Author: Margaret Bendet (Page 3 of 5)

I’m Margaret Bendet. I left a journalism career to live in a spiritual community and, after several decades, left that community to become, once again, a professional writer. That’s the nature of my re-entry. The question is, how to do it gracefully. How to return while remembering where I’ve been and why I was there.

Henry Tunes Turns Ninety!

August 1, 2020 / Margaret Bendet

In the Art of the Mini Memoir class that I used teach in the local senior center, I would always bring cookies the first week. Then I’d ask for volunteers to bring cookies in the three weeks that followed. I’ll never forget the class where the first volunteer was a man I knew to be in his eighties. “But not cookies,” he said, “I’ll bring a cake.”

Right, I thought. He’ll pick up Sara Lee at Payless. But it’ll be fine.

He brought a homemade almond cake, the perfect size for the class, fluted so it cut into pieces easily—and it was delicious! I was thrilled with the cake. And, no, he said, his wife had not baked it; he had. I liked that cake so much that the next week he brought me the recipe… and he said he had an extra fluted cake pan, so gave me that as well. I bake in that pan probably once a month.

So, this was how I met Henry Tunes. Starting then, I saw Henry about once a month in writing groups for the next four or five years.

Over that time, I heard some extraordinary stories from Henry—about his travels to India and China, his collections of just about everything, his experiences as a high school teacher… I think my favorite of Henry’s stories was the time he bought and brought home a functioning windmill.

You could say that Henry resisted my suggestions regarding his writing. I’d ask him to describe a scene he was writing about, and he’d tell me he didn’t remember. Or he’d ask if people really wanted to know that much about it. Or he’d say he didn’t care that much about it himself. But then I realized that, bit by bit, Henry’s writing was becoming more descriptive. I reminded myself that this lovely man sitting in an armchair in my living room had developed his own way of communicating in his eighty-plus years of life. It was likely going to take him a little time to change.

From that same armchair, Henry once gave me precious feedback on my own writing. Once in a while, when attendance at this memoir group was down and we had time, I would read one of my own pieces. On this occasion I had written about Mrs. Kennedy, my teacher in fourth and fifth grade—“my all-time least favorite teacher.” At the end of this, I felt, vivid little essay, I wrote, “It’s been three-score years, at this point. I know, I truly know, that I must forgive Mrs. Kennedy. For myself I must do this.”

In his feedback, Henry gave me a stern look and said, “So, what have you done to forgive her?”

That stopped me. “Well, I wrote this,” I said. But then I realized that after identifying the need I have to forgive this woman, I had done absolutely nothing about it. Thanks to Henry, I brought Mrs. Kennedy into my spiritual practice then—dedicating some chanting to her—and I began to see that I was probably as much a trial for Mrs. Kennedy as she was for me. Something Henry, as a retired teacher, might know very well.

Henry’s daughter circulated the news that her beloved father was about to celebrate his ninetieth birthday (July 29, 2020), and this started me thinking about Henry.

Ultimately, besides his gigantic heart, the most important thing about Henry is that he keeps on learning. That’s how he stays young.

I’m not teaching that ongoing writing class anymore… and I must say that I miss Henry.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, Henry!!! I’m sending you lots of love!

Henry Tunes is flanked by his daughter, Marina Tunes-Nichols, and his wife, Barbara. I think they’re looking at the birthday cake.

A Sweet Blast from the Past

July 24, 2020 / Margaret Bendet

Today I opened my email and found a message from a Pat Fillinghim—a name that meant nothing to me. She wrote, “Peggy, I have tried to find you forever. Tried Terry and discovered that she’s died…”

Pat! It was Pat Sayles, my friend of longest standing, the person I met in the sixth grade in the first year I moved to Tulsa. She had sent the message one minute earlier. I started replying immediately, and two hours later we were talking on Facetime. That wouldn’t have been possible sixty-five years ago, when we first met.

“Ha,” she said when she saw me. “We both have white hair!”

We talked about a lot of things—how both of our younger brothers had variously eaten, smoked, and, for mine, also drunk themselves into early graves. “Corky ate nothing but hamburgers and French fries,” Pat said, “and he wouldn’t quit smoking. He had asthma as a kid, and our father died of lung cancer without ever having smoked. The doctor told Corky, ‘You have two strikes against you already. You have to quit.’ You know what Corky said? ‘It has to be bad for you to do something as painful as stopping smoking is for me.’ So, he died of lung cancer six years ago.”

