My Memoir Space

Creativity 101: Nature as the first teacher

Fri, 11 Oct 2024 21:38:56 GMT

Sex education with iris

As a young girl, I played in our ditch -- to me a burbling stream -- alongside our ramshackle home -- my palace. I pretended I was a native woman using berries to dye bits of cloth on rocks that spawned wild and reckless tiny waterfalls.

“To breed Iris, seeds must develop, from which you can grow new seedlings. Choose the two Iris which you would like to "cross." Using a pair of tweezers and a steady hand, remove the pollen-bearing anther from the center of one of the plants (this will be the "father").

Rub the pollen on top of the stigma of the other Iris (this will be the "mother"). Your chances of a successful pollination will be better if you put pollen on all other stigmas on the mother plant. Label your pollinated plant by attaching a tag to the bloom stalk bearing the names of the "father" and "mother" like this: "Conjuration" X "Blue Suede Shoes", for example.”

Observing and participating in iris breeding was my only sex education for five years. Mom and I never discussed the pollen swapping in sexual terms. I'm sure she would have been overjoyed if the iris experiments had been a proper and thorough substitute for her parental duty to educate her daughter. When I was on the verge of teenage-hood, she had no choice but to spill the goods in human terms.

In my wide-eyed childhood, nature seeped into my subconscious as the first teacher of broader life lessons -- how to observe, how to find joy, even how to begin seeing my place in the world. Ultimately, nature was the spark lighting a creative life.

Has nature inspired your creativity? If so, how?

On being scammed

Sat, 06 Jul 2024 15:53:53 GMT

I thought I was too smart to get scammed

— and certainly not by a person!

Like most adults, I’ve had my share of phishing scares, suspect emails and texts. I coped by becoming more diligent — checking the email addresses of messages that seemed off, never giving my personal information, ignoring or reporting texts that asked for payment on a debt I didn’t owe.

However, until now, I had never encountered such a sophisticated scam by a real person impersonating an authority figure.

It started with a phone call from a man identifying himself as part of my bank’s fraud department. They had detected some suspicious activity on my account and wanted my help to identify the perpetrator. I asked for the caller’s name, which he reported was “Mark Wents.” Mark gave me my case number and indicated the problem was online only; as a result, the bank would freeze my account for 24 to 48 hours while they investigated. He said it was important I not access my online account during this time.

This stay-out admonition seemed reasonable — that somehow dipping into it could trigger more scam activity. Two days later, it became clear that “Mark” was the actual scammer.

That’s when the bank sent me an ominous email: “An external transfer was processed successfully.” What external transfer? I didn’t authorize one — let alone one for $3,000! I called the bank’s fraud department — the real one — and learned the person who called me was not a bank employee and the case number didn’t exist. I learned the bank would never call me out of the blue about a possible scam; they would always send me a message first.

I’d been duped. What good was this big-ass diploma hanging on my office wall if I couldn’t even detect a scammer? A highly contagious case of the stupids took over.

The shame game began to subside as I learned more about scammers’ complex psychological tactics to “socially engineer” their victims into handing over personal data or money. According to Alex Melkumian, founder of the Financial Psychology Center, they force the person to act quickly and instinctively rather than pause and think; in my case, I felt I had to do as he said or I would lose more money. The scammer often impersonates someone in a trusted position whom we want to believe; “Mark” was great at mimicking the lingo and manner of a bank employee. Perhaps most importantly, the immediacy and fear they provoke put victims into a heightened emotional state, causing our emotional blood pressure to soar. I was definitely rattled.

I spent most of the next two days unraveling the mess — changing accounts, getting a new debit card, talking with fraud experts. Luckily, bank employees were helpful and empathetic, which began to quiet my self-judgment. They reminded me that I’ve had a teachable moment, and I’ve learned from it. Two fraud employees told me they, too, had been scammed. OK, I thought: If it can happen to people who specialize in detecting and unmasking fraud, it can happen to anyone. Maybe I wasn’t so dull-witted after all.

They advised me to pay attention to my instincts. If I have any doubt whatsoever of a caller’s authenticity, I should put the phone down and call the bank before giving out any information. I tested that advice almost immediately when a call came in from someone identifying herself as part of my credit card company's fraud department. She alerted me of another possible scam — several credit card purchases I did not authorize. I cut the call short and called the bank to verify that the credit card fraud representative was legit. She was.

