Adventures in Babysitting

I was an early entrepreneur. I sold greeting cards door-to-door in the military housing neighborhood on Davis-Monthan Air Force Base when I was in elementary school and marketed awful perfumes that a friend and I had distilled with unlikely ingredients and by no recognizable method to my classmates. I did extra chores for a nickel or a dime, and began sewing for hire in junior high. I was known as the family banker, someone who could be persuaded to pull a dollar or two from the stash in my Bible. I couldn’t wait to start what I saw as the lucrative career of babysitting, the venerable economic mainstay of tweens and teens.

My avarice was tempered by some degree of kindness so I had a fair amount of business. My first bookings were overflow requests for my older sister. I scheduled as many evenings as I could at a rate of 60 cents an hour, a ten cent premium charged not on the basis of my junior high school Red Cross certification but because I could make minutes into pennies.

One of my mainstay clients was a sweet southern woman whose husband was the base psychiatrist. She was a compulsive talker who would review the same information each and every time I came over. One night, after her typically interminable directions and rambling, she drifted toward their front door. Her husband, who almost never spoke to me, took me by the elbow into the kitchen. There he said quietly, “I was counseling a young airman today who had a violent outburst. He has threatened to kill me and my family. The APs have him now, but if anyone comes to the door tonight, don’t open it.” Then they left. That was the longest evening of my life. Every scritch of a tree branch on a window, every pop or crack of the house settling had me clinging to the ceiling like Sylvester, the cartoon cat.

When my family moved off base, I lost my clientele of officer’s and higher-ranking NCO’s wives and had to rustle up new business. My clients now were single mothers who lived nearby our house in our working-class neighborhood of new tract-development houses. I walked to their houses; there was no father or husband they could send to pick me up and take me back home.

There was one confusing evening when a young widow for whom I was sitting was preceded home by her date, who leaned on the door jamb and told me to go home because the mother would be home shortly. I couldn’t keep him from entering the house—I didn’t try—but there were two toddlers and a baby asleep down the hall so I stumbled around, not actively refusing to leave but nonetheless remaining until I saw my client standing in her own house. She did indeed arrive about half an hour later, as drunk as he and with a couple of friends in tow. I left, unsettled about leaving the kids and about the ways grownups entertained themselves.

I was still saving some of my earnings with a hazy idea of college tuition in mind, but would occasionally splurge on record albums. High school studies should have taken more of my attention, but I maintained my babysitting contacts, and worked every day of the summers that I could. Later that year, I was baby-sitting for a working mother of two little boys.  I remember the tedium of daily lunches, Mr. Rogers and naptime. The boys had a few toys, but were often bored, so I made up a few games, and once went through the hall closet looking for creative play materials. I didn’t know quite what to make of the 8 mm projector and some film canisters, one of which was labeled, “The Twins and the Banana”.  One of the days was enlivened by a tornado touching down on the far east side of Tucson. I heard later that it took the roof off the science building of my high school. Meanwhile, three miles away, I took the little boys into the bathroom and had them play in the tub. When the water got cold, I wrapped them in towels while I drained the tub and ran fresh hot water into it. Adding bubble salts the second time kept the boys entertained long enough for the storm to pass.

I was losing the will to be self-employment by the summer of 1972. I was working then as a wildly underpaid housekeeper for a woman who asked if I would sit for a friend of hers who had three small children later that week, adding that her own ten year old daughter, Sara, could co-sit with me. This would be handy, partly so the daughter could see how it was done and partly so my employer could join her friend for a night out as I’d be taking care of her child as well. This was illustrative of the generally Dickensian nature of this woman. Not only was she paying me an exploitive 25 dollars a week for full housekeeping: laundry (including ironing school clothes for the little miscreants who took their cotton shirts from the closet for summer play), vacuuming, dusting, and toilet scrubbing, but she required me to prepare lunches and start their dinners before I left for the day. Nonetheless, an extra few hours on the end of this week would be a few more dollars, so now I had plans for my Friday night.

