a real-life DAN IN REAL LIFE

orginally posted at older2elder...

On Easter Sunday, John & I had the pleasure of unexpectedly spending a snatch of time with a family who seemed right out of one of my favorite films, the small treasure, Dan in Real Life.  

We were blessed to hang out, however briefly, with a multi-generational family that seemed to truly madly deeply care about each other.  Such get-togethers are their happy norm - the proud grandfather, who hails from Central PA, dashed inside to get a picture of his brood at their annual bowling outing.  

The grandparents, their children & grandchildren (ranging from 7 years old to 31) descend from not-so-near & rather far at Easter to celebrate with one of the daughters & her family, while everyone treks to the grandparents' for Thanksgiving & Christmas.  In the summer, the pilgrimage is to an over-sized rental house at Virginia Beach.  

Our brush with this delightful family came out of the blue, totally touched our Easter with a magic we could never have imagined.  

Thinking about writing this posting got me thinking about how utterly blessed we are to have quite a few Dan in Real Life families within our circle of friends & pleasant acquaintances.  Our bestest friends in the universe gather every late Jan-early Feb with four generations of their family in Hawaii - this year there was a great-grandmother & a soon-to-be great-grandma, our friends, their children, grandchildren, a beloved niece & her family.  I think of all the photos of Easter dining room tables that were proudly posted on Facebook, of pictures of far-flung family arriving for a weekend of reconnection & savoring the joys of being together.

A friend of mine pointed out, "You know, they have their problems, too."  Naturally - as did the fictional reel family in Dan in Real Life.  But they do keep coming together, do keep getting past whatever challenges divide to find the things that draw closer.  

When John fell in love with me, he marveled at how many happily married couples I knew.  He knew one, maybe two.  A couple years after we married, he marveled at how almost all the couples he knew seemed happily married, including two of his good friends who'd been together for years but decided to take the plunge after seeing how well it had gone for us. 

Am feeling blessed to have spent part of our Easter in the heart of a loving family, to have seen the multi-ages competing in the egg toss that attracted us in the first place (great back story!), to have heard the happy voices & seen the beaming faces, to have learned bits & pieces of their stories.  And blessed to be able to look around at our circle of close friends, good chums & pleasant acquaintances and see so many families that take the deep delight in one another's presence that has always & forever been a treasured picture in my heart.  It does exist, it can happen.  

It's not easy, I am sure.  Nothing that matters ever is.  Still, there they were, whether around a dinner table on Marlin Road or tucked off of Buck, down in Atlanta or out in Sacramento, or tossing eggs on a large front lawn in Wyncote, in spite of the challenges & all that divide  Real life playing out even better than fiction!

Letting the circle be unbroken

It's a quiet Easter morning, here at Squirrel Haven.  60 years ago, the same morning would have dawned at The Come-Again Cabin with the sound of Mom already moving around in the kitchen, sharing a cup of coffee with Dad, I'd be checking out from the top bunk if Mim was still asleep in the lower, we'd smell bacon cooking & wonder if it was late enough for us to get up.  

One by one, we'd show up in the kitchen, rubbing our eyes & wishing our parents a happy Easter.  Bacon, eggs, OJ & Mom's hot cross buns would be ready & waiting for the six of us sitting at the table - Dad at the head, Peter, Mike, Mim, Ian & yours truly sitting in our usual places, boys on the one side, girls on the other, with a space left next to Mim in case Mom ever had a moment to join us.  

 

Not likely on an Easter Sunday.  Mom was already deep into prepping the dishes that would be in the oven - ham or lamb - and the sides that would go on the stove as soon as we got home from church.  

In the center of the table would the BIG handsome family Easter basket, filled with jelly beans & all sorts of candies to tide us over until we got our own baskets, waiting in the shuttered living room.  In the center, was one of Mom's glorious chocolate-covered buttercream eggs. 

That dark, beautifully woven round basket is no more.  Every Easter, would bring it out, even if it didn't hold a single jelly bean or chocolate malted egg.  This is the first Easter without it.  This past fall, I took a nasty tumble in the basement & was amazed not to have done serious damage.  I lay there on the cement floor wondering how it was possible I hadn't broken anything or at least took a terrible banging.  As I slowly lifted myself up, looked over to the place of honor where the basket sat - s handle was smashed down all the way to the rim.  It had broken my fall.  It was hard, saying good bye, but it deserved the honorable farewell we gave it.

