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Heart-Felt

Sometimes when I write it is deliberate, sometimes it is inspired. This piece is both. This is  the result of five decades of February 14th memories and opinions.

In 2012 it falls on a Tuesday. I will be working. I will not expect anything spectacular and even if something spectacular happened no one would know, but two others in my immediate family. So what is all the hype?

Mine have been an cyclic battle of “here we are again or it doesn’t phase me” in my adult life. Have you guessed my Valentine’s Days have been less than desired by my standard. To begin with I am a hopeless romantic,  now you know the task of making me happy was daunting. Roses, chocolates, diamonds, sweet breakfasts in bed, romantic dinners… those would have been good starts. Now using reasonable deducing one might think this person is STILL a candidate to be a fan of the day. Maybe the celebrations have “just missed” and the “mushy-hearted”  fool is waiting to emerge. However, that is not the case. Then you explore the disappointed cynic and perhaps that is a part of my feelings too.

How did I get to this place? Well the greeting card industry had a great deal to do with it, but I am not going to bash them. There have been times that I believed I would be better served in that very industry, the flip side of that is I have made myself indifferent due to an industry filled with something I have an on-going love affair with, WORDS.

In elementary school you may recall little heart shaped cards and  hard pastel colored candy that were associated with the day. Nothing noteworthy happened here, that is until the tuggings of adolescence began to surface. At first mostly girls gave valentines and some boys, with their mother’s insistence participated. Then you could see the popularity contests start. It went from everyone in the class to actually recognizing fond feelings, friendship or budding “puppy-love”. You were either giggling about the reality of it, fantasizing about it, or feeling isolated for a lack of it. I spent a great deal of time in the fantasy realm where it was safe. Allowing me to protect my heart, but it happened. He came  mid-school year, I was in sixth grade, and he was the prettiest boy I had ever seen. He didn’t know I existed and as time went on I would hope that I had remained in that place, but I never forgot him.  He wasn’t particularly mean to me, he was being an eleven year old boy who was as guided by his hormones as he was by peer pressure.

The teen and early adult years would be a series of  near misses with  significant others or simply lack there of. The lukewarm would-be cynic began to develop and grow. Somewhere in between there were some really special ones for me, ones that will remain in my heart and mind forever.

Therefore, I felt compelled to research Saint Valentine, whom of we have to thank for the name of our sentimental fool’s holiday. He was beheaded.  I am laughing as I bluntly put that out here, for while this was not intended to be a super serious piece it was not the intention to poke fun at either. Irony at it’s roots.

Finally and all put aside; I truly hope your Valentine’s Day is filled with chocolate hearts, beautifully worded poems and the sweet embraces of the one who holds the key to your heart. That is a sincere heart-felt wish.

Ahhhh..Mondays

Whether you listened to them or not we grew up with groups that bemoaned this day of the week. “The Carpenters”-Rainy Day and Mondays, “The Mamas and the Papas”-Monday, Monday  come to my mind first and foremost; no one I can think of right off hand has written a song saying  YEAH Monday, can’t hardly wait! Today I am feeling all the dread associated with this day of the week.

It began about 7:15a.m. I saw the light filtering  in from my bedroom and bathroom windows, and my thought was,” Oh No…..” Once again the weekend had flown by and all I was left with was another MONDAY. From my “Facebook” posts  I wasn’t alone.

I don’t know why this Monday January 30,2012 was so very bad. I certainly have seen worse ones. By that I mean I was faced with things that would actually contribute to a bad day, while this Monday was simply bad  because.. Maybe it was because I didn’t get enough sleep, maybe it was because it was the last Monday in the month, maybe it was bad because I was looking for a reason to feel bad and Monday just happened to be available.

Happily I can report it did get better. Once I started the day, once I realized Monday was not going to disappear because I wasn’t ready for it to be, my universe returned to “normal”. I had to come to grips with as bad as I may have thought my Monday was and facing the day ahead, it sure beat the heck outta the option of not being able to face that same Monday.

The day far behind me and nothing significant to report. Either consciously or unconsciously I did not let a particularly bad start direct the remainder of my day.  I submit this to you; if your day starts off bad, make a decision and take a stand. Do not become one of those folks who lets things happen, and  the only thing they have available to contribute is a complaint.

Going Off On A Tangent

Oh, how we love to hear ourselves speak. At times it is to a point that we do not even realize how self-absorbed we truly are. I remember a song that James Brown sang a few years back , “Takin Loud And Sayin Nothing”. I was not a fan of James Brown in those days. I do however appreciate him now. I had to listen to him to put myself in a mindset to write about this  subject and James put me in that state.

I periodically find it difficult to concentrate, there are so many things going on in most of our daily lives. We feel odd or concerned when we cannot remember things, but the busy-fast pace we exist in can be pointed out as the reason. It takes time to process everything and when you do not give proper time to any project or endeavor the results will reflect the negligence.

