Picking Up Poo

My sister picks up poo.

Now before you start wondering what kind of people we are, let me give you a little background. My sister has dogs that she walks several times a day. Being an all-around good neighbor, she picks up her own dogs’ deposits.

She goes a step further, though. If she happens on an unknown dog’s poo, she picks that up, too. If you’ve ever stepped in a pile (an who hasn’t!), you’ll appreciate this Good Samaritan act.

Seeing my sister on poo patrol got me thinking: What if we all picked up poo? Literally when it comes to dogs. That in itself would make the world a little bit better,

What if we took it a step further? What if we tried not to leave (metaphorical) poo in the first place? What is “metaphorical poo?” It could be a snide remark about a co-worker. It could be an offhand comment about what a bad day we’re having. It could be a complaint about the job. What if…we just didn’t say those things? Bit our tongues and moved on? The piece of the planet we inhabit would be a little bit cleaner.

Then…what if we started picking up other people’s (metaphorical) poo? What if, when someone made a snide remark to us, we absorbed it and moved on? Not complaining about it to a co-worker. Not stewing about it. Not retorting with a snider remark. Just abosorbing it without a comment beyond “uh-huh” or something equally non-commital…then nothing. That particular pile of poo would go no further. No one else would have to deal with it.

My sister has inspired me to be aware of the ways I might be leaving poo for someone else to deal with. I try harder to think before I speak. To avoid passing on gossip. To criticize less.

Leaving poo behind is natural for animals and young children. Picking up after ourselves takes maturity. Helping other people with the task takes compassion.

(photo by Ryan Wyatt on Unsplash)

Resurrection

One veined hand

In another clasped,

Love grasped

When even memories die.

A breath,

A sigh,

No asking why.

They know, these two,

Love reaching beyond death.

Photo by Harli Marten on Unsplash

The Customer

The first thing I noticed about him was how he didn’t lift his eyes from the counter in front of him. People approach my counter tentatively, confidently, aggressively…and they look at me. This man doesn’t.

His hands are always dirty, but that’s not unusual. Homeless people often come into the store, so dirty hands aren’t uncommon.

What he buys isn’t uncommon either: oatmeal cookies, maybe a cheap frozen meal. For some reason, though, it makes me sad to see a grown man buy nothing but this kind of cheap, quick food. I’ve never seen him buy cigarettes or alcohol.

He always pays with coins, or maybe small bills. I’ve never had to break a twenty for him. I’ve never seen him use a credit card.

The most striking thing about him, though, is that he doesn’t look up at me. At most, he glances up briefly, then looks back down at the counter, or at the change he’s counting out. What happened to him, that he can’t even look up at me?

It’s easy to speculate about him. He’s probably homeless. He probably gets his small change from recycling aluminum cans. Maybe he does drugs. Maybe he has a mental illness.

Or maybe I should just leave him alone – even in my own mind. Maybe I should just let him what he is in that moment.

A customer. A human being.

Photo by Steve Halama on Unsplash

Right-Handed Writing

For years now, I’ve been writing with my left hand.

You know how it is. You’re doing something that isn’t among your skills or gifts. You do it because you think you have to. You have to pay the mortgage. You have to because your boss is depending on you. You have to because you’ve been doing it a long time, and it’s too late to change.

Even though you’ve been doing it a long time, it’s still uncomfortable. It still feels awkward. You feel like you’ll always be catching up.

Have you ever written with your right hand? Have you ever done some work that felt natural, that felt too easy to be work? You almost felt guilty for calling it “work” because it came so easily that it seemed to happen in spite of you.

You still had to put forth effort. It came naturally, but it still had to be honed, as a diamond is honed from carbon. But it was there, part of you, just waiting to be developed. You delighted in seeing that diamond emerge.

Left-handed writing doesn’t feel like that. Whatever that is for you, it never feels natural. It never comes easily, even after years of practice. It might be acceptable, even good – maybe even excellent. But it never comes naturally. It never feels as if it’s part of you.

I’ve done both right-handed and left-handed writing, so I know the difference. Right-handed writing feels like a gift. I still have to work at it. It doesn’t spring forth fully formed the first time around. But I know there’s a diamond there, and I know that I will reveal it, so I’m willing to chip away patiently until the glory emerges.