In the last nine months of his life, my brother Geoff did quit drinking—as many as three fifths of Scotch a week—but by that time, he was on morphine, so I’m not sure giving up alcohol counted as a health measure. Geoff died ten years ago; he was just sixty-two.

It turned out that our friend Terry Shurig Farrier died only this last August. “I thought she might know how to find you,” Pat said, “but when I went looking for her, I found her obituary. It said she died in her sleep.” We agreed that this was good.

It was a wide-ranging and highly personal conversation, and it was sweet beyond measure. Pat is on her fourth marriage—two were to the same man: her first husband, Mike. “I remember,” I said, “at the wedding reception dinner when Mike told you to stop chewing ice. I thought, ‘That’s not good.’”

Both Pat and I had spent our early married lives trying to live up to what our husbands wanted from us.

“But I liked your Ed,” she said. “I thought he was nice.”

“He could be lovely,” I said. “But then he would close into himself and have nothing to say–for months.” It’s lonelier to live with a person like that than it is to live alone.

Pat met Ed when she came to visit us on R ‘n’ R from her husband. She was pregnant for the second time, and he’d started sleeping with his secretary and had decided that he didn’t want to be a father. Pat should have an abortion, he told her, “And he wanted us to give up the child we had for adoption,” Pat said, “the one-and-a-half-year-old.

“Now, I ask myself: How could I remarry such a man? I can’t fathom it. But I so believed in marriage. I thought I should be able to make it work.”

I told Pat a story about Terry’s first husband, Joe, that I don’t think I’ve ever told anyone. “He was a piece of work,” I said.

“He was very bad,” Pat said. “He was terrible to her.”

Then I explained how I had once seen how bad Joe was. Terry and I were both at O.S.U. We’d gone out on a double date—Terry with Joe and me with a friend of Joe’s they’d fixed me up with. Joe was a little older than the rest of us; he’d been in the military and was now going to school. This was a friend of his from the service. We all went out on a picnic of some kind, and there was something strange that happened with a pill. Joe seemed like he was going into some kind of a fit, and his friend got a pill into him, and it calmed him down. I went into the glove compartment and got one of the pills, taking it with me. I don’t know what I thought I was going to do with it. Have it analyzed? But how?

What I did was to tell Terry my concerns that Joe might be a drug addict of some kind. Of course, now I know that this isn’t the way drug addicts behave, but I didn’t know that then. Anyway, what Terry did was to tell Joe.

Joe called me and said he wanted to talk. He picked me up at the sorority house, and we went on a little drive in the Oklahoma flatlands around the Stillwater campus.

Joe told me, “When I was in the Marines, they taught me fifteen ways to kill a person without that person’s ever making a sound.” He paused. “I can kill a person in a lot more ways than that, ways where they might make just a little sound. But fifteen of them are absolutely silent.”

Then he said, “Am I making myself clear? If you ever do or say anything again that might come between me and Terry, I will kill you. I will definitely kill you.”

I was eighteen at the time, and I wasn’t a particularly courageous person. The one thing I knew for sure is that I couldn’t talk with Terry about this. And what if I went to some counselor at the school? They would call Joe in; he would deny it. It would be his word against mine… And then he would silently kill me. Or so I thought.

I said nothing. To anyone. The next year, I ended up transferring to another school that was better for my major, and the year after that, my friend married the man I knew was crazy… and had several really bad years. In the end, she had to sneak away from him with their baby; she feared for their lives.

“I’ve always felt terrible about that,” I said to Pat. “But I didn’t know what to do.” I thought about it for moment. “If it happened now, I would go to a counselor.”

Pat didn’t comment. What could she say? At seventy-five you have a better chance of seeing your mistakes. At least some of them.

And it’s a great solace to talk them over with someone who knows who and what you were at the time.

At Pat’s first wedding, I was maid of honor.

