I don't have a personal blog, and so every once in a while when I have some random revelation, I write it here...and feel vaguely guilty. This post is not about writing, at least not directly, so if you have no interest whatsoever in my general life observations, stop here.
Wait, wait! Not THERE actually. First let me point out that there is SOME relevance to writing here, both because the things people don't know about themselves is a big theme in my writing, and because the different slices of a person that show in different areas of life is a character development issue as well.
But all that (valid) rationalization aside, this post is about my father's retirement. My father retired at the end of June after 24 years with the same company and nearly 50 in the construction industry. At 69, he was still installing custom stairs and rails, the kind you find in upscale new houses where the staircases alone cost tens of thousands of dollars. After his 65th birthday party the company newsletter featured his picture with the caption "the world's oldest living installer", but his more common nickname was The Legend.
Today, his company had a gathering, and one of the events on the agenda was recognition of his 24 years of service. The men put on ties over their t-shirts in honor of the occasion. One of his co-workers pulled out a guitar and performed a song he'd written to commemorate the event--complete with slideshow--and then he presented my father with an oddly shaped block of wood, painted gold. The block of wood, he explained, was something my father had invented, something they all used now. It was named after him. I'd never known it existed until that moment, but one of his much younger co-workers said later that my father had given him one the day he'd started, and that was several years ago.
Now, it might not seem so surprising that I'd missed a detail like that. I am, after all, 41 years old. But I live less than a mile from my parents, and they babysit for my daughter a couple of days a week. We usually have dinner with them one night a week, and I talk to my mother virtually every day. I know several of my father's co-workers and some of their wives. And I knew the reputation he had at work--both for the ability to work out almost any construction problem and for his tendency to ask the new guys he was training, "You ever think about quitting?" But I didn't know about this funny little piece of wood that several of his friends stepped up to have autographed.
There were a few other surprises in the stories as well, but the details probably aren't significant. What seemed significant was the fact that there's a big difference between what we know and what we see, between what we know and what we can really understand. I think that on some level we all know that the people in our lives are "different" in other places and with other people than they are with us. I think that's true of virtually everyone, not because we're insincere or hiding things but simply because different circumstances and different people draw different things to the foreground.
We may even have descriptions of those differences in our minds. A husband may know that his gentle and feminine wife is a high-powered decision maker at work, but knowing is often different from seeing. The mother of a soldier may know that he is of necessity harder and colder and more calculated on the job than she's ever seen him in her kitchen, but knowing the fact is often different from knowing the person that someone becomes under those other circumstances.
What if we did have to write them as characters? If you had to create a character based on your husband in his office or your grandmother with her bridge club or your son teaching Sunday school or your daughter when she's jumping out of an airplane, could you do it? Do you really know who those people around you are in those moments, or would you only, without ever realizing it, take the "character" you know at home and drop him or her into that place or activity? Are we doing that now, in our minds, without ever realizing it?
Showing posts with label family. Show all posts
Showing posts with label family. Show all posts
Saturday, July 21, 2007
Tuesday, June 26, 2007
One Hundred Things
A hundred things is a lot. My friend Barb was working on her list a couple of days ago, and having a hard time with it, and I mentioned that I was pretty sure there WEREN'T one hundred distinct facts about me. So she started writing them for me. I think she was up to 27 or so when I decided to give it a go myself, but I suspected that it was a diversionary tactic designed to keep her from having to work on her own list...or maybe a warm-up exercise.
Anyway, I decided to give it a shot and I was surprised by how easy it was. After I finished the list, three or four additional things occurred to me that probably should have been on the list. I thought about looking for things I could replace, but that seemed like too much attention to give this kind of exercise. It's surprisingly interesting to do, though. I recommend it, even if you're not going to post the results.
1. I prefer old-fashioned film to digital photography.
2. I never look back after I've written.
3. It's hard for me to think sitting down.
4. I'm more from Mars than I am from Venus; it's often very difficult for me to understand what women are thinking and why.
