My favorite part of the day is walking home from the train station. It's about a half-hour walk, through residential streets and across a park. This time of year, the whole way is carpeted with scarlet and orange maple leaves, and the trees lining the street are flaming, almost shimmering with color - gold and yellow and crimson and violet. It's gorgeous. It always makes me think of the Babes in the Wood fairytale where the forest birds cover up the lost children with a patchwork quilt of autumn leaves to keep them warm.
In a week, when the time changes, it will be too dark to walk home and I'll have to start taking the bus home (in the dark), which is kind of gloomy. And I'll miss the fresh air and exercise. The knowledge that my walks are almost over for the year makes them especially bittersweet.
But I can't complain... this has been the most lovely autumn in recent memory. We've had day after day of warm, 70-degree weather with blue skies and golden trees. Wearing short sleeves and racing through crunching autumn leaves is wonderful fun. When February is getting me down, I'll just have to remember how lucky we were to have this time.
Wednesday, October 27, 2010
Friday, October 15, 2010
Brought To You By Glycine Max
Tonight we had a really great dinner. Stir-fried vegetable dumplings, with just a drizzle of soy sauce, steamed edamame, and brown rice. Man, it was good. As I was eating it and enjoying it, it occurred to me how much of it was soy based. The dumpling shell, probably, and the contents, more or less, the sauce, and the edamame of course. And my daughter had fake chicken nuggets, which are also probably entirely made of soy. It's so versatile. It's amazing that you can get bread, meat, vegetable, and milk (not to mention ink, fiber, and probably other things) out of this one plant.
What is wrong with me that as I sat there thinking about soy, I realized I knew the scientific name of the plant?
What is wrong with me that as I sat there thinking about soy, I realized I knew the scientific name of the plant?
Wednesday, October 06, 2010
How To Have a Great Funeral
I started thinking about this because we had a going-away party for a colleague at work, who was fired - or "let go" is the polite word for it. Her job position was eliminated. Anyway, she had worked for the organization for 10 years and was well liked, so a lot of people were at the party. We went around the table and shared our well wishes and our memories of working with her. One person spoke about her successes in her job, another about her warm and convivial presence in the office, someone else about her artistic talents (she does crafts, needlework, photography), someone else about her great sense of humor, someone else about how she'd learned a lot of botany from her, and so on. There was a great diversity in the comments and they seemed to build up a really nice well-rounded picture of a life.
It occurred to me that if I leave or am fired, I won't have a goodbye party like that because people at work don't really know me that well. I have lots of interests that are separate from my work life, but I don't really bring them up at work. No one there knows about my poetry or how I like to run or my interest in young-adult fiction or my loud bird or my projects around the house and garden. No one knows I used to be a competitive ballroom dancer or that I have tree-frog reveries. For a long time I kept my personal life so separate that no one there even knew I was in a relationship until I asked for time off for my honeymoon.
That's OK; I don't care about having a great going-away party. But it did get me thinking about how if you want to have a really good farewell - or, for the ultimate in farewell parties, funeral - , you have to have a life that's full of variety and interest. You have to connect with people on lots of levels. Otherwise no one will have much to say, and it will be kind of a dull occasion, the equivalent of a yearbook full of messages like "I didn't really know you that well, but you seemed nice. Have a great summer!"
So here are my suggestions for having a good funeral:
1. Be a pillar of the community. Have a career like pediatrician that touches lots of people, or even better orthopedic surgeon to an athletic team, so you get to meet lots of famous people. This will generate a lot of memorable encounters that friends can recall at your funeral.
2. Be talented at stuff. Sing, paint, weave, whatever - create things that are beautiful.
3. Be funny. Not in a weird quirky way like me, but in a way that will allow other people to share jokes that you made later, and that will get a whole room laughing.
4. Travel a lot and have a bunch of amazing life experiences like parasailing, skiing in the Alps, participating in a marathon or cross-country bike tour, etc.
