Category: Whidbey Island (Page 1 of 3)

Yesterday it was a shock to find in my post office box a letter from Donald J. Trump. At one point in my life, I did think of myself as a Republican—but then I turned seventeen, and civil rights became a personal issue. That was almost sixty-three years ago, and I am not exaggerating when I say I have never looked back. I don’t think that in my entire life I have ever voted for a Republican candidate.

How did they get my name and address now?

As I was leaving the Langley Post Office, I told the man behind the counter, “I got a letter from Trump today.”

He said, “I noticed.”

That gave me pause. It’s an association that could ruin a woman’s reputation! I wondered briefly if I should sue Trump for defamation of character, but then I decided on another strategy. Today when I walked into the Post Office, I wore my “Childless Cat Lady for Kamala” T-shirt. Again, the man behind the counter noticed. He smiled and waved.

I must admit, however, that I was intrigued to open Trump’s letter and see what he had to say. Predictably, it was a diatribe against Democrats. In it, Trump claimed, “Joe Biden is America’s worst president ever.”

A little fact-check on this: recently, a group of 154 presidential historians connected with the American Political Science Association rated every US president, and President Biden, the current and 46^th president, came out as the 14^th best in history. It was Trump, the 45^th president, whom they put into last place—naming him America’s worst president ever. So, Trump got part of that right; he just needed to apply it to himself.

Let me add that if Trump were to be re-elected, there are signs that he would be much worse the next time around. His election in 2016 came as a surprise, even to him; in 2024 he’s planning for it. He said in his letter that he will win this election “by a landslide.”

The main point Trump made in this letter—one he made three times in full before his final signature—is that, to save our great nation from Democrats, I should sign a Trump Pledge of Support and return it with “a contribution of $35, $50, $100, $175, $250, $500, $1000, $2500, $3300, or another amount today.”

Perhaps this means that he is spooked by groundswell of support for the Democratic presidential candidate, Kamala Harris, who has to date raised $540 million in her brief campaign against him. It’s about $200 million more than Trump raised in that time.

Another thing Kamala Harris has done is to choose a stellar candidate for vice president, Tim Walz, who is Minnesota’s governor, a former high school teacher, a former assistant football coach, a former Army National Guardsman, and a man who has made no missteps in the campaign because he has a wide-open heart. Walz knows how to relate to people.

Trump’s pick for vice president, J.D. Vance, is a senator from Ohio who, in my opinion, has yet to do anything right. Just today he posted a clip of a verbal stumble made by a teenage pageant queen during the Miss Teen USA event in 2007. With this clip, Vance wrote, “BREAKING: I have gotten ahold of the full Kamala Harris CNN interview.” Even when he was told that the woman whose teenage remarks he was using in his send-up had contemplated suicide after people made fun of her answer seventeen years ago, Vance refused to apologize for, as he put it, “posting a joke.” He wished the woman well but said that it’s important to have fun and that politics has become “way too boring.”

A while ago, Vance lamented that America is being run “by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable in their own lives and want the rest of the country to be miserable, too.” It was a bracingly dismissive view of people who do not live as he does. There was a backlash when this came out, and, true to form, Vance declined to recast his remarks—although he did say that he has nothing against cats. He feels that people without children don’t have a real stake in the future of the country and shouldn’t have the same voting power as parents.

The thought of these two weird men being the president and vice president of this magnificent country is something that can make me miserable (though that’s not a word I would usually apply to my life).

I showed Trump’s letter to a friend, who said, “I wish I still had the checkbook for my old bank account. I’d send the Republicans a huge check they wouldn’t be able to cash—and maybe it would mess them up.”

It raises the question: what can an individual do?

Well, for one thing, I’ll keep wearing my “Childless Cat Lady for Kamala” T-shirt. I’ll meditate. I’ll pray. I’ll make campaign donations as I can. I’ll write postcards to other Democrats, urging them to vote. And, of course, I’ll vote myself. Because, in fact, even having no children, I do care about the future of my country.

I am sliding into my eightieth year. No, I’m not going to be eighty soon. I’ll be seventy-nine, which is—as I’m saying—the beginning of the eightieth year of my life. I still feel unaccountably young, and one way I manage that is to have some older friends. When asked her age, my friend Marilee Peterson usually glares and says, “I am older than dirt!”

One life event that comes naturally over time is the death of our friends. There is something shocking about death. It may be the one inevitable fact of life but, still, death is a mystery. It’s a passage and, generally speaking, it’s irreversible.

I say “generally speaking” because my friend Pat Brunges died—a clinical death—in an ambulance a few months back and lived to talk about it. Lived, as well, to deal with the broken rib that came from someone’s shocking her heart to restart it.

But for most of us, once we die, we move on. Whatever that may mean.

