Thanksgiving 2005: Thanks, Megan & Family!


My thoughts on Thanksgiving 2005 -- spent with my friend Megan and her family. Whole new worlds open up for me.

Spent the actual Thanksgiving Day flat on my back on my sofa, too sick to eat much of anything. On the 14th I apparently developed some kind of bug that gave me positional vertigo. Then last Sunday morning, while heading down my back staircase, I slipped and ended up bouncing down several hard, wooden stairs on my back...

View the steps here, with foster kitty Houdini (now returned to his mom)...






Ouch! The back still hurts.

So anyway, even if I had had an invite, I wouldn't have been able to go. Or if I had gone, the sights and smells of food would have made me ill!

I am feeling a little better now, and yesterday spent a Saturday version of Thanksgiving with my friend Megan, three of her children, and her father. (See photos here. These are really just snapshots, under difficult lighting conditions.) I had such a wonderful time! A delicious dinner somehow just fell together. Not the usual Thanksgiving fare, which is fine by me. The hard part was getting an entire group of six totally hyperactive people to sit down at a table all at once. (I include myself in the six.)

Megan's family is incredibly talented -- all of them creative in one way or another, or just plain brilliant. You will notice in the photos that Jeff is poring over some drawing books Megan is letting him have. Every one of them has tried his or her hand at drawing at some point. Megan's artistic ability astounds me. Among other things she has taught herself to draw -- and she draws better than I ever did after three years of an undergraduate art major.

We missed Megan's son Justin, who is down in South America. But his brother Jordan gave a stirring justification to his very logical, physician grandfather (who was mystified), explaining why Justin's decision to go to South America -- to teach English with no compensation but room and board -- may not have been the most practical thing to do but nonetheless was an intelligent choice and perfectly suited to Justin. So Justin was well represented at the gathering.

I enjoyed being a sort of "adopted aunt," recently found...

***

As I was driving over to Megan's it hit home to me how suddenly winter is here -- the colors seem to have disappeared in an instant, and we are left with gray and brown and white. My nasturtiums died within a few days of when I wrote about them. Oddly I still have a few white petunias bravely facing the cold.

I did try a bike ride last Tuesday. It was about 17 degrees with the wind chill, but I was well dressed and not the least bit cold. See, I figure that if people can ski in colder weather than that, they can also ride a bike. The big problem with the bike in the winter is the icy pavement. Not only do I have to worry about whether my bike will stop and/or not slip out from under me as I turn or come down a hill, I also have to worry about cars being able to stop and not hit me!

I did about one-third of my usual route, with no hills, and very slowly (to account for the ice). Well, the problem with that is that it's very difficult to get a good workout going that slowly! So there's not much point in getting out there, taking a chance on getting killed by some wayward, skidding car.

We have a short warm-up forecast for the next few days -- 48 today, 58 and 56 tomorrow and Tuesday, then a couple more days in the 40s before it slips down to the 20s again. Thing is, it doesn't matter what the temperature is, so long as the roads aren't icy. I'll give it a try and report back. That is, if my back doesn't stop me. It was hurting a lot when I rode last Tuesday.

Had a weird, Twilight Zone kind of thing when I tried calling my daughter Anya and her family in Wisconsin to wish them a happy holiday. Called their number umpteen times over several days and couldn't even get their voice mail. I started to worry. Of course, there was a chance they'd be off visiting Erik's relatives, but that still wouldn't explain why their voice mail would not pick up. I tracked down their phone company, but they couldn't give me an explanation anyway. Finally I used a reverse phone directory, looked up their number, and then looked for their neighbors. Found someone with an address likely just across the street from them and called.

"You don't know me, but my daughter lives at ...." The woman who answered did not know Anya, but she was quite happy to dash across the street for me to see what was going on. Turns out the family was home the whole time, what with Erik being on call. Anya called me back and we talked for some time about the kids, then I tried calling back. Still the same problem. Phone rang and rang and rang, with no pick-up. Since Anya's phone was obviously working, who knows what the problem is? Anyway, I'll try again sometime soon, then call Frontier to see if THEY know what the bug is.

How can it be that I can call everyone else with no problem, and my daughter can get calls from anyone else with no problem, yet my calls to her phone end up in the Twilight Zone? Very strange indeed.

***
Went to see my therapist on Friday for the first time in months. There is much to say about that, much that I wouldn't post on a public blog. But this I will say: I have realized that if I am to be in therapy I want it to be with someone who will not discourage me from doing something just because I could end up being hurt. There may have been a time in my life when such caution would be appropriate. But not now.

In order to grow you need to be courageous. You need to take risks. You need to have enough faith in yourself that, should you end up being hurt, you know you will get through it and will be the better for it -- wiser, more confident, more prepared to cope with whatever joys or sorrows might come your way in the future.

I have spent far too much of my life being afraid and making choices based on fear. That's part of what taking on the bike riding challenge is all about -- especially as I work through the challenge of riding under circumstances others would avoid. Yes, I am not going to take stupid risks. I'm not going to risk the icy roads. But I am thoroughly up to the challenge of riding in the cold, because there are a multitude of protective actions I can take in order to prevent that choice from harming me.

And much of that courage comes from my friendship with Megan, who never discourages me and only asks me the right questions, helping me sort through what is best for me -- the path I can take, no matter how strange, that will ultimately lead me where I want to go, even if in the process I encounter twists and turns I could not anticipate before, and I end up in a place I could not have imagined until I took that first step into that fresh new world of possibility.

Posted: Sun - November 27, 2005 at 01:17 PM          

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