That evening I had four children to look after, but they were good natured and easy to amuse. I had put the littler two into their bunk beds, and was diapering the baby when the power failed, as it often did in Tucson during the summer monsoons. I managed to get the diaper pins fastened by feel, which is pretty much how one does it in any case. I held the baby up on my chest and carried him up the hallway. I called for Sara to come to the kitchen and stay there. We found two squat candles in a drawer. I handed the baby to Sara, lit the candles from the gas stove burners and set them on the table. The baby slept in my arms as we sat in the flickering light, me telling Sara any story I could remember from the Andrew Lang fairy books. After a bit, I went to check on the toddler boys. I wasn’t gone more than two minutes when Sara began screeching. I ran back to the kitchen to see the curtains above the sink on fire. Sara had carried the candle to the window to look at the trees flailing in the wind and rain. I hauled Sara out of the room, and almost threw the baby into her arms. I told her to go stand on the porch and I ran down the hall to roust out the boys. It took forever to awaken them; I largely  dragged them down the hall and out the front door. I growled at Sara to keep them on the porch and ran to call 911. The phone was in the kitchen, but so was the fire. I looked from one to the other and decided to address the blaze rather than pick up the phone. A wet dishtowel served to douse flames of a fire larger that it would have been had I simply thrown water from the sink on it in the first place rather than staging a wholesale evacuation, but still small enough to make the telling of this modest adventure longer than the experiencing of it. I retrieved the children from the porch just minutes before the return of the adults. I was grateful that they were matter-of-fact about the blackened curtains, agreeing that getting the kids out of the house had been the proper course of action and that I should still be paid.

Those summers impressed on me at long last that working for ready money with near-slave labor was not going to pay for college or much of anything. In fact, independent sales as a tween and kitchen duty as a teen-ager snuffed out any desire for the rewards of capitalism. I set my sights on academic rewards and steady government work.

Life in the Village

Long ago, my husband, Marc, and I lived as almost starving students in a Quonset hut that was part of Polo Village, the U of A’s married student housing facility. We’d married earlier than we’d planned to get access to one of the limited number of available units, but the absurdly low 47 bucks a month rent and food were about the only living expenses we could cover.  We were content without other not-quite necessities such as a phone or a car. We admired Stewart Brand and his Whole Earth Catalog and wanted to co-evolve as well as two previously well-sheltered suburban kids could.

 

Daily life in the Village resembled camping in many ways and was just about as secure. Few people even bothered to use the simple spring locks on their front and only doors. Most couples had dogs that wandered the neighborhood and cats that availed themselves of unscreened windows necessarily left open for ventilation. The dirt and dust drifted in constantly from the unpaved streets. The gaps in the cave-like arc above us meant we were wet when it rained, and sweaty when the summer sun burned down on the ribbed steel panels that were both wall and roof.

We had to adapt to being very, very close to nature while living in that 400 square foot hut. After about six months there, I reached up to a shelf I’d nailed to the kitchen wall and when I had my copy of The Joy of Cooking” in hand, threw it across the room with a shriek to raise the dead. It was a book in form only, just cover boards over a mass of moiling little black bodies. There were no pages left under or around the hundreds of cockroaches.  Another time I was taking a shower in the minuscule bathroom when the two foot square metal floor pan broke from the rusted screws that fastened it to the painted greenboard of the stall.  It dropped to the ground below, with me—so not like Aphrodite-on the-clam-shell—riding the pan down the seven or so inches to the gravel beneath the plywood floor.  A trickle of water falling from the still-intact showerhead dripped on me as I watched a variety of displaced insects and small reptiles hop, slither and scurry away from my wet feet.

Our miniscule rent would have kept us in Polo Village far longer had it not been for my mother-in-law’s aversion to vermin. Mother Harriet visited us frequently, but for over two years was unaware that we were not as animal-free as our allergies would demand. We set humane traps in hidden corners, but like rodents everywhere, our cohabitants seemed to be born knowing how to lift the peanut butter bait with impunity. I tried to capture a few field mice using rubber gloves and spaghetti tongs. That resulted in a net loss of territory in the pantry and of dignity later in the Student Health Office when I asked for a check on mouse rabies.

 We lived in a tacit truce with our house-pests. They had the advantage of numbers since our allergies negated any possibility of population control via a cat or terrier. As I long as I put every bit of our food in glass jars or the refrigerator, the mice (thankfully, they were just that, no rats were involved at any time) could have the seeds that blew in the windows or grew under the floorboards. They were pretty well fed in any case. Most nights, a scratching run, run, pause, run, pause, run followed by rustling plastic would remind me that yet again I had left the bread out on the counter.

