Grandma's Poem

Don’t Quit

Author Unknown

When things go wrong, as they sometimes will,
When the road you’re trudging seems all uphill,
When the funds are low and the debts are high,
And you want to smile, but you have to sigh,
When care is pressing you down a bit
Rest if you must, but don’t you quit.

Life is queer with its twists and its turns,
As every one of us sometimes learns,
And many a failure turns about
When he might have won, had he stuck it out.
Don’t give up though the pace seems slow,
You may succeed with another blow.

Often the goal is nearer than
It seems to a faint and faltering man.
Often the struggler has given up
When he might have captured the victor’s cup;
And he learned too late when the night slipped down,
How close he was to the golden crown.

Success is failure turned inside out;
The silver tint of the clouds of doubt,
And you never can tell how close you are;
It may be near when it seems afar.
So stick to the fight when you’re hardest hit.
It’s when things seem worst that you must not quit.

Another Word for Love

Photo: Petr Kratchovil

My maternal grandmother was a wonderful woman; as was my paternal grandmother, come to that, but today I'm thinking about my mother's mother. She had a sly sense of humor that sometimes surprised those who knew her as a serious and even stern teacher. An example, you ask? Happy to oblige.

In the last weeks of her life she was sometimes too weary to speak and would communicate with gestures or nods or facial ticks. On one such occasion I asked, "Why are you making that face?"

Her voice was hoarse with illness but there was a familar twinkle in her eye when she responded, "What choice do I have? It's the face I was born with."

IDW, Grandma is synonomous with love.

Like most of us, she was full of inherent contradictions. She was every inch a lady but she could -- and often did -- bring Sunday dinner conversations to a screeching halt recounting the always horrific and frequently gory details of whatever murder or other violent crime she might have found in the day's headlines. She had a reputation as something of a pessimist who scopelocked on the negative rather than focusing on the positive.

Though I disliked her grisly stories and wish she'd taken more delight in the Sunday comics, I never found her to be negative. In fact, she was one of the most loving and positive influences in my life. She lavished her time and attention on me and my siblings and nurtured us in every conceivable way. She opened her home to our friends. She baked cakes for us. She baked cakes for her neighbors, too, to say thank you or I'm sorry for your loss or just I love you. Her dining room cabinet bore the photos of children none of us knew -- the children of some of her many students. Long after she retired, she continued to tutor and, at her funeral, many many people told those of us in her family how she had impacted their lives in the most positive way imaginable.

When I feel blue or discouraged, it usually lifts me just a little to think of her and imagine her listening to me in her patient way. She was judicious about dispensing advice, but she was a great listener. And if you tired of talking, she told great stories -- and not all of them macabre! And I also remember a poem that hung on my grandmother's refrigerator for as long as I can remember. But guess what?! You have to come back tomorrow to get it! (What?! You were coming back anyway, right? RIGHT?!)

Hey, Grandma was a lady and I learned from her what all ladies and the best of entertainers know: Always leave 'em wantin' more!

So until tomorrow, then . . .

The Bear, the Tiger and the Strawberry

Photo: Petr Kratchovil

Buddhist masters give their students problems called koans. In that their purpose is to illustrate important life lessons, they are similar to Christian parables. But – and perhaps only because I was raised within a paradigm that gives me easy access to the teachings of Jesus Christ rather than those of Buddhist elders – I find koans especially difficult to unravel.

Here’s an example . . . a Buddhist holy man is being chased by a bear. In his haste to get away, he unwittingly plunges off a cliff. His descent is halted, however, by a branch growing from the cliff. Miraculously, it supports his weight. Wondering how far he is from terra firma, he looks below him. What he sees is a snarling tiger pacing to and fro, obviously waiting for lunch . . . Buddhist steak tartare. Above, the bear growls and dips his claws, trying to reach the branch and retrieve his prey from its perch.

