Now for the sad part...

 

I clicked open the email with “Hello from the past!” in the subject line to find a note from from a former student, Josh. How I love hearing from former students. I remember Josh well: a little imp of a guy with a perpetual grin and a frizz of curls and an insatiable curiosity. He played the saxophone…or was that his brother Matt? I think both. I’ll let the email exchange speak for itself … 

Hello Mrs. Douillette -

Would you be, by chance, the same Mrs. Douillette who once taught at Cedar School (at least, I think it was Cedar School?) in Hanover 30 years-or-so ago? If so, I believe I was one of your fortunate students. I seem to remember spending countless hours--and reams of magical tracing paper--gleefully working on projects about dinosaurs and whales while under your tutelage. Happy days indeed.

Anyway, if this is really you, hello! I'm sure I can conjure some more memories of those heady days that will make us both feel much older!

Josh

Hi Josh!
 

You've reached the right person and I'm so glad to hear from you. I'm not
the greatest at keeping track of time, but I'm guessing you must be late 20s, early 30s (?). Am I close? I think I had you in the REACH program. ...  I remember you clearly, and you DID have a thing for dinosaurs! :>) Where are you living now and what are you up to?

Best,
Mrs. D. (aka Ruth)

Well, sorry to say (for both of us) that I'm 41. That said, despite the fact that my memory is such that I can't remember changing my kids' diapers, I vividly remember that REACH class. My best friend at the time (and ever since) was John Goff. Somewhere in his mom's house there is a cassette tape of John and I recording some sort of presentation about dinosaurs or whales for the REACH class. I remember that I had terribly laryngitis and that the school bell kept interrupting us! John's a teacher in Maine now.

I have to tell you that your class had a tremendous impact on me. I think about it all the time. Just about everyone in that class went onto excel in life in one way or another. You were the launching pad for a lot of successful kids, and I can't thank you enough for making me feel like I could do things that were creative and engaging, rather than just the ABCs. ...

Now for the sad part - I share this not for any sort of sympathy or to be a downer but, rather, because I was admiring your blog and wanted to show you mine. Over the summer, I was diagnosed with stage 4 stomach cancer. I'm currently in the middle of that fight (I just finished my first round of chemo treatments). I've always been a writer on the side, so I decided to start a blog about the cancer experience. I thought it would be an interesting, real-time dissection of a life-changing event, and it has also proven to be quite therapeutic. Anyway, if you want to check it out, I'd love to know what you think about it.

Josh

  

Ahhh, Josh. Big sigh. I was just getting a warm glow from your memories of my class (Thank you.) and then the punch to the gut. Not at all the news I expected to hear. ...

No need for the rest of my email. This isn't about me. I hope you visit Josh's blog, Stage Four Sarcasm, to wish him well--literally-- and for a dose of his fantastic humor in the midst of crisis.

---

We all travel along on whatever road we find ourselves, but some endure rides bumpier than others. ~RD

 

Mothers and butterflies...

When I visited my 92-year-old mother at her assisted living home, I thought of butterflies—the painted ladies I’d seen sipping the last sweet nectar from the buddleia in my back yard.

Painted ladies don’t live long, and my 92-year-old mother certainly has. So that’s not the comparison. And she certainly wasn’t sipping anything when I walked into her room; she was sleeping in front of a blaring TV. And neither was she painted. She’s never been much for make-up.

But nonetheless, painted lady butterflies that popped into my mind as I watched her sleeping.

“Mom?” I said softly.

She startled and I could see in an instant that she didn’t have a clue who I was.

So I told her.  “It’s Ruthie,” I said.

That’s always been enough for her face to blossom into a smile of recognition.

“Ruthie!” she always exclaims with pleasure.

But this time her smile wasn’t convincing--she didn’t exclaim--and I could tell she didn’t know who I was. 

But she went with me anyway on a drive to the clinic to get her blood drawn. She chatted pleasantly along the way. She only asked twice where we were going and why.

On the way home I asked if she knew who I was.

“Not really,” she said.

I needed to know once and for all if she remembered me, if not by sight at least by name.

“I’m Ruthie. Does that ring a bell?”

“I know it should mean something,” she said with a little chuckle.

“But it doesn’t?”

“Not really.”

So, it’s final.

Now I know for sure I’ve been erased from her memory banks. It’s been a long time coming and I’ve been preparing myself, even fooling myself into thinking she DID still remember when it was pretty obvious that it was “not really.”

So it feels … okay. Expected. Sad.

When I got home I look at the photos of painted lady butterflies I’d taken recently trying to determine why they came to mind when I saw my mother.

They butterflies were still beautiful, but tattered and torn, with chunks missing from wing tips. They’d done a lot of living, these butterflies, and it showed. Like someone else I know.

If a tree falls...

