Ode to Self Checkouts

I have to admit; this blog post is an experiment to see if I really have anything to say other that that I miss my life partner. After nine months of progressing through the stages of grief, I do believe that I am emerging from this particular chrysalis. So, beat, soggy wings! Perhaps some day we’ll have a gossamer glide or two.

I spend far too much time on Facebook, because I kinda like the arena. Except for the crooks posing as your friends, it’s mostly a live-and-let-live community of older folks who have an understandable need to share part of themselves with the world. I’m tracking several communities on Facebook: family, former students and colleagues, old friends in other states and countries, church buddies, musical comrades, and those with an LGBTQ bent, mainly old gay dudes, trans folks and wannabe queer stars. You can bitch all you want about Facebook, but most of us now exist partly in cyberspace, and the Facebook part of cyberspace is an important portal in my life.

I had to learn to be civil all over on Facebook. I no longer vent by sharing a meme or a 2 minute diatribe, though I have many FB friends who do that. For sure, I am careful about how I respond to the very human concerns I constantly read about. My mantra now is to try to bring some good into that arena, no matter how small. I mean, no matter how obnoxious the comment may be to you, the commenter IS dealing with their own feelings, good or bad, about something. I now realize that the chances that I am going to reeducate someone with a differing perspective than mine are almost zero. Hell, I’m a few years away from the great beyond, and I’m not eager to slam the door on almost anyone just now.

All that said, I have to admit that lately I have been quite annoyed by the spate of posts that are dissing self-checkout. These posts are general appeals to everyone to boycott self-checkout stations, and sometimes to boycott any business that has had the temerity to install self-checkout stations. And the thinking behind these pleas isn’t very deep. It’s just this: one self-checkout station puts someone out of a job, and therefore, they are bad. And so, I am going to try in this blog post to offer some reasons why these self-checkout stations might actually sometimes be a good thing.

An Odyssey Comes Home, Continued

I’m not trying to be morbid when I say this, but I am coming to the end of my life. Little did I know that when I was born I had at least 84 years of living ahead of me. One thing I do know now—I definitely do not have even a quarter of these years, not even twenty one years. It took me longer than that to grow up, quite a bit longer. So it’s only natural that my train of thought has tended to move along the lines that it has: thinking about bucket lists, making sure that my genealogy work is not lost to the family, making sure that when I really need to have family near, I am where they can help, and trying to make one more visit, or at least contact, with my dear old friends. I’m not doing all this in a desperate way, and it actually has turned out to be a lot of fun, even heart-warming. But besides the successful family genealogy huddle that occurred at my nephew, Jeff Smith’s house and that I wrote about in my last blog piece, something else happened in my recent visit to Marietta, Ohio that, though it was anticipated a bit, was amazing and heart-warming. That story I now want to tell you.

An Odyssey Comes Home

My mother, Ella Lorene Sullivan Andris, was my inspiration for starting down so many paths. For example, I wonder if I would have started down the long journey into music of many different varieties had Lorene not decided to learn to play the piano. I’ve been playing the piano as long as I can remember, and hundreds of people have asked me how I learned to do it. For most of my life I’ve responded that I was self-taught, but recently, I decided that this was a fabrication. Once she got married to a guy of some financial resources, Lorene bought herself a piano and a correspondence course consisting of 60 lessons in how to play the piano from the U.S. School of Music. Then, she proceeded to find some time almost every day to study those lessons and practice her piano playing. Jimmy was just a year old when this excursion began, and he was listening and watching mom play. Eventually, he started to pick things out on the keyboard when mom was busy. But mom was listening and watching me, too, and she decided that this boy had a lot of talent, enough that he spent four years from age seven on taking piano lessons from a competent teacher.

Lorene at the piano 50 years ago.

Lorene had been raised by her mother, Clara, and her mother’s mother, Eva from the time at age seven when her father, Frank, had died. Frank never had a lot of money, and the little they had saved got used up one way or the other. Eva came from a large family of German immigrants, so the three of them moved around from one relative’s house to another. Eventually, they ended up in a rental house at  107 South Fourth St. in an Ohio River town, Marietta. The house had been through many floods and was ramshackled, as were many of the houses in the neighborhood. Clara rolled cigars for A. L. Savage, while Eva helped with doing laundry, cleaning, or childcare for others. And when Lorene was in the eleventh grade, she left school and went to work 10 hours a day at Braun’s washing dishes.