Something to Defend

June 27, 2020 / Margaret Bendet

Since I no longer have care of a cat or a ten-pound dog, I am able to consider the finer qualities of the raccoons that live in close proximity to me. I looked up one day recently and locked eyes with a raccoon not ten feet from me, poised in the branches of the venerable cherry tree in my backyard. The two of us stopped and stared at each other for what seemed like a brief eternity but was probably no more than thirty seconds. I noticed that the raccoon’s face was open and lovely—an almost human face. I thought, It’s fine that you’re there, and then I turned and went inside. When I came out again a few minutes later, the raccoon was gone. I was sorry.

This was a radical departure from my reaction to seeing a raccoon in that same tree a couple of years earlier, when I still lived with a toy poodle—who would have been lunch for any raccoon. Then, the raccoon was a predator, a dangerous interloper, the potential murderer of a creature dear to me. I glared at that raccoon. I said, aloud, “Get. Out. Of. Here.” I went inside to look for a broom, anything to use as a weapon. When I came back out, the raccoon was still there. Eyeing me with seeming purpose, that little animal leapt further up into the tree, using what appeared to be opposable thumbs and herculean strength. It was like watching an Olympic gymnast—only this creature was stronger and more agile than any human I’d ever seen. Then, the raccoon came back down and, with perfect balance, sauntered along the top of the thin wooden fence that edges the back of the yard. He was leaving, but only because he wanted to. He was utterly relaxed.

I felt a little shaken. If I couldn’t intimidate this raccoon, what chance was Chou Chou going to have? Chou Chou is buried in my backyard now, his demise having had nothing whatsoever to do with raccoons. And today, I encountered a raccoon under entirely different circumstances—I was the one who was seen as a threat. I was on the walkway that cuts through the yard, headed for the post office, when I heard a light growling sound a few feet away. I’d already opened the gate, and I looked off to the side, where my impromptu fence meets the wall of the carport. There are some high bushes there, and peering under the branches, I could make out three little figures. One of them leapt out, ran onto the grass, and turned to face me.

It was a raccoon in full fight mode. Eyes fixed on me, mouth open and growling, showing her teeth, standing as tall as she could. There was fury in her eyes, and fear as well—but I don’t think the fear was for herself. I closed the gate, with her on the other side. I said, “I won’t hurt your babies,” and I turned and walked down the path.

I had a number of reactions. First, I was amazed at the courage of that little animal. I must be five times the size of a raccoon. I don’t have the claws, of course; I don’t have razor sharp teeth. But I am big, and that creature was willing to take me on anyway—just to defend her own. You have to admire that.

I had other reactions as well. I do not want a raccoon nest fifteen feet from my front door, no matter how noble the animals may be. Fortunately, when I got back, the family had decamped. The mother raccoon was probably thinking she didn’t want to live that close to me either. (God only knows what she thought about me!)

Then I considered the striking difference in these three encounters. It was all about having something, or someone, to protect. The feeling that our loved ones are at risk brings out the warrior in us all. I find this a disconcerting thought when I consider just how much everyone in America feels is riding on this next election, how little any of us trusts the process by which that election will be determined… and what we—human beings—might be driven to do to each other as a result. Just to defend what is dear to us.

“I’m Dead”

November 16, 2018 / Margaret Bendet

I haven’t yet worked out what to do about the names of the dead in my address book. It’s disconcerting to have my eye fall on one of these names. “She’s gone,” I’ll think, and there is a little frisson of loss.

If I were committed to electronic retrieval, I could delete that line, just wipe that person off the list. But with a physical address book, there is no erasure. I could cross out that name, but it feels wrong. I could put a star by it, I suppose, or a gold heart sticker. But I’m not going to avoid the sense of loss in that way.

And perhaps I shouldn’t try to avoid the sense of loss. It’s bracing to remember that this person—say Leah Green, with whom I traded dinners and went to Port Townsend, who was a regular movie buddy and with whom I even considered living for a while, a short while—is no longer among the living. It’s a reminder that I, too, will at one point be no longer among the living. It’s a reminder that every friend I have will, at one point or another, bite the dust, so to speak, either before I do or at some point after.

So, why state the obvious? Because I need to come to terms with it.

