Under the Dome

I originally posted this "review" to Goodreads. I thought I'd give it a little extra rotation over here. Yesterday, on day 81 of his stay at York Hospital, Pop was moved to HealthSouth Rehabilitation Hospital to begin the intensive and arduous task of re-learning to stand, then walk, and swallow again. He is on the upswing and I am so proud of how hard he's been fighting. I hope I've inherited some of those genes, and at least a little bit of his determination.

Originally posted to Goodreads:

This isn't really a review. It's a story about the circumstances under which I read this book. But, given those circumstances, I thought I'd take the liberty of posting this instead of a review. The book, by the way, was fantastic.

June 17, 2010

11:59 p.m.

Under the Dome

This has been a difficult year. I’ve lost count of how many funerals there have been for people I deeply admired, and some for people I deeply loved. I resigned from my job, and, in a sense, my community. To hide out and catch my breath.

And then, just when you think you cannot possibly shoulder any more, life has a way of throwing a Molotov cocktail through your living room window while you’re inside, lying on the couch.

Several long months after my aunt passed away, after the nightmare of discovering the secret life she was living, I found a Borders gift card she’d given me for Christmas only two months before she died. It just turned up one day, appearing in a gift bag filled with what I thought were empty boxes and envelopes, cast aside on the floor next to the daybed in the guest room. It was unmistakable, how it popped up in the same fashion as one of her unexpected phone calls used to come: a pleasant, eccentric little surprise.

I carried the gift card around in my purse for about a week, before making a trip to Borders to get the newest Stephen King book, Under the Dome. Although I often say that Stephen King is the reason I love to read, the reason I love to write, I couldn’t bring myself to buy the hefty hardcover. It tops out at 1074 pages and carried a $35 price tag. I reasoned that people without jobs should wait for paperback. No matter that I’d never in my life waited for a Stephen King book to come out in paperback. I’d never waited past the release date to purchase one, and rarely a week to finish reading one. Things had changed, but one thing remained the same – even in death, my aunt had managed to get me a wonderful gift I never would have splurged on for myself.

The book wasn’t easy to tote around for a few stolen minutes here and there, but I tried. The most I’d get to spend with it at a stretch was during the mandatory 20-minute wait after my allergy shots every other week, so I eventually just kept it in the car for those sessions. I figured it would take me the entire summer to read it.

I was about 100 pages deep, two months after I first cracked the book open, when my grandfather was rushed to the hospital on a Friday morning. I had taken the second shift hanging around the ICU waiting room, relieving my mother, who had spent the afternoon there. She came home to stay with my son, and threw a sweatshirt and a book into a bag for me to take to my grandmother. “A book?,” I asked. She shrugged and said any distraction would be welcome. So when I got to the hospital, I grabbed my own book off the passenger seat and took that in with me, too.

The next five days are a blur of waiting, waiting, waiting in the windowless room where surgeons and specialists would appear at irregular intervals to bring news of my grandfather’s fight for his life. And in between, unable to bear the slow crawl of the clock, I opened the giant book on my lap and read.

A constantly shifting cast of characters moved in and out of the waiting room. At one point, a nurse peeked her head into the room to ask the waiting room attendant, “do you want that book now?” The attendant nodded, and the nurse returned from her break with a copy of the book I was reading. She noticed me sitting there, lost in the book, and said, “heeey! She’s reading the same one!” She pointed to the attendant. “I’m loaning it to her to read on vacation.” She came into the room and sat down on the couch next to me. We talked for several delicious, comforting minutes about Stephen King and John Irving. Just two people having a normal conversation, one of them wearing scrubs.

Other people – hospital staff, other people waiting for news of loved ones, even some of my own family members – commented. “That’s a big book,” one man remarked after settling onto the other half of the loveseat I occupied in the large, and otherwise empty room in the wee hours of the first night. I agreed and stuck my nose back in.

When I got to be somewhere around 700 pages in, a panic started settling in around the edges of my mind. What was going to happen when I finished the book? How could I face what was going on without it? But still I pressed on, reading, reading, reading. I am, after all, Stephen King’s Constant Reader.