Perhaps my continual carelessness made them bolder as well as fatter. One time I was sitting with Mother Harriet at my Formica dinette table wedged in the alcove defined by the curve of the wall when her expression froze.  She was staring at the upright piano only five feet across the room. A plump brown mouse was bobbing up and down on the middle volume pedal. It scrambled across the indoor/outdoor carpet and literally over Mother Harriet’s sandaled foot. She shuddered violently and started screaming as the mouse slid under and out of the door.

One week later, Papa-Bob and Mother-Harriet  picked us up for Sunday dinner back

at their house and on the way, turned up a side street off Speedway. As Papa-Bob drove north, Mother Harriet asked how did we like the small red brick house on the right?  I said that it was a cute little place. “Glad to hear that”, she said, “You’re moving in on Monday.”  My in-laws made it a point of honor not to interfere, but a Jewish mother is an irresistible protective force. We lived in that cozy little bungalow, roach and rodent free, through graduate school.

Shotgun Wedding Sans Pregnancy

Last week I was wrapping a wedding present (knives, no couple just starting out ever buys themselves a decent knife set) and reminiscing about my own early marriage that, against early odds, has endured 37 years.

We had several strikes against us to start. Not just extreme youth, but two cultures and one food service job between us added to the peculiar realities of my young husband’s chronic disability had friends and family placing bets on our timeline. Even we had no intention of marrying while still in our teens, but the unexpected availability of married student housing at the University of Arizona prompted a hurry-up wedding to beat a 'be married or miss out' deadline.

Couples and families often waited for years for one of the scarce married student housing units, especially after the restriction to veterans only was lifted in the sixties. Marc and I were finishing our freshman year in 1976. Each of us lived in on-campus dorms during the week and went home to our parents’ houses on the weekends so I could work and Marc could study—he is visually impaired, and managing that disability in a college setting sucked up huge amounts of time). We were not only planning on graduate school, we were both on ‘the five year plan’ since we had both changed our majors. With such long-term plans, we figured we’d eventually want to take advantage of the ridiculously cheap but limited number of WWII era apartments, so in March Marc added our names to the long wait-list.

On the last day of his finals in June, Marc wandered into the student housing office just to see where we were on the list. The clerk said, “Well, I have a unit available unexpectedly, and I can’t reach anyone on this list. As far as I’m concerned, if you’re married, you can have it next week.  Marc called me later that night when I got from the cafeteria in a mall on Tucson’s east side where I worked on the weekends to ask, did I want to get married a little earlier than we’d planned, say on Monday?

I took a bit of persuading, not for the eventuality, but for the timeline. My parents were mightily unhappy, certain that this meant I’d never finish my degree, but the two families put a few hurried plans in place: Marc’s mother, Harriet, had been told ‘Judge Fenton did a lovely ceremony’, so she arranged a 10:00 appointment in his chambers down at the Pima Courthouse. I gave notice at the  restaurant, planning a transfer to the Speedway location, but not really following through. All that was certain was my last night at work would be that Saturday. Marc’s father took him to get the license and the rings. I hemmed a never-worn pink prom dress. After my mother saw me reading the ingredient list on the Ovaltine jar and heard me wondering aloud how simple vitamins and minerals could possibly affect ovulation, took me to my first GYN visit for a hurry-up, double-dose regimen of birth-control pills.

On Saturday night, I was ‘striking the line’, i.e. carrying the serving pans from the steam tables to the pot-boy in the kitchen. On my third trip, I backed through the swinging door with the double-decker mashed potato pots (the lower one held about a gallon of hot water insulating the upper pot with the spuds). Someone had spilled oil, gravy, I never knew what, on the tiled floor and down I went, losing my grip on the pots on the way. The mashed potatoes were at this point room temperature so their heavy warmth after they plopped onto my hair and my face, and down inside my uniform was rather pleasant; the boiling water from the steam jacket splashing all down my left side was anything but. Someone ripped off my white nylon uniform before I could stand. I remember sitting up to hook my thumbs under the waistband of my nylon slip and drag it off, along with the stockings we were required to wear. Unfortunately, that action took the blistering skin on my thigh and calf along with the clothes, so I was a starchy, sticky, oozy, half-naked mess when bundled into an ambulance and taken to St. Jo’s hospital, a half-mile away.