I never feel at ease when I’m writing with my left hand. Even after years of doing it, it doesn’t feel easy or natural. It may look alright from the outside. It might even look good. But it’s a constant effort, done in the constant awareness that what I’m doing is not natural for me.

It’s time to start writing with my right hand again. It’s time to do something that, although demanding, comes naturally. It’s time for the diamond to emerge.

(Photo courtesy of Cathryn Lavery – Unsplash)

 

Crossroads

When I was in college, having a minor in Italian, I studied the Divine Comedy. The circles of hell were the most fascinating to my 20-something self; Dante’s “middle of life’s journey” was incomprehensible. Forty seemed unreachable then.

I’m beginning to understand that midpoint now. It seems like a crucial time – “crucial” as related to the root of the word, “crux,” or “cross.” I’m at a crossroads, and the choices I make now will shape the kind of elder I become.

According to Erik Erikson, the developmental choice during the middle years is between generativity and stagnation. The choice is a stark one, and the temptation to stagnation is terrible. How easy it would be to coast until I die! How tempting to stop trying, to stop fighting, to stop challenging myself. It’s like syrup, that sticky temptation.

The other pull is to generativity – the pull to pass on what I’ve learned. This includes a direct transmission of knowledge, but also the passing on that is done through action and behavior, as well as through words.

For most of my life, I’ve considered myself a loner and a writer. My volunteer position is challenging me on both counts. I’m challenged to work on relationships – relationships with executives because I hold the volunteer equivalent of an executive position, and relationships with people younger than I am who have different skills than I have.

In both cases, one of the challenges is to stand up straight and act out of my gifts, to hold my head up and say, in action if not in words, “Yes, I am leading a team. We are doing this work that enables my supervisor to do other work. Without us, this amount and quality of work would not get done. And without me, the team would not be as strong as it is.”

I’m afraid of responsibility, and there have been times in my life when I’ve ducked out from under it. Responsibility can feel like a burden. It can feel overwhelming. For me, having responsibility carries the fear of failure.

It is important that I not duck the responsibility this position offers me. I have opportunities to recognize and facilitate the development of others’ gifts. Part of my responsibility as a leader is to ask myself, “Who on the team could some day hold the position I hold now? What can I do to help that person grow into such a position?”

This position also offers me ongoing opportunities and challenges to recognize and develop my own gifts. Yes, I am a wordsmith. I will love words as long as my mind allows me to use them. There is comfort in putting that label on myself.

But I am also able to lead a team. I am able to relate successfully to a variety of personalities, to recognize and facilitate the use of others’ gifts. I am able to acknowledge my own mistakes and to move on without wallowing in them.

So, as uncomfortable as it can be, as tempting as stagnation is, I must continue to move ahead. My control over the aging of my body is limited; for my spirit, I must continue to choose expansion and growth.

And We’re Off!

My sister and I are beginning to plan another trip. For me, the planning is part of the fun of the trip! It’s the beginning of learning more about another country. In this case, we’ll both be learning “survival German” as well.

I speak Spanish and Italian and a bit of French already, but German is another story. German has declensions! The form of a noun changes depending on how it’s used in a sentence. Is it the subject? A direct object? An indirect object? These nouns have identity crises!

The fun thing about learning another language is that you pick up a taste of the culture as well. The Romance languages have formal and informal “you” forms; so does German. So speakers have the option of indicating degrees of familiarity just by their grammar choices.

This is not a feature of English and I miss it, although English is my first language. I can’t use grammar to indicate that someone is a friend or a peer, as I can in French, Italian and Spanish (and soon German!). I can’t, with a simple verb form, indicate respect for an elder.

German will be more of a challenge than Spanish, Italian and French were. I was 16 when I started studying Spanish, which was not as foreign as it might have been if I hadn’t taken Latin. And I am older, long past the prime years for learning a new language. I expect my mind to be more resistant to the language, my spirit more resistant to the culture.

But the new world that will open to me will be worth the trek ahead. Onward!

Gumption

 

My people weren’t fancy – not on either side of my family. My maternal grandfather came from a tiny town in Sicily that we reached via a hair-raising drive requiring the skills of an Indy race car driver. To this day, raw meat hangs in the butcher shop window, and the evening’s entertainment is a stroll with your neighbors. (It’s far more fun than it sounds!)

