Category: Day by day (Page 3 of 4)

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.

Nutritional Overhaul

October 30, 2014 / Margaret Bendet

I’ve long been wary of diets that forbid that trinity of culinary pleasure—dairy, wheat, sugar. Physical pain is a powerful incentive for change, but can changing your diet truly provide a cure? Then a friend with arthritis gave a glowing account of her own nutritional overhaul, an approach called The Abascal Way.

I remembered that a book by that very name had been sitting in the library, on a shelf in my line of vision for at least a month. The next time I was in the library, I found this book, took it home, and put it on my dining room table, where it sat for another week and a half, unopened. Having such a book is one thing; reading it is what threatens the status quo.

Then I spent an entire day in a meditation workshop, and when I got home, I picked up The Abascal Way and began to go through it. The next morning I started the diet.

I wasn’t committed to actually doing the diet, you understand. I was just going to put a couple of the principles into practice: a breakfast with no grains; a breakfast that’s half protein and half fruit or vegetables. It stretched my ingenuity to come up with such a breakfast, but I did. That first morning I ate fried eggs and kale.

Later in the day two friends from Seattle dropped in. I mentioned this impossible new eating plan—No grains, indeed! What other breakfasts are there?—and it turned out Alice and Jane had been following this diet for a year, they’d taken Abascal workshops online, they knew the founder’s story.

Kathy Abascal lives on nearby Vashon Island, a lawyer who also studied neurobiology and botanical medicine. To deal with her own health issues, she developed a nutritional program she describes in her books and now teaches in that online class called TQI—To Quiet Inflammation.

I got more serious about my new diet. It was now my new diet. A few weeks ago, I wrote about how I’d stopped eating chocolate and almost immediately started having less arthritic pain in my right foot. But less pain is not the same as painless, and this is what I’m shooting for. I’ve been on the Abascal diet—and truly on it since that first day—for three weeks now. My newly un-inflamed foot is a joy to walk on.

What is most interesting to me is why it took me so long to let go of culinary crutches that I knew, intuitively, weren’t good for my body.

Chai, for instance, is an Indian-style tea I was drinking in quantity every day. I’ve loved this sweet, strong, milky, spiced concoction since the first time I tasted it, forty years ago. And I’d been telling myself, “This isn’t so bad.” The spices—ginger, cardamom, fennel, clove, cinnamon—are medicinal, and I was replacing the milk with soy creamer and the sugar with stevia. In her book, Abascal points out that packaged foods have additives. The third ingredient listed for that creamer is, I found, cane syrup—no wonder it tastes so yummy! As for stevia, Abascal writes that, from the body’s standpoint, sweet is sweet.

I let go of chai that first morning—you can do anything for one day—and found I could finally taste the black tea, which has quite an interesting flavor all its own. Now I look forward to a cup of tea in the morning, and because it’s not sweet, I don’t keep drinking it all morning long.

While I’ve overcome a few hurdles, I know there are more a ahead. I’m now facing my three favorite culinary holidays: Christmas, Thanksgiving, and Halloween!

I just have to find a way to remind myself that inflammation is a pain.

Life Spans

October 13, 2014 / Margaret Bendet

A few years back a beautiful and charismatic woman who was my next-door neighbor told me, repeatedly, that she was not going to die. I suggested that perhaps she’d experienced the part of her being that’s eternal, but she said, no, this was not it; her body was not going to die. I might die myself, if I chose to, but she wasn’t going to. She spoke in a tone of certainty, but her truth, however she had found it, was not what happened. About six months ago, this woman succumbed to her human destiny. She died.

As we all will.

My friend Donna Hood and I teach a course on some of the things we can do in light of the fact that we are going to die—record our favorite personal stories, write our own obituary. Who else is going to remember what matters most to us! Donna asked her elder daughter to write her (Donna’s) obituary, and she (the daughter) remembered an ancient and minor beauty crown but forgot to mention the existence of her own father.

We used to call the class “Preparing for the Inevitable,” but a few weeks ago Donna convinced me to change the name. “It scares people,” she said. “They don’t want to think about death.” Now we’re calling it “Legacy”—and it turns out Donna was right. Next week’s class has only one space left.

