Archive: May 2009

A progress report on my three resolutions for 2009:

Every day, I will clean for 15 minutes.
Yet again, I was foiled by installing cabinets. During that whole week, I was packing kitchen items or tearing out old units, and I pushed the cleaning scheme to the back burner. However, I kept track of my deficits, and May has been a month of clean-up catch-up. Even today, the last day of the month, I took care of tasks from all the way back to Friday, but I am finally in good standing, at least for the moment.

Every week, I will write and send my grandmother a note.
This month, I had something to report every week, plus the boon of a Mother’s Day card, so I managed to send my little missives without any last-minute panic or retrospective regret. I have sunk to a new low that is adding “Write and send weekly card” to my PDA as a recurring task; it seems that unless I do that, nothing will get done. Eh. Whatever works, I guess.

For those who have asked how my grandmother has reacted to her mail, the answer is that I am not totally sure. I just send her the notes in good faith that she’ll appreciate getting mail. When we saw my parents in Baltimore recently, my dad mentioned that my grandmother had brought up my cards and that she liked them. “You write them every week?” he asked incredulously. So, that’s nice to hear.

Every month, I will take at least a few hours just for myself.
I mentioned last month that I had started participating in a small group discussion with three other women from my church, and it has been really good for me. I leave every week with something new to ponder, and the plan for this week is to talk about C.S. Lewis’s The Horse and His Boy. I can’t wait.

In other news …
I ran my second 5K race of the year today! I don’t have any plans for another race, but I imagine that I might run the Mushroom Festival 5K again. One thing’s for sure: I need a new pair of sneakers like whoa.

We’re picking up our first share in our CSA on Wednesday, and I am so excited and nervous. I’m excited because I can’t wait to have fresh produce at hand, and there are so many things I want try. I’m nervous because I want so badly to eat or freeze every single thing we get and rock the face off of this CSA. I hope I’m not the only one whose neurotic over-achiever tendencies emerge when supporting local agriculture.

In my quest to further organize our kitchen-in-progress, I took a trip to Walmart this week to scout out solutions for storage under the sink. After I found a plastic drawer unit and a small crate in what I thought were the right dimensions, I picked out two Father’s Day cards and headed to the self-check-out area.

When I have a basket’s worth of purchases, I love the self-check-out, but I have certain beliefs about it:

• The people waiting should form one line. It makes no sense for each station to have its own line! With one queue, the next person can go to the next open station, and no one is penalized by a malfunction, either by the machine or the user.
• Self-check-outs should be treated as express lanes. Realistically, only as much stuff as can fit into the bagging area is manageable because the system has a conniption at the offense of taking bags away. Besides, when I have a full cart, I sure as heck do not want to scan and bag everything by myself.

Out of the four self-check-out stations, one was out of order. The lady at one of the remaining three stations was in the process of buying a lot bulky paper products and corralling her four children. All of a sudden, she came rushing out of the check-out area with her toddler daughter in her arms and shouted to her three sons, “Stay right there!” The boys proceeded to crawl and climb all over the station, which was still out of commission because the order wasn’t complete. I was dumbfounded.

I was next in line, and just as a girl finished ringing up her lip gloss, a woman cut me off with a cart with a baby sitting in the front seat.

“Excuse me,” I said, “the line for the self-check-outs is here,” and I gestured to the three people standing behind me.

“Well, there are two lines,” she said, with quite a lot of attitude. “Which one are you in?”

“I – I was going to go to the next open one,” I stammered.

“Well, go,” she snapped, nodding at the station where the girl with the lip gloss had been.  Then she went right past the line and parked her cart behind the one belonging to the lady who had run out with her toddler.

My fellow line-waiters and I exchanged exasperated glances. I began scanning my purchases with a vengeance, determined to get out of there before this woman. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed that she had realized that her station wasn’t exactly progressing, and she persuaded the cashier overseeing the self-check-outs to ring her up with her scanner. What! That is not the point of the self-check-out! I grabbed my receipt and made for the door, mad as a hornet.

“Miss!”

The long-suffering man who had been waiting behind me all that time called to me. “You forgot your change.”

Of course, I did. I walked back, took my money, thanked the man, and made it out of the store first. It was a moral victory, or something.

As I look back at the situation, I’m sure there was a reasonable explanation for everything. I’m sure the first mom was completely frazzled, and her daughter had some kind of emergency. I’m sure the second woman did not appreciate me pointing out a less-than-universal  “one line for self-check-outs” rule, even though a line had already formed of its own volition.

A friend of ours has a saying that about how people are rude, inconsiderate, and … and something else. Selfish? Self-centered? Something like that. I’m sure he doesn’t forget the third one. Basically, his point is that I shouldn’t expect courteous, reasonable behavior from people (not that I am the shining beacon of those virtues), so there’s no need to be upset when my expectations aren’t met. Sigh. I know he’s right, but I still get all up in a tizzy.

