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

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!

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.

Culture Crash

Crash. Crash. Crash.

Dozens -sometimes hundreds – of time a day, I crash into people. At work. Where I volunteer. With friends and family.

Yes. Even with friends and family. With people I know and like. How does it happen?

It’s bound to happen. Our cultures are different. Even my siblings, who have the same parents I have, have developed cultures very different from mine. We cover the socioeconomic spectrum, from working poor to upper middle class. We cover the educational spectrum, from GED to master’s degree. We work in the trades, in retail, in the classroom.

Growing up, we shared a common culture. Dad was a teacher and guidance counselor, Mom mostly a stay-at-home mom with part-time jobs here and there. It was a strictly Catholic home where education was valued.

As we developed our own friends and outside interests, these modified our natal culture. Now when we get together, we have common ground in that early culture. It’s something we still share. But we bring with us all those other cultures we’ve collided with.

“Culture” here means more than the Sicilian-German culture we inherited through our parents – which was clash enough it itself: the stoic, reserved German with the sometimes volatile Sicilian. “Culture” also means the way we see, think about, talk about ourselves and the world. That’s been shaped by education, work experience, spouses and significant others, friends. Different factors have shaped each of the seven of us, and sometimes they collide.

If this is true in one family, it’s no wonder there’s so much conflict in neighborhoods and nation. We see the world automatically from our own place in it – and everything that doesn’t look like us seems foreign.

But we can be more than mere tourists in other peoples’ worlds, gawking and pointing at that which seems “other.” Like sensitive guests in another’s country, we can look and listen before we open our mouths, let alone act. We can choose, however briefly, to immerse ourselves in the cultures around us.

As any sensitive traveler knows, it’s hard work to put aside your own language and a worldview that measures everything by “the way we do it.” But it can be done. It must be done.

Or…

Crash. Crash. Crash. Is that the way we want to live?

Losing Things

My mother has been losing things for years. I wasn’t around when it started, but I’ve seen what she’s lost over the past seven years.

She lost me, for one thing. If she knows who I am, she’s unable to say my name; she hasn’t said it for more years than I can count.

She’s lost most language. She used to speak word salad: words that made sense individually, but not the way she put them together. Now she says more letters than words.

She’s lost the ability to feed herself. Before she lost it completely, she was able to raise a roll to her mouth, so we asked that she have a roll at every meal so she could still feed herself a little. She still gets that roll. Now she can only eat it if we feed it to her.

For a long time after she couldn’t feed herself, my mother could still walk – with help. Then she didn’t walk anymore, but she could still stand. That meant she had some say in moving from toilet to wheelchair to bed. My mother doesn’t stand anymore. A Hoyer lift does the moving for her.

In the midst of all of this loss, my mother still holds on to at least two things: her eyes and her smile. When I look into my mother’s eyes, I still see something – someone – there. Her look isn’t vacant; it seems purposeful.

And my mother still smiles. Everyone involved in her care comments on my mother’s smile. One of her caregivers told me that her smile reminds him why he does this work.

My mother was an anxious woman. She worried about everything. She worried about germs. She worried about sins. It’s not that she didn’t smile, but she didn’t smile nearly as often as she does now. If she is awake, she smiles.

The protein plaques in my mother’s brain have stolen so many things from her, but one thing they’ve given in exchange is a ready smile.

I find it hard to visit my mother. Seeing her, seeing the people she lives with, makes me afraid for my own future. But I have to visit her.

She’s my mother. And she smiles.

 

 

Leaving Home

I took this photo in Alimena, the Sicilian hometown of my maternal grandfather. The part of Sicily my friend and I drove through during our June 2015 trip was hilly; the less-travelled roads we took had at least one literal U-turn. The landscape was beautiful, with small towns seeming to grow right out of the hillsides.

The experience of Sicily made me wonder why my grandfather left. Was it to escape the effects of World War I, during which so many of his townsmen were killed? Was it to escape the lack of amenities in a town that didn’t have indoor plumbing until the 1950s? Was it lack of work in what even today appears to be a small town?

I’ve raised these questions with my siblings, but all we can do is speculate. What I do know is that it took effort to leave Alimena, because even today it takes effort to travel to and from the town. He would have first had to get to the ferry – by car? by donkey? Then he would have taken the ferry to the mainland, and from there a ship to the United States. He must have been a determined young man.

I wish I knew more about what motivated my grandfather. I do remember him, but the elderly version of a person can be a faint reflection of the younger. I know that from watching my father age: Had I not known him as a younger man, I would never have guessed who he was and all that he had accomplished.

My visit to Alimena gave me an insight into who my grandfather was before he became the rotund old man who spoke broken English and brought us coloring books. He had a young man’s dreams, once. I hope at least some of them were fulfilled in the country he worked so hard to reach.