Yesterday, Pop made it through his third major surgery and to a point where one doctor finally said to us that he thought Pop might make it through. We all breathed a sigh of cautiously optimistic relief and I opened my book.

Tonight, lying on my stomach on my bed, on top of the covers, I finished Under the Dome. I cried silently for the last 20 or so pages. The entire thing was a pedal-to-the-metal page-turner, would have been so even under the most typical circumstances here on my side of the looking-glass. But the intense crescendo of the final scenes wasn’t the only thing that made me weep. I was crying for knowing I’d soon be crawling out from behind the book’s protective shield. Crying over the fact that I’d have to rejoin a world less perfectly choreographed.

I finished reading the author’s note in the final pages, closed the back cover, and lay my head down in my arms and sobbed. I discovered I was also crying from the weight of knowing that I could never do that. Never write anything like it.

And so here I sit, in this flawed world, where we never know what’s going to happen next, or just how much we can bear. There is nothing to do but keep turning the pages, and enjoy the story along the way.

Funerals and Pink Sequins

I know it’s been a long, long time since I posted anything here. Let’s skip the part where I apologize and berate myself, shall we? Good, thanks.

I took the day off work today to attend the funeral of a very dear family friend. Nannie Pearl was the grandmother of my oldest friends, Lauren and Rob, whom I met when I was three years old. I’ve known them, literally, my whole life.

She died the same way she lived: spontaneously. One moment she was here, the next she was gone. It’s left us all in shock. I called a friend who’d grown up with us to tell her the news, and she just seemed confused. “I know,” I told her. “Sure, she was almost 86 years old, but she was Nannie Pearl.”

She had always been there, and hadn’t seemed to change much at all throughout our entire lives, except maybe to slow down a bit, and I don’t think it ever really occurred to any of us that there would ever be a time when she wouldn’t be there. I could picture her at her grandkids’ weddings, could even picture her at her great-granddaughter’s high school graduation (which, at this point, is still almost 8 years away). It’s so strange to try to picture some momentous occasion without her being there.

I shuffled into her church with my parents, trying, for reasons unknown to me now, to be stoic. I was telling myself I wanted to hold it together for my mother, whose anxiety was threatening to make her head explode, for my father, whose joints were stiff with the cold of a windy January day, and for Nannie Pearl’s daughter and grandkids, who I consider extended family. But when we got up near the coffin and saw her with her pink sequined baseball cap in her hand, I lost it. When I reached where Diane, her daughter, was standing, words failed me entirely. Where were any of us to begin expressing our sympathy and our gratitude for having known her?

We took our seats and I stared at the memorial leaflet, which featured a small illustration of a floral arrangement with calla lilies and lilacs. “Lauren likes calla lilies,” I told my mother. That’s why I’d chosen a sympathy card with them on the front.

Next I opened the program. Lauren would be reading from Corinthians 1:13, a passage I’d been asked to read at three weddings (so far). It seemed a fitting way to pay tribute to someone so full of love for life and those around her. I also saw that someone had selected “In the Garden” to be part of the service. I pointed it out to my mother, who raised her eyebrows quizzically. It was my grandmother’s (my mother’s mother’s) favorite hymn. Apparently my mother did not know this.

I felt very glad to know these kinds of things about the people in my life. I’ve always been a walking encyclopedia of these kinds of details, but I don’t ever consciously think about it, or about the fact that this is a gift for which I should be grateful - not everyone is equipped to notice or remember this kind of minutia. I hope there are people who know what kinds of flowers I like (alstromeria, gladiolus, hydrangea) and the very few hymns I know by heart (Peace in the Valley, Up from the Grave He Arose).

I watched as kids I used to babysit, now grown men, filed into the pews, nodding their condolences to each other. I thought of the memories, many of which I’d witnessed firsthand, that must be swirling through their heads.

I have never been someone who goes to church, but I have always admired a pastor who can give a sermon that says just the right things at a wedding, a christening, a funeral; I admire anyone speaking publicly who has this talent. The service was perfect – a comforting remembrance of someone whose faith and love were vast and unconditional.