5. I'd kind of started to believe that my dog was going to live forever, and I hate that I was wrong.
6. My health problems make me angry.
7. At 16, I described the child I wanted to have in great detail, and at 29 I had her.
8. I can't sing.
9. I sing all the time.
10. I am English, Irish, French and Danish in nearly equal parts, but I only feel Irish.
11. I am not as good a Catholic as everyone in my life thinks I am.
12 I've only had two jobs I didn't like in my whole life, and they were both part-time summer jobs.
13. I carried my dog in my book bag around my law school campus years before anyone had heard of Elle Woods.
14. I am friends with nearly all of the men from my past.
15. My first paid article was about McGruff the Crime Dog, and it took me hours to write.
16. A similar-length article now takes me about 20 minutes to write.
17. I can do well on any standardized test, even if I know nothing about the subject matter.
18. My left and right brains are nearly perfectly balanced, and I shift back and forth as to which is slightly dominant.
19. I love math, but I didn't know it until I was 30.
20. I recently lost my best friend, and it still hurts every day.
21. I have a hard time turning off my "work brain" and focusing on anything else.
22. I am happiest and healthiest when I go to mass every day...but I usually don't.
23. I am very messy.
24. I love blank paper, to the point that I keep buying it even when I have stacks of different varieties already at home and am doing most of my writing on the computer.
25. I have very little curiosity about other people's business.
26. I am very uncomfortable in situations in which there is nothing productive to be done.
27. My daughter is 11.5 and her beauty still catches me by surprise on a regular basis.
28. Tea is an important ritual in my family.
29. I've been saying that The Sun Also Rises is my favorite book for so long that I'm no longer sure whether it's true.
30. When I was in law school, I hung out with a bunch of guys who thought I was cool because I'd drink cheap whiskey straight from the bottle with them, but a lot of times I covered the opening with my teeth and didn't really drink.
31. I skipped a day of my bar review class to take my sister to see the Grateful Dead at Soldier Field.
32. People are often surprised to learn things about me that I thought were right there on the surface.
33. I write very fast--5,000 to 7,000 words a day if I'm mostly focused on writing, and with very little editing required.
34. I hate milk, but all other dairy products (ie: ice cream, milkshakes, cheese) are my favorite food.
35. I made yogurt in a high school microbiology class and have consequently never tasted it.
36. I miss my hair.
37. I had "morning sickness" all day every day for four months, and came home from giving birth two sizes smaller than I'd been when I got pregnant.
38. People mistakenly believe me to be social.
39. I have kept every drawing, craft, and note that my daughter has created in her lifetime.
40. I also have a box of drawings, crafts and notes my sister made for me when she was a child and I was a teenager and in college.
41. I am not sentimental.
42. I love infrequently, but completely.
43. I do not know why I blog.
44. The song "Hang on Sloopy" always makes me smile.
45. I love semi-colons.
46. I love water, whether it be in my bathtub, falling from the sky, or filling an ocean.
47. I pay for and start watching a lot of movies I don't end up finishing.
48. When I was writing my book, I listened to nothing but Rick Springfield's music continuously for nine months.
49. I have three full filing cabinets and I don't know what's in them.
50. I have storage units in two cities and I still can't fit everything in my house.
51. I get excited about mathematical patterns.
52. I can't help noticing grammatical errors; I don't want to nitpick, but they stand out to me like flashing neon signs.
53. When I see words in isolation, like on a street sign, I automatically read them in different directions and scramble the letters.
54. My bookshelf is full of books I will never read again, and the books I cherish are packed away in boxes.
55. I keep a copy of the Catechism of the Catholic Church near my desk for quick reference.
56. I once wrote 273 pages of a novel in three weeks, but then took years to write the ending.
57. I used to do a lot of writing on the train back and forth to work, but now I can't stay awake long enough.
58. I am surprised that I like my daughter's mice.
59. I prefer not to think about people reading what I write.
60. I don't care much about stuff; I have a painting on my living room wall because my sister brought it over and hung it up, and I'm still using the stereo my mother bought for me in 1985.