One fraud expert reminded me there are at least 1,000 scams going on at any time, and more pop up every day. “It’s impossible for anyone to keep up with,” he said.

Throughout these anxious days, my daughter was her usual fountain of sympathy and help. Together, we strategized how to handle a scam differently if it happened again. Her voice held no tincture of “Wow, Mom, you’re really getting old,” or “How could you let that happen?” She, too, had been scammed. Guilt trips and their resulting shame were not on her agenda, nor were they present in the voices of any of the few friends I told about the scams.

Having a great support system is the key to moving from “How could I have let this happen?” to “I will learn from this unfortunate situation.” The bank employees and my daughter became that for me.

Storyteller and researcher Brené Brown has studied shame and empathy. Her wisdom became my antidote to feeling vulnerable and dumb:

“If we share our story with someone who responds with empathy

and understanding, shame cannot survive.”

Amen to that.

Have you been scammed? How did you deal with feeling guilty or embarrassed about it?

Autumn haiku

Thu, 09 May 2024 15:17:15 GMT

Morning's task delayed

Haikus are true memoir spaces: They capture a brief moment in time.

Want to try one? It's usually written in the present tense, avoids unneeded words and has a seasonal reference. A haiku has 17 syllables in three lines. In general, the first line has five syllables, the second seven, and the third five.

Are all small towns the same?

Thu, 09 May 2024 15:07:13 GMT

A tale of two towns

Hailing from Hood River Oregon makes me a rural gal. I grew up in the ‘50s and ‘60s in a big ol’ house with a picturesque ditch abutting it and a chicken coop next to the garage. Orchards surrounded our house.

After I left for college, two conjoined subdivisions displaced the pear and apple trees as our town morphed from charming enclave to a mix of suburban mini-me houses, estates for California transplants and original homes that either maintained their character or gradually lost it to the ravages of time, poverty or life circumstances.

Our home fell into the dilapidated category after my parents sold it. But that’s another story. The point is that I experienced what I can only describe as great fortune to grow up surrounded by such beauty and simple joys.

History tells us that the people who moved to Hood River in its formative years — the late 19 ^th and early 20 ^th century — were a hardy bunch. Many were dumb-struck by its valleys and vistas — the towering Mount Hood in the distant back yard and its sister Mount Adams across the wide Columbia River. Both stand as fraternal twin sentinels guarding the region’s treasures.

Family lore has it that my Grandfather McClain was a victim of this awe as he travelled east from a Portland business meeting to his home in Ohio in the very early 1900s. When his train stopped in Hood River and he stepped off, Herbert almost immediately telegraphed his wife to announce they were moving to the Hood River valley.

Thirty years later, my father made his first trip to Hood River for his and my mother’s engagement party. Like his soon-to-be father-in-law, Russ Guppy was captivated by the area. The young Guppy family moved there after World War II.

I may romanticize my heritage, but I can’t help but think I grew up in an atypical rural area. Its beauty was and still is its calling card. No matter a person’s bent — running a small business, tending a pear orchard, teaching kiteboarding, laboring for a utility company or painting scenes of the valley, to name a few — people’s kinship with the land was and is palpable.

Politically, the Hood River people I knew as a child tended to be conservative in the old-style Republican model of Mark Hatfield and Tom McCall. They had both served as Oregon governors and Hatfield as a longtime senator in midcentury Oregon. Less was more in their preferred government mode, and “progressive” wasn’t a dirty word. This now seemingly lost political vision kept a tight reign on government and its funds without sacrificing the environment or humans who needed help.

In this political and cultural milieu, many Hood Riverites’ brains seemed cracked open a tad bit for new perspectives — just enough to allow a glimmer of change. A mind-bending experience at my church denomination’s San Francisco national youth gathering when I was 16 turned me into “one of three people in my town openly opposed to the Vietnam war,” as I described it. Yet people in the area listened. No one posted hate messages on our lawn or picketed the church for supporting peace rather than war. Cautioned curiosity, not abject fear, was at sway.