Diane's eulogy perfectly captured how everyone felt about her mother. She talked about how Nannie never changed, and about her love of shopping that now spans several generations. She said that she wasn’t sure how the Bon-Ton was doing here in the first quarter, but that we might want to consider selling our stocks. We all laughed.

The eulogy was followed by a “time of personal sharing,” during which people stood to say how much Nannie had meant to them and the kinds of things they were going to fondly remember when they thought of her. The recurring theme was that Pearl was always Pearl…she never changed. And everyone kept saying how strange this world will be without her.

For my part, I kept thinking about when Nannie Pearl and Papa Bob would take us kids to the pool in the summer in their station wagon with the wood panels on the side. We did everything together as kids, and Nannie Pearl and Papa Bob were around almost as much as my own grandparents. I remember how devastating it was to hear that Papa Bob had passed away. A few years later, when my son Carter was born (exactly two months after Nannie Pearl’s first and only great-grandchild, Vienna, was born), we gave him the middle name Robert, for several people who were important in his family history, including Lauren’s beloved Papa.

I sat in the church, crying and laughing at the same time as people remembered our Nannie Pearl. I thought of her past pets, her old pink refrigerator from the 50s that was still running until just a few years ago. I thought about the Thanksgiving when she ate my mom’s Jack Daniels cranberry relish on Ritz crackers (there comes a point in any Thanksgiving when anything can become a vehicle for eating more of the JD cranberry relish). I thought about this Thanksgiving, when Lauren and Diane put Nannie in the car and drove her the one block to my parents’ house so she could see the spectacle of my brother and father deep-frying a turkey on the front lawn. I thought of other holidays and birthdays and family outings, and reports from my mother on the funny-but-sage Pearl-isms I’d missed when I was celebrating holidays elsewhere.

I thought of trick-or-treat nights when we were kids and she would come over to help hand out candy, and how every trick-or-treat night since Vienna and Carter were born, how we’ve started with dinner at Diane’s house and then take the kids around to all the houses we used to visit on Halloween when we were their age. What would it be like this year when the kids come back to Diane’s with their loot and Nannie Pearl isn’t there to oversee the Great Candy Trade, when they dump their bags out onto the family room floor?

When we left the church, we walked among our old neighbors, people we’d have been so happy to see and catch up with under different circumstances.

I shivered against the cold and thought of a warmer time, two summers ago, when we sat at the ballpark with Nannie Pearl, and I told her how much I liked her pink sequined cap. She posed for a picture, wearing the sequined cap and her ever-present smile. That’s how I will always remember her: smiling. That will never, ever change.

Pearl Maciolek

March 13, 1924 - January 21, 2010

Back to Me

I have turned some kind of corner.

I woke up one day recently and realized I’d been in a good mood for several weeks. I’d strung together a few good days, and then a few more, and the gaps were becoming fewer and farther between. I was vaguely aware that something was different, but it sort of came over me gradually until I realized that I’d hit some kind of new record for keeping my anxiety at bay.

When it hit me, I actually wondered whether something was wrong. Was it normal to sustain feeling this good for this long? It certainly wasn’t “normal” for me. I couldn’t quite put my finger on this new feeling right away.

But I soon realized what it was: I felt like myself. For the first time in longer than I can even remember, for the first time in – quite literally – years, I felt like me.

I am still facing the same big life challenges, but I am no longer feeling overwhelmed by and hopeless about them. I’m dealing with them with a matter-of-fact objectivity that’s much healthier and certainly more constructive.

What’s the secret? I suppose it’s got a little to do with timing, and a lot to do with just deciding to work to make it happen. I’ve come a long way in the last year. I’ve healed and I’ve grown and I’ve become more comfortable with myself than ever. I’ve taken ownership of my own happiness by focusing on my own needs and attending to them at a much healthier level than I had in the past. I’m delighted to find that taking care of oneself does not preclude one from taking care of others. In fact, it makes it much easier. I’ve sought out opportunities to spend time doing the things I love, and have minimized time spent doing things about which I’m not passionate. And I’ve become very picky about who I’m spending my time with.