That’s fine, but death is inevitable. I do like to think about it. This is an ongoing contemplation for me, and it comes up in various forms:

What should I do with the time that’s left?

When I die, is there anything I’ll regret not having done?

How can I organize my life to make my death easier for people around me?

Yesterday morning I got an email from a man whose wife—healthy, vital, in her mid seventies—took our class about six months ago. In writing her own obituary, she had placed her death in 2028, far enough in the future that it didn’t impinge on today. This woman has now lost her mental faculties and is, in many ways, dead to life as she knew it. Last week, and her husband wrote to thank us for the fact that his late wife had written her obituary and a brief account of her life story. He said, “It was very important for the family to see this.”

So, our preparation to depart from this life can make a difference to the people who love us.

And once we acknowledge that our life will end, we might also be willing to look more closely at what supports us in living—what human beings actually need in order to live. Air. Water. Earth. Light. The list is short but pithy. If you have time for a two-minute video clip, this Conservation International link (sent by a friend this morning) is worth seeing.

In terms of life spans, what humanity does on this planet isn’t going to kill Mother Earth, but we could do in our own species. For sure, we’re wiping out others. That too is worth thinking about.

Looking at Light

September 22, 2014 / Margaret Bendet

"Together and Apart" is Asian ink, gouache, and Japanese watercolor. For more, here is a link to Angie Dixon's website.

“Together and Apart” is Sumi (Asian ink), gouache, and Japanese watercolor. To see more, visit Angie Dixon’s website

I work part-time at the Whidbey Island library that’s in a double-wide, a cozy space where we have interesting conversations. One day we convinced a library patron to bring in her art portfolio from her car. This artist, Angie Dixon, showed us glorious pictures—horses, a friendly orangutan, and one I’ll never forget: a window with rays of light coming through it. Nothing else, just the light.

As a child, Angie said, she’d read a read a book whose story entered and took up residence in her, even though the book itself disappeared from her life and its title and author’s name were forgotten. Here is my telling of the story she outlined:

A child enters a light-filled room that has two floor-to-ceiling windows looking out onto a lovely sunlit garden. A large gilt-framed mirror hangs between the windows, and it is this mirror that interests the girl. She walks up to the mirror and looks into it. It’s herself she sees, of course, and what she notices first is that she is becoming quite a big girl—a fine girl!

Of course, there’s that funny thing about the way her hair curls in the very back. She turns around, with her back almost to the mirror, and peers over her shoulder, looking critically at her reflection. Perhaps the hair will change in time. Her mother had suggested that once, and the girl had only dared to hope that it might, because her mother obviously didn’t like this tendency toward unruly curls.

The girl turns to face the mirror head-on. This is better. She looks much better this way. But she’s having trouble making out her reflection now. Why?

There is no light. The windows are like slits on the wall. They’re tiny! These windows were huge when she came into the room. How long ago was that? The girl isn’t sure.

She looks back at the mirror, and the minute she does that, the windows become still smaller. Horrified, she realizes she’s in almost total darkness. She walks over to the window then—if you could still call it a window—and reaches her hand toward the tiny ray of light that remains. Her finger won’t fit in the crevice. No, you wouldn’t call this a window at all. But it had once been a window.

Is there something she can do to make it a window again?

Angie doesn’t remember what happened at this point in the story. The girl had to do something to get back the light. “It was one of those fairy tales,” she said, “you know, where the heroine undertakes a mission or passes a test. The girl gets the light back, but I don’t remember how.”

If it were my story—and for this moment, why don’t we call it my story!—I would have the heroine pay attention to the light.

The girl looks intently at the window, willing it to expand. There is just a sliver of light now—and the light is extraordinary, the girl realizes; it’s beautiful, that light.

Once she notices its beauty, there is more light. The girl laughs then. It’s the first time she’s laughed since she walked into the room, and with her laughter, the slits in the wall become windows once again.

But they’re are more than just windows. These are doorways. The girl realizes she can do more than just stand in this room and look at the light. She can walk through the doorway. She can go outside, into the beautiful garden. She can be in the light.

So that’s what the girl does: she steps into the light.

Giving something our attention for the sake of delight—that is the magic key that expands anything in our lives. So, if it works for the rest of us, surely it would work for this girl in a fairy tale.