After college, I moved to another rural locale — tiny Pattonsburg, Missouri — for a year as a Vista volunteer. Swapping a rural childhood for an even more rural young adulthood seemed a bargain I could make with myself. My job was to work with local teens to create a youth center as a healthy outlet for kids whose entertainment options were almost nil. Like Hood River, Pattonsburg is plopped down in a pleasantly treed agricultural area at least an hour from a city. However, the town was so small — 500 people — that teens and young adults had no local drive-in restaurant or public swimming pool to meet and greet. There was no movie theater or even a dedicated local high school; local kids from kindergarten through high school attended the same school. Perhaps our youth center, which later switched to being a senior center, helped just a bit.

I spent my own leisure time joining the ladies’ circle for quilting, attending estate sales that felt like after-church coffee hours, and getting to know the teenagers. More than once, a few of them skinned a freshly killed rabbit in my bathroom sink and gifted it to me.

As a government employee and volunteer living in and serving a small town, I was expected to model the best possible behavior. I sometimes resisted this label, surreptitiously exploring the rebellious 22-year-old I also wanted to be. Some weekends I joined other 20-somethings for beer parties in a cornfield. I can’t recall ever discussing politics there; in my bones, I knew surfacing my views would cause chaos and disagreement that would harm my work and reputation.

Whereas Hood River folks seemed at least tolerant of the new and confusing, most Pattonsburg people resisted differences or growth.

As a result, I bring a dollop of midwestern small-town lived experience to reading “The View from Rural Missouri,” Jess Piper’s stories of living out progressive values in a conservative rural environment. I don’t pretend my own Pattonsburg experience, forged 50 years ago, is typical of the Midwest’s current political and cultural environment that the author speaks to so well.

However, my experiences in Oregon and Missouri towns disillusion me from painting all small towns’ political and cultural leanings with a broad brush stroke. Good people exist everywhere. I found them in both towns. However, parochialism can exist anywhere, too. In the Pattonsburg I knew 50 years ago, isolation, inadequate education and social services, and a dwindling economy challenged its progress. Severe economic downshifts often harden people's bitterness and powerlessness, which can narrow viewpoints. Today, the town’s population has plunged to 233 people.

In contrast, Hood River’s population has almost doubled in the last 50 years — largely thanks to economic growth and the draw of a coveted natural environment that encourages water sports such as windsurfing.

Authors and artists usually present either a nostalgic, charming vision of small town America or a scathing view of petty, small-minded people. In truth, small towns vary greatly in personality and politics. Yet they have one thing in common: As professor of American literature and screenwriting Dennis Clausen says, “Those of us who were raised in small towns never stop thinking of them as home.”

No matter our towns’ differences, that abiding sense of closeness and community will always remain.

Have you ever lived in a rural area? What was your experience?

Can we believe what we see?

Thu, 09 May 2024 15:07:12 GMT

The suspect lens of grief

What is it about a beloved celebrity’s death that unlocks an emotional door to grief for us all?

Perhaps we feel we know them and their families well, though of course we do not. We are touched by photos that seem to track their joys and triumphs as well as their sadness and profound humanness.

Celebrities' gestures in their day-to-day media-told activities often seem like posturing. Yet a simple photo of a spouse’s hand on the back of her grieving partner as he views the flowers left to honor his grandmother can appear unfiltered, even raw. Do we dare believe this image is authentic — that it is not also constructed for the benefit of the public eye through the camera’s lens?

We hunger for authenticity, seeking it wherever we can in our cursory postmodern culture that celebrates reality shows over real, glitz over substance … a culture where social media players rally for a “Housewife” or “Teen Mom” to be fired because their storylines don’t bring enough drama to the show. As if the shows and storylines were real.

What gestures between people should we believe, given the absurdities of our times, and the ubiquity of artificial intelligence and unchecked social media?

Seeing the photo of Meghan touching Prince Harry’s back brought a tear to my eye. Can we believe authenticity is still alive, even for them — that the camera has accurately captured their grief?

It’s an open question.

What do you think? Can we believe what we see of celebrities' lives?

Grieving our furry pal

Thu, 09 May 2024 15:07:11 GMT

That darned cat

She's gone now.

And every day I’m reminded of the little habitual things she did that I miss. Drinking water off an open shower door. Pawing when she wants my attention, looking at me with those big dough eyes.

But then there are other little things she did that I don’t have to deal with now.

I don’t have to look back over my shoulder before I open the front door to make sure she isn’t close enough to escape, though she never did.

I don’t have to call her as I go upstairs each night to go to bed or beckon her for her nighttime meal. Yet she always came swiftly.