So with all those pieces in place, lots of other ones have started to fall into place on their own. Many of them are music-related, and nearly all of them happened sort of organically – that is to say, without me taking the initiative to get them started. I’ve helped a friend write a song. I’ve been invited to write for a few cool new projects coming down the pike (details soon, I promise). Everything’s coming up JJ! Amazing how life starts to help you out when you start helping yourself out.

It feels so good to feel this good.

There's No Such Thing As Too Much

I will one day look back on 2009 as the year when I finally began to believe in myself as a writer. I can’t remember a time in my life when I didn’t write. I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t receiving some form of instruction to improve my writing. I can’t remember a time when I did not identify myself in my own mind as a writer.

But my name has rarely been attached to my best writing. Through my day jobs, I have frequently written compelling appeals and calls to action, but have rarely had a byline; in fact, I often sign other people’s names to them. Sure, I keep samples for the portfolio I’ve never created, but the evidence of my writing does not seem entirely tangible without my name next to it. (Side note – I am not complaining; this is the nature of the kind of work I do – work I find incredibly fulfilling).

In my personal life, I’ve written more poetry than I can even recall. But until recently, no one had ever read it. I write because that’s how I process what’s going on in my life and the world around me. It’s a creative outlet that helps me understand my own thoughts and feelings. It’s just what I do.

If 2008 was the most difficult year I’ve ever been through (see first post to this blog, “I Don’t Know How She Does It”), 2009 has so far been the most inspired. I continue to face some major challenges and obstacles in my daily life, but I’m also very excited to be growing by leaps and bounds as a writer.

I am no good with New Year’s resolutions, but I did make some promises to myself around the first of the year. I thought about how I’ve always wanted to be someone who keeps a journal regularly, and how I beat myself up about not having documented some of my life’s monumental moments. And I vowed to find ways to create opportunities to write. Any accomplished writer will tell you that the way to get better is to read and write. A LOT.

So I started this blog in January. I figure if the possibility exists that someone out there may be reading it, I will hold myself accountable for posting regularly (once a month is the schedule, at least for now, although you’ll notice I missed posting in April). I am encouraged by the positive feedback I’ve been receiving. It feels good to have someone start up a conversation based on something they’ve read here, explore a topic further, and/or share their own perspective.

I also started a gratitude journal. It’s still a journal, of sorts, but it has a theme, rather than serving as a record of all that’s going on (which is sometimes too much to face in the format of a diary). Each night, before I go to sleep, I take a few minutes to reflect back on my day and record five things for which I am grateful. I also write about an interaction I had with someone during the course of the day that made me feel grateful. This ranges from some showing of compassion by my son, to a friend performing some unexpected act of kindness, to a stranger offering me a tissue when I sniffle in a coffee shop. The added benefit of the gratitude journal is that it directs me to focus on positive things before going to sleep. In the past, I almost dreaded going to bed because I’d lay there and my mind would start racing and I wouldn’t be able to fall asleep. So the gratitude journal, you see, serves several purposes.

And the biggest piece of the puzzle is the independent study in poetic expression I just completed at Penn State York. I have taken many writing classes over the years, but they’ve all been professional writing classes – journalism, business writing, grant writing, etc., etc., etc. I have never taken a creative writing class in my life. And while I write poetry every day, virtually no one had ever laid eyes on any of it prior to this semester. My enthusiasm for this study is a testament to how much I admire and trust my professor as both an instructor and a writer.

I have always been one who appreciates The Red Pen, but my thirst for constructive feedback has reached new heights in the last few months. This class had, without a doubt, more of an immediate and profound impact on my writing, my work, and my life in general, than all the other classes I’ve taken – combined. It was the perfect storm of one-on-one instruction with a great mentor and absolutely perfect timing. This was exactly the right moment in my life to have this opportunity, and I am so grateful for it.

I am keeping my fingers crossed that all the details will soon be ironed out for a second independent study that will focus on publishing. If you had told me last year that I would be considering – let alone looking forward to – submitting any of my work for publication, I’d have thought you were nuts. Further proof that the only constant in my life is change.

Once I complete the second study, I’m hoping (pending receipt of an undergraduate research grant) to launch a publishing project and invite you to participate. I’ll post details here when I have them – maybe as soon as this fall.

