Holiday Craziness and Health Insurance.

Since I work in retail, I do not enjoy the holidays as much as I used to. I come home from work exhausted, and frankly I have a hard time getting into the spirit of the season until Christmas Eve. If you want to know how I feel about that day, go back and read my Blog post of December 23, 2011:
http://laughingqueenwislanscraft.blogspot.com/2011/12/laughter-nerves-and-christmas-roast.html
But the weeks preceding have become hard.
Hallowe'en is a tapestry of memories, joyful and sad, as well as the opening salvo of "the holiday season". In 2001, my mother passed away as I was handing out treats to my neighborhood munchkins. She had been ill, and in hospice, so it was not unexpected, but I spent the evening arranging travel, and packing. When I looked out the window and saw that there was a full moon, I felt a sense of wonder and joy that she had chosen that particular moment to start her new adventure. I had no regrets about our relationship, and the event has not had any effect on my joyful heart on hallowe'en as I greet hundreds of smiling, sweet (mostly) children each year.
But in my work, Hallowe'en has begun to morph into the Christmas shopping season. I'm already tired of candy, and I'm already just plain tired at the end of the day.
This year I am especially saddened that the big box retail store that employs me and provides my health insurance, has opted to ask its employees to interrupt time they might otherwise be spending with their families, so that it may begin its "Black Friday" event on Thanksgiving evening.
Even before I worked in retail, I wasn't one of those who partake in this remarkable event each year. I like to stay home and watch football. When asked what hours I wanted to work on that day, I opted for my regular schedule. I'm not looking forward to the craziness, but I am thankful for the health insurance.



When my children were small, Thanksgiving was a day when we would gather together, either at our home, or at the home of my in-laws, to cook, eat too much, and relax. Some years we would invite an "orphan" to join us. Usually a friend who was single and living far away from his or her own family. It was a way to share a day that, I believe, is a day we celebrate family, with someone who would otherwise be alone.
These past few years I sometimes feel I have to dig deep to find the joy in the cooking, eating and clean up, since the next day begins the grueling shopping season.
As you shop this year, dear Reader, please remember your tired retail worker. Did I say how I am thankful for the Health insurance?
Be friendly. Curb your frustration, and share a little love. I know I will appreciate your extra smile and patience.
ADDENDUM:
Since I have written this, numerous petitions have sprung up asking various retailers to adjust their openings back to actual day-after-Thanksgiving, in order to allow their employees to spend the entire day with their families. If you are interested in signing any of these petitions, click on this link: http://www.change.org/petitions#search/Black%20Friday Or just Google "black Friday petitions".
Thanks
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Memories of a Good Man

In 1944, my grandfather hired a young man to work as a farm hand on the land he had inherited from an elderly cousin. At the time, my grandfather was working for the Southern Pacific railroad, and was planning to move to the farm full time upon his retirement three years hence. The young man was 32 years old in 1944, the same age as my father. He was paid a small salary plus given a small house to live in down the lane on the farm.

When my grandfather died in 1961, my father inherited the farm, and our family spent the hot summer months at the farm.

The young man continued to work for my father and live in that little house. He was easy to spot as we drove down the mile long lane. He was tall and lanky, with a long face, a quick smile, and a sparkle in his eyes. He would look up from whatever he was doing and give a wave.

He  married and had some children. All told, he and his wife raised fourteen children in that small house on my grandfather's farm. During those summers, our family would sit outside as the evening cooled. The distance between the two houses was probably a half mile as the crow flies. We would hear the laughter of children, and sometimes the crack of a baseball bat, from the little house down the lane.

My father eventually stopped growing tobacco after the dangers of smoking became known, and both he and my mother had quit the habit. But during the 1940s and through to the mid 1960s, the main crop of the farm was tobacco, and harvesting tobacco has to be done by hand. I learned from my father a little about the process of harvesting it.

Without going into detail, it's a labor intensive process.









I guess, back in the day, if you wanted to make any money, you had to grow lots of the stuff. And you needed to hire extra people during the process of the picking, sorting, and hanging it to dry. The young man's children provided much of that labor.