5. Get married and have kids and grandkids so you will have a lot of family memories. It's ideal to have at least one child of each gender so no one will think you "missed out" on raising one type. Don't get divorced.
6. Write a book that touches a lot of people.
7. Have the kind of joie-de-vivre that makes people see you as an inspiration.
8. Stay in touch with childhood friends but make new friends wherever you go, so there will be people who knew you from all the different times of your life.
9. Be a joiner in the community - church, civic association, Girl Scout leader, etc. so all your neighbors know you.
10. Bake really great cookies that people will remember decades later.
11. Be musical. For some reason this really goes down well - and gets people smiling when they remember it.
That's all for now. Looking over this list, I can see that I'm really falling short so far. I bake so-so cookies, write short stories that I never let anyone else read, make friends easily but don't quite have the knack of holding onto them, and make a living by cobbling together office work and largely solitary freelance work - nothing spectacular. I don't have a very loud voice and people often don't hear the things I say. Sometimes I'm even being quite funny and no one hears me. Maybe that's why I prefer writing.
Perhaps it doesn't really matter, because after all I won't be at my own funeral. And the people who really know me will still miss me, so why try to impress those who knew me only peripherally? Still, it is something to think about.
It occurred to me that if I leave or am fired, I won't have a goodbye party like that because people at work don't really know me that well. I have lots of interests that are separate from my work life, but I don't really bring them up at work. No one there knows about my poetry or how I like to run or my interest in young-adult fiction or my loud bird or my projects around the house and garden. No one knows I used to be a competitive ballroom dancer or that I have tree-frog reveries. For a long time I kept my personal life so separate that no one there even knew I was in a relationship until I asked for time off for my honeymoon.
That's OK; I don't care about having a great going-away party. But it did get me thinking about how if you want to have a really good farewell - or, for the ultimate in farewell parties, funeral - , you have to have a life that's full of variety and interest. You have to connect with people on lots of levels. Otherwise no one will have much to say, and it will be kind of a dull occasion, the equivalent of a yearbook full of messages like "I didn't really know you that well, but you seemed nice. Have a great summer!"
So here are my suggestions for having a good funeral:
1. Be a pillar of the community. Have a career like pediatrician that touches lots of people, or even better orthopedic surgeon to an athletic team, so you get to meet lots of famous people. This will generate a lot of memorable encounters that friends can recall at your funeral.
2. Be talented at stuff. Sing, paint, weave, whatever - create things that are beautiful.
3. Be funny. Not in a weird quirky way like me, but in a way that will allow other people to share jokes that you made later, and that will get a whole room laughing.
4. Travel a lot and have a bunch of amazing life experiences like parasailing, skiing in the Alps, participating in a marathon or cross-country bike tour, etc.
5. Get married and have kids and grandkids so you will have a lot of family memories. It's ideal to have at least one child of each gender so no one will think you "missed out" on raising one type. Don't get divorced.
6. Write a book that touches a lot of people.
7. Have the kind of joie-de-vivre that makes people see you as an inspiration.
8. Stay in touch with childhood friends but make new friends wherever you go, so there will be people who knew you from all the different times of your life.
9. Be a joiner in the community - church, civic association, Girl Scout leader, etc. so all your neighbors know you.
10. Bake really great cookies that people will remember decades later.
11. Be musical. For some reason this really goes down well - and gets people smiling when they remember it.
That's all for now. Looking over this list, I can see that I'm really falling short so far. I bake so-so cookies, write short stories that I never let anyone else read, make friends easily but don't quite have the knack of holding onto them, and make a living by cobbling together office work and largely solitary freelance work - nothing spectacular. I don't have a very loud voice and people often don't hear the things I say. Sometimes I'm even being quite funny and no one hears me. Maybe that's why I prefer writing.
Perhaps it doesn't really matter, because after all I won't be at my own funeral. And the people who really know me will still miss me, so why try to impress those who knew me only peripherally? Still, it is something to think about.
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