Who In The World is Matt Lauer?

"The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing." - Socrates

They are dropping like flies. Harvey Weinstein, Kevin Spacey, Ben Affleck,  George H.W. Bush, Louis CK, Jeffrey Tambor, John Conyers, Garrison Keillor, Charlie Rose, Roy Moore, Al Franken, Matt Lauer and on and on and on.  At first it was interesting to watch the stories unfold.  The real pain started for me with Al Franken.  I had just finished reading his book.  I liked his politics and admired his passion. I didn't want to believe it but I could not deny the evidence I saw with my own eyes.  The searing pain set in with the termination of Matt Lauer yesterday from his co-hosting job on NBC's Today.  I've been watching Matt for the last twenty years.  I felt like I knew him.  Apparently not.

The past few days I've been questioning whether we really know anyone.  It is not about whether at some point in their lives they have done anything we wouldn't think was okay.  Every adult alive has a chapter of their book they wouldn't want read aloud.  But rather, are the offenses a pattern that they are still living?  I'm not that much interested in whether some man made a clumsy pass at a woman by touching her butt twenty years ago.  I'm not saying that was okay but it was a different time.  But did he do it last week, last month or last year?  Did he do it to control her, intimidate her, scare her or just satisfy his own twisted urges? Is he a predator or just a creep?  In the case of Mr. Lauer, it seems he was both.

I would like to think the revelations of impropriety are over.  The last of them has been unmasked.  I suspect not.  More shoes to drop.  Sigh.

Willkommen daheim!

"There's moisture in my madness. I should start keeping my insanity in Tupperware containers." -  Jarod Kintz 

I swear I've purchased a couple hundred food storage containers in the last eight years.  When Jacob was away at school I often cooked large batches of his favorite foods to keep his freezer stocked between visits.  I prepare meals several times a week for my sister Nancy and I still often cook to stock Jacob's fridge now that he has moved into his own place.  I am always begging him and my sister to return my containers for reuse.  It is crazy to keep buying them.  Jacob is pretty good about returning my glass containers as well as my freezer bags and coolers.  Nancy sometimes remembers to give them back but as often as not, I get just a bottom or just a top so I now have a cupboard full of mismatched food containers but not a single usable combination.  That was my frustration yesterday when I was trying to pack up the meals I made for Jacob to greet him at the airport as he arrived home from another adventure.

For the best part of two weeks, Jacob and a friend have been exploring Germany.  I'm really happy for him that he is doing some traveling.  I believe travel is essential to gaining a real understanding of the world.  I know he has more adventures planned for next year to some destinations in the Orient.  And while I think it is wonderful, I also wonder if I will ever learn to sleep when he is away.  Jacob and his friends are sane and sensible people but the world feels like a dangerous place these days.  While he checked in a couple of times, I couldn't get him to do it with the regularity I would have liked so I settled for stalking him on Facebook to see if he had been on-line.  My son is not a user of social media but he will use Facebook Messenger as a vehicle to communicate when he is away.  Relief for me did not always come from a message home but from seeing that he had been on the app at some point that day.

Like a child I found myself counting the sleeps until his return.  I grocery shopped to stock his cupboards and cooked and baked all morning to stock his fridge.  I tracked his flight in real time on a flight tracker website and waited for him at the airport anxiously, peering through the glass intently to catch a glimpse of him at the luggage carousel.  Finally he arrived, looking tired but happy.  It was all I could do not to run to greet him squealing all the way.

We dropped him and his friend downtown and headed home.  Our time together was short and filled with stories of where he went and what he saw.  He promised more details and a long visit next weekend.  I wish I didn't have to wait so long but I'm okay with it.  I heard his voice, hugged him and saw him with my own eyes.  Last night I slept like a stone.

Not The Domestic Type

"My idea of housework is to sweep the room with a glance." - Erma Bombeck

Though I am 62 years old, I'm still a work in progress, still trying to figure out who I am and what I want to be when I grow up.  It's a lot of work.  The deterioration of my heart health has accelerated this process a little.  I've started cramming for finals.  It's not that I'm planning to kick off any moment but rather that the end zone seems a little more in sight. It is true that there was never time to waste, but I'm more aware of that now than I was a while ago.

I haven't found a blueprint to follow to help me get to the big answers so I'm forging my own path on this endeavor.  I decided to start with figuring out who I am.  The voice in my head has had a lot to say.  I have believed many things about myself that I accepted to be true because it is what people have said to and about me.  In really examining those things, I realized that they are not all true. The first realization of an untruth about myself that I have long held is that I'm lazy.  It is a leftover from childhood.  I was not the most physically active girl.  I was far more inclined to get lost in a book than to engage in a game of sandlot baseball.  I didn't do the yard work at home and given the chance, I liked to sleep in.  How that was interpreted as laziness is neither here nor there.  In fact, I was born with a dysfunctional heart and have always wrestled with the physical limitations imposed by it.  But it didn't make me lazy.  I wasn't lazy then and I'm not lazy now.  For much of my adult life, I have worked in some form or another most of the waking hours of the day. I've long suffered from an inability to do one thing at a time.  After years as a c-suite executive, mom, crafter, learner, wife, daughter, sister, friend, volunteer and Martha Stewart wannabe, I am a master multi-tasker.  Not lazy.  Never lazy.  When I tossed out that one belief about myself, I felt suddenly liberated to consider all the rest.  What else did I believe to be true about myself and how have I allowed those beliefs to place limits on me?

In my secret self, I've always wanted to be a painter.  In the years of my childhood when art was a part of the curriculum, I was lucky to get a "satisfactory" in art.  My sister Nancy was, and still is, the family artist.  She is brilliant and talented.  I wouldn't allow myself to pick up a brush.  I have no skill and I believed no talent.  I would not allow myself to paint when it was so clear to me that I would not be able to produce a worthwhile result.  But a couple of months ago, I decided I don't care.  So what if I don't produce a worthwhile result.  I wanted the joy of the experience of painting.  So I bought a canvas, brushes and paint and set up an easel.  I produced my first piece and had it framed.  It is not great art but it is my art.  I did the next piece with perhaps less than impressive results but I had just as much fun.  There is a larger canvas on my easel right now.  I've been planning it in my head while I lay motionless in scanners on long and painful days in heart clinics.

In the time when I started high school, girls and boys were still streamed into different courses which we called options. Boys went into "shop" class.  Girls went into "home ec" or "stenography and typing".  I wanted to take home ec but my mom wouldn't let me.  She told me I am not the domestic type.  While most of my classmates were learning to  sew and cook, I was trying to learn Pittman shorthand.  Apparently, I'm not the shorthand type either.  I didn't enjoy great success in typing class, though I would come to master the skill on my own.  What I did do, was get a bit stuck in the notion that I'm not the domestic type.  I did learn to cook, had a child and have successfully run my home for more than three decades.  I taught myself to refinish furniture which I frequently do while I have a loaf of bread baking in the oven.  I entertain regularly.  And yet, I somewhere still harbored this old idea.  Last week, I spent six consecutive days in my kitchen making jams, jellies, pickles and delicacies to share at Christmastime.  This morning I sat down to label the jars before I carry them down to the cold cellar.  It would seem that I am the domestic type after all.