A painting of our son’s girlfriend Catherine (Buff) by Jamie Stoneman, her friend and art major.
Our future daughter-in-law Buff is having surgery today. I’m asking for prayers for a successful surgery for stage three colon cancer, without complications.
Buff is an amazing person and a beautiful poet who has been published in numerous literary and poetry publications. We love her like our own daughter.
Here’s one of her poems:
Coal Oil Point Tonight the sky with its plummy texture Is especially dear to me, and the small purple Flowers shuddering in the sand. Tonight the wind curls soft and salty against My bare arms with that strange lively mourning. You let me look at you and understand that Nobody has ever had eyes like yours, fringed with Red-gold lashes, and nobody will again. I look up at the stars and pity them: The more they burn the faster they die. How I burn makes me live beyond myself.
Catherine Simpson is a cellist who lives in Berkeley. She has been previously published in Big River Poetry Review, Right Hand Pointing, Spectrum, Step Away Magazine, Into the Teeth of the Wind, Poydras Review, and Splash of Red.
My Mom, her older brother and my aunt who is 11 or so years younger.
When my family got together to share memories of Mom — while feasting on her favorite dinner of prime rib and popovers that my brother prepared — my aunt (pictured above with Mom) shared several stories. I wrote about the red square contest HERE.
My mom had a funny sense of humor. Even in her later days. When I’d drive her for our favorite sushi lunch, if someone was crossing the street, she’ tell me’d say “Hit her. She’s worth three points.”
Mom’s dad died from stomach cancer at a very young age. My mom was possibly a freshman in college? With her little sister 11 or 12 years younger, my aunt didn’t remember much about her dad. She asked Mom, “What was Dad like? Was he an introvert? Or an extrovert?”
My mom thought for a bit and said, “He was just a regular vert.”
That reminded me of several comments I’ve seen on blogs lately, including my own. We identify as introverts and extroverts.
But are we really one or the other? Is there a combination? Are we introverts more extroverted with people we’re comfortable with? Or is that true for everyone?
My BFF from the University of Washington and me during one of her visits to our home.
Without my friends I would have been lost.
I’m talking about my recent visit with my mom. In case you missed it, I wrote about it HERE. It was difficult to find my mom in skilled nursing and to see how drastically she’s aged since my last visit.
I stayed with my best friend from college who lives six miles from my mom’s assisted living. Lots of times I stay in a small hotel close by. It’s not that nice, but affordable. It was so much better to come back each day to my friends’ comfy house and not be alone.
My BFF’s husband loves to cook and he shopped and prepared my favorite foods. The first night he made steamed clams, garlic bread and a delicious salad. Last time I visited, we went to Pike Place Market and I bought clams, which he cooked. They remembered how much I enjoyed them which was touching. I suppose they didn’t forget after I kept asking if they wanted the clams on their plates! They surrendered them to me.
It was so comforting to not stay by myself and to be able to relax and talk with close friends each day and tell them about my mom. I don’t know what I would have done without them.
The power of music.
One day my mom was kind of out of it. When I walked into her room, she was asleep. She woke up and said “Who are you and what do you want?” I was standing over her bed. To be fair, she didn’t have her glasses on and was groggy.
I got her out of bed and helped her sit in a chair while I sat on her walker. I turned on the TV, but she wasn’t interested and stared down at her hands.
I remembered my brother told me that she perked up listening to music. Mom was a coloratura soprano opera singer. My brother played her Joan Sutherland, a famous coloratura soprano, on his phone and he said Mom sang along with her. I played her favorite songs from Don McClean including Vincent, American Pie, And I Love You So, and Castles in the Air on my phone. She owned every one of McClean’s albums and played them over and over when I was a child.
After a few minutes of listening, my mom began to sing along. The music moved her and made her more alert. She focused on getting out of her chair to walk to her old room. I was amazed at the power of music and the effect it had on her.