___
"If you're always battling against getting older, you're always going to be unhappy, because it's going to happen anyhow." ~ Mitch Albom

Function over form~

I spent the last day of 2011 with a group of photographers, taking pictures in Saint Anthony of Padua Church in New Bedford.  The ornate interior, decorated for the Christmas season, was beautiful. Gleaming floors and polished wooden pews reflected color and light from stained glass windows and detailed carvings. 

 Despite the color and detail available to shoot, I found myself drawn to the light that played through the rails of the drab stairway leading to the second and third levels of the church.

The stairs were off to the side of the foyer, easily overlooked by anyone intent upon entering the splendid sanctuary.  Probably those who trudge up to the choir loft, which looks out over the gleaming center aisle in the nave,  don’t give the stairs a second thought, but they are as necessary as the marble columns that support the arched ceiling. 

 A friend who saw my photos called the stairs “grungy and worn and burnished with age.”

And I thought …  if we live long enough, we’ll all end up worn. But burnished?  That’s something that comes only to those who allow the stresses of life to polish them, rather than scrape them raw. Not an easy thing. It comes, I think, from a willing acceptance of our purpose in life. As I said, not easy to accept that our function is ultimately greater than our form...especially in this world where glamor and glow distract us from inner beauty.

--- 

You can take no credit for beauty at sixteen.  But if you are beautiful at sixty, it will be your souls's own doing.  ~ Marie Sropes

It is the pervading law of all things organic and inorganic,

Of all things physical and metaphysical,
Of all things human and all things super-human,
Of all true manifestations of the head,
Of the heart, of the soul,
That the life is recognizable in its expression,
That form ever follows function. This is the law.

~ American architect Louis Sullivan

---

Inside the box~

At Thanksgiving time, I always think back to my years as a young teacher. It was traditional to have students list all the things they were thankful for. But I was a think-outside-the-box teacher, and I urged them to think beyond what I thought were the obvious things to be thankful for.

Yes, yes, mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, I'd think, as I listed their comments on the board. Sure, food and pets. Yes, of course, your house.

 

"But what ELSE?" I'd ask.

They were silent.

For these seven- and eight-year-olds there really was nothing else. What they were thankful for fit neatly into the box.

And I've come to realize this is true for me, as well. My box is full of the obvious blessings. What ELSE could I ask for? What else really matters?

The blessings outside my box--and there are plenty-- are mere frosting on the cake...or should I say, stuffing in the turkey?

Happy Thanksgiving. May your boxes be full. May all your thorns have roses.

---

Giving Thanks For *You* (2007)

Some people are always grumbling because roses have thorns; I am thankful that thorns have roses.
~Alphonse Karr

Just for fun...

Sometimes it’s fun to photograph something different, something playful,  to take a break from  landscapes and sunsets, as much as I love them. Fun to shoot something I could never do on my own.  So I was happy to have the opportunity through the Plymouth Digital Photographer’s club to do just that. 

Roy Marshall, a member of two local camera clubs, did the prep work, setting up a sophisticated system that relies on perfect timing, with strobes designed to flash in time to catch the split-second of action--in this case,  a splash of colored water.

Roy partially filled three brandy snifters with colored water and set them on a platform. About twenty of us stood behind our cameras, which were perched on tripods, and focused on the glasses. Then Roy pulled the platform up a short incline, and lights were turned out.   

In this pitch-blackness, we clicked open camera shutters, using "bulb mode," which allowed the shutter to stay open until released. We waited for the platform to be released to slide down the incline and come to an abrupt stop. This triggered the high-speed flash to light the snifters so we could capture the resulting slurp of the colored water.

Fun. Different. Pretty cool!

Roy's Suggested Camera Settings
• ISO 200

• F Stop: about f/11 to f/16

• Manual focus

• No auto focus and Anti Vibration off

• Camera on Blub or able to have a 2 to 4 sec. exposure.

Cause and effect ...

A local man, Michael, was killed when the North Tower of the World Trade Center, where he worked on the 105th floor, collapsed on September 11, 2001.

For the ten-year anniversary of 9/11, a monument in Michael’s memory was designed and built by an architect from his town, and was to stand somewhere in the section of the town cemetery dedicated to veterans. 

The architect wanted two things: granite of a certain grey color that to him signified somber respect, and granite that was quarried in America.

He searched for granite wherever it is architects search, and eventually found just the grey he’d envisioned. And it was quarried in America -- Shanksville, Pennsylvania, to be exact – a perfect and symbolic touch for a 9/11 monument.

It didn’t take long for those in charge of the 9/11 ceremony to pick the proper spot for Michael’s monument.  It was placed just behind the Iraq memorial … because the attack on the World Trade Center had spurred another man from this town, Shayne, to enlist in the Marines.

Shayne served in Iraq, where he was killed, in effect, because of the attack that killed Michael.

I don’t know why it is that these connections have stayed with me since September 11th, when I covered the 9/11 ceremony for the paper.  But I keep thinking about the links people share.