First, I want to figure out how to live with the passage of this person I love. Just because they’re gone, doesn’t mean that I don’t still love them. Everyone I know who has moved on is still a part of my life in one way or another, large or small. Leah, for instance, is in my mind daily, when I look at the small wooden cow and cat seated in windows in my living room. I first saw them in Leah’s living room some nine years ago. Those are wonderful, I thought, and then, six years ago, when she moved from Whidbey to live near her son in Oregon, she put them out in a huge yard sale, and I snapped them up. But in my mind, they’re still hers. They hold essence-of-Leah—just like the Christmas tablecloth and napkins she gave me and the necklace I made from her scarab pin . . . It’s not much, really, but these bits of Leah mean that my friend is still in my life. It’s just that I don’t have ready access to her.

This must seem silly to those people who have lost a spouse or a child to death. A friend isn’t the same kind of loss, not nearly. I expect that losing a mate is like a body blow, whereas having a friendly acquaintance die is more along the lines of a nudge or even a paper cut. But as you move along in life, you get a lot of these paper cuts. I suppose that if I live to be ninety-three, as my maternal grandmother did, and if I keep my wits about me, as she did not, I will have more friends who have passed on than I have still here on the planet with me. This must happen to a lot of people.

There are two answers that occur to me in the moment.

The first is that the greatest and richest ongoing friendship in my life is with myself, with my own higher self. This is the essential food-of-life, and all other friendships are like gravy to it, like added spice. If my friendship with me is in order, then other friends can come and go.

And the second answer has to do with what happens to us after death. We all have different views on this, and my perspective is colored by the experience of having my friends who’ve passed on get messages of one kind or another back to me from wherever it is they may be. With Leah it was a strong sense of her presence at the memorial service at the Woodman Cemetery in Langley when some hundred of us gathered to scatter her ashes.

My first friend to die, Yashoda Duffy, said in my mind’s ear as I walked into her memorial service, “Hi, Honey!”

My departed father told me, in meditation, “I was weak,” and when it was almost a year after his death, he asked me to plant a tree in his name at the ashram in India. I did this, and when I saw the tree, a year later, I was filled with ecstasy.

A few months after my mother’s death, I heard her say, “We’re finished”—and I knew this was in a good way; she meant that the difficult things between us were over. And then, a few years later, when I was an old white-haired woman living alone in a little house—just as she had been in her final years—I found myself thinking about Mom a lot . . . until one day in meditation, when I hear her say, “Peggy, I’m dead!”

Whatever that means, being dead, it isn’t, I think, that consciousness is gone.

So, this is something to look forward to: maybe a new adventure.

It’s Not Just a Book Reading

June 9, 2017 / Margaret Bendet

When we think of events where an author presents a new book, most of us picture a celebrity saying a few words to fans, people who have come to buy said book and have it signed by this great person—a famous and successful author.

Thanks to the recent opening up of publishing to include self-publishing and hybrid publishing, lots of people living on Whidbey Island have published books. Most of us are not famous, and if we’re at all successful, it’s usually not in publishing. Still we give book signings—at a bookstore, a library, a church, the home of a friend… These can be delightful, celebrative events, introducing the book and giving the new author a sense of being, truly, launched.

There are, however, some common-sense ground rules involved in a book signing, and in recent years, I’ve attended several where one and sometimes all of these guidelines were ignored. It makes the book signing, which could have been fun for everyone, a less than salubrious occasion.

And it’s so simple, really. It’s a matter of remembering that, when we’re not famous, those who come to celebrate our life events are not the general public but our friends and cohorts, many of the very same people who helped us put together this book.

Here are my ground rules.

