Category: Day by day (Page 2 of 3)

A Gift from Dad

December 2, 2020 / Margaret Bendet

It can be quite edifying to glimpse oneself from another’s perspective. I don’t often receive such bounty, and when it comes, it may take me some time to welcome it. Today, I remembered my final conversation with my father, our last one-on-one exchange, which took place almost thirty years ago.

This was in 1991, a few months after my father had open-heart surgery. I wasn’t around for the medical drama. I was in India at the time, living in an ashram, and it wasn’t possible to jump on a plane and be at my father’s side. When I got back to the U.S. a few months later, I went to see my parents right away, and only then did I realize just how serious a time this was. My robust, high-color, very-much-alive father was pale gray. When I first saw him, the color of his skin took my breath away. It was as if I were looking at a cadaver. Yet I seemed to be the only one who could see this.

Dad and I both knew that he had very little time left. My mother was in denial. When I tried to hint that her husband could pass on at some point, she balked. I don’t remember how I tried to say this—tact has never been my strong suit—or the specific words of Mom’s reply, but I do recall my certainty that this was dangerous ground, a subject not to be broached. Not with her anyway.

One afternoon, Dad and I were sitting alone on the deck. It was the beginning of spring, and a little chilly, even in the sun. Mom was inside, probably in the kitchen, probably cooking. I told my father that I knew he didn’t approve of what I had done with my adult life. “But because of it,” I told him, “I want you to know that you’re going to be taken care of.”

He nodded. I knew he understood that at least part of my truck with God would come to him when he needed it. Then he said, “You were such a strange child.”

It was true, but neither of my parents had ever said this to me directly. I didn’t say anything in reply. I looked at him intently and waited. I knew there would be more.

“You’d stay in your room for hours,” he said, “all by yourself.” This was true as well. I would read mindless books, little mystery stories with formulaic plots and safe, predictable characters. I would listen to music, or what passed for music among my friends. I’d play the same song again and again and again. I know now that I was numbing myself. I didn’t feel comfortable with the people around me, and I didn’t feel comfortable with myself. Somehow, I never realized that my father had noticed.

“I know that you and your mother have had difficulties,” he said, soldiering on, and at this I felt that I really should say something.

“She tried to kill me,” I told him.

“When did your mother try to kill you?”

It was the summer before the sixth grade, right after we moved to Tulsa. She and I were at the swimming pool, which is where she and my brother, Geoff, and I spent most days that summer. Mom and I’d had a disagreement. I said something dismissive to her. I turned to go down a steep set of concrete stairs, and she pushed me from behind. I felt the push.

Dad listened to my little tale, and then he said, “Your mother never tried to kill you.” I didn’t argue with him. Now that I think about it, I’m certain that this happened but that my mother’s gesture was just the rage of the moment and not some diabolical attempt to end my life. She was probably horrified when I almost fell, catching myself on the bannister at the last minute.

“You may not know this,” Dad said, “but your mother loves you. And if something happens to me…” He paused then, and for a moment we shared a look.

“When I go,” he corrected himself, “your mother is going to need you. I want you to promise me something. I want you to promise me that you’ll stay in touch with her. You call her. You call her every week.”

“Yes,” I said, “I’ll do that.”

Then he said it again: “Every week!”

As I think about it, this was the most important conversation I ever had with my father, much more significant than the one where he made me promise to go to college, certainly more meaningful to me than the one where he told me that now it was time for me to find a husband. I accomplished all of the tasks Dad set out for me, but this, the last one, was the one that mattered most.

My father did leave us a couple of months later, and I started, then, reaching out to my mother—calling her every week and writing to her as well. She liked the letters, she said, because she could go back to them whenever she wanted to; she could reread parts of them. I spent my vacations with her, and when it was time for her to move into progressively smaller homes, I helped her do that, too. I got rid of furniture that didn’t fit, arranged the furniture that did; I hung paintings and organized spices. I sat with my mom and watched sappy love stories from the forties and fifties, her with her vodka and me with a companionable glass of wine. It was by my steady reaching out to my mother and, after her death, to my brother that I forged a bond to my family of birth.