After breakfast, we'd make a beeline for the living room, where the baskets awaited, and all of the kids - from youngest to oldest - participated in the Easter egg hunt, outside in good weather, inside if it was raining.  Then, it was get ready for church, each of us with flowers in hand, and head up Alden Road, the Black Path, along South Avenue to family service.  

Then it was home to nosh & nibble Easter goodies waiting for dinner to be ready.  The whole family would sit around the table & dig into the lamb (with mint sauce, never jelly) or ham, the candied sweet & regular mashed potatoes, peas, creamed onions - am sure I'm forgetting a couple sides.  For dessert, we'd "operate" on the egg sitting in the middle of the family basket.

A very different morning from today, with John still sleeping upstairs, the cats having a post-breakfast siesta in the living room.  After writing this, will take a drive over to Giant - which would have been closed for the holiday not that long ago - to see if they have hot cross buns for my morning coffee.  Will shower, then head off - flowers in hand - to the adult Easter service. Later, we will drive over to where Peter lives in Norristown, taking him a matted picture of himself, Mom, Whitney & Reynolds, a photo I must have taken decades ago (pre John)after a long-ago Easter family service.   We'll take a drive to & through beloved places, ending up for a late afternoon walk along the Pennypack Trail.  Will stop at Boston Market for a bounty of vegetarian sides for our Lockphy Murphart Easter feast.  

It is a wonder to me, letting the circle that is my life be unbroken - to no longer feel like it's somehow hopelessly off-kilter because our holidays aren't filled with the family who gathered with us back in the days Mom was alive, when Peter typically joined us, even Mim might put in an appearance, when Whitney & Reynolds would swing by if they were in the area.  

Hey, it's not like I wasn't prepared.  Remember Mom once telling me, "When I am gone, your brothers & sister will feel closer to you," to which I replied a prescient, "Mom, when you're gone there won't be any reason for them to be anywhere near me."  

Still, it's one thing to predict & another to experience.  For years, my Easter felt wrong, just as our Christmas did.  I saw & felt my family circle as being broken, when it was just the same family circle it's always been.  

What a wonder, to be enjoying every moment of this Easter, to think about my sibs, my nieces celebrating with their families, my nephews with friends, to remember past holidays & feeling wondrous blessed by all that I have with me at this year's - loving thoughts going out to all my family, across the country & around the world, the company of the treasured friends & friends who feel like family that we'll see at church & along the trail, for all the blessing of spirit that fill our lives.   

My circle of loving & being loved is unbroken.

 

Rejoicing

originally posted on Secrets of the Home...

Tomorrow is Easter Sunday, one of the greatest times for families coming together & celebrating the joy of Christ's resurrection & the sheer wonder of being with each other, basking in the goal of love & connection.

As someone raised on the delight of planning fabulous egg hunts, loading up epic baskets & helping put on a Sunday dinner to rival Norman Rockwell, with family gathering each Easter - while  Mom was alive - it was a wound in my heart & soul to be  a l o n e  all day with wistful memories & an woeful longing.

 

Took me until last year to figure out that while I was feeling all misty-eyed over my holiday celebrations not being what they were, not being what I felt they were meant to be, that they were somehow off-track or wrong or downright smashed into smithereens, the reality is that my holiday celebrations are perfecto, at least for me.  Yes, my Easters aren't the picture of All-American family dinners & unforgettable hunts, not my image of what they SHOULD be, but they suit me fine.  

When have I ever been conventional?  I took my B.S. in Religion & Philosophy, rather than the Ed degree women were expected to take.  I was professionally shived by my principal - a minister!  Fell head over heels in love with my first & only love at 37.  And my wedding dress was originally a table cloth! At 64, while the rest of my classmates are planning or already have retired, I'm just getting revved up to do my most important work.  Hells bells, hardly anything about my life has been remotely conventional, so why would my sense of connection, family, community?!

 

It's not at all what I'd expected, longed for, sought.  But it's real & it's all mine.  My life is filled with loved ones, with friends who feel like family & people who mean the world to me even if we don't do much more than smile & shout out greetings.  My community means everything to me - all of my communities.  In the ways that matter most, connection defines my life.