If a bookstore or library offers to host a book signing for you, the first thing you need to do, as the author, is to invite your friends—all of your friends—and not just by posting something in the newspaper or (for Whidbey) on Drew’s List but by personally contacting them. I remember one woman, an editing client, who had written and self-published a truly lovely book that was featured in an event at a local library—and who told not one single soul about that event. Four people came, including the library branch manager and myself.
Prepare a few remarks about the process of writing or publishing your book. Often these events are called book readings because it’s expected that the author will read a bit from the text of the book. It is not, however, expected that the author will begin by reading from the book. You’re launching this book; you want to give it a context. People have come to hear you speak about your book. Why you wrote Why you published it. What you’re hoping they’ll get from reading it. Something. I will say just a bit more about this part of it. Even if you’re an accomplished speaker, you must actually prepare these remarks.
After you write this out, go over it with a friend. Don’t think you can wing this by speaking extemporaneously. There’s something that can happen to the mind when you stand in front of a group, even a group of family and friends—perhaps especially a group of family and friends. You need a plan, and it helps if you allow yourself to have a few notes with you when you get up to speak. You are not going to read those notes to the people gathered, but if you have some notes, you can glance down at them when your mind goes blank. These notes will remind you of what you wanted to say. Then you look back up at the people in front of you and say it.
Plan how you will thank the people who helped you. Again, think about this, and think about it carefully. This is why most Academy Award winners go to the mic with a piece of paper in their hand: they are in horror of forgetting to thank someone who helped to make their moment of triumph possible. A book signing is a time to be gracious and inclusive: the person who brought the flowers, the groups of people who provided food, people in the audience who may have critiqued your book, the person who was your editor. OK, so, as a professional editor, perhaps I, particularly, notice this—but when it’s done well, it’s wonderful. One author I worked with recognized me by name and function when I tried to slip into the back of his book event a few minutes late. Another author, whose editor was a friend of mine, called her editor up to the front with the book’s designer, thanked them, and presented them each with a bottle of wine.

This is all hard, I know, because once you’ve written the book, you’d like to think that the pressure is off, that you’ve already done the most important part. For a few weeks after I’d completed my memoir manuscript, I balked at the idea of talking about what was in the book. If people wanted to know, they could read it!

But you must do a little to entice them to read it. And why not? There’s so much you couldn’t say in the book itself, so much for people to know about the process of transforming a spark of an idea into a bound volume that readers can take home with them. Think of it as sharing information and acknowledging support.

In a Liminal Space

November 23, 2015 / Margaret Bendet

Marilyn Webberley’s painting of Chou Chou and me at home

A few winters back, when it was icy, I complained to a grocery cashier about being tailgated on the way to the store. “I don’t want to drive that fast,” I said. “It’s dangerous on these roads.”

“I’m with you,” she said. “I have to be careful. I have responsibilities—I’m a dog owner.” Her words warmed my heart. She described my situation exactly.

There is one being on this planet who depends on me, and he is a toy poodle. I won’t say he’s my toy poodle; we share our lives, Chou Chou and I.

It’s a special relationship. Around the house, we have distinct responsibilities. I take care of our food, pay our rent and utilities—the ordinary things. Chou Chou offers protection. He sits at the bathroom door while I shower in the morning. He barks whenever our next-door neighbor gets in or out of his car. He welcomes anyone who comes the door—and continues welcoming them, with enthusiasm, until they have said hello to him. He takes me out for walks every day, which, on my own, I would never do. He retrieves balls that I throw. And most importantly, he greets me, literally jumping up and down, every time I come home—no matter how unhappy he was when I left without him. Chou Chou never holds a grudge.

He and I go way back. In 2003, Chou Chou was my mother’s dog, the last of a long line of Mom’s toy poodles. Mom had a real thing about toy poodles. My father once said that if he had to be reincarnated, he wanted to come back as my mother’s dog. He was only half kidding. After he died, of course, Mom’s dogs were even more important to her. When the toy poodle that Dad had given her died, my brother bought her Chou Chou. I was coming visit quite a lot then, and the dog and I got along famously.

One day on a walk, and we ended up at a golf course. Fortunately, no one was around because Chou Chou went berserk on the green. He put the side of his face down on the grass and ran as fast as his four legs would go—first one side of his face, then the other, and then he flipped over and rolled in the grass. Also, I think I petted him more, or better, than Mom did because when I was there, he was my dog.

Mom died less than a year later, and I wasn’t living in a place where I could have a dog, so Chou Chou went to my brother. Geoff did teach Chou Chou one trick—an unusual martial-art style rear kick—but after six years my brother died, and I was then able to take Chou Chou. Gladly.

The first time we went for a walk at South Whidbey Community Park, when we got to the soccer field by the forest, Chou Chou saw that stretch of bright green and went berserk. He was running and rolling like a puppy, so excited to be back in the grass again.

And at Whidbey Farmers’ Market, he found a use for that kick he’d learned. We were standing at one of the stalls one sunny Saturday morning, and a man behind me said, “Your dog just kicked dirt into my dog’s face.”

