Are you better off....?

It's a recurring question in the political drama that is filling the airwaves this summer: "Are you better off than you were four years ago?" Of course, one party wants you to say no, no way, no how; the other hopes you've already found the silver lining in the dark cloud that is our economy. If you look at life from a strictly economic standpoint, then the answer for many of us could be no. After all, the stock market tanked four years ago and ate up most of my recently rolled over 401k (along with other folks') and at the same time my home value tanked. Shortly before President Bush left office, the southbound economy took my job with it, along with my health insurance and a big chunk of my identity. I have not found another full-time job, so my income is not only irregular, but only a fraction of what I made when I had a job. For a while, I'll admit, I floundered. I bought into the idea that without a job and a paycheck my life wasn't as good as it had been. I worked for the census, scoured the want ads and worried about what I would do as my unemployment ran out. Then I took a walk with a dog, took a few deep breaths and said a lot of prayers. Now, almost four years later, I would have to say that yes, I am better off, if not in the balance of my net worth. The fledgling business I started before I was laid off has turned into my new career. As well as boarding dogs, which I love, I apprenticed with a groomer and added baths and trims to the business. I don't make a ton of money, work my tail off in the summer, and spend a lot of time with very little to do in the winter. While I really miss the interaction with the community that was part of my former job, I've got a whole new family of dogs and their people. The job is seven days a week (when there's anything to do) and holidays aren't down time, they are a busy time. There are no benefits, no wardrobe requirements (yes, I work in sweats and tees) and I pay my own insurance. At the same time, I don't have to worry about job security and the fitness plan (try walking up to 20 dogs a day) is great. I've made great friends and go to bed at night not only tired, but assured that I've done the job that I felt needed to be done in the way I wanted. Because my income fluctuates, I've learned to save. I can't count on the same income from week to week, so if it's a good week, I can't just spend it. There's no such thing as living from paycheck to paycheck. As a side effect of that, I'm eliminating debt (heck, I can't borrow any more). When the economy recovered enough for my retirement fund to pay off my house this summer, I did it. I saved enough money to trade cars and not have a car loan. I also put in a new heat pump and reroofed the house while there were energy credits for doing so. Next on my to-do list is a kitchen revamp (long overdue). Part of that frugal approach means we don't eat out like we did (have I mentioned my husband was only 9 months behind me in the layoff line?) With my old job, I was often too tired to cook, now it's still not a priority, but a long day won't end with dinner at a diner. I've got a garden and chickens (we had a lot of quiche this summer) and a freezer full of food. The eat-at-home option means not only cheaper eating, but healthier eating as well. We both have smaller sizes in the closet than we did four years ago. Money aside, the loss of a job has given me my life back. I go to church regularly, something my old job didn't allow, but which I practically write into my weekly schedule. Having that christian network to lean on makes my life richer and more stable. Taking time to worship and study God's word helps me feel better and be healthier at other levels. Even while those things alone would help me say my life is better, the addition of two wonderful granddaughters is the icing on the cake. The fact that I work at home means I'm able to care for them when their parents are both at work, an extra benefit of my change in career. They add a level of richness and excitement to my days that I would never have imagined four years ago. Yes, things have been tough at times and may be again. But losing my job was one of the best things that could have happened to me and my family. Ditto for my husband's career change. Am I better off? Maybe not when it comes to the way our society so often measures success, but I really don't measure it that way any more. In all the ways that count, my old life couldn't touch this one. The unequivocal answer to the question of the year, is your life better than four years ago, is yes.

The convertible has to go

It's time to face reality. Two grandchildren in the back seat of a convertible just isn't working for me any more. No matter how much I love the wind in my hair when the temperature is above 75, I can't turn the CD player up high enough to drown out the older one screaming "Too much wind!" Ok, so I don't really do that, and she will occasionally embrace leaving the top "open," but when I see them cowering in the back seat trying to keep the wind out of their eyes, I just can't do it.

And despite the fact that I've had a convertible pretty much continuously for a dozen years or so, and that it's like asking my honey to sell his Harley, I've admitted that it's time to do it. I've practically cried as I've listed its many attributes on CraigsList, AutoTrader, and a ton of Facebook pages. I've lovingly cleaned it and photographed it and tried to convince myself that I'll be happy in something else. But I know the truth is that I'll miss it as much as I miss the career I loved for 25 years. It will be like losing a tooth, it won't always hurt, but there will be a gap there. Of course, like losing a job, letting go of one thing opens the way for another. I've spent the morning browsing the internet for, now brace yourself, station wagons. Wow, the luxury of four doors and no need to practice a balanced yoga pose to maneuver a 20+ pound child into a car seat while teetering on the back of a tilted bucket seat. The magnificence of a large cargo area in which to stow a stroller, chicken and dog food, or even shopping bags. The idea of a hard top that I won't have to wonder if I've closed as well as possible when rain is pelting on the roof at 2 a.m. Yes, like letting go of chasing ambulances and covering long governmental meetings made way for days cleaning up the literal crap of dogs and little people, wearing casual clothes, and enjoying the total absence of deadlines, selling my convertible will open new doors (at least two of them to the back seat) and may in fact give me things I enjoy just as much. All the same, while I've looked at options ranging from captains' seats in the back and third row seating that folds down to all wheel drive, a CD changer, and heated leather, the option that has most caught my eye isn't really surprising. It's a moonroof.