After my brother died, the next time I meditated, I heard him say to me, I never knew… and by this I think he meant that he never before knew how much I had to contend with in my own mind. Then he said, You just kept coming.

Thanks to my father, I kept coming. I kept calling. I kept writing. Thanks to Dad, I came out of my room. I offered myself, strange person though I am. Possibly that’s all any of us can do, and our humanity is the measure of our willingness to reach out of our strangeness, our willingness to try.

Rite of Passage

October 28, 2020 / Margaret Bendet

A few months back, I heard inside my mind my teacher’s voice saying, “It’s not the way you think it is.” That’s all. I don’t know what “it” refers to, and so I have no idea how I am thinking about “it.” What I do know is that something I’m depending on to be a certain way is not that way. Since then, a couple of times a day I’ll recall this warning—yes, I think we can call it a warning—and I’ll wonder about it.

I have known for some time that my life is, like the lives of most of humanity, currently in a state of flux. This involves politics, the pandemic, and for me—at seventy-five—the outcomes of age itself. Life is changing in ways I cannot foresee. My next-door neighbor had his sons and few friends over for a barbecue a few months back, and, amid the conversation, I heard one person say, “It’s the end of the world.” It struck me that he was right. The world, as we know it, is ending.

All of this factored into a decision I made around this time to stop drinking alcohol. I am not an alcoholic. My late brother used to say that he and I come from a long line of alcoholics. I think Geoff was right about this; he was clearly a functioning alcoholic himself. However, my own addictive fallout from our challenging childhood manifests in other ways. It is possible for me to have a glass of wine , or two, with dinner each day and leave it at that. I just really like the taste of wine, a good red wine. (Well, not that good; I don’t have the budget for really good wine.)

I had an early experience to pull me away from drinking, shortly after I arrived on Whidbey. Having lived in an ashram for so many years, initially, I felt freed from constraint. I was drinking a glass of wine and watching a movie every night with dinner. After a few months of this, I had a dream in which I was supposed to retrieve a bunch of beets from a pantry. I opened the pantry door and saw a large angry snake, a cobra, coiled around the beets. In the dream, I was nervous, but I knew I could do this. By the end of the dream, I had the beets in hand, and I hadn’t been bitten. Then I woke up and understood that I had just done something terrible. In my spiritual tradition to be bitten by a cobra in a dream means that you will become Self-realized in this lifetime—and I had successfully avoided it. I was horrified!

The sketch I made of the snake, who I now saw as Kundalini Shakti.

Certain that the snake in my dream was none other than Kundalini Shakti, the goddess of spiritual transformation who is symbolized in India by a cobra, I pulled out my sketchbook and started drawing this snake I had just seen. As I drew, I was struck by how humble the form of a snake actually is. “You don’t have any arms,” I said to the figure taking form on the page.

I heard a voice inside reply: No, I have no arms. I can’t make you do what I want you to do.

“What is it you want me to do?” I asked.

Stop drinking wine every night!

So, I did. For a long time—years—I had a glass of wine only a few times a week. I became aware that wine is an anesthetic, a depressant, a downer, and that I never endeavored anything very interesting with my solitary evenings after drinking wine with dinner.

Then, about three years ago, I broke my back. The pain was, for a time, excruciating and relentless. With all the pills and forms of cannabis I had legal access to, the only thing that gave me relief was—you guessed it—red wine. So, once again I drank wine every night. I think that, following this experience, I was so angry about the pain that I felt entitled to the wine. Of course, I had created the pain myself by ignoring the state of my bones, but that’s another story.

Right now, we’re coming to the end of the world—and my understanding that if there is even a chance it truly is, I do not want to face this threshold with an alcohol-befuddled mind.

It’s been six months now, and in that time instead of roughly two hundred glasses of wine, I’ve drunk three. I enjoyed each of these three glasses of wine tremendously, but I have enjoyed even more the intangible benefits of my restraint. I am now focusing my attention and energy in a different direction.