It has been my experience that the deaths that occur as a result of illness or accidental trauma are infinitely easier to cope with than those that happen years prematurely and by choice. A former neighbor of mine took his own life several years back, and I asked myself many times afterward if there was anything I could have done to change Greg’s decision. Surely, yes. Surely, there was something. A couple of times since, on the street, I thought I saw him. . . Then I realized that, no, it was not Greg. Greg is gone.

The pain of a friend’s suicide has been experienced by a whole tribe of people—fairly young people—on Whidbey Island in the last couple of weeks. In that time, two vibrant individuals in their thirties, or perhaps early forties, who lived here made the choice to end their own lives. They were connected to each other, and one of them grew up on Whidbey, so the cross currents and overlapping waves from these two personal tragedies are touching many local hearts—a daughter’s best friend, a son’s first love.

I believe it’s the thought what could I have done? that carries the greatest sting. I had affection for you. I respected you. Was that not enough?

Of course, it is never enough. The whole world can love us, but if we do not love ourselves, then, ultimately, our lives will not feel to us that they’re worth living.

My revered teacher recently published an essay about how, in our search for inner peace, we can reclaim, rename, and reconceive any aspect of our lives to support ourselves to find what we’re looking for. If something about our lives is unsatisfying to us, or has come to feel flat to us, we can find new words for it and, with this renaming, we can discover that—yes—what we have is quite sufficient for our needs. It is, in fact, divine.

For instance, in regard to aging, I could focus on the changes that are happening to my body and the way that, as an older woman, I have become invisible to large swaths of the people around me… Or, on the other hand, I could look at the mental tranquility I have developed and the way my guru-mantra—employed now over some length of time—protects me and helps to keep me steady. So, instead of “aging,” I could look at how I’m “coming into my maturity.” And what a difference that makes!

We may not be able to do this for those who have chosen to leave us but, seeing the pain their departures have created for ourselves and for those we love, we can decide that we will not make that particular choice. We will find a way to survive—and to thrive—for as long as we can.

Even if we’re “older than dirt.”

At the height of the pandemic, I was adopted by a cat—a blue-eyed, probably part-Siamese female who had been left with my next-door neighbor. The cat’s name was Marie, but this didn’t seem to suit her, so I began calling her Mira—which is close in sound but quite different in association. Mira is the name of one of India’s poet-saints, a sixteenth-century Rajasthani princess who left her husband to join the company of other devotees. That’s the way I see what our Mira did. I’m not sure how she sees it. She and another cat, a male named Roy, were parked at my neighbor’s house last summer by one of his ex-wives, who told him she was going on a two-month vacation to Hawaii.

Shortly thereafter, one day in July I was sitting, just as I am right now, on my couch writing, with my laptop propped in my lap. The front door was open but with one of those magnetic, semi-cloth screens that discourage flies from coming in but not cats. A cat with artful markings in silver, black, and gold crept in from under the screen, walked quickly and stealthily past me, through the living room and into the kitchen… and just as stealthily back through the living room and into the bedroom and bathroom… and then she ran out the front door.

It was odd. Anyway, I thought it was odd. This whole time—maybe a minute in total—I was trying to encourage the cat to come to me on the couch so I could pet her. But it was as if she were on a mission. The next day, the cat came back, and this time she approached me directly; she was happy to be petted—a bit. Once again, she didn’t stay long. But I realized then that the first day had, indeed, been a mission, a reconnaissance mission. She’d been checking out the whole area, making sure there were no nasty surprises in store—a dog or another cat hiding somewhere, ready to ambush her.

Before very long, Mira took to staying the day with me. When my neighbor returned home after work, she’d go to his place for dinner—and then come back to me again to sleep. I got some cat treats for her, but that was it. She ate with him and lived with me. I hadn’t been ready to take on another animal. Having lost a beloved pet a few years back, I didn’t want to make another commitment. But this was just for two months, right? So, in this way, Mira snuck up on me.

When autumn came, I surmised that the person who’d dropped Mira off was not coming back to get her. By this time, the bond was forged, and there was no going back. I started feeding her, my landlord put in a cat door, a friend installed a ramp on the deck, and I got one of those multi-level cat environments, which now has pride of place in my living room. I became a cat lady.

It would have been hard to go through the isolation of the pandemic without Mira curled up and sleeping in a ball in various places throughout my home, leaping to the top of my bookshelf, sitting in my lap when I chant, looking over at me with her enigmatic blue eyes, making those deep-throated cat sounds that I cannot replicate even though I try.

A few months ago, I got a hint that Mira’s moving in was, in part, a way for her to escape from some form of domestic abuse next door. Late one night I heard her making distress sounds in her penthouse suite. I got up and walked over to her. Mira was sitting erect in the dark, staring out through the sliding glass door to the deck outside. I couldn’t see anything in the dark, but I turned on the deck light—and there he was: a stocky male cat looking up at Mira. “Roy!” I thought. I stood next to the window and tapped on it, close to him. Roy hissed at me, and then he turned and ran off the deck.