A sad ending for Joe

I never met Joe Paterno or particularly cared that much about him as a football coach, but his death this weekend was particularly sad. Like anyone who watches college football -- and I watch a lot of college football -- I knew who Joe Paterno was and tended to agree with my husband that he seemed a little old to be coaching. Okay, a lot old. He was older than my grandfather when he died and he was trying to stay in touch with a group of college students (jocks) and keep them in line while planning winning football strategies. It seemed like a tough task for a much younger man, but in the end it wasn't his players that caused trouble, it was one of his fellow coaches. When the allegations came to light last fall about his assistant coach, Jerry Sandusky, I was struck by how lost Paterno looked trying to process it. I imagined the great gulf between how my generation views the world and reacts to situations and how my grandfather would have reacted. I understood how he might have failed to make the right decision and produce the amount of rage against Sandusky that we would have preferred. Unlike those of us raised on the horrors that are now so commonplace, he had trouble imagining that his coworker and friend could be a monster. Any of us would have some trouble with that idea. Penn State, where a lot of people apparently underreacted to the allegations, overreacted when it came to Paterno's role. The governing body of the college fired him, not in a decent conversation in someone's office with the doors closed, but by phone. They began trying to erase what had happened, as though by giving up the good they could get rid of the bad. Photos of Paterno after he was dismissed showed a man who appeared to have aged a decade in a few short hours. A much beloved coach lost one of the things he really loved getting up for each day and had to sit powerless and watch as his legacy not only came to an end but was tarnished with ugliness of the worst sort. When he was diagnosed with lung cancer, it should come as no real surprise that he didn't have the will to fight it. While many cancers are now treatable and beatable, doing so requires physical and mental strength and determination that he no longer had. While his family still surrounded him with love, the game he loved was lost to him and his place in history was blurred and unclear. I hope the earthly powers that be will forgive his shortcomings and take no further action to erase his memory from the college program where he was so important for so long. Whatever failure he may have had has already been forgiven by the one who took away his pain. RIP Joe Paterno.

Fresh eggs and squirrel gravy

A casual chat about chickens with an almost neighbor whose dogs come to my house to get their nails done and a bath awakened in me a hunger for free range eggs. Although she was happy to bring some eggs at her next visit, I wasn't satisfied with anything less than a flock of my own. When Easter rolled around, the toddler and I selected a half dozen little balls of fluff. They soon matured into three Leghorn hens, a pair of giant roosters, and a big hen who collapsed and died. A search of CriagsList found a local farmer trying to sell a few young birds and I added a pair of Silkies and a pair of Rhode Island Reds to the flock, although it was just really good luck that we chose a hen and rooster of each breed. I also rounded up a rogue hen who was roosting on a former neighbor's car every night. She began laying right away, but for a long time the brown egg she left in the small house every other day was all I gathered. Instead, I gave away the giant roosters and spent a lot of time catching my Leghorns and clipping their wings. Silkies don't fly and the Rhonde Island Reds have never flown either. Now all the Leghorns are laying and the other two young hens are occasionally contributing a little egg here and there.

I love my chickens, but I really love the eggs. I also love to hear the roosters crow. The Silky has the deepest voice, although he's the smaller of the two roosters. He also pursues the hens with a passion. All of them. And I do mean passion.

The extra weight on the birds as they've begun laying mean that only one still feels the need to spend her nights on the four-foot fence that protects them from dogs and wild animals. She always returns to the lot in the morning so I haven't clipped her wings in a while. Our biggest issue now is that they want to lay under my the deck, which means crawling through the muck to get the eggs each day. When warm weather comes again, however, they'll be confined in the smaller lot with their house. Now they need access to the heated water bowl, and it's in the upper lot. By next winter, however, I'll have another plan for that.

As fall has turned to winter, and the hens have matured to the point that they prefer grains, the daily feedings attract more than the chickens. At first it was only one brave little fellow who was chased away by the red rooster shortly after he began eating. But he soon bought friends. The roosters and hens now ignore the little gray interlopers, although when the squirrels are joined by crows they sometimes chase the black birds away. Other birds also come and eat, including doves, blue jays and cardinals, and the chickens don't seem to mind. I don't mind the creatures of the wild joining in the meal. After all the birds eat in a feeder in the front yard all the time. But my favorites have to be the squirrels, who are becoming so tame that they no longer flee when I step out on the back porch, and sometimes stay in place when I start down the hill to feed the little flock.

