Musings

The Love of Their Life

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I have developed a fascination with obituaries lately. Most likely, this is because I read them out loud every month from the local newspaper for my volunteer stint with the Lighthouse Center for Vision Loss.

Despite my history as a romance writer, the cynic in me always gets a kick out of obituaries that state the departed met or married someone who was the “love of their life.”

I have noticed that the “love of their life” phrase is usually used when the “love of their life” survives the person for whom the obituary is written. Could it be that the survivors are the ones who wrote the obituaries? If so, are they including the phrase because it’s true, or as an ego boost for themselves and a way to assert their important status in the departed person’s life?

The romance writer in me would like to think the phrase is true. But I have done an informal survey and have noticed that almost every time, the “love” is the one who is the survivor.

If the couple had a long relationship, I’d be inclined to believe that the phrase is true, but length of a relationship does not always indicate a happy, loving relationship.

I often wonder if the departed person would have included the phrase in their obituary if they had been the one to write it. Since they are dead and I cannot ask them this, I guess this is one of those unanswerable burning questions that will plague me for the rest of my days during the wee hours of the morning.

What do you think about this phrase? Is it overused? Is it just a way for survivors to feel better? Am I entirely too cynical? Should I try to solve world hunger instead?

Happy Belated Birthday Bob (Dylan)

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Bob Dylan’s childhood home in Duluth.

Last Friday was Bob Dylan’s birthday. My hometown of Duluth does it up right by holding an annual Dylan Fest — a week of events that features song, poetry, lectures, tours, and birthday cake.

This year, we attended the launch of a new book of poetry inspired by Dylan. “Visiting Bob” contains 100 poems by U.S. and international poets. A half dozen of the poets read their works and other poets’ works. Some of the poems were beyond me but others I understood. One that stuck was by local poet, Connie Wanek. Its theme was Dylan sightings in Duluth — are they false? Are they true? It ends on a hopeful note that perhaps someday the poet really will see him back in this town where he was born.

We also attended a lecture by one of the poets from Texas, David Gaines. Because he wrote a book about Dylan, he attracted media interest when Dylan won the Nobel Prize. Gaines described his experience being interviewed by Swedish public television and other major media outlets. He also got to travel to Stockholm to attend the airing of a Swedish public television story in conjunction with the prize ceremony.

On our way home from the lecture, we decided to stop by Bob Dylan’s home on the hillside, since it was on our route and we’d never seen it. A fan owns it and has spiffed up the duplex. Dylan lived in the right-hand side. A plaque on the front of the home proclaims its significance.

It’s hard to believe that I’ve lived here over five decades and never looked it up before. ‘Bout time, I guess.

When I posted the house photo on Facebook, one of my friends said they had a chance to rent the place in the mid-1970s, but turned it down. They didn’t know the home’s significance, however. When they found out afterward, they deeply regretted their decision because they were fans.

Another friend said she walked by the place thousands of times but it took years before she learned who had lived there.

These are typical instances of  “Duluth” to me. It’s a big small town. It’s large enough to get lost in if you want, and to never see parts of it. But it’s small enough that everyone has friends in common through one means or another, whether they went to school with them, or worked with them, etc.

Even after all this time, this town still has hidden gems to discover for those who take the time to look.

Dining in the Dark

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Yesterday, Russ and I paid good money to eat food we couldn’t see. The dinner was a fundraiser for the Lighthouse Center for Vision Loss, a local group that helps people with vision problems. (You may recall that I volunteer for this group by reading the Sunday newspaper aloud over the airwaves once a month.)

The event was hosted by a local TV news personality and the keynote speaker was a man who lost his vision due to retinitis pigmentosa. From him, I learned that blind people make jokes just like the rest of us (imagine that!) and that 66% of visually impaired adults are unemployed.

Another speaker before the dinner was a woman who lost her vision to diabetes. Her best joke was that this was one night when she didn’t have to worry about how awful she eats. (Because everyone else will be blindfolded. Get it? Maybe you had to be there.)

Then two speakers instructed us on how to go about eating when blindfolded. The main tips were: to sit close to the table; put a napkin in your lap or tuck it into your shirt; feel slowly with your hands where your silverware and drinks are first; think of your plate as a clock face and have someone tell you where your food is in relationship to that; use the edge of your fork to circle your meat and determine what size it is; and keep the sharp side of your knife down when cutting meat.

Before the food was brought out, we were instructed to don black blindfolds that were provided near our place settings. Once our plates arrived, I cheated and took mine off so I could tell Russ where his food was on his plate.

I found that cutting meat was the hardest part. I attempted several cuts, but couldn’t tell if my knife was  sharp-side-down or not. I ended up just stabbing a large piece of pork and tearing off pieces with my teeth — not exactly fancy dinner behavior, but hey, it worked. I appreciated the advice about reaching slowly for water glasses and silverware. I am proud to report no spillage or droppage.