While I was being cared for in the emergency room, my father, still gruff and disapproving of the whole endeavor, called Marc, saying bluntly, “There’s been an accident, Lynn’s in the hospital. We’ll call you when we know more”, and hung up.  Marc told me later that he walked outside  his parents’ house and sat on the curb with his head in his hands,  imagining everything from car accident to assault, and thinking back on a short life long on disappointment and concluding, “Good lord, I just can not catch a break.”

I left St Jo’s around midnight wrapped from ankle to hip in white gauze and high on Percocet. Sunday remains a mystery to me still, but early on Monday morning, I swallowed some more painkillers and the Orvo-whatever,  washed my hair, slathered on the blue eye-shadow we all wore in the ‘70s, and struggled into that pink dress. I managed to get it up, down and mostly around all the bandages on my left side. My parents, my little sister and I met Marc, his brother and parents at the fountain in the courthouse and we all crammed into the same elevator to the third floor office. Judge Fenton bustled in the room to perform the ceremony in a rushed recess between two murder trials.

I was only hazily aware of the whole event, woozily clinging to Marc’s arm while Judge Fenton, kept emphasizing ‘this is forever, it is not easily undone, it’s a commitment’, etc, all the time looking pointedly at my dress, which with all the bandages, was very full about the middle. I wanted to say “Hey, Bud, I am so not pregnant!”, but my obvious nausea from all the meds was additionally misleading. I managed to say a simple “I do”. At that moment, the summer heat in the stuffy chamber overwhelmed my mother  and we all rushed to the cluster of overturned chairs where she'd fainted.

We’d planned a family dinner with presents and cake at my parents’ house but first was a side trip to the GP for a check on my burns. When Dr. Grossman saw that the emergency treatment Saturday night had been….inexpert…, he said, ‘I’m so sorry, this is going to hurt’,  braced his left hand on my forehead (!!?), and with his right, ripped away the gauze stuck to the wounds in one rapid sweep.  More painkillers before leaving that office made the mini-reception a blur.  Neither of one had a driver’s license, so my new father-in-law took us to the El Dorado Hotel as planned for the three-day, no-refund honeymoon he and Mother-Harriet given us. Since I couldn’t even walk, Papa-Bob helped Marc get me to the honeymoon suite and then brought us pizza for dinner. By Thursday, I was mostly mobile and almost drug-free, so we asked our parents to take us, our books, bicycles and an upright piano to the as yet unseen ‘housing unit’ west of the U of A Medical Center we’d scooped.

In the quiet of our first summer night in our new home, I looked at the rusty steel walls and plywood floor of our new home and reflected that some women marry for money, whereas I had apparently moved heaven and earth for a 400 square foot, roach-infested Quonset hut.

Lessons in detachment... of various kinds

I’ve hesitated to post this, because… I am the other driver.  I am the vessel of the divine that offers Cas and the community opportunities to practice compassion while on the road, or more particularly, in  parking lots.  I take no pride in the role; it is my fate to be the humble instrument of instruction.

As my husband, Marc, said plaintively to his brother once while I was on the phone for yet another insurance ordeal (difficult for the rep perhaps, my repeated practice with the “recorded to serve you better” phone calls has put me quite at my ease), “She’s actually a good driver, she’s never hurt anyone.”  Trash cans, ash cans, light poles, guard posts, plants and planters, and poorly placed public artworks would all tell a different tale were they animate.

It is stationary vehicles that are the most distressed.  For years, I maintained there was a magnetic attraction between the metals used in older cars’ bumpers, perhaps caused by the energy field created by turning on the ignition, but the fact that I’ve … made contact… with as many of the newer rubber bumpers as the older steel ones suggests the ignition may be involved, but only peripherally. The newer rubber baby buggy bumpers are no help in improving my fellow drivers’ acceptance of the inevitable. Their ‘paintability’ is touted as a improvement, but the merest kiss causes deep scuffs and scars and pigment apparently costs three times as much as chrome, so fat furry false savings on that, Mr. Estimator.