One time, when I was visiting my parents, one of the young man's children drove the taxicab that delivered me to the airport. He told me about working summers harvesting the tobacco. Hard, hot work, but he spoke of it as a gift. I felt humbled riding in the back of the cab.

When my father died in 2001, he was 91. The young man and his wife were still living in the little house. Our family sold the land, but the young man and his wife stayed on, until age and financial concerns made it more practical to move into a retirement home.

The young died earlier this year at the age of 99 years and seven months. His family memorialized him as being the cornerstone of a house full of love and laughter. If I close my eyes, I can still hear the crack of bat on balls and the sound of children's laughter across the hot summer field.


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Location:Omaha

Suanne and Lord Byron

My friend, with whom I shared so many girlhood conversations, has died, at the too young age of 59.

We met when we were twelve. Her family had just moved to my neighborhood, and she lived between my house and the all-girls school where she and I were among the "new girls" that year. We became the walking to school friends that I wrote about in my last post. I would stop by her house sometimes after school for awhile before heading home.
Here we are in our school uniforms:




I met her mother and the toddler brother of whom she was so proud. I remember a day when she showed me a tuft of fur she had saved from her dog "Rex", who had died not too long before. Even at that tender age, an age when we are often too wrapped up in out own little worlds to notice to much about others', I could tell how much love she carried in her heart.

We discovered we both had a love for art and music. It was in the world of music and singing that we really came together. I envied her her high clear soprano, I was a lowly alto, but even so, we often competed for the same solos in the various choruses in which we sang. She usually got the Soprano solo, and I would sing the lower harmony.

Our class graduated in 1970. I don't know how it came to be, but around our junior year, we began calling ourselves the "Babes of 1970", and that name has stuck for the last forty-two years.




After graduation, we went our separate ways. We had children, married, divorced, remarried. But we always were "the Babes." I have seen Suanne every ten years at class reunions, but, with the help of the new technologies that keep us all connected, email, and social networking, have been able to enjoy her friendship, and that of most of us "Babes" on a daily basis.

Yesterday I scrolled back through three years of "conversations" with Suanne on Facebook. I saw her comments to others, including other "Babes". All were filled with love. Love for her friends, her husband, her children, of whom she was so proud, and her lovely grandchildren.

It was through this medium that I learned she had written and illustrated a children's book*, and I am proud to be the owner of an autographed copy.

I also learned things about her life I had not known when we were growing up, after I encouraged her to write a "25 things about me" note, which she graciously shared with her friends and family. One of her children asked her to illustrate it on paper, because, "face book will not last forever". I hope she did that.

I have written again and again of the endurance and importance of childhood friendships. When we are children we do not know what we will become, nor how much we love each other. But the experiences we share as children are what bind us. When I met Suanne for the first time after thirty years in 2000, I knew her mostly by the sound of her laughter. Like water flowing over pebbles in a stream. The sweet soprano of her voice so much the same as it had been when we sang together at seventeen.

She seemed to find her joy as an adult. It was in her art, music, and especially her family. As I reread all those posts on Facebook, that joy was always at the surface. She had married her true love, and was living a life surrounded by beauty. Even as she wrote of the trials of her final illness, she was optimistic.

Last Friday after treatment, she wrote one day, one of the techs asked, "do you meditate during treatment?"
Surprised by her query due to my daily struggle for calm, I replied, "no. I sing".

Lord Byron could have been describing Suanne when he wrote this poem, so I'll let him describe my friend.

She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies,
And all that's best of dark and bright
Meets in her aspect and her eyes;
Thus mellow'd to that tender light
Which Heaven to gaudy day denies.

One shade the more, one ray the less,
Had half impair'd the nameless grace
Which waves in every raven tress
Or softly lightens o'er her face,
Where thoughts serenely sweet express
How pure, how dear their dwelling-place.

And on that cheek and o'er that brow
So soft, so calm, yet eloquent,
The smiles that win, the tints that glow,
But tell of days in goodness spent,—
A mind at peace with all below,
A heart whose love is innocent.




* http://www.kopaldart.com/SKK_Illustrations.html
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Location:Omaha