In this same six months, I have been spending a little more than an hour a day reciting a Sanskrit text, Shri Guru Gita, which has the effect of smoothing out my rough and angry edges—the sparky-ness of my personality—and giving me better emotional balance.

One of the results of this is that my meditations—once an opportunity for me to rise above my emotions—have become auditory. There is a sound, an inner sound, that I hear now whenever I listen for it. I think of it as the sound of silence. When I meditate, I give myself to this sound, and it becomes… not louder but deeper, as if the sound were taking my awareness into the peaceful space from which the sound itself emerges.

I like this a lot. Also, as a bonus, I can now have a moment of meditation at any point in my day. I think this boon has come as a result of both the daily chanting and my cautious approach to wine. So, I would say the result has been worth the effort.

As for “it” not being as I think it is, I’ll just have to wait and see what “it” turns out to be.

My Friend, the Fly

October 15, 2020 / Margaret Bendet

“Can you even trust a person who has a pet fly?” one of my friends commented after the vice-presidential debate last week. She was thinking about the fly that sat forever in the vice president’s snowy white hair. I had a lot of bones to pick with Mike Pence regarding that debate, but the fly was not one of them.

I wrote back to my friend, saying that she shouldn’t knock pet flies. “I used to have a pet fly,” I said, “although I never took mine out with me.”

I had pet flies when I was living in the ashram. We weren’t supposed to keep cats or dogs, but flies there were aplenty. They hibernated through the frigid Northeast winters, and in the spring, when the weather started to warm, they would suddenly appear, trapped in the plastic-ed windows. They’d start buzzing, and I’d let them out. One always stuck around. When people came to see me in my office, they’d complain and ask, “Why don’t you kill it?” I’d say, “That’s Charley, my pet fly.”

I did not have a remarkable relationship with any of the Charleys, but I did once encounter a fly with whom I had a surprising conversation. This happened right after I read a book I still have, some fifteen years later: Kinship with All Life by J. Allen Boone. The book goes into the author’s relationships with various animals: dogs, snakes, ants, and I don’t remember what all. But I do recall quite vividly that the final six chapters of this modest tome describe the profound friendship the author developed with Freddie the Fly, a Musca domestica with whom he lived in Hollywood for a period of about six months. He writes:

“Wherever I went in the house, Freddie would come along too and share as best he could in the activity, often riding on one of my shoulders, sometimes flying ahead of me doing acrobatics. If I were in a hurry and raced through the rooms, he would always shoot ahead and show me how little accomplished I really was in speed and agility. If I suddenly stopped, he would usually make a few observation loops and return to my shoulder.”

One day, immediately after finishing this book, I had taken my lunch outside so that I could sit by myself and think through a particular problem I was facing. I put my plate on a table in the shade of tree, and then noticed that a fly was standing on the table, across from where I had just sat. Images of Freddie the Fly in my mind, I looked at this fly and thought, I came here to be by myself, and I would really appreciate it if you wouldn’t buzz my face or try to eat my food. I then considered that this wasn’t a very gracious communication. I selected a small spoonful of my lunch—a bit I felt would be most appealing to a fly—and put the food directly onto the table close to where this fly was, thinking, This is for you. I then forgot about the fly for a while; I ate my lunch and considered the problem I’d wanted to think about. When I was finished, I realized that the fly hadn’t bothered me once. I looked for him, and there he was—eating the food I had put out for him.

Thank you so much, I thought to the fly, and I added, You’re really amazing. I’ve never had a fly listen to me before.

The response was immediate. I heard, quite clearly: You’re pretty amazing, too. I’ve never had a person talk to me before.

My mind did not make that up. I knew it didn’t because I was truly surprised.

And the other thing I knew, on reflection, is that I would never again have reason to feel alone. It’s just one consciousness out there; we’re all a part of it.

And if someone wants to have a pet fly, more power to him. He still won’t get my vote.

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.

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.