Friday

Link: Spark
Title:Seven Wonders

What are the 'Seven Wonders' of your world? What places, objects, people or accomplishments in your life would you herald as the most meaningful, life-affirming features of your existence?
Give a tour of your wonders. Describe them — perhaps as one would in a travel guide. What do you hope a visitor would learn from visiting and admiring each? Is there a notable distance (be it in time, space, or other ways) between them? Are they presented in a certain order, and if so, what does the journey as a whole signify?

1. The Rocky Mountains--I grew up with mountains everywhere. They are more than just cool scenery to me. Without them, in both literal and figurative senses I have to work very hard to figure out directions. Having lived in flat places for over 20 years now, it amazes me at how any mountains, anywhere, viscerally call to me. Even hills. The Yorkshire Dales, the area around Galena, mid-state Maine....these all are important areas because of the knobbiness of the land. I am beginning to appreciate prairie, now. But I crave being surrounded by rocks and scrub-grass and blue-white sky; it's almost like anti-claustrophobia.

2. Ellen--My second oldest sister, who was 17 when I was born. When I was 3, she took some illegally-prescribed meds that caused her bone marrow to stop working. In 1966, over 98% of the people with aplastic anemia died. Not my sister. She had transfusion after transfusion, in arms, legs, neck... She graduated college in spite of it, was told she'd never have kids (and had 2 in spite of it), loved life and people (in spite of it), and died the day before her 49th birthday in 1994 of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. She was diagnosed 10 months earlier. Every good book I read I still want to call and tell her about. She is my hero, because in spite of everything, she believed in God and people and herself.

3. My dad--Without him calmly telling me in 4th grade (I didn't want to go to school) that even he had to do things he didn't want to do--while tying his shoes on his way out to bankruptcy hearings [his]--I wouldn't get through most days. Not a big scene, but it has stuck with me, and reminds me that whining about my job, or anything else, is pointless unless I'm willing to work towards a solution. There's a lot of backstory here, but another thing that sticks with me is that he wore the same winter coat for 25 years. Because he had to, because educating his kids was more important to him than anything else.

4. The house I grew up in and the house in Ouray--Houses are important to me; I seem to define myself by where I live, or stay. If a house has no proper soul, I can't stand it. The house I grew up in was built by my father in 1946 after he was discharge from the Army Air Corps. When I say he built it, I mean from plans to landscaping. Himself and his dad. There is only one other house with the same floorplan in the world, and even the other one doesn't have the upstairs room over the garage (built because I appeared and they were out of bedrooms). He had to use whatever materials were available and cheap before the post-WWII production had geared back up for consumers. We had weird stuff, curved walls and--in the 70s--orange shag carpet in the bathroom!
The Ouray house was actually a service station that my parents bought, and then incorporated as a family corp. Dad redesigned it to fit in a small bedroom and kitchen, enlarged the bathroom, covered the oil pits (although they 'thonked' every time you walked over them), built a hearth for a Franklin stove, put a front bay window where the garage door had been. And painted the door red for my mom. When I was 18, he had the septic field dug up (it never drained right--we had lots of icky bathroom rules...), and then he and I dug a 15-foot deep pit for the new septic tank. We also installed a new drain field. He was 62. I was not going to be beaten by an 'old man' but he very nearly killed me that day.

4. College--Oh boy did I grow up! Just a list here: my roommate and her family, Jenny (who is still my soulfriend), hearing about my niece Elizabeth's first drunken debauch (she was 16, I was 21), my first drunken debauch (and second and third, after which I sort of figured that this wasn't really fun), Beast chasing my roommate and staying up all night in his dorm room talking, Jerry (ick), W*CC*X, N*CEP (USSR/China/Italy/Switzerland), all the good profs, the bad profs too (S!d J0nes playing with his pocket change while discussing Existentialism), Charl#s H0use, the language lab....

5. Psycho-Boss from Hell--My boss at my first full-time job. She was a great teacher of how not to live one's life. She was nuts (clinically), but she also had a really shitty personality. And she was a criminal, not to mention manipulative and (did I mention?) crazy as a loon. So I learned how NOT to be a boss, how NOT to treat people, how NOT to instill self-confidence in others, how to cause health problems in others, how to lie to library boards. BUT! I outlasted her, by God! She left before me. heh

6. Sparky--I'm not an advocate of the "everyone must have kids" school, since I never really wanted any, until I got married. All those Little House episodes with women in labor convinced me that this was something I could live my whole life without experiencing. Nope, adoption was the way to go. Then: tick-tock, biological clock. And all those trite things about doing anything for your kid, and getting between a mother and her child and so forth? Uhm, yeah, true. This person is quite honestly the only person I would lie down without a thought and die for. And he has no idea. And don't mess with him or you'll deal with me. Which is hard to curb now that he's old enough to have to start dealing on his own with reality. He is my star. And a surprisingly good teacher of patience, love, loyalty, honesty, and guilt.

7. Music--A cornerstone of my life. This is the only way I have found to consistently bring out my soul and get me to ME. I have extremely eclectic taste: Beatles to Marsalis, "South Pacific" to Gregorian chant, Shania Twain to Vinnie James. But it has to be something besides noise and banging gongs; there has to be some content, although I do like a good, mindless 'boppy' tune too. The main reason this is so key is because good music always brings me closer to God. Even the ranting "anti-Christian" stuff. And the big kahuna, the major overarching Wonder of my life is God.

So. God.--Well, yeah, without God I'd be a mess. Not the big scary dude with the robe and beard and the BIG STICK he's gonna use if you don't frickin' BEHAVE YOURSELF. And not the cherubs and effing angels and cuteness shtick, no way! And not the Big Daddy who knows all the answers but won't tell you, you minuscule piece of shit. My God is the God of music and mountains (and--grudge, grudge--prairies) and love and personal ACTION and doubt and tears and confusion and self-honesty and safety and peace. I can't explain more than that.