The latest evidence of the insufficiency of rubber bumpers was after a recent play date with the terriers of a friend who lives in the foothills. I wasn’t there to help a puppy of my own learn doggy manners; I have no pets. I was visiting primarily to play with the dogs myself.  Drunk on puppy-loving, wishing my allergies would permit me to live with a dog rather than just occasionally dating them, I backed my Subaru out of their owner’s steep and winding driveway. I heard a scrape and felt a tug. When I got out to check the rear, I found I had backed over a low retaining wall that bordered the driveway. I saw nothing in the bright sunshine: no damage to the rubber, no black marks on my friend’s expensive brickwork, no need to go inside and say anything at all. All the way down the rolling hill to the four lane street that would take me home, I wondered what was that tugging feeling?  I pulled into a shopping center to find the wraparound bumper that had looked just fine at first had actually popped off the entire left side of the Outback, and must have been swaying back and forth as I drove. I drove home slowly, on side streets. The next day, a sympathetic male teacher at the elementary school where I worked managed to wedge the bumper back into place, with the panel hugging the body close enough so that its recent adventure wasn’t terribly obvious. He also pounded out a dent in the rubber that I still hadn’t seen. This kindness meant I was able to leave the whole incident unmentioned at home. I support honesty and truth in a relationship, but when stories like this are such oft-told tales, perhaps every telling isn’t essential.

It is my great hope that latest Subaru bumper story will be a book-end to earlier ones about my recently sold Honda Pilot, and there will be no more. I'd gotten to know the Pilot's power and size after introducing it repeatedly to our large green trash bin, and once to a friend’s front-mounted tow-hitch. Another friend Jen, had joined us for dinner and a DVD one night. While she was chatting with Marc in the living room, I was messing about in the kitchen. I realized I had forgotten the salsa for our tacos. I hollered from the kitchen door that opens into the garage, "Be back in sec!", jumped in the Pilot, backed it out of the garage and into Jen's new (of course) Toyota Corolla. I take the $600.00 for her new bumper out of savings, and am grateful that we carpool to the same school anyway. About 4 months later, Jen is again over for dinner, and this time, having forgotten butter for the brownies, I grab the keys, jump in the Pilot, back out of the garage and into Jen's car again. Another $600.00, even with DentBuster's good customer discount. This time I have to put the expense on our charge card, and there is a slight chill in the carpool over the next few days. A few months later, dinner is complete, we've had a lovely evening, and we're walking Jen out to her car.

"Jen, why is your car parked sideways in our driveway?"

"Oh, I got sideswiped at the grocery store by a hit'n'run, and figured since Lynn would be hitting me again anyway.. "

Well! But, the sad truth is, about nine months after that, I did indeed back into her car in our driveway a third time. Jen burst into tears, seeing that this time I had managed to crunch her front bumper, and somehow the hood was buckled as well… and the front left side panel looked a little droopy. At 1600.00, this one had to be handled by our insurance company which also provided a rental car for a stony-faced and silent Jen. Now when she visits, Jen leaves her car across the street in St Jude's church parking lot.  Most of our repeat guests do so, each being offered multiple opportunities to practice compassion.

A Thankful Feast; an incident of culinary mishap

        I think it is important to remember when we talk about the seven deadly sins that they are in fact only vices that some church decided to upgrade to sins based on their severity. That, and there used to be more than seven, when is the last time you accused someone of acedia or vainglory, or chastised anyone in despair?  I know, I know some of the seven are truly abhorrent; greed, wrath, lust, envy…bad, all bad. Pride and sloth? Well, we all have our moments of pride and honestly sloth, or the opportunity for a single moment of peace in which to practice sloth is probably my highest ambition. Which brings us to gluttony. Let’s just be completely straightforward…could we really be American, REALLY good AMERICANS, without a little gluttony? We certainly couldn’t celebrate being American at an annual feast of Thanksgiving. The Thanksgiving holiday is marginally about history and patriotism and primarily about food, family, food, friends, drink, food, thankfulness and a little bit more food.