The Weight of Heaven is tough book to read because its content is so difficult: death, marriage struggles, alienation, and political unrest. Thrity Umrigar’s rich language creates a compelling read with a tight, fast-moving finish that was worth the tension.

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I knew from reading the jacket information that Thrity Umrigar’s novel, The Weight of Heaven, would not be a light read. The book tells of a couple who has lost their only child, and the prologue grabbed my attention from the start:

A few days after Benny’s death, Ellie and Frank Benton broke into separate people. Although they didn’t know it then.

Hoo boy.

The story begins with Ellie and Frank in Girbaug, India, where they have moved from Ann Arbor, Michigan, in the aftermath of losing their son. Frank’s company offered him the opportunity to run the plant in the small Indian town, and despite her better judgment as a psychologist, Ellie encourages the move as a way to make a clean start where no one would view them as poor Benny’s parents. As the story jumps around in time, the reader sees their early courtship, the years with Benny, and ultimately, how their marriage suffers the wounds of grief and blame. Ramesh, the son of the couple’s servants, is the one bright point in India for Frank, but Ellie fears that a dangerous substitution — one son for another — is taking place in her husband’s mind.

I should start by saying that I loved the book. Umrigar’s word choice and pace lulled me into the heat of India and let me walk comfortably in the perspective of all of her characters. I empathized most strongly with Ellie. She analyzed situations with her psychologist’s brain, and she was with Benny when he died, with Frank out of town. She loved being in India, and she felt disconnected from her husband. I wanted the circumstances to improve for her in particular.

However, when I recommend this book to others, I need to disclaim that reading it felt like being punched in the stomach or having the air knocked out of my lungs. The characters were imbued with such deep pain, and watching them muddle through it made me wince and sigh for them. Umrigar’s perspective is not devoid of hope or light, but she’s very clear that life is a hard lot for some folks, and reading about it is not going to be a picnic. After I had been knocked around for 300 pages, the ending slapped me right in the face, leaving me stunned, and yet I still kept turning pages like a maniac.

I guess the moral of this story is that if you are grieving a loss or just not in the mood to think very much, The Weight of Heaven is probably not the best choice for reading. But if you want a novel that is thought-provoking, compelling, and heartfelt, I think you should go for it. Plus, I am dying to talk to someone about Frank and the ending, so the motives of this recommendation aren’t entirely pure.

As we have in the past, JG and I spent most of the long Memorial Day weekend with his parents, but this year marked the beginning of a new era that includes a lake house. My in-laws recently finished building it this spring, and the plan is to use it as a vacation home until my father-in-law retires in three years, or his company offers him an incentive, whichever comes first. In the meantime, however, JG and I have acquired keys to the place along with his parents’ blessing to use it as often as we can, and I have no problem taking them up on that.

Between JG’s grandma, aunts, uncles, and cousins, there were 16 of us gathered at the lake house for Saturday’s main event. We ate a ridiculous quantity of food (I brought raspberry bars and chocolate chip dip) and then walked it off on the way to the beach, where people went boating, played games, and napped. This side of the family only comes together about once a year, so there is always a lot of exclaiming over how much people are growing or how soon others are graduating. A luna moth, games of Speed Scrabble, an aunt’s homemade pickles and deviled eggs, and my first pedicure were my highlights. I also enjoyed watching the youngest cousin cautiously pet Ted at the start of the visit and then give him a goodbye hug at the end of the day.

Whenever I spend time with JG’s family, I’m struck by how different my experience is between the two families. For me, family time on my side tends to be tense and charged, because it seems like actions connote a lot of meaning, like how prepared I am to host, what dessert I bring along, or what I contribute to a conversation. I don’t feel strongly that people necessarily want to see me; it’s more of an assumed ritual to undergo as part of my familial responsibilities. Part of that is cultural, I’m sure, and I don’t mean to bash at fulfilling one’s duty. It’s only that I’ve been married that I feel the rub of simply spending time together because we happen to be related and that’s what related people do, not because we actually like each other. At the same time, I don’t think I am entitled to spend time with only people I like. If that were the case, even JG would be exiled at certain moments.

JG’s family is much more laid-back than mine. They don’t care what time I emerge from bed, what I wear, or if I’m dozing off while the rest of the room watches a football game. Everyone is generally more effusive and talkative, so it seems like they genuinely enjoy seeing me. Maybe it’s that I don’t feel so closely monitored, or that I don’t have much to prove, so I perceive a significant difference. Of course, the time is not completely free of obligation. I’m still finding my footing in the family, so I empty the dishwasher, make up the guest bed, bring a dessert, and try to make peace with my deep-seated duties. It can be just as tiring as being with my family, where I am accustomed to the pressure, because I’m still translating the family ways into my language.

I suppose my struggle might be one of those rough spots of being an adult child, that paradox of living independently, but having learned how to function beneath my family’s framework. I understand the value of holding to an obligation or a tradition, but I have to believe that, with family ties, there can be a balance between have-to and want-to.