“He can’t help it,” I said. “He’s French.” The truth is that Chou Chou does not like to be smelled.

Deon Matzen’s painting

I work as an editor and writing coach, and two of the people I’ve assisted in the last five years were talented artists who paid me “in kind”—both of them with paintings of my beloved dog. I like to point out that not many people have their likeness in an oil painting, and I live with a dog who has not one portrait but two!

Chou Chou has been wonderful company, but this may not be for much longer.

Last spring as I was meditating I heard an inner voice say, This is my last summer. It was an intuitive leap, but I figured this message came from Chou Chou, who was lying beside me in that moment.

The summer is over now, and he has a cough. It’s a typical ailment for toy poodles, who were over-designed and have the problem of a collapsing trachea, which becomes more pronounced as they age. At one point a few weeks ago, the cough was so bad that I thought, Oh no. Is it time?

I heard, After Christmas.

So, we’re in a liminal space, this toy poodle and I. Of course, none of this may be real. Chou Chou has never before spoken to me. I don’t know if this was truly him, and if it was, I don’t know that he knows for sure the timing of his departure. But I do feel taken care of in this. I’m treasuring the time we have together now. If Chou Chou does go in a month, I will feel I was warned.

And if he doesn’t, I’ll be very happy to continue being with him for whatever finite time remains to us.

An Ounce of Prevention

July 26, 2015 / Margaret Bendet

I was on my way to pick strawberries, driving down a country road when it happened. About a quarter of a mile ahead, I saw a fawn step onto the blacktop. I slowed down. The fawn saw the car, turned, and began running straight toward us. I stopped, but the truck behind me didn’t—or, anyway, not as soon as I stopped.

The impact was a jolt. It didn’t trigger the air bags or injure my two passengers, but it was enough to accordion-pleat the trunk of my little Nissan Versa. The truck’s license plate was imprinted on my car’s never-to-latch-again trunk; one of the license plate screws was embedded in it. Other than that, the truck, a Ford F-350, was unblemished. When metal meets plastic, metal scores every time.

The driver, age twenty, was on the phone to his mother right away. “The truck is fine,” he said. “Maybe we don’t need to tell Dad…” This was, it turns out, Dad’s truck.

The next day, when the claims adjustor from Dad’s insurance company called, he said, “I’m sorry this ruined your weekend.”

That surprised me. “It didn’t ruin my weekend,” I told him. “Far from it.”

The young man who ran into me had been contrite; personnel from the three emergency vehicles that showed up were exemplary—it was the medic who figured out how to close my trunk with a borrowed bungee cord—and, as I said, no one had been injured, not even the fawn. My car would have to fixed, but someone else would be doing that and paying for it and also paying for a loaner car for me to drive in the meantime. At the worst, this accident was an inconvenience.

I had to wonder, how many people let an inconvenience ruin their weekend? The thought of that made me grateful for the benefits of a daily meditation practice—of consciously quieting my mind, of keeping wild thoughts in check so they don’t get the chance to “ruin” a weekend.

That was the day after the accident. Now, two weeks later, I’m more inclined to see the collision as a gift.

First, there is my contemplation that I got off lightly. This message came from a couple of directions, beginning with my own insurance agent who, when she heard that it was an F350 that had run into us, said, “This could have been so much worse. You were lucky. Your little Nissan served you well.”

Two days later, on a bus to pick up the loaner car, I spoke with a woman who turned out to be homeless—living in a tent on the local fairgrounds. Since this woman is attractive, well groomed, well spoken, I asked about the last job she’d had. She hasn’t worked, she told me, since being in an accident. I hadn’t told her about my accident, but hers sounded a lot like it—except that she’s had spells of dizziness ever since her accident. “I wasn’t able to work after that,” she said. “I can’t focus now.”

After that conversation, I was feeling quite a bit of gratitude for the way this accident happened.

Then this morning, I told the story to an old friend—one of several old friends who have been in car accidents that were not their fault yet left them with serious, debilitating injuries to overcome. For a few moments, I had the uncomfortable feeling of being happy about something good that had happened to me but not to a friend.