“And I Love You So”
And I love you so The people ask me how How I’ve lived till now I tell them “I don’t know”
I guess they understand How lonely life has been But life began again The day you took my hand
And yes I know how lonely life can be The shadows follow me And the night won’t set me free But I don’t let the evening get me down Now that you’re around me
And you love me too Your thoughts are just for me You set my spirit free I’m happy that you do
The book of life is brief And once a page is read All but love is dead This is my belief
And yes I know how loveless life can be The shadows follow me And the night won’t set me free But I don’t let the evening bring me down Now that you’re around me
And I love you so The people ask me how How I’ve lived till now I tell them “I don’t know”
One of my mom’s all time favorite artists and songs.
What are your thoughts about the power of friendships and the power of music? Do you have any examples of how they’ve added to your life?
The baby quail are growing up. Bird watching, especially the babies, helps me relax.
I have two mindfulness apps on my phone. They are supposed to help me with anxiety and stress. One is called Mindfulness, the other Headspace. I’m not very good about using them. I’ll go through a phase where at the end of the day, I’ll sit down and turn on the app for a five minute mindfulness session. Then the next week, I forget about them.
I saw a headline in the Washington Post that caught my eye:
An unintended consequence of mindfulness
Sometimes it pays to contemplate other people’s feelings — not merely your own by Andrew C. Hafenbrack
Here’s an excerpt:
You’ve had a stressful day at work, so, like millions of other people, you open up Calm or Headspace on your smartphone and do some mindful meditation — concentrating on your bodily sensations, “observing” your thoughts in the moment. Research has shown that this is likely to have benefits: Mindful meditation reduces anxiety, depression and stress; more pragmatically, it can also improve sleep, decision-making, focus and self-control. This helps to explain why so many companies have jumped on the mindfulness bandwagon, incorporating it in corporate wellness programs (and why Calm was valued at $2 billion in 2020). But what if, in the course of your stressful day, you acted like a jerk toward a colleague at a meeting? Could all of that inward focus cause you to downplay the harm you caused that person, letting it float away like a leaf on a stream?
That’s exactly what my research colleagues Matthew LaPalme and Isabelle Solal and I found in a series of eight studies, involving more than 1,400 participants in the United States and Portugal, slated to be published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Across a range of laboratory scenarios and online experiments, we found that asking people to engage in a single session of 8 or 15 minutes of mindfulness meditation — focusing their attention on the physical sensations of breathing — reduced their self-reported levels of guilt (about incidents warranting guilt). It also reduced their willingness to take “prosocial” steps to remedy harms they’d done. The research suggests that people ought to be careful about when they use mindfulness meditation, lest the comfort they derive from it come at the cost of their connections with other human beings.
The writer is an assistant professor at the University of Washington’s Foster School of Business. In his studies he discovered that Meditation led feelings of guilt to subside, along with the desire to rectify the situation.
So meditation is good at making us feel calm, but it may get rid of guilt when we hurt someone else’s feelings. Sometimes feeling guilty is good, especially if it’s warranted. The emotion of guilt can prompt us to do the right thing like apologize. The inward trend of mindfulness can lessen our empathy to those around us.
I had never heard this perspective before and I found it interesting.
What are your thoughts about mindfulness? Do you find it helpful? Do you think it alleviates feelings of guilt or not?
The big news on Thursday was Elon Musk offering to buy Twitter at a 38% premium. What will happen?
Twitter employees were given a day off to rest last week because of the stress of learning Musk bought 9.2% of their company and was offered a seat on the board. Imagine how they felt Thursday!
During the brief time the world thought Musk was going to be on the board of Twitter, he tweeted some funny stuff including this:
Musk said in a Ted Talk yesterday that he doesn’t have an economic motive but believes in free speech. I read that people at Babylon Bee, a satirical site, were contacted by Musk before he purchased shares. He asked if they had been banned and why.