As Life Unravels

September 2, 2014 / Margaret Bendet

Whidbey artist Pam Winstanley does amazing work with silk.

Prayer flags, made by a friend, have been fluttering their good will and compassion in my backyard for a month now. I love the idea that these silk flags, vibrant but fragile, are doing their best for the universe in the short time they’ll be here. They’re a daily reminder that my life, too, is impermanent.

Earlier today at a happy hour celebration, I watched a woman in her early sixties sit before the candle on her birthday crème brulee and wonder aloud what to wish for. “There’s nothing more that I want,” she said. “I have so much joy in my life. I just want it all to remain as it is.” This is, of course, a wish we’ve all had at times, one that is never granted.

Life moves on, and it’s for the best. Frayed silk, sun-bleached color—dissolution has its own stark beauty and a reason for being.

This week, I learned a valuable lesson from a physical infirmity that is practically synonymous with aging. There had been intermittent pain in my right foot. I thought perhaps I’d strained it in the warrior pose, but the pain reoccurred over the course of weeks, was worse in the mornings, and was sometimes acute. I went to a doctor and told him, “I think I may have arthritis.”

“At your age?” he said. “Of course, you have arthritis. Sooner or later everyone has arthritis.” He told me to continue the exercise, especially in the morning, and to ice the foot afterward—excellent suggestions—and then he offered me a prescription for a pain medication.

I didn’t want a drug—the pain wasn’t that bad!—but then he gave me some sample pain pills, which were free and an insurance I could carry in my back pocket.

This was all good, but there was little change in the state of my foot.

A couple of weeks later, I received some clues about dealing with osteoarthritis that I wouldn’t hear from a doctor, and which now seem to be working.

The first was from a friend who asked how much I weigh, divided it by two, and told me that was the number of ounces of water I need to be drinking every day. “Clean water,” she said. “No chlorine. Filter it if you have to. Go to a health store and get the drops you put into water to make it alkaline.”

This woman, whom I hadn’t seen in decades, was in my face about water. “You take a vow,” she said. “You promise me—and I want you to call me in two weeks and let me know you’re doing it.”

So, I retrieved my plastic water filter from the back of a cupboard, bought the drops, increased my daily intake of water by about three hundred percent—and within a week of my drinking seventy ounces of water a day, my right foot became noticeably better. There was less pain.

The second clue came while I was on an outing to the Seattle Art Museum with a couple of colleagues from work. I’d brought along a bar of premium European dark chocolate, in case we needed a snack. Then I remembered that one of the women no longer eats chocolate. “It’s her right toe,” the other woman said. “She gets pain in her right toe whenever she eats chocolate.”

Her toe? Why would chocolate have anything to do with her toe? But the toe is so close to the foot, and then the woman herself explained that it was her arthritis that was being inflamed by the chocolate. Arthritis… foot…

I said, “I’m going to try it!” I fished that candy bar out of my purse and handed it to the only person present who still ate chocolate.

That was a week ago. I let go of chocolate and, within a couple of days, my foot felt almost normal. Most of the pain is gone, most of the time.

Many people will tell you that dark chocolate is good for you, and indeed it may be, if what you eat in a day is no bigger than the size of a Hershey’s kiss. I was doing one or two lines of chocolate from those three-and-half-ounce bars, both after lunch and after dinner. I ate lots of fresh, green, organic vegies, but I also ate lots of chocolate—not such a healthy diet.

Of course, I don’t know that stopping chocolate and increasing water is what’s healing my foot, but I’ll keep up this new regime for the time being. Right now, I’m not even tempted to do otherwise.

And I’m actually grateful for the arthritis. I’m taking much better care of myself than I was only a couple of weeks ago.

My point is that the unraveling that happens in our lives may not come in a way we would have chosen. No sane person making a birthday wish says, “What I really want is pain.” But when pain comes, it brings us gifts—that we receive, I think, as long as we keep flying our colors as best we can.

A Visitor

August 25, 2014 / Margaret Bendet

It was a Sunday morning. I’d slept in, meditated, and gone into the kitchen to make chai—when I had the feeling I was being watched. At the sliding screen door stood a large grey tomcat. I walked over and he sat, looking up at me. I sat. I opened the door a crack, put my hand out, and he arched his head under my fingers, encouraging me to pet him, which I did.

