to me.

I haven’t forgotten that lesson.

Faith · family

Caregiver’s Serenity Prayer

Sally6 Comments

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot do,

I can’t “fix” my loved one.

I can’t make him think more clearly.

I can’t make him understand.

I can’t go back in time, and mustn’t languish over how or what he was, because he is who he is now and that’s where we are.

Courage to do the things I can,

I can handle business affairs — writing checks, paying bills, scheduling appointments.

I can do laundry.

I can prepare meals and serve snacks.

I can answer the phone.

I can chauffeur.

I can explain things over and over and over and over, and set my exasperation aside.

And the wisdom to know the difference.

When I lay in bed at night, let me not angst over the battle, but, in the weariness of a hard-fought day, take my rest knowing that I did the best I could.

Few will see or know what I do.

My own loved one will never fully grasp the sacrifice that I, and my husband, and my children, are all making on his behalf.

But it is right and good.

And You know, o Lord.

Let that be enough.

Adapted from The Serenity Prayer by Reinhold Niebuhr.

dementia · elderly

In the Parking Lot

Sally8 Comments

I never know what I’m going to see in the parking lot at the local grocery store.

In the village of Cooperstown, there is one — yes, only one — grocery store.

I go there often. My father’s refrigerator is small, and we go through perishables fairly quickly. I started keeping a chart of how often I go to the grocery because I felt like I was going every day. It turns out that out of 50 days, I only went 36 times.

I never know what I’m going to see there. Once, I saw Mrs. Claus pushing a shopping cart up the parking lot hill to her car.

Yesterday, I stood behind an elderly man at the check-out. He paid for his groceries and handed his change back to the cashier.

“I think I owe you this,” he said. She shook her head in protest and smiled at him.

As he headed for the door, he turned and said to her, “See you tomorrow.”

Another person who goes to the store nearly every day.

As soon as he was out of sight, she put the loose change he had just given her into the container at the checkout for the this month’s charity — I think it’s Muscular Dystrophy.

“I tell my boyfriend that I have a sugar-daddy,” she said to me. “He gives me quarters every day.”

We both laughed, and she told me how he comes in every day and goes through her line.

“Once he brought me a poem,” she said. “It was strange and I didn’t understand it.”

Poetry can be like that.

I thought about my father and the way he focuses on young women who smile and are friendly. With him, I get irritated about the whole thing. It’s a fixation that bothers me, but I know that it shouldn’t.

The man at the grocery store didn’t bother me in the least. I could see how lonely he was. And old. And slightly confused.

I paid for my groceries and headed out to the parking lot. The man was standing in the middle of it, a look of consternation on his face.

“I can’t find my car,” he said, and I could hear the panic in his voice.

“What kind of car do you have?” I asked him.

“It’s a blue Ford, but I can’t find it anywhere,” he said, one hand on his cart, the other fumbling with his keys.

“Well, let’s see,” I said, and I began to look around.

With minimal effort, I found a blue Taurus and pointed to it. “Is that your car?” I asked.

A huge smile broke out on his face. “Yes! Yes, that’s it,” he said. “Thank you so much.”

I watched him push his little cart to the car and was grateful I could help.

As I drove home, I hoped he could remember where he left his house.

I’ll have to ask the cashier about it when I see her today.

A to Z Blogging Challenge

Theme Reveal

Sally15 Comments

Today is the theme reveal day for the A to Z Blogging Challenge.

This will be my third time doing the challenge. (This morning I re-released the posts from the other two years.)

In 2015, I just gotten back from Laity Lodge in Texas and my posts more or less revolved around that experience.

In 2016, still grieving for my mother, I wrote posts about her, dementia, caregiving, and such.

For 2017, I knew exactly what I wanted to do, but struggled to find a label for it.

For some months now I have been playing with the art form of collage. I find children’s books that are in a state of disrepair, cut out the pictures, and make new pictures, mostly on cards.

I mailed a bunch out as cards to friends and family without scanning them to save the art, but now I scan what I make so I can remember.

At Christmas, I made a little picture for each family member that served as their place-card at the dinner table.

The more I do, the more I learn.