Once I mostly emptied my plate, finding the remaining food became more difficult. I can’t imagine having to eat that way all the time. The experience gave me a greater appreciation for the challenges that visually impaired people face and the important work that organizations like the Lighthouse Center do.

Careful! People Might Take you at Your Word

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Cake by Chriss

Image by Chriss from Flickr.

An incident is arising in my mind from the mists of time, perhaps because I’ve been planning several events recently. My husband and I had purchased our first house in a Duluth neighborhood. Our son was one, so we decided to hold a combination birthday party and open house for our friends and the neighbors.

On the afternoon of the party, many people showed up. Things were in full swing when a couple from down the street rang the doorbell. We hadn’t met them yet and were happy to see them at our door.

After introductions, the woman said something like, “I’m sorry, we don’t have time to stay, but we just wanted to say hello.” My husband and I expressed our disappointment at this. We chatted a few moments more and then they went on their way.

I was surprised some months later to learn from my mother (who lived in our same city) who in turn learned from one of her friends who was acquainted with the couple, that they were incensed and highly affronted that we didn’t insist they come into the party.

I stared at my mother in disbelief at this news, then started to laugh. Oh the social games people play! I had never run into that behavior before. And I’m sorry, I’m not the type of person to beg people to come to parties if they’ve said they can’t. Imagine that — the couple was angry because we believed what they said.

We lived in the neighborhood for a few years more and never did run into the couple, so we had no chance to smooth things over.

I suppose they had expected us to say, “Nonsense, please come in. We’d love for you to stay!”

Instead, they got, “Oh, sorry to hear that,” and eventually, a goodbye.

In our defense, we were new homeowners, new parents, and unschooled in social mores. But I do hope the experience made those neighbors think twice before they tried this tactic on others. I’m sure there are other people in the world who think people actually mean what they say.

Marriage Advice Learned in a Bar

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I attended a bachelorette party recently in a local pub. Two patrons near our table were asked for their advice for the bride. Bernie (a woman) and John had these sage words of wisdom to impart from their 40 years of marriage:

When you wake up each morning, ask yourself what you can do for your spouse today instead of what they can do for you. 

Solastalgia: The Psychological Impact of Environmental Change

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Leah Prussia, College of St. Scholastica.

Earlier this month, I attended the St. Louis River Summit. This science conference about the largest river that empties into Lake Superior (on the U.S. side) has gradually been incorporating more presentations that aren’t as “sciencey” as usual.

One of them caught my interest. Presented by Leah Prussia with the College of St. Scholastica, it was called “Solstalgia: An Intersection of Shared Knowledge.”

“What is solastalgia?” you may ask. Solastalgia is an English term for the mental or emotional distress that people feel from harmful environmental changes. It’s made up of “solace” and “nostalgia.” People feeling solastalgia no longer receive solace from their environment. Due to changes, they feel nostalgia for the way the place used to be. It’s a relatively new word, coined in 2003.

The changes can be from environmental catastrophes, such as volcanoes or floods, or from human-made changes like development or climate change.

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St. Scholastica students gathering stories about people’s experiences with solastalgia.

Prussia, a social work professor, had her students at the Summit to collect people’s stories during lunch. I told them the story of a grove of trees near my home where I used to play with other neighborhood kids. I was devastated when the grove was cleared for a new house.

I remember complaining to the neighbor boy about it while we were on the swing set in my back yard. He said I’d get over it. That was almost fifty years ago!

I’m obviously still not over it if I can remember the pain I felt at the change. Have you ever felt solastalgia?

 

What it’s like to have Cataract Surgery

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As the anesthetist wheeled my hospital bed down the hall, I looked up at the rectangles of passing florescent lights overhead, stereotypical of every television hospital scene ever filmed. Maybe it was a side effect of the sedative he gave me, but the thought that I was in a bad TV movie amused me.

I was going into surgery to have my old dirty cloudy eye lens plucked out from my right eye and replaced with an UltraSert lens, corrected for my nearsightedness and with UV and blue light filters! Years of squinting into the sun and just plain living had caught up with me. I’d been seeing haloes around the headlights of oncoming cars for years. Things had gotten so bad recently that I started avoiding driving at night.

This surgery was going to give me a new lease on seeing. My friends who had undergone the procedure told me it was a piece of cake, but I was skeptical about staying awake and having someone rummaging around in my eye innards. It didn’t help that the day before my surgery, news reports came out about a woman who committed suicide because her Lasik surgery went wrong.

At least I was having a different procedure done, but it still gave me pause.

