from the mixed-up files of a middle-aged mind

Jen Galan Bright blue eyes full of mischief and also full of love. Brightest smile. One of the smartest and funniest people I may ever know. Jen had-- has --the biggest and most generous heart. Jen was my friend for years before I actually saw her. We met right here--through Blogger, back in the day. Galanpalooza meet Compulsive Writer. We had mutual friends. Bloggers--mostly moms--for blogging sake. We connected because she was brave enough to be vulnerable before it was the subject of a Brene Brown book. Our hearts went out to each other's. Jen has many friends and was open and loving to all. She made us all feel special and like we were her best person. Not in a contrived way. She just gave you her heart. Sometimes she confided in me. Sometimes I peeled away a layer or two and confided in her. We listened, loved, and supported and strengthened each other. We connected because she was real. This past Christmas I did some organizing. And it seemed every time I turned around I foun...

i planned on reading the book for book club this month. at the risk of being mean, i've decided to attempt to write this post without saying the name of the book i'm talking about, but we'll see how it goes. (or rather, to avoid coming across as mean.) it was not a book i had selected or voted for. in fact at the time we chose it as a group i can't recall if i mistook it for its sister book or if i knew already i didn't want to read it. memory--at leas mine--is fickle like that. in any case, when i heard we were reading it this month at first i mistook it for its sister book. two friends--very funny--write books. my kid who at the time was fascinated by tv comedy and movies and screenplays and all sorts of clever (because he is clever) bought both books. with my money, but still, they were his. in any case, i tried to read the first one and didn't get much past the first chapter. there was an edge, a bitterness, yes, i'll say it, a meanness to ...

my grandfather--well, one of them--lived to be 98 years old. nearly every day i saw him the last handful of years of his life--you know, the five plus years he was on hospice. and oxygen. he would say to me "growing old ain't for sissies." well shoot. i'm just a bit over halfway there and i'm already hurting, so i just don't know about that. i'd like to think that as long as i keep moving--even if s-l-o-w-l-y--i'll be ok. but i just don't know. sometimes i want to live a long time and visit all the places and see and do all the things and love all the people and watch all the babies be born and grow and do things and become who they are and get married and have their own babies. some days i worries this is a hard cruel world and i don't know that i can lose anyone else or watch any more people i love suffer any more and i want to be done sooner rather than later. i just don't know. sometimes i have hope we will clean up...

i don't understand a lot of things. i don't understand why i'm content to not yet understand some things, but discontent to not understand others. this prompt was issued before the latest school massacre. i don't understand why so many this year already, so many the year before, and the year before, since ??, since columbine, since forever. and we do nothing but yell at each other across the divide. i told my son today i'd like to think there are rational people who understand we need to quit yelling at each other and find some common ground and sit down at the table together to find some solutions both sides can live with but that the media doesn't talk about it because they get more clicks from the yelling (i don't hate the media. i know there are good people working hard to sort fact from fiction and get to and reveal the truth. but greed and profit seem to rule the corporate world.) i don't understand why we are tearing apart families and y...

The best posts I read about fruit are metaphorical rather than literal, but the truth is I love grapefruit. Instead of buying soda, I sometimes splurge and purchase the rather expensive fresh-squeezed grapefruit juice available sometimes at Macey's. I work really hard not to see again that time I was there while the Macey's employee was pushing fresh citrus down the machine. Did he wash it first? (I always wash my produce before I cut into it.) Did he wash his hands??? The other day I stopped at the El Salvadoran restaurant on my way home from seeing The Post--by myself (the restaurant, not the movie, where I was met by a friend) and ordered their steak and fries because I knew the steak is marinated in grapefruit juice. (I keep mistyping grapefruit.) Even though I like it so very much, I rarely buy grapefruit. Is it because the best grapefruit are sold at Sam's and I only have a Costco membership? Am I lazy? It takes time to loosen the flesh from the me...

my work is loving the world. that means finding joy in cloudy skies happiness in rainy days enduring a too-warm too-dry winter that wasn't without at least too much complaint, maybe only feeling a little guilty for not hurting from the cold looking up and finding light when your heart is down or feeling dark laugh a little, even when you feel like crying being kind to yourself even when the voices you hear in your head are harsh that's where it starts then it means looking outward even when you feel compelled to retreat inward lifting, loving others whose hearts and heavy and feelings are dark noticing and appreciating and paying forward kindness both small and large remember, there are no small things being of good cheer even on those "fake it till you make it" days maybe especially on those seeking understanding and responding in kindness to those who lash out and wound maybe even removing yourself from target practice or that which dra...