My paternal grandfather ‘s family was equally salt-of-the-earth. He was born in an Ohio village that at its largest boasted fewer than 300 souls.. The steeple of his family’s parish church still dominates the skyline.

It wasn’t an idyllic life. His father died at 49, while Grandpa was still a teenager. That left his mother with at least one dependent child at home. That younger sister also died a few years later, of diphtheria. Although I didn’t seek out their graves, they are surely among those buried in the cemetery not far from that church.

Grandpa Chimera didn’t have it any easier. As a young man, he and his surviving siblings traveled those twisting roads to Palermo, where they embarked for the United States. In his New World, he suffered the loss of his wife just months after my mother’s birth.

My grandparents were not pull-yourselves-up-by-your-bootstraps successes. Both of my grandfathers were blue-collar workers, and Grandpa Chimera’s English was comprehensible but broken all his life. Grandpa Shuler, as I recall, didn’t go beyond eighth grade.

But I am proud to come from this stock. I am proud that they had the gumption to leave their small worlds for what they saw as something better, although perhaps also frightening.

I need to remember the courage that produced me.

 

Keeping My Sister

They thought it would never work. We are too different, my sister and I. How could we possibly take a two-week trip together?

Rose and I are less than a year apart, so I guess it was to be expected. You can see it in our old family albums, where there’s a photo of Rose in her stroller, me standing beside it. She appears to be pushing me away.
That pretty much sums up my memory of our relationship. We are so opposite in so many ways, beginning with appearance. My father’s Teutonic ancestry is evident in her fair skin and hair. She approaches life with a self-confident stride.

I, on the other hand, manifest my mother’s dark Sicilian features. It’s immediately evident that my background is Mediterranean: Brunette hair, brown eyes, coffee complexion. And a reserved disposition.

So there we were, both in our 50s. I wanted to return to Spain, a country I’d travelled in as a recent college graduate. But I didn’t want to go alone. So I asked this most unlikely of travel companions if she wanted to go with me.

Why? Because in that circumstance, I valued the very traits that also intimidated me. My sister would stride confidently through Spain, unintimidated by language or strange cities or the fact that this would be her first trip to Europe. Or so I thought.

I’m also a teacher by nature, although not by profession. Since I was 16 and first studied Spanish, I’ve loved the language as inexplicably as most teenagers love their first love. That led to a Spanish major and the month-long solitary trek around Spain. It also led to two unforgettable years as a high school Spanish teacher.

And Rose was interested. She let me take the lead in planning the trip – half the fun, as I told her. We had minor disagreements at that stage, but no deal -breakers.

So we touched down in Madrid’s Barajas airport – and most of what I knew about it now came more from Rick Steves than my previous experience. We took a fee-controlled taxi to our hotel, a serviceable one with friendly staff, and within walking distance of the Plaza Mayor.

At this stage. I was the interpreter. Rose had questions; I posed them to the cab driver, then translated his answers. But only for the first two or three days. My sister’s fearlessness came to the fore. She started saying things herself, starting with “Do you speak English?” If the answer was no, she uses a combination of the Spanish she knew with my filling in the blanks to find out what she wanted to know.

We’ve both matured, my sister and I. There were many points at which, in the past, disagreement would have led to an argument and discord. But she gave way sometimes, and so did I. I’m fascinated with the Basques, and I wanted to visit a Basque museum. Rather than say she didn’t want to go, she said, she’d just sit and read in the lobby while I satisfied my curiosity. And she did it, not grumpily and grudgingly, as some such compromises are made, but apparently content for me to pursue my interest while she pursued hers.

I enjoyed that trip with my sister. I know she has plans to go back to San Sebastian, her favorite city there, so I think she also enjoyed the trip, although I know now that she would have planned it differently. I’m glad I was able to introduce her to Europe.

Every once in a while, I get a text from Rose, often a question about Spanish grammar or how to say something. Sometimes she writes in Spanish. I’m glad to share the language and culture I love with the sister I’ve learned to appreciate not because we are alike, but because we are so different.

Ego

My job looks very boring and ordinary, and on one level, it is. I’m a customer service clerk for a supermarket. I solve customers’ problems and answer their questions.