61. When I read, I skip over descriptions of rooms and locations entirely.
62. I love lightly salted rice cakes--not as a diet food or a "lesser evil" or anything like that...I eat them on purpose.
63. I didn't get my driver's license until after I graduated from college, and then probably only because my parents bought me a used car for graduation.
64. Two years later, I'd driven across at least ten states alone (but for my poodle).
65. I hate volleyball with such an all-consuming passion that I am suspicious of anyone who plays it.
66. I still collect Hot Wheels.
67. I still have the teddy bear I got just before I turned two, in 1968.
68. I was a political activist in college.
69. I once ran a welfare advocacy clinic.
70. I worked three jobs simultaneously while going to law school full time.
71. Once every couple of years or so, I suddenly think of my best friend from law school and really appreciate anew the friendship that we had and the fun and mutual support we shared...but I don't get in touch with him.
72. I miss paper letters. Email is okay, but I loved writing and receiving handwritten letters in the mail.
73. I gave up voting after GWB was elected for the first time.
74. I love soccer, but I haven't been to a game in years.
75. My library books are always late.
76. I like to read in the bathtub. If the water would stay hot and life didn't intrude, I'd stay to finish the whole book.
77. I hate meeting new people with my hair short because I feel it gives the wrong impression of who I am.
78. I improvise.
79. I say what I mean--it's a big waste of time and counterproductive to try to read between the lines and figure out what I "really mean"--I really mean what I said.
80. A nurse tried to "hold back" my birth until my mother's doctor arrived to cover her own mistake, and without the intervention of a young intern at Jackson Park hospital in Chicago, I might have been brain damaged.
81. I haven't really given any new music a fair listen since the late 80s or early 90s.
82. I tell my daughter every day that she's exactly who I always wanted.
83. Getting caught in a downpour makes me laugh out loud.
84. In high school I got physically ill whenever I had to give a speech.
85. I've made a good part of my living as a teacher and public speaker.
86. I do not like poetry.
87. I love to discover people who are better/stronger/faster than I am in intellectual and professional arenas and work to keep up with them.
88. In my teens and early twenties, I avoided shorts because I thought my legs were fat; now that they really are I couldn't care less and wear what I want.
89. I didn't go to the dentist for 22 years.
90. I love to throw things away; I check my coupons hoping that they've expired so that I can clear them out.
91. I only own one pair of jeans, and that only because my mother insisted that everyone needed at least one pair of jeans and bought them for me.
92. I have as many vacuums as I have carpeted rooms in my house.
93. I am afraid of spiders to the point of possible phobia, but other bugs don't bother me in the least.
94. I love Neons. I can't think why anyone would want a whole, real, grown-up car when we could all have these friendly little high-mileage, easy to maneouver, practically free cars.
95. Every Monday when I'm dragging my garbage can up the hill behind my house at 6:00 a.m., I wish that I was married.
96. I have had two dogs who were well and truly mine throughout their lives, and I feel disloyal to both; each of them deserved to be the best dog a person ever had.
97. I don't have an artistic or decorative bone in my body.
98. I don't care in the least if you dislike me for who I am, but being misunderstood makes my brain explode.
99. I have been a lawyer, a receptionist, a hostess in a restaurant, a business college instructor, a curriculum developer, an author, a journalist, a salad prep girl, a telephone solicitor for the American Heart Association, a teacher trainer, a stay-at-home mother, and a night auditor in a hotel.
100. I'm madly in love with my kid. That probably sounds trite and overlaps with half a dozen other things I've said, but anyone who knows me would probably agree that it's my defining characteristic.
Anyway, I decided to give it a shot and I was surprised by how easy it was. After I finished the list, three or four additional things occurred to me that probably should have been on the list. I thought about looking for things I could replace, but that seemed like too much attention to give this kind of exercise. It's surprisingly interesting to do, though. I recommend it, even if you're not going to post the results.
