YOU are the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown!

The last time I went trick or treating was in high school (apparently, shame does not come easily to me).  It was 1978 and I'd foolishly chosen to go with the tallest of my friends--Julie Watts.  Towering right around six feet, with a joyful, booming voice, Julie was a terrific, fun friend.  But, because of her height, she also was the very worst person a sixteen year old could chose for a night of pillaging the neighbors' candy supplies.

While we still managed to fill our  pillowcases that night with an impressive array of chocolate-covered booty, we also collected an unenviable pile of cold stares, muttered insults and general disdain. . . as though a teenager needs yet another supply of such things.

Looking back, do I regret that candy-and-laughter-and-shame-filled evening with a fine friend who died too young?

Not so much.

As I type this--a smattering of emptied candy wrappers collecting at my feet--I think of the human riches I've collected in this life.  Kind and funny and generous people who, like candy gathered on a crisp fall evening, fill me with wonder and joy, minus the empty calories.

More than once, I've told my own children that they really only need one or two good friends in their lives.  Usually, this advice has come on the tail of disappointment.  But the timing of my advice has nothing to do with its truth, which holds steady through all seasons, all circumstances.

Human kindness is the real treasure of this life, and we should seek it out and give it away with the same joy that possesses the toddling Luke Skywalker who greets us on our doorsteps each Halloween.

Disappearing Acts

My, oh my, but the early mornings have grown darker lately.  And quieter, too.  These days, on my 6 a.m. walks with Finn, I can actually make out the individual voices--the legs, I suppose--of our neighborhood crickets.   That's because so many of their exoskeletal cousins have cried "uncle" under the cooling canopy of mid-October skies.

Like the crickets, so, too, have my friends Mary Kay and Andrea gone silent.  And now, Pam, my friend's sister whose voice was swallowed up last week, sucked into the cosmos and dispersed among as-yet unnamed planets that are whirring above my head, humming like crickets gone home.

The older I get, the more juxtaposed my life seems to become.

In our school's library, for instance, I am as happy as I have ever been as an educator--lighter and looser and freer, unless students happen to be making out near Children's Lit or eating Doritos at the computer.  But, still. . . I feel as though I have found both feet on the ground, and each one of them is comfortably--rebelliously--clothed in a snappy, message-filled sock of joy.  Yet, how do I explain my joy as I stand in the long shadows of my friends' deaths?

And this morning, as my friend Ken and I headed to my car to attend yet another funeral?  Here, too, I was juxtaposed between worlds, telling Ken about my weekend plans.  How I'd be muddy and happy and lost in the reedy banks of the Platte River, just north of Gibbon, sounding a bit like an America song, all "plants and rocks and birds and things."

Ken, whom I've known and loved since I was a young teen, had no idea that I was a Master Naturalist (yes, it needs to be capitalized).  And, while Ken struggled to avoid going  all "adolescent teen" on me--in which he'd imagine a naturalist as some sort of dumpy nude on a half-hidden river in California--I tried to let him know how much these two-and-a-half years as a Master Naturalist have meant to me, immersing me in the great outdoors,  St. John's Worts and all.

Maybe, at age 53, I'm finally "getting" life and all of its ironic twists and turns.  Maybe I'm finally realizing that it's all just one hot mess filled up with good and bad, joy and grief, acquisition and loss, and that my job is to cull a mostly contented existence from it all, to find the joy in the midst of these disappearing acts.

. . . to wander the banks of an old, wide river and bend low, taking in all of its tiny lives before they move on to the next big thing.

45 Minutes in a Hammock

My brother Jack, a sports-psychology professor at Indiana, is chock full of interesting stories about elite athletes.  He also has a bit of an obsession with zombies, but that is another story.  One of the most interesting things he has researched is what happens to time when an elite athlete is competing. Apparently, time slows waaaay down for these special athletes, allowing the baseball player to see the pitched ball in slow motion or the swimmer to see the wall in great detail.

I am fascinated by the idea of changing the feel of time.  But I am hardly an elite athlete, so I have to find other ways to make time feel different.

That's why I spent 45 minutes in a hammock yesterday. You remember yesterday--that quintessential October afternoon when the sky was deep blue and the breeze was still warm with the breath of late summer.

Supine and looking skyward (when I wasn't nodding off), with Finn at my feet, I rocked my way into an alternate universe, one in which the air was sweet and my mind could not for the life of it remember if I was 9 or 53.  There, with a wall of reddening Boston Ivy on my side, I watched life pass me by--buzzed by a low-flying flock of red-winged blackbirds; tickled by handfuls of yellow locust leaves; dizzied by the wormy paramecium swimming their way across my eyeballs.

Set against the fuzzy soundtrack of neighbor kids playing up the street, I found myself transported to a cool summer day in the '70s, my toes testing the chilly waters at East Hills Swimming Pool.  There, beneath the strange, gangly arms of my neighbor's wisteria, I wondered and wandered my way through seasons and years and strange half dreams, my feet literally not touching the ground.

It was a time warp of Rocky Horror proportions, only woozy and wonderful.

I will never be an elite athlete.  I will never see the stitched seams of a baseball as it whirrs its way towards me.  But I can make time slow down, right there in a hammock in a back yard on Woods Avenue, with my mind opened to the possibilities of what was and what might be.  And I'd recommend it to anyone with a little time on her hands and a hankering to change the feel of that time as it slips through her fingers.

Time on a hammock is always time well spent.

Split Personalities

The internet is teeming with tests.  If I wanted to, I could take a new test every ten minutes or so, and finally figure out who it is that I am.

The problem with all of those personality tests, though, is that they boil us down to four letters (ENTJ!) or an animal (otter!) or, most recently, a color (orange is my new black!), and we find ourselves trying to retrofit our awkward pieces into those awfully tight spaces.

Take...me, for example.  If you're short on time, just study the "information" between the parentheses and you'll know what you need to know about me.  I get a boost of energy from crowds, am comfortable trusting my intuition, am not terribly mushy and, uh, am represented by a color that really shines in October!

. . . or so these expert-approved tests tell me.

How to explain, then, my regular need for solitude?  And where is nature in all of this?  I don't think any of these tests explores our relationship with the out of doors.

"Out of doors."  There's a phrase that begs a turn or two.  We have become, I'm afraid, a society that prefers our doors closed, thank you.  As a result, we've got a toxic group of people in Washington, many of whom refuse to see what or who it is that sits on the other side of their own doors.  So, instead, they keep those doors closed, because it is simpler, less ambiguous, and what is expected from their most vocal (and monied) constituents.

The story goes that the journalistic term "deadline" came from the Civil War, when troops were thinned to the point of needing to find new ways to keep the captured enemy contained.  Placed in slap-dash structures (most often, behind fences or stockades), prisoners were shown a line in the dirt--the deadline--and told that, if they crossed it, they'd be dead.

Nearly 150 years later, we still tell people to stay inside their lines, to behave accordingly, to be who it is we expect them to be, the implicit threat of exclusion or derision or removal of support always hanging in the air.

We haven't come very far, have we?

There is an "us versus them" mentality that comes with all of these labels, a strange willingness to buy into the standardized formula rather than muddle into the mess of getting to really know people--ourselves included.

I'm ready for a liberation, for a skeleton key that opens all the doors.  I'm ready for someone to insist that we let in some fresh air, that we mix it all up until we look like a toddler's finger painting--messy and feral and pure again.

I think it's long past the time for people to once again trust their own guts--rather than the polls or the experts or the personality quizzes--and start meeting each other where they are, lines in the sand be damned.