Sometimes, as with Michael and Shayne, the connection is tragic. But I’d like to think that more often good comes to others through the unseen threads that stretch from person to person.

Then there are the coincidental connections that tie up the ragged ends of loose threads in a more satisfactory way -- such as finding the perfect granite from a town that serves as a burial ground for passengers of United Airlines Flight 93.

This story, of course, begs for further examination of cause upon cause, decisions upon decisions, going way back that ended with these men, and so many others, in a cemetery.

---

"A hidden connection is stronger than an obvious one." ~Heraclitus

The rest of the story...

---

Timing is Everything~

I was in Rockport recently, a picturesque North Shore coastal fishing town. It’s got a small artsy village where tourists roam the narrow street that leads to Bearskin Neck and a view of the ocean.

Bruce and I stopped to watch a cat hunting a grasshopper in a raised flowerbed, that  bordered the roadway. The cat was quick. She darted and leaped, following the erratic hopping of the insect.

When the cat looked right, the grasshopper leaped left,  perching triumphantly on a zinnia. I thought briefly of scooping it into my hand and moving it farther away from the cat, who was still searching.

Then the grasshopper hopped onto my foot, but before I could walk away--taking it with me out of harm’s way--it made a dynamic leap into the street ... where an oblivious tourist immediately stepped on it.

The crunch--like biting into a potato chip—stayed in my ears. The unexpected unfairness of it still lingers.

The man continued walking; the cat went on hunting. And I was left to think that surely there was a moral to the story. Or at least a lesson.

But all my lessons seem too grim. This was only a tiny slice of a grasshopper's life, and why should I expand it to mean more than just unfortunate timing? A little good luck followed by bad. 

Timing is everything.

---

The timing of death, like the ending of a story, gives a changed meaning to what preceded it. ~Mary Catherine Bateson

A bird in the hand~

Recently I had the privilege of going with a group of photographers to a bird banding station in Plymouth—Manomet Center ForConservation Sciences.  In the roughly forty years the center has been operating, the center has banded more than 350, 000 birds.

The coastal acres are thickly wooded. Fine mesh nets edge trails and capture low flying birds. Volunteers check the nets hourly and gently extricate any birds that have become entangled, then band them and send them on their way. 

Because the staff knew we were coming—twenty of us with our cameras—they had held onto a few birds for us to photograph up close. 

What became quickly apparent was the personality of each species. Some are cooperative and preen for the camera, some are flighty and flustered at being the center of attention, some peck at the handler, and others resort to unusual postures, like the blue jay who bent its head at a ninety degree angle to its body and stuck his beak in the air, resisting gentle "rearrangement" attempts for the camera .  Some just patiently await release.

The birds were in the care of volunteers who know just how to hold them and what to expect. They are calm and measured and make no sudden moves to startle the birds. In fact there are several previously banded chickadees who’ve discovered that the food placed in walk-in traps is worth repeated capture and release from such kind souls.

But as much as I appreciated seeing the birds up close, and as much as I recognize the value of the ongoing study of migrant birds, I couldn’t shake an uncomfortable feeling at seeing such wild creatures in human hands.

How would I do if a being many times my size clamped an ID to my ankle and then said, “Go in peace?” I'd probably be one of the species who peck at the handler. The birds seem none the worse for their momentary fear. I’d still be having nightmares…unless I was in hands as gentle and caring as those at Manomet. 

---

“I am no bird; and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being with an independent will...” ~Charlotte Bronte

Sunrise... my new friend~

Since I retired, I don’t often see the sunrise—by choice. No more setting my alarm. I wake when I wake, and it's usually well after the sun has broken the horizon.

As a photographer, I know this cuts out the best light of the day, but what's wrong with sleeping late and going after the sunsets? 

Recently, I joined Plymouth Digital Photographers, an online photography club that has frequent live meet-ups to shoot at various places in the area.

A twice a year opportunity arose this week to photograph the Bourne Bridge and the Railroad Bridge with the sun rising beneath them both! The same alignment happens again in August, so I’ve been told.

So when my alarm went off at  4 a.m., I dressed quickly, got my camera and tripod, and set off for Wareham, a town on the "mainland" side of the Cape Cod Canal-- a forty minute ride from where I live. 

The forecast was iffy;  it had rained off and on in the night. Who wants to wake early if the sun might stay in bed?

Still, I made myself go. And the sun more than rewarded me and the one other lady who showed up. Not only did we get some beautiful shots, we chatted over coffee and bagels afterward.

This early morning trip revived my love of early light.  I just may set my alarm now and again. In fact, I'm sure I will.

Click on photos to enlarge.

"The grand show is eternal. It is always sunrise somewhere; the dew is never dried all at once..." ~John Muir

Winter's just pouting~

You think I LIKE working overtime?