The only thing I've ever wanted to be is a writer. I’m doing what I love. So the lesson here is that the more opportunities I’ve managed to create for myself to write – often and in varied forms – the closer I’ve gotten to finding my voice and honing my skills. This is true with most things in life; practice makes perfect. Go out there and do what you love to do – with reckless abandon.

Personal Anthem

I had a conversation with a friend today that reminded me of a journal entry I’d written back in January, when it was still cold and windy, especially at night.

I have always been someone who has found solace and vindication and understanding through music – or more specifically, song lyrics. And I don’t mean playing or writing music. I do not play any instrument. I do not have a good singing voice. But I am an avid (read: rabid) music lover with a voracious, nearly insatiable appetite for songs I can add to the soundtrack of my life.

So music is the thing that really juices me. I’d like to believe that everyone has that one thing that really – pardon the cliché – makes their heart sing, be it hiking through the woods, or painting, or taking their grandkids to the beach, or enjoying downtime in their favorite coffee shop, or playing a round of golf, or planting flowers in their yard... But I’m not sure that’s the case. I hope you know what that thing(s) is for you, and that you make time for it as frequently as you can.

Below is my brief commentary on the reminder I received, in an unlikely moment on an ordinary night, about the impact music can have on my mood, my perspective, my life.


January 10, 2009

I haven’t been so affected by a song in a long, long time.

Maybe it had something to do with the fact that I hadn’t slept much over the last week. I met a friend over drinks and we sat around restlessly, talking about nothing until the lights came on and we had to leave. I said goodbye on the sidewalk in the cold and headed for my car, shoulders hunched up nearly to my ears, my breath escaping in little white puffs.

I turned the car on and just sat there in the yellow glow of the streetlights, wondering what to do next. I turned the radio on just as they introduced a song. I wasn’t listening to anything but the blank space in my head, so I didn’t catch the name of the song or the band. I never listen to the radio. I snapped to attention in the opening chords. I was instantly wrapped in the song as though it were a sleeping bag. I had never heard it before, but it felt like an old familiar friend. It was my story. My right now. I cranked the volume as I put the car in drive and pulled out onto George Street.

I wanted to curl up in those lyrics and take a nap. It wasn’t until it ended that I realized I was driving aimlessly, no longer pointed in the direction of home. The roads around me were completely deserted. It was as if I were the only person out on this cold night, the only one to bear witness to the first flurries of the alleged storm to come.

Some quick research this morning turned up the song info and I went to three stores before I found a copy of the CD. I wanted to hold it in my hands. I wanted the liner notes to have a home in my house. I never buy CDs.

I want to listen to the rest of the CD, but I am not ready to take this song off repeat.

Everyone should be so lucky as to find the songs, artists, writers, etc. that they best connect with, the pieces of art and expression that speak clearly – and with force – to them as if they are the only person on earth.

Sure, I’ve Got Baggage, But It’s Really Cute and It Matches!

I’ve come to view life as a series of peaks and valleys. I’ve got a long family history of anxiety and depression. It’s not lost on me that I have it easier than the generations that came before me. I’ve come of age in an era of at least some measure of stigma-shedding, and certainly of hyper-diagnosis and over-prescribing. This is a day and age where we’re less afraid to talk about mental health, and slightly less likely to remain “stoic” and resist seeking help and treatment when appropriate.

I’ve also been fortunate enough to be someone who could manage (or at least believe I am managing) my anxiety without having to rely on drugs. Oh, I’ll take the occasional Xanax when I’ve been soldiering through one of life’s valleys and recognize that I need a good night’s sleep to properly care for myself, just as I’ll take an occasional Tylenol when a sinus headache is getting the best of me. I have seen enough people around me return to wellness through proper medical attention to view mental health issues from much the same prospective as physical health issues.

I know myself and my body and mind well enough to see certain things coming. I’ve had enough sinus infections, for instance, to recognize the symptoms early and visit the doctor before I end up completely miserable and unnecessarily ill. And I am attuned to recognizing when my anxiety level is rising to a point where it’s going to start affecting my daily activities. If I’m not careful, it will manifest itself in ways that impede productivity, which only begets more anxiety. At the high water mark, the symptoms range from extreme fatigue to panic attacks, to an inability to get anything done, despite an overwhelming sense of urgency to do it all at once.