That night Mira slept in bed with me, rolled into a tight ball, pressed against my heart. So, perhaps I did something good for her as well. Which is as it should be.

I do like Christmastime, and I hate to admit it, but I think part of the reason has to do with the lights, the sparkle, the surfeit of cookies and candy, and all those wrapped presents. My favorite image from Christmas is the tree with presents around it.

My experience has almost always been that the gifts themselves are bittersweet—not quite right, if you know what I mean. I don’t think I’ve ever unwrapped a Christmas gift and been utterly thrilled by it—but I am happy to see presents in their paper and ribbons, and I love to wrap the gifts I give other people. It’s an art form, which at the least half the time I create with paper and ribbons salvaged from earlier gifts. Something happens in the wrapping of a gift. A simple expression of one’s affection becomes… a mystery, a sparkling symbol of the season, a sign that this person is loved.

My mother had a real thing about having a lot of gifts under the Christmas tree. Money was always tight in our house, but Christmas had to be big. My senior year of high school, when we were shopping for school clothes in September, I absolutely loved a particular jacket called a car coat. It was stylish and cool… the coat that everyone at school would be wearing. My mother said, “I’ll buy it for you, but it has to be a Christmas gift.”

“Can’t you let me have it now?” I asked her. “You’re paying for it now.”

“No,” she said, “because then, when Christmas comes, you’ll forget. The car coat will be old then. You’ll have been wearing for months. And you’ll feel badly that you aren’t getting enough for Christmas.”

So, for four months the car coat sat in my mother’s closet. It was then duly wrapped and put under the Christmas tree, and I wore it to school in January—when that very car coat was on sale for a fraction of what it had cost in September and when, truthfully, at school it was no longer considered “in.”

With a history like that, you’d think I’d despise Christmas gifts, but no. Perhaps I’ve become my mother. I like wrapping the gifts, having the wrapped gifts sitting out.

My brother was the same way. After Mom died, I spent a few Christmases with Geoff and his family, and one year, I realized that he and his wife had wrapped underwear—not special underwear, just underwear that they were going to get for themselves anyway—and put it under the tree with their names on it. “It’s nice to have a lot of presents under the tree,” Geoff said. He wasn’t even embarrassed. Why would he be? He was raised by the same mother I was.

I will say that my focus long ago shifted. Almost nobody is coming into my house in this year of social distancing, so the presents I’ve wrapped and have sitting around my tree are not for show. And they’re certainly not presents for me. Truly, I no longer think of Christmas as time to receive gifts. It is a time to give—and the wrapped gifts that sit around the tiny tree on my dining room table give me enormous pleasure because they’re a sign that I’ve grown up, that I have a family of my own—my friends—and that within my always-somewhat-limited resources, I can create shine and sparkle and mystery to share.

Absolutely the best gift I gave this Christmas was to Mira, the Siamese-and-something cat who is now living with me. She is named after a 16^th-century Rajasthani princess, a poet-saint who is celebrated for the ecstatic love-songs she sang to Lord Krishna. Our Mira has not manifested this particular trait, but she does sit in my lap purring while I recite holy texts, and I take this as a sign of her potential for elevated consciousness.

I couldn’t help but notice, however, that this cat was actively seeking elevation of another kind. She liked to jump from my computer desk to the top of a five-foot bookshelf in the living room, switching her elegant tail in front of a picture of my Guru that hangs there. Once she leapt—I know not how—to the top of the seven-foot bookshelf in my bedroom and knocked to the floor the stuffed animals on display.

I decided that what Mira needed was her own seat, and one day last week, on a whim, I went to a sort of pet emporium just north of Freeland and purchased a four-foot-high contraption fashioned by a local artisan from Whidbey Island driftwood. This piece involves two stable steps to an upholstered perch, where Mira now pretty much lives. It took her a day to try it out—as sometimes happens with gifts—but once she’d achieved that penthouse level, she clearly knew that this was her place.

I have seen friends enjoy, and sometimes even cherish, gifts I’ve given them. But I have never before had the satisfaction of watching someone inhabit their gift. It was as if I had bought Mira a home. I found the experience quite fulfilling.

It reminded me of a conversation I had some three decades ago with a Hawaiian kapuna, an “elder”—who was probably the age I am now—about the nature of aloha, which in its broadest sense, means “love.” This woman said, “If I give you a papaya, it isn’t that I wouldn’t enjoy eating that papaya myself. I would enjoy it. I like papaya.” She paused. “But I would take a greater joy in your joy.”

So, that’s my new understanding of the Christmas spirit—it’s about the greater joy of giving.