Well, I am still here to say that I’m looking forward to having my other lens replaced later this week. Although I didn’t feel that sedated, I was apparently relaxed enough that they didn’t need to strap my head down to keep it from moving.

The doctor opened my eye with a speculum. They irrigated my eye with a saline solution and that’s about the only thing I felt. The main thing I had to remind myself was not to try to blink or struggle against the speculum.

What did I see? The white light that the doctor used to look into my eye. I saw the light the whole time through the 20-minute procedure. I couldn’t really tell when my old lens was gone and the new one was put in – I always saw light, although I guess from stories I’ve heard, other people see a red light or blackness. There was one point when my sight seemed to take a more internal turn, and I got impressions of things floating around inside my eye. Perhaps that’s when I was lensless.

From the time I got to the outpatient clinic to the time I went home took about 4 hours. You’ll need a friend to drive you home and back later the same day to the clinic for a follow-up exam by your doctor where s/he will check the pressure of your eye and make sure everything’s okay.

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A blurry photo of my fashionable night eye guard that I wore for a week.

Be prepared for a lot of different drops put in your eye. Post-surgery you’ll be on an eye drop regimen that consists of a steroid to keep the swelling down and an antibiotic to prevent infection. At night, you’ll need to wear an eye guard for the first week.

The worst part of the procedure was only having one good eye to work with for two weeks. Although I got a clear lens placed in my eyeglasses over my good eye, I found I couldn’t tolerate wearing my glasses because of the lack of depth perception. So I’ve just been going around with one clear eye and one fuzzy eye. So if you notice any spelling errors in this post, that is why! But I’ve been making due the best I can in the meantime, and I’ve been able to drive all right (20/30 vision in my surgeried eye makes me legal to drive).

I also went out and bought a brand new pair of nonprescription sunglasses — first time I’ve been able to do that in years! The surgery seems to have made my eyes more sensitive to light, and the sunglasses are helpful.

A creepy side effect of the surgery is that, in the right conditions, I can see reflections from the artificial lens in my eye. I can tell that it’s not natural – kind of like having a robot eye. I wasn’t expecting that. But I guess it’s worth it to have better vision.

Anyway, wish me luck on my next surgery, and if you are scheduled to have it – I’m here to attest that it really isn’t so bad. It may even free you from glasses. And no, my doctor is not paying me to say any of this!

The Gauntlet

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Shopping for lotion, I enter the store.

A clerk approaches and asks if I would like a basket.

“Why yes,” I say.

As I walk to the rack that carries my lotion (named Hello Beautiful)

the clerk asks if she can help me find anything.

“It’s right here,” I say proudly, having found my lotion by myself. “Hello Beautiful.”

She triumphantly points to another rack nearby

where lotions sit with the same name and a different label design.

I ponder the new ones, wondering, why can’t they just leave it alone?

Whenever I find something I like, the powers-that-be

change the recipe, change the label, change the scent, change the price.

I put the lotions in my basket.

I walk through the store where another clerk

asks if I’ve found everything I need.

“Yes,” I say.

She leaves, downcast at my satisfaction.

I stand in the checkout line,

almost to the end.

It’s my turn and the cashier looks into my basket, dismayed.

“Oh, don’t you want any spray? It’s twoferone!”

“No thank you.”

She tisk-tisks and rings me up. Asks if I have an email address.

“I don’t like to give that out,” I say.

She give me a look, bags my purchases and starts to hand them to me.

I expect a request for my social security number before she

lets my lotions go, but no.

She has my money and I am free now,

having survived another pass

through the capitalist gauntlet.

The Jayme Closs Case and the Importance of News Headlines

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Jayme (right), her aunt, and doggie, safe at home. Credit: Jennifer Smith

I was in the bathroom, putting on my makeup with the door open when the television news story came on about Jayme Closs. She’s the 13-year-old girl who was kidnapped in northern Wisconsin. This was the morning after she was “found.”

The newscasters were going on about how she had been “found alive.” Of course, this was wonderful and superb. News of her kidnapping had filled newspapers and airwaves for weeks, and it seemed that, especially during the holidays, her photo and identifying information appeared often in an attempt to keep public awareness keen.

The reporter on the news show was interviewing Jayme’s aunt over the phone and was asking for details about how Jayme had been found. Since there had been such a major search effort put on for her in the area where she disappeared, I think most people assumed that volunteers or the authorities had found her. Part of the inherent definition of “found” is that it’s something that somebody else does.

Then Jayme’s aunt said that Jayme had escaped from the house where she was held. I popped my head out of the bathroom and walked over to the television. This was new information. This wasn’t just a damsel in distress being found. This was the damsel slaying the dragon and saving herself!

I watched the interview for a few more minutes, but then had to leave for work. During my drive, I heard a radio story about how Jayme had been “found.”