1. I prefer old-fashioned film to digital photography.
2. I never look back after I've written.
3. It's hard for me to think sitting down.
4. I'm more from Mars than I am from Venus; it's often very difficult for me to understand what women are thinking and why.
5. I'd kind of started to believe that my dog was going to live forever, and I hate that I was wrong.
6. My health problems make me angry.
7. At 16, I described the child I wanted to have in great detail, and at 29 I had her.
8. I can't sing.
9. I sing all the time.
10. I am English, Irish, French and Danish in nearly equal parts, but I only feel Irish.
11. I am not as good a Catholic as everyone in my life thinks I am.
12 I've only had two jobs I didn't like in my whole life, and they were both part-time summer jobs.
13. I carried my dog in my book bag around my law school campus years before anyone had heard of Elle Woods.
14. I am friends with nearly all of the men from my past.
15. My first paid article was about McGruff the Crime Dog, and it took me hours to write.
16. A similar-length article now takes me about 20 minutes to write.
17. I can do well on any standardized test, even if I know nothing about the subject matter.
18. My left and right brains are nearly perfectly balanced, and I shift back and forth as to which is slightly dominant.
19. I love math, but I didn't know it until I was 30.
20. I recently lost my best friend, and it still hurts every day.
21. I have a hard time turning off my "work brain" and focusing on anything else.
22. I am happiest and healthiest when I go to mass every day...but I usually don't.
23. I am very messy.
24. I love blank paper, to the point that I keep buying it even when I have stacks of different varieties already at home and am doing most of my writing on the computer.
25. I have very little curiosity about other people's business.
26. I am very uncomfortable in situations in which there is nothing productive to be done.
27. My daughter is 11.5 and her beauty still catches me by surprise on a regular basis.
28. Tea is an important ritual in my family.
29. I've been saying that The Sun Also Rises is my favorite book for so long that I'm no longer sure whether it's true.
30. When I was in law school, I hung out with a bunch of guys who thought I was cool because I'd drink cheap whiskey straight from the bottle with them, but a lot of times I covered the opening with my teeth and didn't really drink.
31. I skipped a day of my bar review class to take my sister to see the Grateful Dead at Soldier Field.
32. People are often surprised to learn things about me that I thought were right there on the surface.
33. I write very fast--5,000 to 7,000 words a day if I'm mostly focused on writing, and with very little editing required.
34. I hate milk, but all other dairy products (ie: ice cream, milkshakes, cheese) are my favorite food.
35. I made yogurt in a high school microbiology class and have consequently never tasted it.
36. I miss my hair.
37. I had "morning sickness" all day every day for four months, and came home from giving birth two sizes smaller than I'd been when I got pregnant.
38. People mistakenly believe me to be social.
39. I have kept every drawing, craft, and note that my daughter has created in her lifetime.
40. I also have a box of drawings, crafts and notes my sister made for me when she was a child and I was a teenager and in college.
41. I am not sentimental.
42. I love infrequently, but completely.
43. I do not know why I blog.
44. The song "Hang on Sloopy" always makes me smile.
45. I love semi-colons.
46. I love water, whether it be in my bathtub, falling from the sky, or filling an ocean.
47. I pay for and start watching a lot of movies I don't end up finishing.
48. When I was writing my book, I listened to nothing but Rick Springfield's music continuously for nine months.
49. I have three full filing cabinets and I don't know what's in them.
50. I have storage units in two cities and I still can't fit everything in my house.
51. I get excited about mathematical patterns.
52. I can't help noticing grammatical errors; I don't want to nitpick, but they stand out to me like flashing neon signs.
53. When I see words in isolation, like on a street sign, I automatically read them in different directions and scramble the letters.