I have adopted a number of cats in my life, and this cat was lovely; this cat had a presence. I, however, currently have a commitment to a toy poodle, and Chou Chou is no friend to cats. So, even while I stroked this feline visitor, I was thinking, I can’t take you in!

Fortunately, the cat wore a collar and a tag with a phone number on each side—not a local number, I noticed. I called one and got an office answering machine; I called the other and got voicemail.

A minute later, the dog came tearing out of the bedroom, barking in fury at this invasion, and the cat fled. Then my phone rang.

“Did you just call my cell phone?” a woman asked. I told her about the cat.

“Oh my God!” she said. “Where do you live?” It turned out that this woman, Janice Martinez, and her partner, Michael Greenfield, had been docked at the Langley marina the week before. Kitty had jumped off their sailboat the previous Sunday. “He’d never done that before,” she said.

They spent days looking for the cat—met the local vet, who tried to help; met the owner of Music for the Eyes, who said that if Kitty showed up, he would fly him home to British Columbia. Because, in time, Kitty’s owners had to move on.

“We’re on Orcas Island now,” Janice said, “but we’ll come back for him.”

I was explaining that the cat had run off again, when I spotted him sitting under the front of my neighbor’s car.

“Put him in your bathroom,” Janice told me. “It’s just for today. We’ll be there.” But it took me a few minutes to get together clothes and a piece of smoked salmon, and by that time Kitty had disappeared again.

When you’re looking for a grey cat, the world is vast and dangerous place, full of hidden nooks and deadly predators.

I had to leave a cat behind once myself. Turning a beloved pet into a stray because you cannot find him and you cannot spend more time looking for him and you don’t know what else to do but go on—it’s an agony.

I felt the pain all over again that day: searching my neighbors’ yards for that grey cat; calling his owners; leaving the message that I hadn’t been able to catch Kitty; that he was, once again, MIA.

I was going to the Langley Shakespeare Festival that afternoon and was due at a friend’s house at 4:15. Just before 4:00, Chou Chou and I, coming back from a walk, saw a large grey cat on the driveway. The dog started barking again, tearing up the drive—and, of course, chasing the cat away. I could hardly blame Chou Chou. He hadn’t been looking for Kitty; he hadn’t missed that cat at all!

But it gave me hope… and five minutes later, I got call on my cell phone. It was Janice. “We’re here,” she said. “We’re in Langley. Where do you live?”

Even knowing I didn’t have their cat, these amazing people had spent the entire day to come back for him! From Orcas, they’d sailed their boat to Anacortes, rented a car, and driven down the length of Whidbey Island in the hopes of finding Kitty—a North American shorthair they had adopted as a rescue cat and loved. A cat they loved.

Kitty, back on his sailboat

I still had to go out, but I left Janice and Michael in my apartment—I would trust my life to people who went to these lengths for their cat! I told them I’d just seen Kitty; he couldn’t be far away.

And he wasn’t. This story has a happy ending. After an hour, they found Kitty, sitting in Island Church’s children’s play area, just over my back fence.

When I got home that night, I found a note that began, “We Found Him!” Janice went on to say that she thought Kitty had sensed “the energy” of my home. A meditator herself, she recognized certain signs of meditation in my apartment.

Later, when she sent the photo, she wrote that it was nice to read about Kitty’s adventure from my perspective, but what she and Michael most want to know is the cat’s story. What did he do in his week “living on the lam”? Because now that they’re home, it’s clear that Kitty has developed a bit of an attitude and a new taste for romping in the garden and woods. It’s probably the liberating effect of life on Whidbey Island but, whatever the cause, it’s brought permanent improvement to the cat’s life. Janice said, “I can’t imagine restricting him to a boat again.”

Coming Together

August 11, 2014 / Margaret Bendet

Photos by Kathy Rothschild: The thumbnail is the bride's mother.

Photos by Kathy Rothschild: The thumbnail is the bridal couple.

You can’t always figure out why two particular people bond. Often they don’t know themselves. Last weekend I went to the wedding of two truly beautiful young people, who married at the bride’s parents’ home in a garden the bride, a professional landscaper, had designed and her mother and father—working hard—put in with their own hands: six-foot stands of sunflowers and double tiger lilies waving in the breeze, a humungous climbing monkshood, and masses of dahlias.