                That said, everyone cooks too much food at Thanksgiving. Especially when you have two cooks with a lot of restaurant experience. My friend Tracy and I may have actually set some sort of record for overcooking if anyone were keeping track. It was our first really grown-up Thanksgiving, you know not traveling back to our folks or someone else’s folks, but staying at our apartment and cooking for 12 people. The guests were going to be my husband Mike, myself, Tracy, her roommate Michelle, and friends Thomas, Chris, Kim, Jan, James, Buster, MaLaura and Jen. A sizable group with some big eaters Mike, Thomas, Chris and Jan (pronounced “Yon”) could probably out eat ten people all by themselves. Tracy and I felt safe planning a big menu and cooking a lot. Plus, both of our moms had recommended cooking a few extra dishes or portions in case something flopped. We were creating an entirely vegetarian meal. We had two kitchens to use. My husband Mike and I were the caretakers for our apartment building and our neighbor Patty across the hall had gone out of town for the week. We were watching her cats and plants and she had agreed to let us co-opt her kitchen during Thanksgiving. 

                The cooking went flawlessly and we had a great time cooking together. Both of us know our way around a kitchen and we had fun developing several of the recipes. The menu was glorious and included some dishes I still make 18 years later because they are amazing. Our problem was really about portioning. We mistakenly calculated an actual portion of each item for each person and then doubled it!! Let’s be clear about this…portions assume that you will have 3 to 4 items on your main course plate. Who puts less than 12 things on their plate at Thanksgiving? You see the problem? Maybe you are reading this in time to save yourself this year. Even if you create half portions of every menu item for every guest, you will STILL have leftovers. 

             The meal began with wine, a beautiful cheese plate and crudités. For the sit down, take turns saying gratitudes, hand around serving plates portion of the meal we had…wild rice stuffed squash, vegetarian stuffing with mushroom and tarragon gravy, yams baked with blueberries and mandarin oranges, mashed potatoes with carmelized onion and port gravy, green beans baked with shallots and slivered almonds, cranberry and kumquat sauce, a four cheese noodle au gratin with peas and fresh baked rolls. We intended to serve four kinds of home made pie and espressos for dessert. The pies were a (from scratch) mince with rum sauce, pumpkin, whiskey chocolate and a raspberry, loganberry and apple. Our guests were debilitatingly stuffed mid way through the main course. 

             Our dear friend Thomas invited us all into the hall to roll around and move the food in our bellies. Not for gastric comfort, but to make more room for MORE food and eventually dessert.  When we began surveying the still massive amounts of food and trying to determine storage, we realized we had to consume more to even consider storing the leftovers (in two kitchens). We made up plates to take out to the streets, we fed over twenty street dwellers. We took to the apartment building and invited neighbors, most had their own dinners, but several who were not originally from America, happily helped and were fascinated by our version of the holiday. One couple from England just could not grasp the idea of how much food was a reasonable amount to adequately “feast”.  As we loaded up their plates they kept asking in shock…"This is just ONE meal?” Eventually, we packaged up the leftovers!! After a run to the park and a vigorous snowball war, we even made room for dessert. To this day, however, I clean my entire fridge every year before Thanksgiving for the express purpose of making room for containers of leftovers.

What the Muppets Knew.

    My son and I regularly go to the library together.  He is free to pick out any books he wants and other media he can get if I approve. Several weeks ago he discovered the Muppet Show. He has seen Sesame Street, The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth and so has been exposed to pieces of Jim Henson’s legacy. To say that these things don’t compare with being exposed to the Muppet Show for the first time would be a severe understatement. Like someone saying they love chocolate because they eat M&Ms.

     After watching several episodes my son, very seriously, asked his parents to sit down because he had some questions. He begins, “So there’s this show…and it’s filled with puppets, mostly monsters (a key point because his deep love of monsters is nearly unparalleled in his life) and in EVERY episode there is tons of music and singing and new instruments (another key point, music MIGHT be the only competitor for his monster love).” My husband and I both nod, agree, yes, yes, that’s right…did you have a question about that? He sums up, “Neither one of you ever thought it might be a good idea to show this to me? I had to discover it myself?” He asked this wryly in a tone and attitude well beyond his years that implies not only sarcasm, dismay and complete befuddlement, but also an unspoken belief that surely there was no entrance exam for this whole “parenting” gig. Touché.

