Kris’s Kolumn

The other day my son said to me, “Mom what’s up with you? You are more hilarious then ever, nothing seems to bother you much, and I’m trying to figure out what happened.”  Well, here’s what happend.

I just got myself back.  It wasn’t as if I was lost or anything but the mundane realities of life were smothering me and all those little pieces of life – in some places we call that stuff shit – was piling up in every direction.  That alone is pretty funny when you think about it because if you are breathing, someone loves you, you love someone, there’s wine on the counter or better yet in your glass, and you can see birds flying – isn’t that pretty much absolutely perfect?

We all get lost now and then and I’m sure it’s going to happen to me again. Not sweating the small stuff really does make for a happier life.  Really, think about it – if you can’t control it and you are smart enough to know that eventually it’s going to be like a pimple on an ants rear end – what’s the point?

And no – this is not easier said then done. It’s much, much harder to be a crabass and to worry about why something happened or didn’t happen or why that person didn’t do what he or she said they were going to do…or a million other things.

Forget about it! Sleep naked! Drink the whole bottle! Laugh at the jackass at the stop sign! Don’t respond when someone is being a jerk!  Jump off the couch when the medical bill for knee surgery arrives!  Snort into the wind when the wrong package shows up!  Don’t bother with excuses because you don’t need any! Eat the last cookie!  Start using exclamation points needlessly!

See how easy this is? Now go look in the mirror and laugh at yourself. It’s the funniest thing you’re gonna see all day.

My beloved mother sent me a big box of rich, earthy, ceder wood pieces for Mother’s Day. Yes, a box of wood!  This might seem seem like an odd gift. Who in the hell sends her daughter a box of wood that she can burn in her fireplace? Only a mother who really knows her daughter.

My mom is a scrappy, tiny, adorable, kind woman who has been my father’s fulltime caregiver for the past twenty years. Last week she had an MRI on her knee, “Well, I’m starting to drag the thing and it hurts like hell!” she told me. Yesterday the doctor called to tell her she has an injury that is usually only sustained by football players. Let’s remember that my mom is going to be 83 in July.

The football thing is funny because my mom has always been a very classy lady. She was a model a long time ago and even now she outdresses me and looks at least a decade younger then she really is. And yes, she still dresses my one-legged father and he’s pretty darn good-looking for an old fart.

I’m a mother too, and I like to think I’ve done a pretty good job but I couldn’t have even changed my first diaper without having been mothered the way I have been my entire life. Beyond that absolutely stunning force of love that cascades throughout your entire body when you become a mother, what is most important is being selfless. Motherhood is a giving profession, there’s receiving too, and that payoff is marvelous, but there are years and years of giving.

My mom has always been there for me. We talk almost every day and email often and even though our personalities are so different there has never been one day of my life when I haven’t felt love. My expressions of love are big and bold and loud and immediate. My mom is more reserved (someone has to be!) and yet I know that every waking hour she thinks constantly about me, my two brothers, my sister and all her grandchildren. If I told her I needed an arm she’d cut one off and it would be here by morning.

I can’t think about losing her. The mere thought, like now, makes me start sobbing like a baby but I know it will happen. I also know that when mom dies everything changes and so I’m preparing by writing a novel about it. And in the meantime I’m loving her and making sure she knows I’m here to hold her up and that everything, absolutely everything will be okay because she showed me how to do it all.

I celebrate my mom every day and when we aren’t together and I’m lucky enough to have  the richness of all those years and experiences and lessons of life that she poured right inside of me.  I am who I am because of her and her love and generosity and sweet spirit has also been passed on to my own children.

So in the end – beyond the wood – what I have for Mother’s Day is this lasting gift from a woman who I adore and who has taught me the most important life lesson of all – nothing matters but love.

Two weeks ago during my Radish Reader’s Retreat I had one of those extended laughs that make us weak in the knees, weak in the bladder, light headed, dizzy and absolutely uplifted. The experts tell us that those kinds of physical and emotional connections extend our lives so I’m pushing 95 this week.