Rather than having a religious functionary take them through ceremonial vows, these two young people passed out flutes of champagne and, standing in the midst of seventy-five family and friends, spoke about their love for each other. They’d both grown up on Whidbey Island and hadn’t liked each other much in high school. “He had an air about him,” the bride remembered, “an annoying way of brushing the hair out of his face…”

They went to the same college; they found common ground; she cut his hair. One summer he went on an ill-advised bicycle tour through Nevada and while he waited for the air to cool each day, they talked on the phone—for hours. She wrote in her diary about how one day she’d like to have a life partner and “wouldn’t it be funny” if it ended up being him? Later, she wrote down the date when she knew she loved him.

And the bridegroom talked about how this strong young woman keeps his compass pointed in right direction and how, if he gets off kilter—as he has before and must suspect at some point in his life he might once again—he knows he’ll fight to stay close to her steadying influence.

It was a Whidbey Island event: pot luck appetizers and salads fresh from backyard gardens and the farmers’ markets, a whole pig roasted in a European-style imu, paella prepared by the mother of the bride in a huge pan over an outdoor fire, and a table laden with wedding cakes—some bought at the last minute by one of the guests when it seemed like there might not be enough.

It was such an auspicious beginning—how better to step into marriage than by stating, clearly and in your own words, your love for this person! And it shouldn’t end there.

I had been working in the library that day; a man spent the shank of the afternoon in the leather-bound chair in the library’s back room reading The Brothers Karamazov because he couldn’t be at home with his wife. She needed the space to grieve their daughter’s death from cancer. “She needs space from me,” he admitted. He said that he was Vietnam vet, on medication, someone who never “got over” what happened in the war. “It’s not easy to kill people,” he said, and later he added, “…but it was harder on my wife. They give awards to the soldiers for being in battle. They should give awards to our wives for what they put up with. They should have a parade for the spouses.”

“Tell her that,” I told him. “Take your wife out to dinner tonight and tell her that.” A few days later, he said with a smile that he had done just that.

In our culture, we’re so ready to express our negativities, so eager to tell people what we think they’ve done wrong. Sometimes that’s important, but what we need more of, I feel, is the kind of truth-telling that expresses our love.

That’s the way to honor the bonds we form with each other, whatever the circumstance, whatever our reasons may have been for coming together.

The father of the bride is about to take a formal wedding portrait.

Dollars and Sense

July 22, 2014 / Margaret Bendet

So many people send me opportunities to make and save money. I have to remind myself: what’s great in life has no price tag, but nothing—no thing—is ever free. Like the message I received from the credit union that holds the loan on my car. They’ll give me $150 if I refinance my loan. It sounds good. I’m sure they’d lower my monthly payments. But what would they charge me in added interest over the course of the loan? Much more than $150!

Recently I had an intriguing offer from the car company as well. They’re offering to take my 2011 model on trade for a 2014 model—with no money down and no change in the monthly payments. Of course, I would end up making those monthly payments for a lot longer. If I did this every few years, I could pay them forever.

And invitations to change my insurance come almost daily. Everyone knows about insurance companies. They’re lovely to deal with while you’re signing up or sending them money. When, however, an event in your life might require them to send you money, the honeymoon is over. That’s when you find out the true nature of your relationship—have you aligned yourself with a company you can trust or with the corporate equivalent of Bluebeard?

When I made my recent life transition and was in the market for medical insurance for the first time ever—I’d always had an employer-based plan—I did something truly foolish. A friend told me that if I joined this particular organization, the group would provide me with medical insurance, and because of the large numbers involved, the price would be half the market rate.

I called and talked with a representative, a charming woman who told me she’d signed up for this insurance herself—and weren’t we both clever for finding insurance so inexpensively! I loved that insurance—until I fell, broke my left arm, took an ambulance to the nearest hospital for an X-ray, and learned that I needed surgery.

The medical drama was over in about six weeks; my negotiations, machinations, frustrations, and, ultimately, condemnations involving the insurance company went on for years

Initially, there were issues about the medical procedure itself: the insurance would cover my surgeon and the surgical facility but not the anesthesiologist employed by that facility. (They had the anesthesiologist’s name but at another address. “They have to match perfectly what’s on our list,” a polite voice on the telephone told me: “both the name and the address.”) The insurance would pay for a pin to be put into my elbow but not the medical apparatus the surgeon recommended.