     As a family we enjoyed watching the entire second and third season of the Muppet Show including all the special features. Thackery is a connoisseur of special features. In one of the features, Jim Henson and Frank Oz do a tutorial on how to create a puppet’s character using detachable interchangeable features and different gestures and voices. Pure genius. Thackery watched it again and again creating sock puppets, stick puppets and working with his own “attachable puppet” Gooey. He at one point said to me, “All t.v. should just be these guys helping kids learn things.”  

     Which got me to thinking, you know when I was a kid, that was pretty much true. Jim Henson, Frank Oz and Dr. Seuss comprised 75% of what my generation was exposed to in early childhood. So I blame them for our complete inability to function in modern selfish consumer driven times. We are all old hippies in our hearts. We know that acceptance and inclusion are good and we know racism is bad. We know the Once-ler got it wrong and the Lorax had it right. Love your neighbor, protect the environment!!! Charity is good, greed is bad. Oh how sorrily and ill equipped were all were for the corporate buy out of our democracy and the systematic replacement of our education system with consumers-in-training programs. It isn’t our fault!! We were led to believe as very small children that the older generations had it all figured out and that they were forewarning us against mistakes that previous generations had made. We grew up in a time where parents thought Alice Cooper was the closest thing to the Devil that was out there and we got to see him ON THE MUPPET SHOW!!! Kermit made a joke (referencing Faust) to mock Alice about his “contract with the Devil” and then they all laughed about it and Alice put on a monster suit to dance with some Muppets.  Message? You can be as different as you want as long as we can all laugh about our differences and pull off the big dance number at the end of the show!

     We literally grew up thinking all the Once-lers had learned their lessons, were filled with remorse and wanted to help us fix everything. We thought everyone was on the same team. The debates were over and our job was to clean up, decrease our carbon footprint, distribute the wealth more humanely and equitably, get healthcare for everyone and walk happily into sunnier times. We were going to establish America as the leader of great minds, great ideas, compassionate humanitarianism and creative genius. Right? Right? Yeah, so what happened with that?

Yoga Zen Driving

     My friend Tracy kindly gave me a periodical that she thought I would enjoy, all about environmentalism and education, right up my alley. Thank you, very kind. In it, we discovered a wonderful article about all the times during our busy hectic days that we could be recognizing ways to practice compassion, a yoga mindset…a Zen attitude. Great article, good ideas…again, thank you. Wait…what is this number four? Finding Compassion on the Road? Hold on a second…did I read this right?

5 Yoga Practices For Mind-Body Balance,  BY DAVID SIMON, M.D.,

4. Finding Compassion on the Road

Driving is an excellent laboratory for self-awareness – and an ideal place to cultivate equanimity and calm. Before you start the car, give your body a good stretch to each side and set your intention for a peaceful, safe journey. As you drive, relax your grip on the wheel. Keep your tongue at fire point (the spot on the roof of your mouth just between your two upper front teeth) to keep your jaw relaxed.

Be aware of situations that cause you to become frustrated, such as slow traffic or someone cutting you off. When these situations arise, see if you can focus your attention on your breath and put your awareness in your heart, letting go of the story you’re telling yourself about “the jerk” in the other car. Advanced yogis can practice feeling compassion for the other drivers as well. You can silently repeat, “Just like me, they want to feel happy, peaceful, and loved.”