He Left a Stamp on my Heart

I haven’t been blogging for about two months now. I didn’t want to say any more about my grieving process after loosing my husband earlier this year. Friends have been kind and supportive, but I didn’t want to inadvertently drag them into an emotional dishwasher.  As you might imagine, the grieving process continues to evolve. Fortunately, I’m learning how to use the challenges that have arisen as fuel for productive activity. Here’s a blog post about that.

When Stephen and I first got together, I often joked that he brought an impressive dowery with him. For example, he had and insisted on using a huge box of exotic table napkins. He frequently exhibited an encyclopedic knowledge of classical Greek literature and A. A. Milne poetry. And carefully stored away, he possessed the precisely correct tool for every imaginable household emergency or fixitnow crisis.

Three shelves of Stephen’s stamp collection

The guy also left an impressive inheritance. There was a carefully collected and catalogued CD overview of Western classical music. There were several successful stock investments that he never told anyone about. And today’s topic, there were 50 hefty albums of stamps—I just recounted them—filling up one side of a double door closet.

When I finally was able to engage in productive activity after Stephen died, I jumped into downsizing, throwing away, donating, recycling, or selling anything that I didn’t have a good reason to keep. It took about a month before I had run just about everything in the apartment through this process. I started to think of my job here as a process of securing the family legacy. His stamp collection didn’t fit so neatly into this scheme. Here was a guy who had spent decades happily whiling away some free time buying or trading stamps, mounting them, and putting them in albums. And while he would share an occasional interesting, and sometimes even fascinating fact about history, culture, or just stamp collecting lure, he never pushed the hobby on me. I had my own hobbies. All attempts he had made to interest other potential heirs of his lifelong endeavor had come to naught. I also had a hunch that even though this lifelong project of Stephen’s might have considerable value on paper, it was not at all clear if a stamp collection is a fungible thing, that is, easily transformable into something else useful or into cash. Probably not, I surmised.

Where do you go after The End?

I went to a fabulous free concert last Saturday night. The all volunteer LGBT+ ensemble, BandTogether, was giving the last concert of its 26th season. The theme of the concert was Movie Time, and we got to hear music from movies as diverse as Raiders of the Lost Ark, Gone with the Wind, and Platoon by composers as varied as John Williams, Elmer Bernstein, and Samuel Barber. The band has grown from 10 members to 100 in the last 25 years. And to make it even more amazing, there are two equally talented and unique conductors, Gary Reynolds, who founded the group, and Jeff Girard, who joined a year later. Their concerts are held in the 560 Music Center in University City, now run by Washington University. The Art Deco structure was built in 1930 as the Shaare Emeth Temple, and is a rich environment for the concerts.

Making it to this concert was a big deal for me. My husband, Stephen and I had been going to their concerts since the late 1990s, though we stopped going a few years ago with Stephen’s relentlessly encroaching disabilities. I’m trying to pull the pieces of my life together again after this beloved spouse/soulmate of nearly 4o years died in February of this year. Just last week we had a memorial mass for Stephen at Trinity Episcopal Church in St. Louis, and interred his ashes into the memorial garden there, just as my ashes will be interred there in a few years. I loved my life with Stephen, even when it got hard, and I became his full time caretaker. Our life together had become the rock on which my living was built. But after two months of crying, talking, reflecting, begging and praying, I have concluded that nothing is going to bring that life back. Stephen is still in my heart, but Stephen is gone, and I believe he is truly resting in peace. And so in the past few weeks, I have explored taking brief junkets to the Missouri Botanical Gardens and the St. Louis Art Museum. But this BandTogether concert was the first event that I decided to go to.

The End as Far as We Know, Part 3

I’ve been sharing with you my reflections during my grieving the loss of my spouse, Stephen Nichols, and particularly my quest to better understand my loving relationship with Stephen now that he has died. I’ve been helped through this process by the thinking of David Lightman, the host of a three-part series recently presented on PBS, Searching: Our Quest for Meaning in the Age of Science. I reported on and reflected on the first two episodes of this series, but I’m not going to report on the third one. While Lightman doesn’t really find an answer to his profound questions about consciousness and meaning, he does succeed in sketching out an expansive picture of how this inquiry might continue to proceed if it is to have a solid footing in established scientific inquiry. He concludes by reminding us that as human beings, we are connected to the Universe. He gets down on his knees in the grass with a magnifying glass and becomes engrossed in the plant and insect life that he finds there. That is one thing we can always do: carefully examine and connect with whatever is in our surroundings. However, as good and informative as Lightman’s inquiry has been, and as bright and informed as he and his several interviewees are, it seems to me that Lightman has missed the mark in several ways.

