FAMILY

INHERITANCE

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This morning, I read a column, “Dividing assets in your will can split siblings. Here’s how.” at The Washington Post, about the damage that can result when a parent favors some child or children over others or cuts a child from their will, especially without explanation. Aside from permanent rifts that can result between siblings, there is also the lingering unresolved hurt. A comment from an attorney reports that his experience is that giving more to dysfunctional [addicted, mentally ill] children is common. However unrealistic, many parents hope to equalize situations that are out of their control by gifting one child more than the other in life or in their wills. Some felt permanently injured by fathers who seemed to have abandoned them in favor of a second family. Some inheritors in control have corrected an imbalance as best they could. There were a lot of issues.

I could relate.

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ALICE MUNRO

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For years, most of my life, I claimed I’d never been sexually assaulted, and I even believed that was true. I’m angry about it now. And even so, I get it.

“We say of some things that they can’t be forgiven, or that we will never forgive ourselves. But we do—we do it all the time.”

—the last line from Munro’s last book, Dear Life (2013)

I suspect that Alice Munro had been abused herself, most women of her generation and before were [and mostly still are], and she accepted the inevitability of just getting on with life. I’m not making excuses for bad parenting here, but I keep reading younger people and men condemning Munro as if she’d been the abuser herself. She officially found out about the abuse when her daughter was 25. Her ex-husband found out when their daughter was 9 and told no one.

All sympathy with their youngest daughter.

Jenny Munro, daughter of the 2013 Nobel Prize Laureate in Literature Alice Munroe of Canada, receives the Nobel Prize in her place from Sweden’s King Carl XVI Gustaf, during the Nobel Prize award ceremony at the Stockholm Concert Hall in Stockholm, Tuesday, Dec. 10, 2013. The Nobel awards are always awarded on Dec. 10, the anniversary of Alfred Nobel’s death in 1896. The prizes for laureates in medicine, chemistry, physics, economics and literature are awarded in the Swedish capital Stockholm, whilst the Nobel Peace Prize is awarded on the same day in Oslo, Norway.—FRANK AUGSTEIN
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POETRY and WAR

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I am reading poetry by Danusha Laméris. The first volume chosen by Naomi Shihab Nye, The Moons of August and her second Bonfire Opera. I ordered these chapbooks after reading one of Lameris’s poems, “Incha’Allah.”

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MOTHERS DAY

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Today, at least where I live, was a day to honor mothers. My mother and my husband’s mother have left the planet, as Gary says. Our fathers too, both of lung cancer, both Camels smokers, both veterans. His father died on Mother’s Day 1979.

I want to say something about mothering, because whoever birthed the people we care about, many of us mother. And father, too, is a verb with a broad implications. My mother used to say, “Think how the other person must feel.” She said this when someone was impatient or lost, more often when I was myself impatient or lost. She must have said that to me a hundred times.

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FRIENDS & FAMILY

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I was reading an article about why older people need more friends and suggestions about how to find them (do something different, take up a hobby or join a club) when a woman we met on the beach a couple of times this week and chatted to, rang our garage doorbell and offered her contact information.

Life is wonderful that way sometimes. Full up with wonder.

Early snapshots from my family’s summers at Arch Cape. One at left is dated 1913 when this was still called Cannon Beach. In the middle is the old “beach house” my family used Memorial Day to Labor Day until the 1940s. At right is the first cannon found onshore in 1846 (rediscovered in 1898 according to Wikipedia), my grandmother Fay Fletcher Jackson Smith just after the Great War, and my Aunt Marcia as a toddler in 1925. Gary insists we sort them all by the end of summer. He warns: “It’s going to take weeks.”
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LUCKY

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I recently read an insightful article about what can be learned from regret. Before I started reading, I thought of past regrets and how they informed future actions: failing to respond to the cruelty on the bus, failing to confront racism, as a teacher teasing without malice but also without sensitivity. Each of those events taught me to be better next time. There have been next times to be better. Lucky.

There are the once-only times where I made a choice that stuck, the repeated events where I learned to make better choices, the examples that taught me how to move courageously and generously through my life, and the examples that showed me what not to do. In growing from those opportunities: lucky.

I could credit myself with avoiding the worst of the drug scene, the fraught romantic relationships, the dangling desires that might have lead me astray. I could say I turned away in time, credit myself for having better sense than others, boast of my foresight. The truth is mostly about luck.

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LUCK BETWEEN THE LINES

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Everything I know about promotion, bias, and lies I learned from television ads. The pain reliever that claims to alleviate most headaches when taken with a glass of water? My dad pointed out way back in the 1950s that most headaches are caused by dehydration. They only needed the water. My dad taught me habits of skepticism that have served me well throughout my life. I question everything, consider the angles of possible deception, and sometimes I see right through the pitch while only half trying.

Found on my first run since Covid, the day before yesterday: It’s not your imagination. The base of this tree has grown right around the fire hydrant, which is still seems usable.

Years ago, an educator handed me the new biography, Three Cups of Tea, and assured me it was better than Mountains Beyond Mountains. I had been teaching Pulitzer-winner Tracy Kidder’s book about Dr. Paul Farmer’s campaign to serve the poor in Haiti and elsewhere. Could this memoir be better?

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EASY DOES IT

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We’ve been sorting and clearing for a few years. It’s gone well so far. The attics are empty. Most of my books are prioritized and the most precious of mine have moved East. We’ve talked a lot about the art and furniture that is important to us both. Gary even completely cleared his corner of the living room!

Gary emptied his desk—everything! The desk remains empty, the contents shown here are sorted and stashed invisibly in Portland. Other of his things are set in prominent locations but they do not show in this photo. It all matters to him, and so do the 29 boxes he constructed from my roll cardboard I using on my loom. Each has a shelf of CDs. They will fit under the bed, and Gary wants them kept though he’s not sure he will ever open those carefully constructed and labeled boxes.
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MINDFULNESS

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PE was the hardest class for me all the way through public school. Girls were not much encouraged to play sports in the 50s and 60s, of course. Outside the school day, I rode my bike everywhere, climbed trees and a rope all the way to the top of the gym, nearly drowned in Echo Lake, and later learned to swim but not the kick-turn or water skiing (failed both). During the school day I was teased and bullied and sexually assaulted before I was ten. Ellen and I were always chosen last for playground softball. I learned shame and fear in grade school. Junior high was not much better. I was told I had ugly hands, still couldn’t throw, and the play on my name Priddy still led to many chants of “Janice Ugly.” High school was better because I liked the uneven parallel bars and a bio-feedback unit that taught us how to fully relax our body and focus/unfocus our minds. I imagine what I learned then—the only useful thing I ever learned in school PE classes—might be called mindfulness today.

It took me from “Think how the other person must feel” to “Be mindful of how you feel.”

What you might think you see at left in my photograph of this sandstone headland?—yeah, I see it too.

I am about to write about detail from my real life. I ramble. I wade into shallow waters. Be warned.

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MY FIFTIES

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An article in The Guardian details Fanny Johnstone’s experience caring for her father in the last year and a half of his life. “I wouldn’t have missed it for the world’: 10 things I learned when my father had dementia.”

Illustration: Ula Šveikauskaitė at Synergy/The Guardian; used here without permission. This is a not-for profit site.

It is a healthy and generous story, rich with laughter and grief and kindness and family support. I wish my experience had been like hers, but it wasn’t.

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