But Shyamala had a message for me: “What I want you to know is that about fifteen years before my big accident happened, I was in an accident just like yours. I was driving on a country road . . .” Coming into a town, Shyamala slowed down, and the truck behind her didn’t. “And just like your accident,” she said, “there were no injuries. I thought it was nothing. It seemed like nothing—and maybe it was nothing . . .” Perhaps there was no connection at all between that one tiny collision and the accident that came years later whose physical impact was monumental for her.

Who knows! It’s not as if a person can always be safe. But the conversation set me to thinking: what could I have done differently on the day I set out to pick strawberries?

Something occurred to me. A few miles before I saw the fawn, I noticed that a truck was following too close behind me. I looked for a convenient place to pull off and let him pass, but I didn’t see one.

The next time a truck is worrying my fender, I’ll pull off at an inconvenient place. I’ll be an old woman about it.

This accident could have been serious—perhaps the financial consequences are serious in that young man’s family—and I could have prevented it.

No False Spring

March 17, 2015 / Margaret Bendet

Spring snuck up on me. It was beautiful for a week in early February, and then I looked around and the whole world was in bloom. At first, I didn’t trust it. Twenty years on the East Coast taught me not to have confidence in an early spring. There, the weather would warm for a few beautiful days, maybe a week, in March, and my body, which had become acclimatized to the inhuman cold of Northeast winters, would begin to relax. My shoulders would widen and lower, my chest would expand. Breathing would become easier; walking less tentative.

And just when I felt safe, winter would blast back—and then it seemed worse, much worse, than it had before that sweet respite of the false spring.

But in this time and in this place, it was not a false spring. There was no killing frost to confuse the daffodils, no final blanket of snow. A month on, it’s still beautiful on Whidbey Island. Last week I planted lettuce. Without thinking, I told a friend in New York that, and she almost wept.

Spring means lighter clothes, lighter colors, more light altogether; it means being outside more; it means longer walks; it means planting—and because my birthday is in the spring, for me it is also a time of personal rebirth.

It’s fortuitous that spring started earlier this year, because when my birthday comes next month, I will be heading into a new decade, the big seven-oh—an age that I have never thought of in any regard except as the beginning of “the final years.” Actually, I’d thought that about fifty and sixty as well, but these milestones I managed to go through with no sense of true change. This time, I know there should be changes, there must be changes—there are changes. Any point in life can be our final year, final moment, but if death hasn’t come by the time you’re seventy, at least by then you know it’s fairly close. And if not death, then serious aging—the deterioration of body and mind—and these are certainties that, if you’re prudent, you acknowledge and anticipate.

A few weeks ago a friend suggested I dye my white hair, and I had to laugh. What would be the point of it? Do I want to fool people? To kid myself?

And perhaps that is the change I’m undergoing. I have no energy left for making a show. If something isn’t either fun or nourishing, if it doesn’t contribute to my well-being or to someone else’s, why bother with it? At this point, dying my hair would be like setting up a false spring in my own life.

Of course, the winter of our years has its own compensations, and the meaning of any milestone is what we ourselves give to it. Someone has just reminded me of what George Bernard Shaw, then ninety, said to a friend at his seventieth birthday celebration—“Oh, to be seventy again!”

Stepping Out

January 27, 2015 / Margaret Bendet

In the first week of the year, I understood that it was time to let go of my part-time job at the library—a fifteen-hour-a-week ballast, working with friends and surrounded by wonderful books and movies. What could be more pleasant! Then I wondered, If given the chance, what else would I fill this time with?

And I was being given the chance. I saw that I could, indeed, support myself with work that I find more than just pleasant, work for which I feel passion. I could focus on telling my stories—and on helping others tell theirs!

The day after this contemplation, I gave notice at the library, and two weeks later I dispersed chocolates, hugged my colleagues, and left. It isn’t exactly like retiring, but there is a wonderful unanchored feeling to time right now.

This weekend I went to the opening of a pop art exhibit at the Museo Gallery in Langley—and loved looking at all of the creative things that local artists are doing in the name of tin cans and soup labels. They’re having fun with their art! That was inspiring, and so was talking with a friend about her accomplished high school–age daughter.