Tomorrow is Easter.  And my life will feel as whoopie & full of tender love & joyful connection as anyone's, even if the only ones celebrating with me are my O Best Beloved, our stuffies, dolls, kitties & backyard critters.

No sense of loss & lack.  That, dear readers, is my own, slightly unconventional Easter miracle!

 

friggin fabulous life

originally posted on Secrets of the Home...

Wee small hours realization - mine is a friggin fabulous life.  My timbers are shivered with goose bumps over how, time after time after time, jaw-dropping ZOWIE! things happened, often in response to potentially spirit-splitting events.  Or maybe the events were spirit splitting, but in a productive way, like splitting apart a mass of bulbs to increase vitality & start new gardens.

This is the second time in my life that I've set about deconstructing it.  My first stab was as a college sophomore, writing the "research" paper for Mike Brown's Psych 101 class - on me.  Got to honor my life, which at that point was still seriously in the throes of whacked out family dynamics, see some of the things that had gotten me to that moment in time, did it clearly & dispassionately, bagged an A.  

What was triggered by coming across a cache of letters that reached back to the late 1950s has quickly evolved into a appreciation of the astonishing life that has always been mine, one brimful of blessings & wonder.  While I am fervent in my request to "Keep 'em coming!", am ablaze with excitement over this incredible opportunity to see all the ab fab aspects of this very American (Bryn Athyn, Lockhart, Lockphy Murphart) life.

Woke up about 15 minutes ago - around 3:15 a.m. - after savoring dreams that I can't remember, but still felt the uplift, the inspiring awe.  As I stretched to get up & head down to the loo, felt John's warmth on my right, stroked Max's warm fur where he lay sleeping, between the two of us.  As I tossed the covers back (careful not to bury Max) & hove my legs over the bed, it hit me how many times something happened in my life at a time that turned out to be the cusp of a seismic shift in awareness.  Getting up * walking across the darkened room to the door, thought about the first major BANG! of my life - Ian's death in 1959, at 11.  

As I reached for the bathroom door, it dawned on me that in the late 1950s & early '60s, psychiatric care was still socially unacceptable.  Even my forward-thinking mother, who was incredibly open about her mid-1950s mental breakdown, in her mid-40s, wouldn't have found family counseling (which didn't exist yet, anyway) unacceptable, having her children be counseled unthinkable.  

Mim, Mike & Peter were 15, 17 & 21; I was 7, a just-right age to benefit from what was perking in counseling, with more & more attention paid to behavior rather than pathology.

  
 By the mid-1950s, Carl Rogers & Abraham Maslow were bringing attention to approaches that centered on the conscious mind, free will & an individual's capacity for self-actualization.  1957 saw Noam Chomsky publish his work on the study of linguistics, which would evolve into the psychology of language.  In 1963, President Kennedy signed the Community Mental Health Centers Act, mandating construction of community facilities, which carried far less social stigma than the large, regional mental hospitals that fired up more fear than hope.  Philip Rieff, who started his tenure at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith After Freud in the mid-'60s, plotting a new course for counseling, away from Freud & embracing influences, including faith, once considered outside the psychotherapeutic pale.  

 

I was at just the right time, even the right place, to soak it all in.  And apparently I did.  
 
Yesterday, my heart was all aflutter realizing how growing older, learning that things have rarely (if ever) been the way I originally thought, gaining perception of my ignorance & an appreciation of the fabulous humanity of all who touch my life.  It stunned me to realize that while there were times my sister-in-law confused & exasperated me, I never felt any sense of ill will toward her.  Ever.  That is, to me, a big deal.  I felt anger, but not animosity.  That wasn't apparent to my, until doing a deconstruct of our history.  I thought that was pretty darn ZOWIE-worthy.  Never expected things to evolve to where they did just over an hour ago - into a flat-out, no-holds-barred appreciation of the friggin fabulous life that is mine.  It's not easy, not what I expected, not what I hoped for & dreamed about, but it is astonishingly wondrous in ways I'll never fully fathom.  

It's 4:55 a.m. - headed back to bed.  Not even taking the time to do a spell check, let alone a thorough review.  Too filled with how cool it is, knowing that my true north purpose as a life expansionist is to do all I can to help everyone realize the same reality.  That's not being cocky,  The whole WHY behind our creation, the reason we're on this earth, is so we can each, to the best we can, develop nurture celebrate a friggin fabulous life!