By the time I got to work, the writer in me and the MeToo woman-power feminist in me was dismayed by the passive and inaccurate role these newscasts were putting Jayme in. I wrote this quick post to my recent (personal) Twitter account:

I’m happy and relieved to hear that Jayme Closs is alive! However, it bugs me that the media keeps saying she was “found” alive. She freakin’ escaped her captor and saved herself. #JaymeCloss

I’ve only written a few tweets before then, and I’d never used a hashtag before. I didn’t expect much to come of it.

Holy moly, the thing went viral! As of this writing, my little tweet made 209,000 impressions. It had 4,400 engagements, 2,270 likes, 372 retweets and 78 replies. At one point as I sat watching the stats rise, 20 people per second were viewing it.

That was scarily overwhelming for a person whose most popular tweet to date only had six likes. Handling the comments was also overwhelming. Obviously, many people agreed with my sentiments and said they thought the same thing. Others were upset because they thought I was criticizing law enforcement personnel. I explained I was criticizing the news media, not law enforcement.

Others asked me what words would be better to use instead. I said, “Missing Girl Escapes.” Better yet is the headline I saw a few days ago that said, “She’s the Hero!”

Others jumped on my semantics bandwagon and criticized the use of the word “miracle” in connection with her escape. “It’s called self-preservation and bravery,” one tweeter said.

Then the authorities held their first news conference after her escape and commenters to my tweet started dissing them for the self-congratulatory tone of the event. Yes, these agencies did stellar work in trying to find her, and yes, they found her captor soon after Jayme escaped, but to many, it seemed as if the law enforcement agencies were taking all the credit and not giving enough to Jayme. This incensed one commenter so much that she said she called the sheriff’s office and complained about the way they handled the press conference.

Others criticized me for making a big deal out of word choice when this was such a joyous occasion. All I can say is that words matter. Accuracy matters. I have a journalism background and master’s degree in journalism. Words are part of who I am and I’m not going to apologize for that. And it’s obvious my words struck a chord because a heck of a lot of the commenters agreed with me.

This issue makes me wonder, if Jayme had been a boy, would the news media and the authorities have characterized her escape so passively at first? Comparing headlines (passive vs. active) for kidnap victims who escape would be a good PhD journalism research project to see if gender plays a role. PhD students feel free to steal this idea!

Lately, the news conversation has been about who should get the $50,000 reward in the case. Everyone – even the people who first saw Jayme – are saying the reward should go to Jayme because she saved herself. I think that’s very fitting. Jayme’s parents were both killed by her attacker/kidnapper. She’s going to need all the emotional and financial help she can get in the future. I hope that happens.

But I’m not going to tweet this opinion. 🙂

 

P.S. If you want to write or donate to Jayme, the address is: Light the Way Home for Jayme, PO Box 539, Rice Lake, WI, 54868.

Old Wood: A Love Story, Part 3

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A screenshot of the Globe Elevator fire, courtesy of WDIO-TV.

Sometimes I shiver at the prescience of my past blog posts. Like the time I wrote about the “ice castle” that was being built outside of my office and said, “What could possibly go wrong?” (It collapsed while its creator was talking to a reporter for the New York Times.)

I got the same shiver when I read my 2013 “Old Wood” series about the historic Globe Elevator in Superior. (See Part 1 and Part 2.) The owners were trying to save their wood reclamation business from bankruptcy. The last line of my story was, “These pieces of history should not go up in smoke.”

Guess what? Unfortunately, the old grain elevator, some equipment, and a couple million dollars of wood burned in an accidental fire last month.

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The view of the fire from my office window.

The sight of flames and a plume of smoke out my office window alerted me to the fire. My coworkers and I immediately felt the lingering trauma of the Husky Energy Refinery Fire that happened this spring near our office and required a community evacuation. We made frantic calls to assess the danger and whether we should leave again.

Thankfully, no explosive chemicals were involved in this fire, just some really dry and valuable old wood, so we didn’t need to evacuate. The people I interviewed for my previous posts no longer owned the site – others were working to salvage the wood. News reports blame a spark from a piece of equipment for starting the fire, which quickly engulfed the elevator.

Another thing to be thankful for is that the elevator was out on a spit of land in the harbor away from other structures, so there wasn’t much danger of the fire spreading elsewhere. The location did make firefighting a challenge, however, because it was a long way away from a hydrant. Once the flames calmed down enough, fire crews were able to pump water from the harbor to put out the fire.

Anyway, now I’m rather paranoid to write about anything for fear of encouraging mayhem. I learned during Christmas gatherings with my relatives that I am now known as “the cousin in the middle of all the disasters.”

Of course, I know I don’t really have the power to write disasters into existence, but you’ve got to admit, my record is rather uncanny!