Could things get worse? Yes. Yes, they could. (As they almost always can, so never ask this question!) The monk now notices that the branch on which he is so tenuously balanced is slowly yet surely losing its grip. His time suspended between two mortal enemies is finite. And then. He notices something beautiful. There in the soil next to the branch’s root he spies a jewel: one single, perfectly ripe, red strawberry. He reaches forward, plucks this treasure. He admires its physical dimensions; its bright color. He savors the way it feel between his thumb and finger, lifts it to his nose to inhale its scent. Then, and only then, he pops it into his mouth and rolls it gently on his tongue before, finally, biting into it and marveling as its juice washes over his taste buds. He sighs with rapture. “Ah,” he says. “Perfection!”

I’m embarrassed to admit how long I’ve struggled with this story in frustration. Well, yes, of course I get it. It’s about living in the moment. Living juicy. Blah, blah, blah. But there’s a BEAR trying to tear him apart from above and a TIGER waiting to tear him apart from below. And he’s got time to pick strawberries?! ARE YOU KIDDING ME? YOU HAVE GOT TO BE KIDDING ME. You’re not kidding me? *Sigh.* Okay, I’ll try one more time . . .

A monk is being chased by a bear . . .

The problem is that I’m an American. From my first fairy tales to the Hollywood movies I see today, I’ve been spoon-fed “happily ever after.” I like a happy ending, dammit. And I gotta tell you, things aren’t looking promising for that little bald dude in the saffron robe.

I want the monk to be a highly trained Special Forces operative, packing heat. With flawless precision, he shoots and dispatches the bear. (Yes, I DO know how hard it is to kill a bear.) But the shot causes the bear to stumble off the cliff in confusion and pain. He misses the branch bearing (no pun intended) our protagonist by inches but hey, a miss is as good as a mile. He does not, however, miss the tiger. He lands right on top of the tiger and both are dead. The monk drops safely from his perch onto a mattress of bear and tiger and, just for good measure, he takes both the skins home to adorn the monastery. Alternately, the monk unsheathes his trusty K-bar, places it between his teeth (sharp edge out, of course!), times his drop from the branch precisely and lands on the back of the tiger. This stuns the tiger for a moment . . . just long enough for the monk to slit his throat. In this scenario he gets only one rug for the hut, but it's still a pretty good deal.

Yes, yes, I know Buddhist monks won’t swat a mosquito or hurt a fly. And yes, we DO see a lot of movies here IDW. But we also know a lot of Marines. And one bad-ass Special Forces operative. Just a few of the reasons I had trouble wrapping my little Western mind around this particular message in a bottle.

And then one day. One day I had the moment of intuitive enlightment that is the purpose of the koan. For just a split second, I WAS the monk. And that juicy berry was my life. That little bald dude in the saffron robe stood in for my mortal coil, suspended between life and death. Because let’s face it: No one gets out of here alive. Knowing this as we all do, knowing the branch is tearing free and death awaits us, it takes enormous courage to reach out and pluck the berry; to let its juicy sweetness delight us in spite of everything. It takes courage. And it takes a certain measure of enlightenment.

Life is filled with microcosms of this story. Relationships end. Loved ones die. Illness strikes. A flood destroys the crops. A fire burns our home. Thieves steal what we have earned. Friends betray us. There is war and plague and pestilence. But – as my father so often sings in his deep baritone – “It’s a good life, if you don’t weaken.”

The bears and the tigers are everywhere. (And I ain’t lion!) But the berries are here, too, even where you least expect to find them. So as long as we’re perched here on this branch in the abyss . . . let’s reach for the berry. Here’s to living juicy.

Core Stability

Photo: Anna Cervova

A few years ago, I spent several months in training for the Marine Corps Marathon. I logged my miles, using the 1.58 mile loop around the reservoir and the 6.1 mile loop around the whole of Central Park, as work-out staples. I joined a gym so I could use the treadmill on the days it was too hot to exercise outdoors. (Like my personal favorites, the violet and the lily of the valley, I am a shade flower that wilts easily in direct sunlight. Especially since a bad episode of sunstroke.)

There were some bumps along the way. A bad bout of bronchitis in late spring set me back almost three weeks. And life intervened once or twice with other minor problems that cost me a few more precious days. Then, my friend and training partner decided to drop out, which was discouraging. But after each set-back, I picked myself up and got back on course.