Cheap paints run. Note how blue Rabbit and the The Velveteen Rabbit are in their encounter in the lower right corner. The blue paint has just been a stinker for me. It ruined more pictures than I can say.

Cheap paper wrinkles when it’s glued. Some books have great pictures, but the paper is so cheap it’s almost not worth the time cutting the picture out.

Heavy glossy paper doesn’t glue well either. Pictures from pop-up books and the covers of coloring books just don’t want to stay stuck.

For April 2017, my A to Z Theme is Quirky Collage. A collage a day  — plus words, because I find them inescapable.

Hope you enjoy!

family

Pi Day

Sally4 Comments

On Pi Day (3/14) I made pie: shepherd’s pie for dinner and lemon meringue pie for dessert. I forgot to take a picture of the shepherd’s pie at all, and I snapped a shot of the lemon meringue after we had already had some.

Today I was thinking about the Meal-on-Wheels controversy. Apparently Donald Trump proposed cutting funds that provide for that program.

At first I was horrified.

My father-in-law relied on Meals-on-Wheels. Of course, he didn’t always like the meals and let us know. He also saved up the little cans of juice that he got with the program and offered them as treats to his grandchildren. It turns out nobody really liked them.

If Meals-on-Wheels funding had been cut back when he was using it, what would have happened? I’m sure we would not have let my father-in-law go hungry. My first call would have been to his church and the next to other people in the community where he lived most of his life. It would have taken some work, but we would have figured something out.

It would have required something of me.

I thought about Meal-on-Wheels on Pi Day, because I know my father isn’t a huge shepherd’s pie fan. I comforted myself with the fact that he was getting a hot homemade meal — not because I’m part of a government program, but because I’m his daughter.

This morning I read this from Pascal:

Dost thou wish that it always cost Me the blood of My humanity, without thy shedding tears?

I fear that we, as a people, are reaching a point where we are always looking for someone else to pay the cost without us having to shed a single tear. Or make a meal for someone else. Or even help ourselves.

If governmental funding for Meals-on-Wheels is cut, we could still get to work and make sure our elderly are fed.

When the going gets tough, we need to look for ways to help.

 

 

poetry

Brontosaurus

Sally5 Comments

A baby brontosaurus is sleeping ‘cross the way
That would explain the humpy bump that’s been there all the day
Pshaw, you say, don’t you know that dinosaurs are gone?
But how else can I justify the lump outside the barn?

It’s smoothly gently rounded like a brontosaurus spine
Long neck and tail wrapped near its feet in a curving line
Sleeping, hibernating — beneath that mound of snow
The thing I really wonder is where did its mother go?

 

Underneath the massive pile of snow is our minivan.  Thank goodness, I don’t need it for the next few days.

family

Old Habits Die Hard

Sally5 Comments

“Aw, phooey,” he said, as he handed me the shovel and turned to go back inside.

“Aw, hell,” he said, as he hung up his coat and turned toward his walker.

We are in the midst of a major snowstorm. The Weather Channel said something about 48″ around Cooperstown. I believe it.

Even the dog doesn’t like it — and our dog loves snow. Maggie can’t play in this. All she can do is flounder.

Last night and this morning Laurel and I shoveled for a while and barely got past one car. Then my brother, Peter, came down to borrow the car because he needed to go into town. His driveway is much longer than ours, and the plow guy hadn’t come yet.

So Peter walked over and together we shoveled.

And shoveled.

And shoveled.

We finally had a path wide enough to back the car out. I ran into the house to get Peter some money so he could pick up a prescription for my father. Just inside the door stood my father, coat on, gloves on, ready to head outside.

“Where are you going, Dad?” I asked.

“Well, I’m going outside to help,” he said.

“I think we’re all set,” I told him.

“Do you know how much work it took to get all this stuff on?” he asked, and headed for the door.

I sighed, and ran to find my wallet. It wasn’t worth arguing about, and he might like to see all the snow.

When I came back out, Peter was talking to my father on the ramp leading to the house. Laurel and I had barely shoveled a path wide enough for the walker to fit. I gave Peter the money and he left.