Personally I’m against censorship and banning people unless they are breaking the law. I’m all for free speech.
I think Musk is one of those polarizing figures who people love or love to hate. I have taken the temperature of my immediate family to attest to this fact.
What are your thoughts? Do you think Twitter should be owned by Musk? What are your thoughts about censorship and free speech? Do you use social media? If so, which ones?
Another funny tweet during Elon’s one or two days of being named to the BOD.
Life at the beach with two young kids back in our Laguna days.
I’ve been struggling to find the words. My brain is hurting at the thought. We lost another friend. A close friend. Our son’s godfather.
I got the call last week from our friend’s wife. I cried all night. I need to send a sympathy card and I can’t get myself to write it. The words seem so tiny and small. Helpless. I don’t know how she and her daughters are getting through each day and night. My heart aches for them.
We have so many memories with our two families together. At one time, Joe was my husband’s boss. They moved from San Francisco to the Palm Springs area when our son was a newborn. They had three daughters close in age to our kids.
They invited us into their beach deal. They found an inexpensive house to rent in Laguna Beach from Memorial Day to Labor Day and asked us to split the summer with them. With summer temperatures ranging from 110 to 124 degrees in Palm Springs, this beach rental changed our lives. I was a stay-at-home mom taking the kids to swim lessons and hanging out at the beach building sand castles and boogie boarding with my children.
My husband took long weekends and commuted back and forth. We shared a few weekends with our friends during the summer playing volleyball, Trivial Pursuit and eating pizzas with the kids.
When they moved to New Jersey to corporate headquarters as Joe moved up the chain of command with the firm, we visited them and spent Christmas together. We shared time together on corporate-sponsored trips and visited them more often when they moved to Nevada (a four-hour drive from Palm Springs).
Joe was proud of his Catholic education at an all boys school on Long Island. He was a Lit major at Rutgers and he loaned my husband and me must-read literature we had somehow missed including “Atlas Shrugged” and “The East India Trading Company.”
Joe had charisma, charm and a great sense of humor. He had a band of employees at the firm and friends throughout his life that put him on a pedestal — our family included. The last time we saw him was on Coronado Island at his middle daughter’s wedding. It was a beautiful weekend filled with memories I treasure.
We planned on going back to Coronado to visit them that summer or driving to Vegas to visit during the winter, but COVID hit. I feel like a few years of friendship were stolen. Joe was diagnosed with cancer years ago but survived and beat it. His heath was an issue, but he was living his life in his big way until this last year when another cancer hit.
I sincerely hope that it’s true that deaths come in threes, because this is the third close friend we’ve lost since Thanksgiving.
Do you think it’s an old wives tale that deaths come in threes? Have you lost anyone close to you this past year?Do you feel like COVID has stolen time from you with friends and family?
A watercolor by my grandma of our cabin in Washington.
I have been avoiding a difficult conversation for months now. It’s been eating at me. I’ve prayed to find the right words. I received an email yesterday that I needed to answer — and I realized I was being handed the perfect opportunity. I decided on the outset of the day to call right away and get it over with. But first I took my morning walk.
I think by procrastinating, literally for months, I was building the call into something it wasn’t. I was making a bigger deal out of the call than it was. I knew I’d be anxious all day, so I chose to make the call in the morning.
By putting off the inevitable, I was stressing myself out and generating needless anxiety.
Yes, I did it. I feel like a huge weight is off my shoulders. The person I talked with is very reasonable and understanding. That helps.
I remember working as a financial advisor, I hated some calls more than others. I could easily put some calls off on the back burner — until they absolutely had to be made.
I have a sign sitting on my desk that says “Live now. Procrastinate later.” I should look at the sign a little more often.
What do you do when faced with a conversation you don’t want to have? Do you tackle it right away? Or avoid it at all costs? Do you do the same thing with chores or things you don’t want to do like taxes? Or do you face the monster and end the nightmare?