Sometimes, however, when I look out the window and see a whole contingent of the little fuzzy creatures eating, I imagine what my grandparents would have done, even though it's not something I would ever do, or even enjoy. I find myself imagining a meal of fresh eggs and squirrel gravy with cathead biscuits. And even though I've never wanted to eat squirrel, I'm betting the grainfed little boogers would be good.

The lure of the soaps

Lately I've found myself giving into another guilty pleasure (besides "Hoarding") when I settle into a cozy chair and let the television take me from the midday news seamlessly into an alternate reality -- the world of the soap opera. While I don't go out of my way to watch "Days of Our Lives," and wouldn't schedule my day around it, I watch it with a sense of catching up with old friends.

My grandmother watched her "stories" when I was a child. Although she worked most of the time, when one of the periodic layoffs in the local textile plants left her at home in the afternoon, she'd be tuned into one soap or another. I grew up acquainted with the Hortons on "DOL" as well as other characters on the shows that took over our limited television channels throughout the afternoon. As I grew older, I forgot about soaps until I went off to college. There, suddenly, soaps were the rage and we scheduled our classes around time for our soaps. Bo and Hope were young star-crossed lovers on DOL. So were Jack and Jennifer. When it came time to choose classes for the quarter (yes, it's been that long), we'd block out our soap times first, avoid 8 a.m., and go from there. Then college ended, the star crossed lovers married (or perhaps in some cases didn't) and so did we. Looking back at Bo and Hope's wedding, I can vividly recall the 80s and where I was in my own life.

With a career and children of my own, I can't say I've actually given the characters on what was my favorite soap much thought in the last few decades. But lately I'm a stay at home caregiver and naptime, or often the time I'm waiting for the quiet that means little people are really sleeping, corresponds with Days of Our Lives. So I found myself watching and recognizing old friends. There was Marlena, the least changed, although she somehow wound up with John, not Roman, who I seem to recall died, then was not dead after all. The senior Hortons have passed away leaving mystery in their wake. Jack and Jennifer, looking a bit different from the teens I remember, have apparently been together and then apart and aren't sure where they are now.

Characters have died and been born, moved in and moved away, gone from bad guys to good. Children have aged at an unnatural pace, but otherwise, their scripted lives, minus the drama, have moved forward much as mine. Just like my friends and I, they've had children, made marriages work or not, made good choices and bad, drifted apart and reconnected. If you've ever watched a soap, then you know the feeling. Despite the often overblown situations, there's a sense of the familiar, an understanding and a comfort. Especially when you see that you're not the only one getting older. So are Hope and Bo.

Not quite what I expected

After walking, shaving and cleaning up after a group of visiting dogs, entertaining two little people, tending a small homestead (garden and chickens, with work depending on the season) I typically find myself at the end of the day wondering how I came to be exactly where I am. I am so totally not the person that I expected to be just a few short years ago. That was when I had a full time job, paid someone to do something with my hair occassionally, and wore nice clothes and dress shoes five days a week. In those days, sweats and sneakers were for my paid gym membership; these days, they're what I live in. I've long given up on using highlights to hide the gray in my hair and the last trim it had was self inflicted. I realized recently that while I'm not the person my working self would have expected, I'm probably much closer to the person I would have envisioned when I was still young and idealistic. That came as a shocker, let me tell you. If, during my working days, I had thought about being a grandmother,(which let me assure you I had not until the December day my daughter announced her pending motherhood about one month before I became unemployed) I would have expected a different role. I'd have been the cool grandma with gifts and fun outings. Instead, someone else gets that role and I've become a third caregiver, behind the two parental units, of two family treasures. Instead of buying them neat things, I shop on Ebay and devote hours of my time to such fascinating passtimes as building block towers to be knocked down by crawling infants, coloring with broken crayons, changing diapers and potty training, knitting hats, stockings, blankets and sweaters while they sleep, watching Baby Einstein and Your Baby Can Read videos, and memorizing the dialogue of Dora the Explorer. We do crafts, play for hours on the porch, and take long walks with a jogging stroller and an assortment of neighborhood dogs. I introduced the toddler to the real origin of eggs, and hold her up to watch the daily battle as chickens and squirrels compete for corn. I'm fairly certain I've spent more time with them than I did my own babies, because face it, babies are like puppies, cute, but it's largely a stage to outgrow. What's been really surprising is that sometime after number two came along, when I accepted that this was what God had intended for my life, and when number one began without any encouragement to call me "Ma"(my daughter had been calling me Mimi in an attempt to guide her), I suddenly felt at home in the role. Perhaps it was partly due to her choice of Ma and my love for my own grandmother. Perhaps it was because, as I'd told someone, I would feel like a grandmother when she had a name for me.