“Okay, Dad,” I said, “let’s go back in.”

“I want to go get that shovel,” he said, pointing to the shovel I had shoved into the snowbank.

“I can get it,” I told him, but he pretended not to hear me and headed down the ramp.

When he reached the shovel, I was right behind him. “Let me take that back to the house for you,” I said, reaching for the shovel.

“I’d like to shovel,” he said.

I groaned. He started shoveling. Inside I was feeling frustrated.

“Dad,” I said, trying to sound calm and reasonable, “you may have reached the time in your life when you need to let others do things for you — like shoveling.”

He stopped and looked at me. “I’m not helpless,” he said.

I walked back to the house and stood there. Why can’t he just stop? I muttered in my heart.

I touched Tuga was in my pocket. Go help him, Tuga seemed to whisper.

I grabbed another shovel and went back down to where my father was shuffling snow. He leaned on his shovel when I got there. “Maybe you’re right,” he said, and handed his shovel to me.

“Aw, phooey,” he said, and I felt a little sad.

“Aw, hell,” he said when we got inside, and my heart broke a little more.

His instinct was to help, and I had just told him that he couldn’t.

 

Faith

Immersed

Sally3 Comments

…The finite is annihilated in the presence of the infinite, and becomes a pure nothing. So our spirit before God, so our justice before divine justice….

Blaise Pascal, Pensées

When the perishable puts on the imperishable, and the mortal puts on immortality, then shall come to pass the saying that is written:
“Death is swallowed up in victory.”

1 Corinthians 15:54 (ESV)

When I read the Daily Prompt: Immerse, Pascal’s words and the scripture from She Reads Truth’s Lenten devotional were fresh in my mind.

I could picture my tiny finite being totally lost in the Infinite God.

Swallowed up.

Immersed like my swimmer in a great ocean of Love.

family · swimming

The Record Board

Sally2 Comments

Whenever I go to a pool, my eyes are drawn to the record board.

It’s kind of funny, because I haven’t always been a fan of the record board. Helen still holds over 20 age-group records at the pool in Cooperstown — the earliest from when she was 8 years old, and the latest from when she was 13. Then we moved, and she started racking up high school records in Greene.

Margaret in the middle

A couple of years ago, I caught one of the swimmers in my group staring at the record board in Cooperstown.

“Do you know Helen Zaengle?” she asked.

“I do,” I told her. “She’s my daughter, and she’s Laurel’s sister.”

“Wow,” Margaret said. “She has a lot of records. I’m going to break some of them.”

That was the moment my feelings about the record board changed.

Helen was very good at swimming from a young age. She loved winning races — although there was one time when she asked me why she couldn’t get a rainbow ribbon (the ribbon handed out for participation); all her ribbons were blue.

The record board wasn’t posted at the time, and, quite frankly, I think Helen and I were both unaware of all the records. When the record board went up, part of me felt a little embarrassed because I never sensed that Helen was swimming for the glory of the record board or all the accolades. She swam with the truest sense of the amateur — a love of the sport.

But I worked in the pool these last few years with all those records at my back, and I tried not to look at them. Don’t misunderstand — I am very proud of Helen, but not because she rules the record board. I just think she’s wonderful.

Margaret helped me to see that the records are goals for other swimmers, not to induce pride, but to produce hard work.

Michael Phelps said, “Goals should never be easy,” and Margaret took that to heart. She’s 10 years old now and continues to push herself harder than her peers. She still hasn’t made it to the record board, but I have no doubt that she will.

Laurel swimming breaststroke

Last year, Laurel made it to the record board, by breaking a record that had been up there since before Helen was even born. 11-12 100 Breaststroke.

This year Laurel was studying the records to see if there were any she was close to.

“How about that one,” I said, pointing to 13-14 200 Breaststroke. “I think that one is do-able, maybe not this year, but next.”

The name next to the record: Helen Zaengle.

Helen called me right up. “I heard you told Laurel to break my record,” she said.

“Heck, yes, I did,” I replied.

“I think that would be great,” she said.

She holds her records with open hands, bidding other swimmers to take them, and I think that makes me even prouder than all the records combined.