It may sound strange, but I seem to have the hardest time while I’m on semester break – especially over the summer because it’s such a long one. Once things are up and running again and I’ve got 10,000 things I have to deal with, I tend to do much better emotionally. I think it’s because I’m forced to manage my time really efficiently and also because I don’t have time to get all bent out of shape about the things I can’t control. It’s easier to let things just roll off when I’m keeping busy.

People generally think of me as someone who’s laid-back and doesn’t get caught up in petty matters or let things bother me. The truth is, I owe a large part of my eternal optimism and easygoing nature to the fact that I’m always doing too much to take anything else too personally.

My mother, who has had her fair share of personal experience on the subject, and who also got her degree from the WebMD school of medicine, preaches exercise and proper amounts of rest. These things are certainly important, and I try my best to follow this advice. And for me personally, keeping busy is another critical component of mental health.

Please don’t confuse this with running away from problems – when I have too much down time on my hands, I tend to create problems from things that don’t really have a place in a healthy worldview. Keeping busy allows me to focus on the things I do need to concern myself with and the things that have a positive impact on my life, and, at least by extension if not directly, on my son’s life.

So here’s to the peaks – may they be frequent and high – and to what we can take away from having trudged through the valleys. They make the peaks that much more wonderful.

Where Everybody Knows Your Name

In the age of big box stores, chain restaurants, and strip malls, it’s getting increasingly difficult to find and hang onto a sense of community. When my son was born, I knew that I wanted him to experience my hometown in a way that would foster a sense of appreciation and loyalty and make him feel compelled to fight for it one day.

And so we avoid the chains and shopping centers as much as we can. We spend our time and money instead in downtown York, an area that has overcome much but still has far to go in its renaissance.

I often say that witnessing downtown revitalization in York has been like being underwater and watching air bubbles rise toward the surface. It feels like there are more and more bubbles all the time, and they’re all about to break the surface at once. And we’re fortunate to have a front row seat. I have sat on boards and committees for organizations and projects that address needs and issues relevant to the City, and the downtown district in particular.

And much of our free time is spent just hanging out and enjoying all the downtown has to offer. We have been unaffected by the concerns and misconceptions that keep many people from visiting downtown (crime and lack of parking are two of the biggest perceived barriers; neither have ever presented a problem for us).

When my son pulls up a stool at Mezzogiorno inside York’s Central Market House, they bring him his usual drink without him having to order. Other customers greet him, ask how basketball is going this season and whether he’s started piano lessons yet. When we’ve finished eating, we stop at some of his favorite market stands, if not to purchase anything, at least to say hello. We catch up with friends and acquaintances, and a few of the homeless guys who we know from the time they spend in the market, the library, and one of our favorite downtown parks. Then we meander around the block, stopping by some of our favorite shops, where everyone greets us by name. This does not happen when we run errands in the suburban shopping centers. Ever.

Having a minor league baseball team in town has further strengthened the familiar, neighborhood feeling of our downtown. The staff greets us – again, by name – when we enter the stadium, and we run into tons of people we know while we walk around the concourse. We purchase a partial season ticket package each year, so we’ve gotten to know the people who sit near us, as well. I love the social interaction I get from the ballgames, without having to sacrifice family time. And having a home team to root for does wonders for bringing a town together.

We come downtown for special events like outdoor concerts and the annual holiday tree-lighting ceremony. We go to shows and film screenings at the Strand-Capitol Performing Arts Center. We volunteer to help install mosaic murals, plant flowers, clean up litter on sidewalks and in parks, and serve occasional meals at the Rescue Mission.

With limited time and financial resources, it’s important to us to buy local and support these businesses and community initiatives that have brought meaningful interactions and depth to our lives. I have built both powerful business relationships and lasting friendships through my love of downtown York.

I believe in our downtown - and in its potential - and will do what I can to help it, in my own small ways, to grow and flourish. And I know that one day, whether he lives here or not, my son will continue to support downtown revitalization, too.