I don’t have to clean her litter. But, come to think of it, she kept a very tidy house-let.

I don’t have to make sure I have both wet and dry food on hand — and only the kind she liked, of course. Then again, she really wasn’t a picky eater; I just liked pampering her.

I don’t have to admonish her every time I hear a little kerplunk telling me she has just debarked from the kitchen counter that she was barred from. There are no kerpunks now.

I can keep the door to the dining room open instead of closed. I don’t need to worry that she will go in and make a mess, though she never did make a mess in the dining room.

I don’t have to wake up in the middle of the night and feel a heavy weight on my feet where she’s leaning against me, because she’s not there to sleep next to me.

I don’t have to make sure I set aside evening time to play with her, and I don’t have to worry that I’ll fall over one of her little play balls. I don’t have to clean kitty fur from her favorite chair, which is also my favorite chair.

I could say that life is easier now with her gone. But, of course, life is harder and emptier. Before, it was full of love. Not to say people in my life don’t give me great love, which I give them in return. Not to say that I don’t love many other things about my life. But the little heart of my house is gone. It will be replaced in a few months, but never completely replaced because every cat — every animal — is special and unique.

Darned you, Myrla. You’re not here anymore to annoy me, which you never really did.

-- Momma

Postscript:

I wrote this after my vet found a chip in Myrla; I had adopted her from a friend five months earlier. Myrla had shown up on her doorstep, but Teresa already had four cats and couldn’t keep her. My friend took Myrla to her vet, but he did not find a chip.

The staff immediately contacted Myrla’s original human family. I learned they had been searching for her for seven months. They had been good cat parents and desperately wanted her back. It was the fair thing to do.

Have you lost a beloved animal or had to give one up? How did it feel?

Reclaiming childhood flight and sight

Tue, 12 Mar 2019 16:48:38 GMT

Now for the solar wind

“How many times have I returned in my dreams to this hill. It is always summer as I look out over the gold and green fields, ditches foaming with hawthorn and lilac, river glinting under the sun like a blade. When I was young, I found sanctuary here and the memory of it deep in my soul ever after has brought me comfort. Once I believed it would never change, but that was before I came to know that all things must. It’s a car park now, a sightseers’ panorama.”

-- Gabriel Byrne

Life at Route 4, Box 309, in Hood River, Oregon

I, too, return in my dreams to my childhood's sweet spaces. My dreams sometimes take me to the orchards of pears and cherries that embraced our old house and its yards. The memory of the sound and sight of tumbling water in our little side yard stream still invigorates me.

When I was young, I found sanctuary in my outside special places. I spent my alone time with untamed flowers, a tiny bridge to my godmother’s cottage, a cherry tree stubby enough to climb, and myriad, sometimes clandestine hideouts — such as the secret door to a child’s work bench in my bedroom.

Memories of these spaces are soul deep. In these dreams, a sprawling spiraling bush always appears. It was easy to climb and full of reward at its top, where I was sure I could see even more than the birds could. Sometimes, in my dreams, I felt the unbridled joy of flying.

Seeing again

Now, 70 years later, my eyes begin to open again … remembering that child through a glass darkly, yet clearer.

I have a few words now that I did not have as a child to describe those precious times. Yet I want only to reclaim and magnify the joy of that imagined flight -- a gift and a surprise -- and seeing again.

These words in Annie Dillard's “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek” have sustained me through a life encrusted with deserts and forests, a mountain climb and lava plains. Through years of pain—joy—joy—pain. Through the love I still can’t articulate for my now adult daughter. Dillard's words guide me now, as I remember how to fly and see:

"The secret of seeing is, then, the pearl of great price. If I thought he could teach me to find it and keep it forever I would stagger barefoot across a hundred deserts after any lunatic at all. But although the pearl may be found, it may not be sought. The literature of illumination reveals this above all: although it comes to those who wait for it, it is always, even to the most practiced and adept, a gift and a total surprise…

I cannot cause light; the most I can do is try to put myself in the path of its beam. It is possible, in deep space, to sail on solar wind. Light, be it particle or wave, has force: you rig a giant sail and go. The secret of seeing is to sail on solar wind. Hone and spread your spirit till you yourself are a sail, whetted, translucent, broadside to the merest puff.”

I’ve been rigging my sail for years. Now for the solar wind.

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