Spirited Woman Blogger Team

One Cooking Lesson I Will Never Forget

My mother was very proud of her cooking – nothing fancy but very tasty.

Now when I look back I greatly regret that although Mother had cooked for me for almost four decades, I can’t remember any of her dishes except one – pan fried red snapper.

However, there was one of her cooking incidents that I’d never forget. One evening my father, as usual, was out gambling, even though he was already heavily in debt from his previous gambling. That night, Mother cooked for the three of us even though he was not home. I don’t remember any of the dishes, only how much effort she put into cooking them.

Even though our the family didn’t have much money left, Mother decided she would splurge on one lavish meal after so many frugal ones -- we didn’t know if there would be any money for our next meal, let alone a nice one. Even though Father was away, we’d enjoy the food together and there would be plenty left over for him when he returned.

But when Mother was carrying the steaming dishes to the table in the living room, the door bell rang. During those days, our only visitors were usually not friends but debt collectors. Frightened, Mother’s hands shook and all the dishes fell. Meat, fish, vegetables crashed to make pretty but no longer edible blossoms on the floor.  

We didn’t pick up the dishes but held our breath and waited till the intruder’s footsteps vanished. Of course we went to bed with none of the food in our stomach but only in our imagination and maybe later in our dreams.

I don’t remember if Mother ever cooked another lavish meal after that. But from then on, I never wasted even a grain of rice  – or anything else for that matter.

Mingmei Yip, http://www.mingmeiyip.com
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No Connection! My Technology Vacation

For the last nine days, I’ve been without internet or voicemail and extremely limited email. Surprisingly, it was easier than I thought it would be…

It wasn’t until day six that I started to miss being “connected.” And actually, I think that was just out of boredom more so than missing technology. My husband Larry and I spent nine days travelling in northern Michigan to visit his family. Rather than stay in a hotel, we opted to bunk in with various family members wherever they could fit us. It certainly made getting a shower interesting with five adults vying for one bathroom!

The first few days of our trip were spent rekindling family friendships, making new ones with young nieces and nephews, and getting caught up on the last few years. There were occasional jaunts about town to try new restaurants and leave tourist dollars with the shopkeepers. We ventured out to Amish country, took the ferry to beautiful Mackinac Island and spent a lazy afternoon floating down river on a pontoon boat. At night there were campfires and s’mores, and perhaps a few adult beverages sneaked in…

But by day six, we had seen all the sights, shared our stories and laughed ourselves silly. We also watched no television during this time and my brain started to get restless. It needed a focus, something tangible to hang on to – so I read a book. What a novel idea!

The blessing of this time is that we could really relax and be present with each other. All the adults adhered to visiting without the assistance of technology – the children were usually the first to complain and request games on their parent’s phones in the evening.

After such a respite, it was a bit unsettling to arrive at the airport to see all these heads buried over cell phones and iPads. There was no conversation between couples, screams when games were taken away from young hands, and much flurry to book new flights when a rainstorm moved in. Oh sure, I’ll be one of the first to post new photos on Facebook, but for now, I’ve got one more day before it’s time to embrace technology again. I’ll be that woman reading a book and eating a giant chocolate chip cookie… I’m in no hurry to end technology vacation!

- Allison Blankenship, http://www.allisonspeaks.com,  http://www.UpsideTheBook.com
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In Praise of Unforgettable Song Lyrics

Somewhere over the rainbow, skies are blue, And the dreams that you dare to dream really do come true. -- "Somewhere Over the Rainbow," written in 1939 by song lyricist E. Y. "Yip" Harburg (1896-1981)

Yesterday I was attempting to concentrate on writing Web site copy for a new client. But my usually enthusiastic creativity had shut down, and I simply had to shelve that project for a while. Once again, panic and uncertainty about the future was overtaking me; I know, it makes no sense to feel panicky, since I just said that I'm working with a new client. Nonetheless, my normally high spirits were mighty low.

Once again, music (or something related to music) came to the rescue! I was noodling around on Google, searching for a YouTube video of a song that could soothe and calm my rattled nerves. Somehow I came across the prolific song lyricist "Yip" Harburg singing Somewhere Over the Rainbow and describing a bit about how he happened to write those particular words. It was fascinating, and I was entranced.

Here is Yip Harburg, speaking about his most famous lyrics, the Academy Award-winning song Somewhere Over the Rainbow.

That brief video led me to more song lyrics Harburg wrote, such as April in Paris, It's Only a Paper Moon, Wizard of Oz, Old Devil Moon, and Finian's Rainbow. Then, of course, I did some research on Harburg, and discovered that he wrote over 600 songs in his 50-year career, and worked with over 60 composers -- everyone from his good friend Ira Gershwin to Jerome Kern and Jule Style and Harold Arlen.