       “Cultivate equanimity and calm”? In my car driving in Tucson? Okay, easily enough I can “be aware of the situations that cause” me “to become frustrated”. Sure, no problem…do it everyday. It’s the part between there and practicing feeling compassion for the other drivers, where I get a little hung up. I’ve read some frightening statistics lately about how over sixty percent of the licensed drivers on the road today would not pass a driving test, not to mention all the unlicensed drivers.  Add to that the fact that a high percentage of Tucson’s driving population are transplants who learned to drive in other states with other traffic laws. States like Denial, Oblivion, Stupidity and my personal favorite the State of I’m-The-Only-Person-Who-Exists-In-The-Universe. I am as eager as the next person to start increasing my positive attitude and decreasing my stress levels. Alright, I’m game…let’s go Yoga Zen Driving in Tucson!!!
        When I moved to Tucson eighteen years ago my brother was driving me from the airport to his house and I commented, “These roads are amazing, wide and flat. The views are awesome. You must ride your motorcycle all the time!!” He replied that he paid way too much money for Medical School to end up splattered on the street and that he had sold his motorcycle. I said that he had to be kidding, why would he do such a thing? He simply said, “You’ll see.” See I did. During my first week driving in Tucson I watched a woman who was trying to make a left turn, but instead drove up onto the median and hit a sign post then backed up off the median so she could DRIVE UP ONTO THE MEDIAN AND HIT THE SIGN POST AGAIN!!! When I shared this story with others they were neither stunned nor surprised. As a driver in Tucson I have witnessed someone do a u-turn on Kolb (a divided street) to then be driving the wrong way toward the traffic that was following him a moment ago sending three lanes of vehicles up onto the medians. I have seen someone run a red light and then back up through that red light the wrong way. I watched someone slam on their brakes so hard they turned their car sideways across three lanes of traffic on Oracle and then got out of their car and left it there. So, before I even get in my car for my first day of Yoga Zen Driving, I acknowledge these memory thoughts and dismiss them from my new intentionally peaceful driving experience. Aaaahhh. Clean slate, new day, new attitude and some Kate Wolf for the CD player.
      Day One wasn’t really going to be that challenging. I had to drop my son off at school, stop by the hardware store on my way home and a few hours later, pick my son up at school. Everything inside a tidy little 2 mile radius. School drop off, flawless, my son’s school is very small, the other parent and grandparent drivers are very careful and aware of each other and the kids…so far, so good. Now to the Ace Hardware in the Campbell and Glenn shopping plaza. I’m not in a hurry and I am a Yoga Zen Driver so I take a route slightly off the busier streets and arrive in virtually the same amount of time the more hectic streets might have delivered me. I pull into one of the available angled parking spaces and am immediately screamed at by the driver in the space in front of me. He was so angry and so hostile that at first I thought he was yelling at someone on a phone device that I couldn’t see. Then he got out of his car and started pointing at me and screaming even louder. He apparently had wanted not to park, but to pull through the space I had parked in and then drive the wrong way down the aisle. Oh, and he felt this was a reasonable response to his not being able to do that. How do I feel? Compassionate? Do I think “just like me he wants to feel happy, peaceful and loved”? No. I do not. I feel threatened and pissed off. Damn it!! Day One…fail.
      Day Two I almost got hit head on taking my son to school by a driver who was driving the wrong way on a one way street AND ran a stop sign. Five cars were honking and pointing at this driver and he flipped them all off and tried to drive straight into me anyway. His final words to us all were, “Turn the F#%K around!!” At this particular adrenaline riddled moment having narrowly evaded catastrophe because my tiny car fits in the bike lane (and a little up on the curb) what I am feeling? …Thankful beyond all ability to measure that my son is safe and that no one was occupying the bike lane. Compassion? Awareness in my heart? Nope! Nope! Thankful for our wholeness is as good as I can get. That guy? I would kind of like to punch that guy. Day Two…fail.
      Day Three, third time is a charm, right? Day three is a lot like those driver’s education movies you had to watch in high school. Football bounces out into the street…I stop carefully and look…sure enough, kid runs into the street to get it. I smile and wave at him…I am a Yoga Zen Driver. Schools bus stops in front of me and puts out its stop sign and I stop a generous distance behind it to patiently wait. The car behind me honks at me and starts to pull around me and I roll down my window and put my hand out in the palm back and down stop position…it works!! He stops and gives me a little “oops, sorry” wave!! I AM a Yoga Zen Driver. A motorcyclist is signaling to get into my lane, but the car in front of me doesn’t see him and nearly cuts him off. I slow down and gesture for him to get safely in front of me. He does and gives a thank you wave. I AM A YOGA ZEN DRIVER!!! Aaah. Success. Wait, what we are being detoured? Wait, why? What happened? Traffic didn’t stop for a siren wailing ambulance and the resulting collision has closed the intersection. Who doesn’t stop for an ambulance!?! Oh, that’s right, I’m still in Tucson. Crud! So much for Yoga Zen Driving.