We all have Perfect Storm weeks when a series of events start adding up to a personal national disaster that can only conclude with – a bigass laugh. Can you hear me now?

I’ve had such a week and it’s finishing (I insist!) with me having to cancel an appearance at a lovely fundraising event for Equality Florida where I am donating the name of a character in an upcoming novel to the highest bidder. I have to work tonight instead and if one was prone to anguish and feeling-sorry-for-ones-self this would be a bad night for me. I am instead very excited about what might happen next.

Could it get worse? Could a stolen car, a scheduled emergency surgery, a trip to the emergency room…to name just a few – become something more? Ha! Bring it on.

I’m expecting laughing miracles this evening and maybe sometime within the next hour. If the universe thinks it has us – it does. I am not to be had but I have an amazing laugh and I’m poised to crack a few wine glasses with it this evening.

Stand back!

Sometimes when my hands are poised above my keyboard and I close my eyes for a second, take a breath, and reach for the next word I feel as if all the writers I have long admired are pushing me forward. Eudora Welty, Carolyn Keene, Alice Munro, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Mary Oliver…it’s almost as if they have their fingertips on my shoulders and are urging me to keep going, to forget about whatever long pause I might have been considering, what excuse I was wrapping up inside of my mind to keep from doing what I so love to do.

I would never be so bold as to compare myself with any of the men and women authors I love so very much but I do know that they had to have been riddled with the same kind of writing passion that keeps me half-crazy most of the time. When I am not writing I think about writing. My life sometimes seems like an endless book title and when I  wake in the middle of a night after a new character has slapped me right between my eyes with an open hand it’s almost impossible to ever think about sleeping again.

I know I am as lucky as I am driven to ride my passion as long as my forever lasts-(another 59.9 years I hope!) I have always known that this is what I am supposed to do, who I am, where I must always be. I’m also way to honest to say that what happens after the writing part is easy. It gets harder every damn day.

But on those hard days I have something that I know not everyone else has – the simple knowledge that I am who I am – and I am a writer, an author, a woman of words. And I’m forever grateful for my wild imagination and the soft push from the fingertips of all that greatness on my shoulders.

My latest move three weeks ago took its toll on my desk. The poor thing is chipped, bent, bulging and it’s obviously never leaving this room in one piece.

This is not the world’s greatest desk unless you are Kris Radish.  I bought it off the floor at an office supply store.  There it was standing all alone, discontinued, cheap and yet it seemed so perfect for me. I like a u-shaped desk so I can spread my stuff out all over, and as I’m usually working on ten things at a time, I really need the space.

This desk is fake wood and there are bulges all over the top where my coffee, tea, wine and water have seeped into its skin. There are tape marks from research papers on the backside, a mess of gouges where I dropped things like printers, rocks, a few hammers and knives and my obsession with burning candles and incense have charred about seventy-five percent of it’s rippling surface.

My desk has it’s own stories to tell. I’ve written books, magazine articles, love letters, essays, and some other things that are none of your business while sitting in my even cheaper plastic chair, which by the way has got to go before the jagged plastic disfigures the backsides of my legs. I’ve cried while sitting right here with my head in my hands, talked on the phone to people all over the world, laughed with a mess of book clubs, and dreamed up some pretty amazing characters while lost inside the crazy word of my own mind.

My desk will be glad to know I think I’ve found a place to stay for a very long time. It’s called home and my mind has been dancing for days now that my candles are lit and everything is plugged in and I can actually find my stacks of projects.

There are new stories coming and this morning as I watch the birds dance, the tide push in, and the palms sway in the morning wind I’m so happy I just kissed my desk right on its lips.

I have this ridiculous notion that I’m not a high maintenance woman. This is what I have been told anyway by the people who live with me.  Like most things in life I’m guessing there’s a bit of truth on both ends of this discussion.