Life wasn't always a rainbow for Harburg, though. Because of his nonconformist and left-leaning political views, he ran smack-dab into McCarthyism and was blacklisted (unable to get work in Hollywood) for ten years, from 1951-1962. But that dark period for many artists, actors, and musicians didn't destroy Harburg's career. He went on to work on Broadway shows, and in fact was writing songs well into his 80s.

After a couple of hours listening to Harburg's jaunty, witty, romantic lyrics that nonetheless always worked in a theme of social justice somewhere, I was not panicky any more. By then it was midnight, too late to write that client's Web site copy. But those unforgettable song lyrics had restored me to my optimistic self.

Linda Jay Geldens, www.LindaJayGeldens.com
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The Great Divide

To say this is a time of great change is of course an understatement that would surprise only the very naïve. But have you noticed the vast differences in how people are reacting to that reality?

I’m observing distinct and polar responses to the uncertainty that is life in 2012. One camp, if you will, seems locked in, dug into rigid belief systems, clinging for dear life and fighting against anything or anyone that challenges their paradigm. They appear stressed-out, self-centered and indignant, trying to control that which is futile. At the heart of it may lie an abdication of true responsibility. It is easy to blame and accuse when your world is out of control.

The other group seems to be riding the wave of change, sometimes exhilarated, sometimes terrified but usually hopeful and open. As ungrounded and unsettling as it feels, they seem to maintain a semblance of perspective – including a sense of humor -- through it all. And they seem to take responsibility in stride, even when it would be easy to take a victim stance.

Now my premise is a generalization I realize. Yet my experience of late has been made up of these curious polarities. My work gives me a peek into the hearts and minds of a diverse cross section of people, though it’s a bit skewed toward clients who are trying to adapt to and align with new realities, even as they look for help and support. Flying to visit those clients, especially on connecting flights through busy hub cities, affords me ample opportunity to observe the general public. And there are many who want to argue passionately with anyone who will fight back. It’s not unique to one political party, one religion, or any other belief system. People are ranting about macro dogmatic views, as well their own victimization, heavy or trivial. At one moment I am hearing a tirade about an American’s unalienable right to bear assault weapons, and the next witnessing outrage over the location of one’s airline seat. Here’s an example – a true account from last week’s trip.

After a three-hour delay due to severe weather, I was finally onboard a plane bound for my destination, taxiing prior to takeoff. The flight attendant was mid-way through her safety demonstration when, from a row toward the back, came a woman's voice:

"I can't smoke? I have to smoke!"

Native American Wisdom

This week I learned that a wonderful woman I met in 1995 when she led a Native American healing workshop near Sedona, Arizona, had died. She was a shaman from the Huichol tribe, descendants of the Aztecs who live in the Sierra Madre Mountains in Mexico. She was a wise, gentle, loving woman.

I remember her very well, as she appeared in my life at a time when my emotions were raw. I had lost my husband of 25 years the previous year, and was still reeling and confused. We had many long talks, and I took notes -- which I came across just the other day, right before I learned she had died.

She told me to put aside my worry because my late husband would be my spirit guide for the rest of the healing journey, which would probably take several years (as it did). Another point she made was that I should not be concerned about meeting the right people in my future, because, truthfully, when the student is ready, the teacher will appear. Lastly, she encouraged me to take my time with healing -- I was trying to rush the process, as it was so painful -- as I needed more time just to be with myself. I liked that she said "with" myself, which indicates being a companion to myself, rather than "by" myself, which indicates being lonely.

The Huichol shaman and her nephew led early-morning welcomes to the sun as we fifteen participants chanted and sang. We learned how to do simple Huichol crafts, like rudimentary painting and beading, and there was beautiful countryside nearby where we could hike or walk.

She was a lovely presence, and will always be remembered. One of her favorite expressions was, The Universe knows.

Linda Jay Geldens, www.LindaJayGeldens.com
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Guest Blogger - Rosemarie Vertullo - Retirement - Or, Reflection?

What does it mean to "Let Go?" Really let go and enter a new phase of your life. Retired sales executive Rosemarie Vertullo, is our new guest blogger. In her three-part series exclusively for Spirited Woman, Rosemarie writes in an up close and personal way about her life after retirement. Welcome Rosemarie!

Retired, retirement – really! What do those words mean? They make it sound like I was once tired and now I’m tired again and need to rest until my final day. Wrong!!! This is actually an incredibly happy time of my life and something that I have looked forward to for quite a while. This chapter should be called Rejuvenation, Revitalization, or something really wonderful, like Reinvention.

I had been a sales professional in the pharmaceutical/medical industry on both the East and West coasts for my entire 34-year career. I worked my way up the corporate ladder from sales representative to my last position as Senior Director of Sales for North America for a major corporation. Not bad for an Italian-American, Catholic school girl who grew up in the '50s in the Bronx!