Now right in the middle of all of this, my position changes again and without warning. I find myself vacillating on the smallest of decisions. Yes, this is a pure demonstration of lack of concentration. Do you have too many things pulling you in too many different directions? I think we all do. There is no time to slow down, because if you do you may miss something else. It is easy to see how one might loose track of where they are or what they were talking about.

It is hard to be effective if you are not grounded or centered. That applies to conversation as well as active, hands-on projects.  Something is missing when we waver, so our battle must begin and we must bother to recover that steady spot. In that mode of recovery our sense of being, our center needs to be retrieved. Otherwise you may find yourself,  literally speaking, in the middle of nowhere and wondering just how you got there.

sour….

This comes up from time to time and I feel compelled to address it yet once again. It is my personal effort NOT to fall into the category.

We will begin with the glass half empty scenario. I have always consciously said I am the “half full” person, but then I examined real life situations and thought how many times did I think or verbally express something like, ” Who left the half full soda bottle in the family room”. We have become condition to say we are the positive being and the correct answer for a positive being is to say “half full”. However, what do you think when left alone with your thoughts? Really. Think about it; if your encounter with that half a bottle of soda is negative what will your question be,  and how will it be delivered.

No one wants to be negative, but negative things occur in our lives. We cannot ignore them all and we certainly cannot be PC all of the time. Plus why would you? I think a better way to approach this is to just be real. Therefore let’s journey into real for a bit and visit my old friend”sour”.

My dear friend/ally/ sister once told me in the closing part of a conversation,” you don’t want to become sour”. That has stuck with me for over 12 years now. She told me that as a passing thought, but it stuck. I cannot give an exact date, but I know where I was and who I was working for. That narrows things down quite a bit. Those things are only important to me if I want to determine the exact time thing. I was 40 and said to myself, “Yeah she is right. No one wants to be bothered with a mean old person.” My thoughts turned to how many I knew and how often I had run into the type in daily passing. I pictured the scowling faces and I heard the ugly tones coming out of their frowning mouths. I vowed that I would not become one of those people.

Perhaps 40 was premature to decide something such as I would not become sour, but that is what I did. I believe that we do not just suddenly wake up and become anything. Time is a factor and must be taken into consideration. Fast forward to now at 52 I am forced to see that maybe I was not so successful in avoiding that “sour”. Along with that nasty disposition and grimacing face comes the need to assign blame and responsibility, as you may have guessed “yours truly” is not going to be tagged for any of this negative material. However, the mere fact that I have bothered to recognize I am not to blame forces me to admonish I am. Where are the scapegoats when you need them?

I looked into a mirror and saw the lines of “that mean older woman”. I tried to smile her lines away, to no avail.  The gray hair didn’t help either. Therefore, this is my shout to my contemporaries; Stop It Now. Don’t let traffic, daily routine, and “other rude people”put a permanent scowl on YOUR face.  We are not as young as we used to be, but we are resilient. We have to be, cause we are still here.

Who Do You Think You Are?

This is an excerpt from my novel in the works…

First there was the sign from God… I walked into my living room and noticed how the light shone in from the skylights. I was putting a book away and then it came to me, there is a book missing. The book was the family Bible.

I took it from its safe haven and looked at the golden name engraved on the leather book cover; the name of our family, the name associated with my husband and sons. I said to myself,” I should have had our fist names engraved instead”. Then there was a flood of information and confusion: what names would you put? your first name or your middle, my husbands first name or his middle. I saw that the controversy I was trying to avoid was deeper than just the name(s) that it occurred to me should be on the Bible; and no matter how I was dancing around it, I was still trying to be cleverly deceptive.

Knowing exactly who you are is a lifetime process. It never ceases to amaze me how much we take for granted, when we should be treasuring these things as gifts. I am/was fortunate to have made friends with a very sweet lady, who just happens to be a member of The Church of Latter Day Saints. Genealogy is very special to Mormons and they have a vast collection of resources. I took advantage of my friend’s offer to help guide me on this personal venture and I will relay my trip.

Once I embarked on my journey I found out very quickly that for all I knew and thought I knew about my family, it was just a surface scratch. The truth was that I had only a vague idea who I was. What’s more I had an even less idea about the people who are related to me.

On a personal note, and it seems I always have a personal note, I am pretty certain who I am. I can trace my lineage back to the mid- 1800’s just from my memory of what has been told to me, through photos, and obituaries. This by some standards is nothing, but the farther back you go the less connected you are. The personal attachment becomes weak and frayed. Surprisingly there may still be some family resemblances one can detect. Having this kind of information is valuable; but remember the rules of a collector’s item  and apply them here, for these “items”are only as valuable as what someone is willing to pay for them. Thus, the assignment of worth can be tricky.