But this morning, as I was looking out of the bedroom window that I can now open, my heart was pushed into a lovely circle by the hands of joy….simply because the window opens and I can feel the fresh air on my face. This might not seem like a big deal to most people but for the past two years I lived in a space that was nice but the windows didn’t open because we were on the twelfth floor.

I have a really old car, haven’t been clothes shopping in over a year, my roots are starting to show, it’s been a long, long time since I’ve had a real vacation or two days off in a row for that matter, but air on my face is like Christmas and free beer. I’m not sure this qualifies  me as a low maintenance broad but I’ve always appreciated the simple things in life.

Camping, the smell of rain, my mother’s voice, my son’s laugh, a card from my now-blind and very ill father, the sound of birds in flight, the first sip of really great wine, the way my daughter looks when she’s sleeping, the last page of a book that has me sobbing – you know – those are the real things in life.

It would be nice to have a new car or to be able to go shopping just once and not look at a price tag or to book a flight to Paris but truth be told – I’ll take the smell of a campfire or that wind on my face any day.

An just like that – there’s rain on my window this morning as a kind of cosmic bonus!!! Double joy!

I love state and county and federal parks and waysides and little picnic tables that are propped up against green garbage cans across the highways all over this country. And there’s a reason why I have a lovely physical and emotional reaction every single time I walk, bike, or ride into one of these special areas.

It’s my memory of picnics and, of course, those picnics were because of my sweet mother.

This morning I biked into an amazing state park in Florida that is less than a mile from what is about to become my new home. There were Seagulls and Egrets and Terns flying about and fish jumping and trees waving in the stiff wind but it wasn’t until I stopped under a picnic shelter that I started to cry. I always cry, sometimes just a little, sometimes a lot, when I stop and meditate when I’m at one of these special spots.

Today it was quiet, and as I always do, I thought of my mom and her picnics and how much our family outings – always outdoors – meant to me. Everything was simple and lovely and quiet and beautiful.  Those picnics and the camping trips that followed set me on a trail of life that has given me remarkable experiences and adventures.

Today when I stood alone and closed my eyes I saw all those days melt into one happy memory as my mother stood guard while my father and three siblings and I, embraced what is most important in life.  We’ve never been to the state park I was standing in but it was not unlike all the others we had visited and for a few moments I was swept into such a tide of awesome joy that I swear I could hear my brothers shouting and my sister laughing and my parents talking softy as they cracked open a beer.

Life is supposed to be a picnic of sorts as we gather memories and sift through them day after day and how lucky am I that there are so many picnics for me to remember.  How lucky……..

This year’s tree is a white two-foot beauty from a store I once vowed never to enter. It cost nine bucks and it’s fake but there’s nothing fake about the feeling I get when I plug in its white lights every morning.  There’s something about a tree, the little lights, the glow of remembering the 58 other Christmases and holiday seasons that I have survived and that lovely feeling of happiness that most of us get during the holidays.

We took the beautiful other tree, the one that was eight feet high and used only one year, down to the Women’s Center and I’m hoping it’s already making someone else smile.  And truth be told I’m not a fake tree kinda gal but this year there’s a mess of circumstances that make the size and smell of the tree less important. Apparently, I turn on the lights and they turn me on.

We don’t do presents around here either for a variety of reasons but my two gifts will be arriving next week and I  expect this to be the best Christmas I’ve ever had. My kids are coming home and I know they could care less where I live or what kind of tree I have and that’s just how I raised them. They are going to drive all night and collapse wherever they land and I’m going to sit and stare at them while they sleep.

I’ve always felt the safest, the best, the most everything when the three people I love the most are all under one roof. Every mother alive knows this feeling. Every mother alive also knows that the world can change in the blink of an eye and that every second of safeness is treasured time.

That’s all I ever really want…treasured time with my friends and with my family and with the sweet silence that comes from a simple look of love.