I loved what I did in my career, as it was very stimulating and rewarding. I got to meet interesting, intelligent people and traveled a great deal. I visited every state in the U.S. and countries like Japan, Australia, Croatia, and Switzerland, to name a few. Recently I made a decision to give this all up because I wanted to embark on a new, exciting chapter in my life.

But my working friends keep asking me, “Rosemarie, what do you have planned, now that you are retired?” or “Aren’t you going to be bored?” “You were a high-powered sales executive, always on the go, always at the top of your game. How can you just stop?” My response is, “Planned? Bored? Stop?”

I will NOT be bored! NOT stop! That’s what “retirement” is all about! Consider this though – never having to wake up to the sound of an alarm clock so you can rush to the office. Never looking at my schedule again, never feeling pressured about a deadline again!

Here is what I will do. I will make sure to keep my PJs on till noon, make all those phone calls I've been wanting to make to long-time friends, work out in the middle of the day when the gym is empty, spend more time with my partner, Earle, and make love in the afternoon (like Cecilia in Simon & Garfunkel’s song), shop for a new camera and renew my interest in my long-lost hobby of photography, which I never had time for when I was working in my high-pressure corporate job. Whew, I think I will be very busy indeed!

Are You Deaf?

When I was younger, I was quite judgmental.

When on a bus, or the street, or the ferry, I’d mentally dissect  other passengers on the basis of their appearance or their manner (to me). Wouldn’t that middle-aged woman look better if she would lift her mouth, so that instead of looking like a capsized boat, it would form a pretty crescent moon? And that young girl if only she would pluck her downward-slanting brows so that instead of looking depressed, she’d look cheerful and energetic? What hadn’t that old man had surgery on that  bad-luck mole right underneath his eye which looked a big black tear?

But then two incidents taught me not to be so critical of other people. One time I went to visit a friend and found that she had a guest, a young girl, who was living with her temporarily. The girl was very quiet, polite and didn’t bother us. But I decided that I didn’t like her based only on one reason. She swung her feet all the time – eating, talking, writing, reading. The Chinese say, “Swinging trees have fallen leaves; swinging people have no luck.” Because people who constantly rock their bodies will not achieve anything of importance.

When the girl was out of the room my friend asked me how I felt about her and I told her how annoying she was to me. 

My friend looked shocked. “Oh, that poor girl, you don’t know how much she has suffered! She swam here to escape from China; her only brother was eaten by sharks on the way. She had no one when she arrived. Our church took her in and helped her find a job in a factory and rent a room. But because she was not fast enough, she was soon fired and got behind in paying her rent. One evening when she went home, she arrived to find her door locked. Her landlord had thrown all her belongings onto the street. She was now homeless. So I took her in until we can find her another job. The doctor feared she might commit suicide and put her on medication. That’s why the swinging.”

It took another incident for me to fully learn my lesson. When I was an assistant professor at the Chinese University, three or four times a week I’d take a van up the hill to the University Library. I liked to browse the rare books there, but not the young man who checked my identity. He always looked at me suspiciously, maybe thinking I was a student pretending to be a professor. But then when I asked him questions he never replied, only started at me.

One time I was so annoyed that I blurted out, “Are you deaf?”

But he still didn’t reply, only stared harder at me with blank eyes!

Then later when I happened to mention this to a colleague, he looked completely shocked. “Oh, did you really ask him that? Everyone knows that the poor guy is deaf.”

Mingmei Yip, http://www.mingmeiyip.com
Click here to read more of Mingmei's posts.

Secret Pleasures

After living in hotels for over six weeks, I noticed something weird about myself. Whenever I butter my croissant, I secretly hope that the butter will taste as good as what I had in Jerusalem. It never does because Jerusalem’s butter is fantastic, so each morning brings me disappointment.  But - a Spirited Woman never gives up hope. Now isn’t that quirky. Who remembers butter?

Yet in a moment of quiet introspection, I scanned my experience to look for other suppressed longings. I used this word puzzle:  When I eat ___, I subconsciously hope it will taste like what I had when I was traveling in ____.  I surprised myself with an extended list of secret desires. I’ll share my top ten with you, if you share yours, too, in the comments section below.