Today I'm proud of getting back on the horse. Several weeks ago I went to write my post and was horrified to see words to the effect that nothing was here. In other words, this is not the blog you're looking for. After losing years of writing before, I was tempted to panic, but didn't. At least at first. It was easy to think maybe the issue was with GoDaddy. "Perhaps GoDaddy got up and went." I thought. But as days went on and after multiple calls by both me and my friend whom I thought was hosting my blog, it became apparent the issue was more serious. Apparently there had been a miscommunication between my friend and I went I took over responsibility for my domain name and while I still don't know who has been hosting my blog since that time over a year ago, or how or why it got disconnected, apparently I am both host-less and blog-less. Well, unless you could my half-dozen other blogs on blogger. I have been stressed at work and loathe to take on ...

"Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy to a friend." Martin Luther King Jr. Sometimes I feel I'm a broken record, writing the same stories over and over. I've written before about several people with whom I did not exactly hit it off, but who I later came to view as a close friend. I was thinking about this recently and about how this happens. I love Brene Brown's work on vulnerability and wonder if perhaps the short cut is when someone shows you their heart--even if briefly--which illuminates a path for your love to work it's way in. A friend of mine (Internet friend, of course--we've never met IRL) recently wrote a Valentine's tribute to her husband. It wasn't soft of mushy. In fact in it she mentioned she is not easy to love and described both her husband and herself as hard coolies. But then she went on to pay tribute to some of the great qualities she noticed and admired in him. I think that's the key. When prese...

So you try directing 700 teenagers from all over the state of Utah and performing in front of a packed house. Last night I sat on the 4th row of the acoustically perfect Salt Lake Tabernacle to listen to the Grand Festival Concert of the Utah All-State Choir . The choir was directed by the delightful and talented  Ann Howard Jones . The kids had spent most all of their fall break rehearsing and it was absolutely fabulous. Hey, even my eight-year-old was interested. No, this isn’t them, but, see the middle and largest pipe in the set of foremost and largest pipes right of center? Luke stood right below it. I bet he had the best seat in the house when  Linda Margetts  pulled out all the stops on  Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor . Anyway, the concert was amazing. I sat there and thought, Wow! How cool is this that that’s my kid up there having this experience of a lifetime and I get to watch and listen. So if you enjoy choral and chamber music  (I didn...

The other day I bumped into a neighbor at the local grocery store. Her delightfully precocious daughter chatted my ears off. She was especially excited to tell me about her pumpkin patch. She was selling her pumpkins to earn some money. “For college?” I asked. “Oh no,” she replied, “but maybe for a trip to Disneyland.” The very next evening the little girl and her mother appeared at my door, with a wagon load of pumpins trailing behind her. She wanted to know if I wanted to buy one. “How much?” I asked. “Whatever it’s worth to you,” she replied. Not wanting to take advantage I pointed out one of the smaller pumpkins and put the bid back in her court. “How much is that one worth to you?” “Five dollars,” she said firmly. “Sheesh–I’m involved in a bidding war with a five-year-old over pumpkins!” I thought to myself. She then pointed to an even bigger one and assured me that one was worth at least $10! Wanting to be generous, but also knowing I’m not made out of money, I told her I ...

So most of you are too young to even know what I meant by that. Except I didn’t really mean that anyway. I just really wanted to be able to write that. I found our pet rabbit, Cookie (short for Cookie Dough, because as a baby she looked just like Ben & Jerry’s Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough ice cream), dead this morning and it broke my heart. We bought her on a whim just over five years ago. I’d run out to Vineyard Garden Center for some mulch. I must have gone in the back way, because it was only as I was leaving with my purchase in hand that I noticed the bunny cage. Bunnies for sale, $3, the sign read. I’d always wanted a lop-eared bunny and these were too cute to resist. Cookie was the runt of the litter and had been chewed up a bit by her siblings. But she thrived on all the attention and extra calories we tried to give her. As far as pets go she’s probably one of the best we’ve ever had. Sweet disposition, warm and cuddly and a kick to watch when she hopped around the yar...

This old house table – October 3, 2007 I’m quite sure by now you are all sick and tired of reading about my remodel. But let me tell you, you’re probably not quite so sick of hearing about it as I am of doing it! You write what you know and right now this is all I know. Tonight, after painstakingly masking off the upstairs with yards and yards of blue tape (and I’ve only just begun) and just as I was thinking about how nice it would be to be able to afford to hire out this type of grunt work, I went into to do one last wipe-down of my soon-to-be refinished dining room table (yes, silly me. I figured it was already in pieces and with the room empty until Friday now was as good a time as any). As I was running my hand–the one that’s still reverberating from too much time holding the power sander–across the smooth wood I realized that is exactly what I would miss if I paid someone else to do it. Sure the DIY series make it all look sooooo much easier than it is IRL. (And no, mos...