54. My bookshelf is full of books I will never read again, and the books I cherish are packed away in boxes.
55. I keep a copy of the Catechism of the Catholic Church near my desk for quick reference.
56. I once wrote 273 pages of a novel in three weeks, but then took years to write the ending.
57. I used to do a lot of writing on the train back and forth to work, but now I can't stay awake long enough.
58. I am surprised that I like my daughter's mice.
59. I prefer not to think about people reading what I write.
60. I don't care much about stuff; I have a painting on my living room wall because my sister brought it over and hung it up, and I'm still using the stereo my mother bought for me in 1985.
61. When I read, I skip over descriptions of rooms and locations entirely.
62. I love lightly salted rice cakes--not as a diet food or a "lesser evil" or anything like that...I eat them on purpose.
63. I didn't get my driver's license until after I graduated from college, and then probably only because my parents bought me a used car for graduation.
64. Two years later, I'd driven across at least ten states alone (but for my poodle).
65. I hate volleyball with such an all-consuming passion that I am suspicious of anyone who plays it.
66. I still collect Hot Wheels.
67. I still have the teddy bear I got just before I turned two, in 1968.
68. I was a political activist in college.
69. I once ran a welfare advocacy clinic.
70. I worked three jobs simultaneously while going to law school full time.
71. Once every couple of years or so, I suddenly think of my best friend from law school and really appreciate anew the friendship that we had and the fun and mutual support we shared...but I don't get in touch with him.
72. I miss paper letters. Email is okay, but I loved writing and receiving handwritten letters in the mail.
73. I gave up voting after GWB was elected for the first time.
74. I love soccer, but I haven't been to a game in years.
75. My library books are always late.
76. I like to read in the bathtub. If the water would stay hot and life didn't intrude, I'd stay to finish the whole book.
77. I hate meeting new people with my hair short because I feel it gives the wrong impression of who I am.
78. I improvise.
79. I say what I mean--it's a big waste of time and counterproductive to try to read between the lines and figure out what I "really mean"--I really mean what I said.
80. A nurse tried to "hold back" my birth until my mother's doctor arrived to cover her own mistake, and without the intervention of a young intern at Jackson Park hospital in Chicago, I might have been brain damaged.
81. I haven't really given any new music a fair listen since the late 80s or early 90s.
82. I tell my daughter every day that she's exactly who I always wanted.
83. Getting caught in a downpour makes me laugh out loud.
84. In high school I got physically ill whenever I had to give a speech.
85. I've made a good part of my living as a teacher and public speaker.
86. I do not like poetry.
87. I love to discover people who are better/stronger/faster than I am in intellectual and professional arenas and work to keep up with them.
88. In my teens and early twenties, I avoided shorts because I thought my legs were fat; now that they really are I couldn't care less and wear what I want.
89. I didn't go to the dentist for 22 years.
90. I love to throw things away; I check my coupons hoping that they've expired so that I can clear them out.
91. I only own one pair of jeans, and that only because my mother insisted that everyone needed at least one pair of jeans and bought them for me.
92. I have as many vacuums as I have carpeted rooms in my house.
93. I am afraid of spiders to the point of possible phobia, but other bugs don't bother me in the least.
94. I love Neons. I can't think why anyone would want a whole, real, grown-up car when we could all have these friendly little high-mileage, easy to maneouver, practically free cars.
95. Every Monday when I'm dragging my garbage can up the hill behind my house at 6:00 a.m., I wish that I was married.
96. I have had two dogs who were well and truly mine throughout their lives, and I feel disloyal to both; each of them deserved to be the best dog a person ever had.
97. I don't have an artistic or decorative bone in my body.
98. I don't care in the least if you dislike me for who I am, but being misunderstood makes my brain explode.
99. I have been a lawyer, a receptionist, a hostess in a restaurant, a business college instructor, a curriculum developer, an author, a journalist, a salad prep girl, a telephone solicitor for the American Heart Association, a teacher trainer, a stay-at-home mother, and a night auditor in a hotel.
100. I'm madly in love with my kid. That probably sounds trite and overlaps with half a dozen other things I've said, but anyone who knows me would probably agree that it's my defining characteristic.
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