I was excited. Nervous, but excited. With the setbacks, I would just barely meet the recommended training requirements and I had wanted some wiggle room. But I believed I could do it and certainly intended to try. And then. About three weeks into August I slipped on a rain-slicked sidewalk and cracked my knee. Not hard enough to break the kneecap, but hard enough to make training nigh-unto-impossible and downright foolhardy from a medical standpoint. My knee was swollen and a gruesome shade of black-purple. And it hurt like hell.

I looked at the calendar and calculated that I could give the kneecap a full week of rest and still complete my training for the Big Day. So I did it. Rest and ice. Ice and rest. By the end of the week, the knee was turning a lovely shade of puke green and bile yellow, but the swelling was down and I could walk on it without too much discomfort. I thought I could resume training right on schedule and make it to the finish line after all. Jubilant at the thought, I went to a movie to celebrate my last night of “freedom” before resuming my last few weeks of training.

I don’t remember what film I saw that night. What I remember is that I walked out of the theatre on a clear night and somehow, incredibly, my foot found a wet bit of pavement. I slipped and fell onto the curb, with all my weight coming down on the injured knee. It hurt so badly I saw cartoon stars. I couldn’t move. I thought I might vomit. But what hurt almost as much as the physical pain was the knowledge that my Marine Corps Marathon dream had been, literally, curbed.

Stunned by the bizarre fact that I had injured myself in exactly the same way twice in the space of a week and (again literally) put myself out of the running, I e-mailed a friend. He wrote back that it sounded like a core stability issue and in his usual proactive and thoughtful way sent me an exercise product designed to address that very issue. I was dubious. I blamed it on the pretty sandals I happened to be wearing on both occasions and retired the shoes. BUT. John, you are entitled to exactly ONE “I told you so.” In fact, it now seems clear to me that you were 100% right. I’ve been concentrating on strength-training for almost a year now and I know how much stronger I am than I was. I am, in every way, more centered than I was then.

Anyone who has sat at a potter’s wheel knows how important centering is. If the clay isn’t centered perfectly, it begins to wobble. At first, it may be a subtle wavering. But in a matter of seconds, you can reach a point of no return at which it becomes necessary to smash the clay and start over again. It’s a little like that in life as well. Core stability is vital to a healthy body, and it has a metaphysical resonance as well. If we stray too far from our center – our core values – we stumble. Sometimes we even fall. At which point there’s nothing to do but pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off and do what we can to make ourselves strong enough that we won’t fall the same way again.

As for marathons? We all have them. I suspect many of us who are attracted to run the 26.2 mile versions want to do so precisely because they're so well-defined. They DO end. There IS a finish line. The challenges in our lives are not nearly so neat and tidy and sometimes it seems there is no end. But if we stay centered, if we're true to our core values, we can stay the course, regardless of what the course may be. And if -- or when -- we falter, our friends can point out the problems, offer solutions and help us if we let them.

Filling Their Shoes

Illustration: Frits Ahlefedt

I am blessed to have some amazing role models in my life, past and present. IDW, there is an unfortunate tendency to lambaste myself for NOT being more like the people I love and admire, rather than using the lessons taught by their example in a way that is kinder and, ultimately, more effective. This is because I am keenly aware of my own failings and peccadillos, and tend to forget that even my nearest and dearest have feet of clay.

Even the most accomplished among us have Sailboats and Garbage Scows . . . Einstein not only couldn't spell, he was downright cruel to his first wife, if his letters are any indication . . . I once read a most unflattering article about Mother Theresa . . . it seems she could be a bit . . . well, militant is a fitting word. I have a friend who performed in a show with music written by a celebrated [still-living] composer whose hauntingly beautiful music can move audiences to tears -- and his lover, who was also in the show, was covered with bruises throughout the entire run. Come to that, I've read in biographies and articles that Martin Luther King, who touted nonviolence publically, actually hit his wife in private on more than one occasion.

The challenge always is to hold these dichotomies gently in mind, remembering that sailboats do not negate the presence of garbage scows, nor vice versa. To use the Sailboats of Others as models to improve our Sailboats of Self, and to be patient with the Garbage Scows. Especially (for most of us, anyway) our own.