That’s also my wish for you this December and every day for the rest of your lives. Plug in your tree and settle into the safe feeling even if things aren’t the way you hoped they’d be this year. Grab a memory, string some lights, and know that treasured time is a gift you can give any day of the year.

When my brother Randy takes off his thin, black glasses and looks at me with his wondering blue eyes there is a look of panic dancing across his face that pierces my heart. His head is full of questions and there are no answers. What year is it? How old am I? Was I born in March or June? Why are you here? Don’t you live someplace else; someplace far away from wherever in the hell I am?

Randy’s stroke has strangled his memory and I can only imagine what it must be like for him to be lost inside of his own mind.  There are doors everywhere and when he opens one all he sees is another door, an occasional light down a dark hall, and then there’s another damn door.  His progress, even in all those deep passageways, is good and he can walk and move perfectly. We can only hope that when the stroke’s hands get tired that all those veins will fill with new hope, old memories, and the crumbs of what he has lost.

I can’t stop thinking about his little blue eyes and the fragile veins of life that keep us connected, not just inside of our own body, but to one another. Sometimes, like now, when I think of him in his monastic bare rehab room, standing by the window with his hands dangling by his side, I cry like a baby. When he sobbed in my arms, whispering how scared he was, it felt as if his entire body was melting inside of me and I reminded him how I told him a long time ago that when he needed me I would be there, just as he was when I needed him. “But I’m supposed to be the one to take care of everyone,” he cried. Fragile veins, Randy. Fragile veins.

We share a sister and a brother and a mother and father and a group of remarkable people who have all linked hands to form a circle around him so that when he is scared there will always be someone to hold him. And he may be scared for a very long time because at 56 he is a young man.

There are lessons falling out of the sky because of this horrid event. Plan and prepare. Take care of yourself. Be ready. Never miss a chance. Say I love you. Take the trip and worry about the charge card later. Forget about the landing because when you jump off the cliff the view is amazing. Drink from the bottle. Say it out loud even if you aren’t sure. Keep the office door closed until morning. Take the ride into the wind because it will make you feel better.  So many lessons.

The fragile veins of life need tending – on the inside and the outside. There’s no doubt that we are not in control of everything. There’s also no doubt that loving and being loved is still the single most important ingredient in not just recovery – but in everything, absolutely everything.

I’ve never been real big on the dress-up trick-or-treat stuff like some adults. It’s hard enough trying to dress up like Kris Radish and I’d rather be writing or reading, you know?

But I have to admit that this time of year, when adults and a few children, dress up and run around and act foolish brings back some absolutely lovely memories. And I’m not talking about my big brother Jeff climbing onto the roof in Big Bend, Wisconsin and hosing off his friends when they came to the door for some candy.

My kids are still pretty cute but they were REALLY cute when they were little. I loved seeing them standing by the door with their faces painted and dressed up like pirates, ghosts, and princesses, and yes, I would dress up too. I was the Avon Lady for about ten years in a row because that’s about as far as I could take it.  I drew big lips on my face, ratted up my hair, put on every piece of old jewelery I could find, wore a gaudy skirt and carried one of those big old American Tourister red bags.  No offense to the Avon ladies because this getup really didn’t change how I usually looked anyway.

Off we we’d go through the leaves and cold air and I’m such a sap I would often cry when I saw how happy they were, (me too!) and I tried to freeze every single one of those moments, all of those years, inside of me.  Those little fingers and faces are right there in a sweet spot right in the center of my heart.

Last night my daughter sent me a photo of herself dressed up in a REALLY tight fitting transformer outfit on the way to well, I don’t want to know where. She’s beautiful, as is every daughter in the world, and I looked and looked and sure enough I saw the little princess right there behind the long legs, body hugging outfit, and the “hello baby” look in her hazel eyes.

And just now I felt a cool fall breeze whisper in my ear and heard the sweet sound of a son and daughter hoping the next house has Snickers bars and not another box of raisins.