Butter—Jerusalem
Tomatoes—Burma  (I’m now a big fan of hydroponic gardening.)
Asparagus—Germany  (I was so lucky to hit Germany in June during Spargel season. I, like the Germans, adore the tender white variety.)
Potatoes—Denmark   (Danish schools still close in October for Potato Week. It’s a big deal. I never ate potatoes until I lived in Denmark. Now I can’t stop.)
Green beans—France  (Haricots verts.)
Pistachios—Turkey (These are addictive. Beware!)
Lamb—New Zealand  (You’d think you were eating a high quality steak.)
Oysters—New Orleans (Chefs can fix them 100 delicious ways, and each new taste is better than the last.)
Pineapple—Ghana (They are so heavy with sweetness. When the pineapple plane rumbled and grumbled, struggling to take flight every morning, I was sure its landing gear or loaded belly would scrape my roof less, than a mile from the tarmac.)
Mangos—India (In the spring alphonso season becomes a national obsession in India.
Raspberries—Washington (This is cheating, I know; It’s not a travel destination for me. But I can’t wait to get home for raspberry season. It’s a craving.)

And to  answer your question: No, I’m not pregnant!

- Nancy Adair  nancyadair2002@yahoo.com
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Surprise!

I never want to do the same things twice. I like surprises. -- Actress Audrey Tatou (1976-  )

Don't you just love surprises? I know I do.

Especially when they're good surprises, and not unwelcome surprises.

This week we had dinner with a longtime friend who has recently made the huge decision to move up here to Marin, after residing for 35+ years in Silicon Valley. This move is a sea change for her; I applaud her. I know first-hand that having to put your house up for sale, go through the mammoth task of sorting through all your possessions to "pare down" for the move, bidding farewell to decades' worth of familiar relationships and coming to live in an area where you know very few people is both terrifying and liberating!

I moved to Marin from Silicon Valley in 1995; she's moving here in 2012. She and I had the same catalyst for our decisions to move: being widowed and forced to consider a new lifestyle. I moved about one year after I was widowed, then made the decision to remarry five years after that. She is making the decision to open a new chapter by moving about five years after she was widowed. There is no standard timetable in these matters.

When we had dinner with my friend on Friday night, it was so wonderfully comfortable and relaxing to talk about people and places she and I have known since the 1970s. It's great to have a shared history! We did not have to explain who and what and why we were dissecting and pondering and, in some cases, laughing about.

The fact that this longtime friend will soon actually be within visiting distance -- not just within phoning or e-mail distance -- is a totally welcome surprise.

Linda Jay Geldens, www.LindaJayGeldens.com
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My Most Dysfunctional Relationship

We had some memorable moments during the book tour of Knowing Pains. Our first reading, surrounded by local friends and family. A later reading, with a sea of empty chairs, wondering if it was worth actually reading aloud to the two lone souls who came to hear us. Fortunately others were standing room only, which evened things out. The most memorable reading for my writer, Esther Gulli, was in San Francisco, where her father-in-law was in the audience. Esther's story of weight loss, complete with a revolutionary new bra fitting and the discovery of Hanky Pankies, might have included more detail than her father-in-law wanted to hear. But the women in the room loved it and I hope you do too! Molly

My thirties were exceptionally difficult for me – three miscarriages, the death of my brother John from a drug overdose, a cross country move to a new city with no friends, a major career change and subsequent layoff, two complicated (but thankfully successful) pregnancies, and motherhood.  And through it all, food was my constant companion, my drug of choice, seeing me through the emotional meat grinder that had become my life. 

As I entered my 40s, I felt as if I was crawling out of a dark cave. All the drama of my 30s was behind me.  I had a wonderful husband and two amazing daughters, and I was no longer burdened with the dual mental tortures of trying to get pregnant or maintain a pregnancy.  I also had a job I liked, and had managed to find some great friends to stand in for the sister and girlfriends I’d left behind on the East Coast. With all the darkness of my 30s behind me, I was incredibly optimistic about my 40s, and appreciative of the quiet, happy life I was finally living. There was only one cloud hanging over this utopia – the final frontier, my weight.

When I went through grief therapy after my brother’s death, which came two days after miscarriage number two, I remember this being the one issue that was absolutely off limits. I told my therapist I wasn’t interested in talking about it, and could we just stick to the real issues like death and infertility, blindly oblivious to the interconnectedness of my pain, my grief and my ever-expanding waistline. In retrospect, I expect that it was obvious to him that I was self-medicating with food.

To be sure, I didn’t gain all my weight in California. After all, I was born in Tennessee, and spent most of my youthful summers in Mississippi feasting on Aunt Millie’s cornbread, black-eyed peas cooked in bacon fat, steak fried up in the black skillet, caramel cake and homemade ice cream – and that was just lunch!  My life has been a series of trips up and down that digital scale.  But somehow, after moving to the Bay Area – the fit capital of the world – home of organic food, great weather and perfect-bodied people, I managed to gain even more weight and become my largest, most slovenly self. 

On or around my 40th birthday in the spring of 2006, I had a conversation with my older sister Elizabeth about how much more difficult it is to lose weight once you hit that mile marker. I also vaguely recall some vow I made about getting down to 140 when I’m 40.  It was, of course, an empty promise I had absolutely no intention of keeping.