I did have the surgery I needed and, yes, I was anesthetized. Then I dealt with the insurance company.

I would have a clear, focused, friendly conversation on the phone with one of the company’s representatives, a woman named, say, Shawnee. I would take careful notes, fax Shawnee the paperwork she said she needed, and feel that everything was taken care of. Nothing would happen. Months later, I would call and be told that Shawnee no longer worked at the company, no one there had a record of my fax—and I needed to send them certain paperwork before anything could happen at their end. I went through this a couple of times, and then by chance heard the company’s personnel listed in a voicemail recording: one of the names was Shawnee. How many Shawnees could there be?

It was two years after the original accident that the company sent the final payment: $500 for the ambulance—a fee I had long since paid myself. In that time, the company had changed its name twice and, more importantly, I had changed my insurance.

Now, I sign up only with an insurance company recommended by a friend—a friend who has collected from that very company. I figure it’s common sense. And when I hear complaints about Obamacare, I remember what medical insurance was like for me before the passage of the Affordable Healthcare Act.

Four-Legged Friend

July 15, 2014 / Margaret Bendet

I was once a cat person. Cats are lovely, graceful, and independent; they can be affectionate but they can also be demanding or aloof. Like many people I know, cats are provisional friends. Then I was given a cat-sized dog, and I learned that a dog is always your friend. I have never been greeted with such exuberance as I am by this dog—and it happens every time I come home.

Maybe I’ve been gone for just an hour. Chou Chou has already forgotten that when I left he was crushed he couldn’t go out with me.

Maybe I’ve been gone for six hours. Still, he isn’t despondent or distressed or reproachful; he is enraptured. As I step across the threshold, Chou Chou runs over and dances up and down, leaping into the air with a big smile, until I pick him up and hug him. To be honest, I probably wouldn’t enjoy being greeted this way by a person. From a toy poodle, it’s wonderful.

Chou Chou is a family legacy. He was my mother’s last pet; when she died, Chou Chou went to my brother; and when my brother died, the dog came to me. I offered to take him with some trepidation. I knew that having a dog would change my life in certain ways—but I could never have guessed precisely how. I see snack-packs in an entirely new light; I’m indifferent to bones under my coffee table; I have a new tolerance for barking; and more…

WALKS:I used to go for walks a few times a week. When I moved to Whidbey Island, I favored a particular beach where, at low tide, I looked for shells, which, for a while, I was painting. Once Chou Chou arrived, the walks became once or twice daily, and it was soon apparent where he prefers walking: on grass, under shade, in places where he doesn’t have to wear the despised leash. (Would you want to wear a leash?) The ideal place has turned out to be the Langley Cemetery. It would never have been my own choice, but there is plenty of room for Chou Chou to roam free, and I get to contemplate the ephemeral nature of life.

EAGLES: Whidbey has a thriving population of bald-headed eagles, and when I first moved here, I considered any sighting of this regal bird to be an auspicious omen. On my walks with a toy poodle I still look for eagles, but now they mean death from the sky! Chou Chou weighs 8½ pounds, just under the carrying weight for a full-grown eagle.

The threat is real. Circling eagles have flown away once I picked up the dog. Possibly they thought Chou Chou was going to be my lunch. One day I saw an eagle watching us from a nearby branch, and I picked up Chou Chou and looked up at the bird. As he flew off, he gave a screech that registered somewhere between annoyance and anger. A friend described an abandoned aerie he found: it was littered with tiny collars—like little trophies!

When I admired these birds of prey, I did know they hunted small mammals. But sharing my life with a small mammal has made me look at this from a personal perspective—and has given me a new relationship with birds of prey.

OTHER DOGS: I also have a new relationship with other dogs. Now that I’m acquainted with one dog—and appreciate his discerning sniff, his never-ending quest for more food, his splendid loyalty—I have a greater affection for any dog. It’s as if I were seeing dogs through Chou Chou’s eyes. As a cat person, I saw dogs as being of various sizes and weights and breeds. Now every dog is a dog—and might be a four-legged friend.