Sometimes customers’’ behavior is rude and demanding. Sometimes they scam the store. Sometimes they get angry because I won’t violate a store policy, or even the law. And I want so badly to retaliate, to give them a taste of their own medicine!

I have a mortgage to pay and pets to feed, so I smile. But it costs me. It costs my ego to bite my tongue and keep smiling. “Ego.” Coming from the Latin for “I.” It’s hard to tell “ego” to be quiet, please. My first instinct is to rise up in my own defense, to return the rude behavior inflicted on me. My first instinct is to focus on “me.”

It’s a natural instinct learned in the crib. As an infant, I cried when I was hungry. I cried when I was wet. I cried when I was lonely. And someone came and took care of the problem. I was the center of my universe.

So, like most children, I decided it was all about “I.” When I didn’t get what I wanted, I learned to say “no.” I learned well how to use those words. I used them often. I wasn’t a brat. I wasn’t a juvenile delinquent, the terror of the second grade. I was just a normal kid learning how to get my way.

Since about age two, though, I’ve been unlearning that lesson. I’ve been learning how and when to give way to others for the good of the whole. But what I’m talking about here goes beyond even that. It goes beyond socialization and learning how to live in polite society. Some religious traditions call it “dying to self.” This is a tricky concept, because there’s a sense in which “self” – the essence of who I am – deserves my protection. I have an obligation not to allow anyone or anything to violate that essence.

In the second half of life, I’m learning by experience the difference between my “ego” and my “essence.” It’s a tough lesson. Sometimes it leaves me in tears. It means I bite my tongue a lot, go home and talk myself out of foolish, pride -driven, ego-driven behavior.

But I’m also seeing the fruits of that self-discipline. One obvious fruit that benefits me in the long run is that I’m able to keep my job and pay my bills. And maybe, by returning courtesy for rudeness, I break a negative cycle in someone’s day.

A similar dynamic plays out in my volunteer position with a nonprofit. I work in the communications department, and my responsibilities include supervising several other volunteers. Time and again, I’m confronted with ego. I might think, “That’s not how I would write that blog post,” or “Why is she going over my head to my boss? What’s wrong with me?” Or, “She gets to shine here, but what about everything I do?”

Lots of “I” and “me” running rampant through my thoughts, lots of hurts and grudges growing. Curbing the “I’s” and “me’s” bears more important fruit in this situation. Stepping back from my own ego makes space for others to use and be recognized for their gifts. The team of volunteers no longer depends on one egocentric person but grows to include many voices – as well as my own.

Letting go of ego also gives me more space and freedom to develop my own gifts. If my ego isn’t always on the line, I can try new things and develop new gifts, because fear of failure no longer cripples me. If I can tolerate not being the best at everything I try to do, I can risk trying to do more things – and discover gifts I wasn’t aware I had.

Photo by Nathaniel Tetteh on Unsplash

Words

I’m a wordsmith. I love words. I love new words and old words. I love learning where they came from, information that isn’t in most dictionaries anymore. I love putting words together, growing sentences and paragraphs into a whole. I love looking at the puzzle of other peoples’ words, shifting the pieces around, shaping them into someone else’s whole, in that person’s voice rather than my own.

Words matter even more when you are speaking them in someone else’s name.  You may be putting them together on the spot, and you must do so in a way that communicates the message without leaving room for misinterpretation. What does the audience think they already know about the topic? What feelings impede their hearing? How can I cut through those thoughts and emotions with the message I bring in another’s name?

It’s an awe-some responsibility. I’m responsible to the one I’m speaking for, responsible to communicate that message without editorializing. I am also responsible to myself: I must never let my skill with words run away with my integrity. Even though the message is not my own, I must ask myself: “Do I believe this?”

There are people speaking and writing today who are also skilled with words. They know how to use language to elicit strong emotions, emotions spilling out onto the Internet and onto the street.

What kind of action is following from these words and emotions? This is not a question of “right” or “left,” “liberal” or “conservative. It’s a question of responsibility. We all must choose our words carefully. We are responsible to ourselves, to believe what we say. And we are responsible for the actions that result.

(Photo courtesy of Antonio Darius Sollers.)