The End as Far as We Know, Part 2

In my last blog post I was describing how I went from feeling absolutely bereft in the wake of my husband, Stephen’s death to feeling still connected to him through the love that the two of us had established over our 38 years in life partnership. I talked about how I reappropriated my “eternity channel”—the conduit that I have used most of my life to communicate with the higher power that created and sustains my life—into a means of continuing my long-standing conversation with Stephen. And I was telling you about the very provocative three-part PBS series Searching: Our Quest for Meaning in the Age of Science which is hosted by Alan Lightman. Lightman is a committed research scientist who is exploring in this series what, if anything, can science tell us about our very personal and vivid day-to-day experience. The first episode proved to be just the catalyst I needed to begin a more measured and reasoned approach to the very powerful and sometimes painful process of grief that I had been going through since February 7 of this year.

In the second episode of the Searching series, Lightman helps us to get some perspective on how we humans fit into our Universe as described by the results of careful scientific inquiry. He says we are right in the middle of the very big and the very small. The stars are about 10¹⁰, that is, 10 billion times bigger than us. An atom is about 10 ⁹ or 1 billion times smaller that us. Science and technology have helped us to see back near the beginning of the Universe 13.4 billion years ago, and we’ve learned much about the stars and galaxies, their containers. Science and technology have enabled a look inside even the atom, but we are about to the limit of small. At the level of quantum gravity, everything fades into a frothy mist of probabilities.

Still, wonders Lightman, where does our consciousness fit into this? He interviews a humanoid robot and wonders if it is conscious. Probably not, he concludes, but maybe in the future. He interviews the Dalai Lama, who tells him that matter and consciousness are two different orders of things; one cannot come from the other. Lightman doesn’t agree with the Dalai Lama. He interviews a scientist who is a reductionist; the scientist tells us that he believes that eventually we will understand how consciousness is generated from matter. Still, Lightman is not sure; he has such intense personal experiences, and he feels love and compassion. These things are not well understood from a scientific point of view. Also, we hear the scientist quoting data and statistics that support possible connections between what goes on in our bodies and brains and what we experience, but these do not impress us as having fully accounted for what goes on in our “inner” world.

The End, as Far as We Know

On the morning of Dec. 31, 2022, we took Stephen to the ER with his ninth stroke in 23 years. In just 40 days and nights we moved from hospital to rehab to nursing care and hospice and finally, to death. As it turns out, it has been another 40 days and nights that I have been alternating between grieving and trying to find my footing while walking as a widower. I’ve done a lot of thinking, questioning, crying, smiling, writing and just resting, but I vowed not to publish any of the writing until I had something a bit more profound to describe than a maudlin reporting of my suffering. Last night, I was able to start a new chapter in my life, and I want to tell you about it.

I Am a Music Box

Every so often we see a news blip, human interest story, or documentary on human beings with special abilities. I find these stories fascinating. There are people for whom numbers come in colors. There are a dozen or so folks who can remember every single event that has occurred in their lives day by day. There are people on the autistic spectrum who do fantastic mathematical calculations in a fraction of a second. One person flew over Rome in a plane and then drew a perfectly accurate portrait of the buildings and other objects that they saw.

I say to you, only slightly tongue-in-cheek, that I am a music box. As a child I showed musical talent by playing popular tunes by ear on the piano. My mom—poor but proud in her childhood—married into a bit of money. One of her home improvement projects was to teach herself to play her new-bought piano from the 60 lesson set of the U. S. School of Music being advertised in the popular magazines of the day. I just happened to be listening at age three, and I picked up a lot of it.

I’m ready to leave

I have a confession to make. I have some strong opinions about some important matters, and I’m realizing that I have almost no power to do anything about making the world at large more to my liking. You’re probably thinking, “So, it took you eighty three years to figure that out, eh?” Well, no, I’ve been playing with that idea for a few decades now. But now, just at the age where my friends far and near really are “kicking the bucket,” as we old-timers used to say, I’m ready to admit it. It’s time for me to let go of this world and turn it over to the grandkids. And yet I don’t understand some of these just turning 20 types.

Case in point. If you’ve read this blog much, you probably know that I am the principal caregiver for my disabled partner, Stephen. We can’t get help any more that will come and reliably stay. We just lost our fourth home healthcare aide that came, looked promising, stayed a few weeks, and then left. But now get this. They didn’t just leave. They left without telling us OR the home healthcare the provider where they were employed that they were leaving. It left Stephen feeling rejected and depressed, and it left me pretty pissed off. But that apparently is the cynical attitude of relatively low paid healthcare workers now.