No, I couldn't be the spoiling grandmother. Instead I had to have rules and boundaries; real meals and nap times and more time than money. But they've got another wonderful grandmother who does the things I would have expected to do and then some, and between the two of us I think we've got the grandmother skill set fairly nailed. But even with my acceptance of my role, I hadn't recognized that where I was going was really the place I intended to go decades ago. I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror as I washed my face, noting the silver streaks pulled back to an untidy bun of hair and realized that this is much closer to the older me I would have wanted to be. When I was young I was artsy and unhampered by the mores of my peers. I liked to be with dogs and be outside and away from everyone. Now, after a quarter century of working in newspapers with constant deadline pressure and the need to be "on" every time I left the house, it doesn't matter any more because it never really mattered to me. I'm back outside the mainstream, spending my mornings, a chunk of my afternoons and some of my evenings (in other words, the time I'm not with my granddaughters) caring for a kennel filled with other people's dogs. I fall in love with the dogs and the people have become my extended family. I do all my yard work, raise a garden and have a small flock of chickens. Sure, a cow and some ponies and goats might complete the picture, but I'm making a gradual transition here. In the late evenings, I knit or crochet, or sometimes do cross-stitch. I'm thinking about taking up painting again. My husband is my partner as we work on our house and outside projects. He still thinks I'm sexy, and no one else really matters. If, when I was a teenager and thinking about life as a grownup, I had really thought about being 50, this might have been pretty close to what I pictured. It's not quite what I expected a few years ago, but I think it's what I really wanted all along.

Giving Away Christmas

Most families, for better or worse, wind up with holiday traditions. They may be Aunt Ava's fruitcake, Cousin Bill's bad behavior, or the holiday ham. Sometimes they are family gatherings that we either anticipate eagerly or dread, or attend with some mixture of both.

When a tradition becomes ingrained, we tend to forget that it hasn't always been that way. Change, when it comes, is with a degree of discomfort. This year marks such an occasion for our family.

Growing up, our family gathered every Christmas Eve at the home of my dad's aunt and uncle. It was a buffet affair with loads of food and four generations of relatives scattered across two floors of the brick ranch home. The women folk had the kitchen and the upstairs area; the men gathered in a smoky room in the basement with a fireplace and a Christmas tree and we children -- siblings and cousins to varying degrees -- roamed the house in a wild mob. It was a terrific holiday tradition. Right up until the year when the great-aunt's recently divorced daughter brought two men from the halfway house where she worked to the family gathering.

(It was the '70s and there had been no interracial family gatherings. After that year, the family quit gathering there at all -- wandering in for some half-hearted holiday hello on Christmas day instead. Last year there was a mixed race couple at the family reunion and I laughed remembering how poorly our family would have accepted them three decades ago.)

Christmas day meant being dragged from our toys to visit the grandparents -- fun with the cousins, but an anxious desire to get back to my holiday goodies. We had lunch at my maternal grandparents' home then, midafternoon, went to my paternal grandparents before returning home to enjoy our loot stuffed with food and exhausted from our early morning.

When I married, Christmas Eve was for visiting my new in-laws. Once again it was three generations of one family under a roof and, when my children came along they joined their cousins with the same wild enthusiasm I once had. Divorce ended that tradition and my mom adopted Christmas Eve as her time. For 20 years we've gathered at her house for our holiday dinner. We spent Christmas Day at home, visiting my grandparents, or perhaps visiting another in-law.

This year, however, that's changing. I'm giving Christmas away, in a sense, although I'm sure that to some folks it may seem I'm taking it. Disrupting the long running tradition, Christmas Eve festivities will be at my home. Although there are a number of reasons, the easiest is to say that now I'm the grandmother and as my daughter said, "Christmas Eve meant going to Grandma's house." Grandbabies don't have to travel so far to a house where they're less comfortable, the burden of cooking for everyone won't be on my mom, hopefully the younger generation will feel less rushed with work and children.

At the same time, I'm giving what has always been my time away. While I look forward to parents, children and grandchildren gathering at my house Christmas Eve, I'm less excited about the gift giving Christmas morning being just hubby and I. For 26 years I've had children under my roof unwrapping their presents on Christmas morning, or I've been anticipating their arrival and a holiday meal.

This year I'm giving them the holiday to celebrate under their own roofs at their own pace. My son will be spending the day, barring any changes in the next few weeks, with his grandparents where he lives; my daughter with the babies at her home with her husband, who will probably have to go in to work later in the day. Neither of them will be expected to come to my house, although I'm not promising I won't show up at theirs.

For the most part, we love to hold on to our holiday traditions, but there comes a time when every family has to make adjustments for distances, deaths, divorces or new generations. In a few years, a new tradition is formed and, although those old memories are still treasured, new ones begin to pile up as well. This year, those new memories begin for us.