This teenager was the down the street that evening, singing at another gallery—and planning a juried performance on the saxophone in a few weeks’ time and an exhibit of paintings this spring. Four years ago this same girl was a concert-ready violinist and two years ago she won an island-wide writing competition. What will this astonishing young virtuoso do next! “I have no idea,” her mother said. “Katyrose is always a surprise.”

The most dramatic symbol for creative potential was what I saw in the street when I left the gallery—a bearded man in a ponytail, wearing pink and twirling fire in the air around him. “How long have you been doing that?” I asked him afterward. “A couple of weeks,” he said. “I saw it on YouTube and picked it up.” My jaw dropped, and he laughed. “I’m kidding you.” He handed me his card: he was Matt “Madhat” Hoar. “I’ve been doing this for fourteen years,” he said, “but if you wanted to, you could learn it in no time. I’ve had people do professional shows after two or three days of lessons.”

Who knows; perhaps I will. (The video is courtesy of a gracious bystander, Jenna Ashley.)

At the new year I always feel the potential for change, but with 2015 the possibility seems momentous. This is a year in which I’ll turn seventy, a year in which a memoir I’ve been working on for more than a decade will be published.

My meditation teacher once spoke of the new year as a gift we’re given, in the way a sculptor might be given a huge block of some precious substance—marble or gold—to work with. This gift of time is our raw material, and we’re asked to create a masterpiece with it. What will this year become in our hands? What will we make of this gift of time?

Now, more than ever, I see that it’s up to me.

The Crash

January 11, 2015 / Margaret Bendet

It’s been many weeks since I’ve posted, but I do have an excuse. Over the holidays I was traumatized by my Mac Mini. First, it was processing at a glacial speed, which was bad, and when I took it in to be checked (at an Apple Store, in a packed mall, a week before Christmas), I was told that my hard drive had crashed. “That’s good,” the young man in the bright red T-shirt told me, and in a way it was. The hard drive is major, but it isn’t an outrageously expensive fix.

So, I left the computer in the shop for organ replacement, along with the nifty little external backup drive, which I had remembered to bring with me. After the new hard drive was in, the folks at Apple would reinstall the software and files from the backup, and I would be up and running again. They said they’d call within forty-eight hours.

After about sixty hours, I called them. “I was going to call you,” the guy said. “There was nothing on your backup device.” I hadn’t hooked it up correctly to the computer; it turned out there was much more involved than just plugging it in.

So, went back to this bustling mall on the Sunday before Christmas to pick up a repaired computer with nothing on it.

I did have a plan B. Carbonite was one of the first in-the-clouds backup systems, and I had been subscribing, by auto-renewal so I didn’t forget. Only two months earlier, my credit card had expired and Carbonite had called for the new numbers. I paused for a moment then. Did I need this second backup? Yes, yes, yes, I did, and fortunately I knew it at the time.

The day after I got the computer home, the stored files began streaming… trickling… drib-drip-dripping into my computer.

I spent a lot of time talking with Carbonite’s friendly technical support crew, and twice I got to speak to people in the second echelon. The first time I did, we scrapped the first day and a half of downloads and restarted the process, routing the files into one discrete directory on my desktop. They were streaming again.

By the next morning, they were back to a drip. I saw how many files were left, how it was taking three minutes per file… and I called technical support. “At this rate,” I said, “it’s going to take another twenty-three days to download my files.”

That was the second time they sent me to the upper echelon. This young man told me that my Internet connection was slow.

I asked him, “What does that mean, ‘slow’?”

“Here, where I am, and even at home on my own computer, I can download ninety-four megabytes a second,” he told me. “You’re downloading two.”

He, of course, lives in a city and has huge cables, while I, a country girl, was downloading my entire computer through a telephone line.

Whidbey Telecom is a divine company. They fixed it so that I could increase my Internet access package for the time it took me to download my computer, and they also delivered the improved equipment on that very afternoon—Christmas Eve!—and let me keep it after I lowered my access.

They’re all great, actually—the brilliant techies at Apple and Carbonite and Whidbey Tel.

I got it all back on Christmas morning, and I knew it was a gift. But I haven’t felt the same about my computer since. The magic is gone.

What was horrifying about the experience—and it was horrifying—was seeing how much I depend on this technology for support in my work, information about my world, connection to my friends, entertainment…and how little I understand about how it all functions and how to use it intelligently.