I was happy to be invited. The service was lovely and I enjoyed sharing the experience with Chandler. At the conclusion of the service, Michelle Jackman, Dean of Students, thanked grandparents for attending, adding how fortunate kids are to have so many grandparents present. She went on to say she had fond memories of her grandmother. “Somehow,” she said, “the Cokes were never as cold or the bologna sandwiches never as good as they were at my grandma’s.”

I know how she feels. I am fortunate to have fond memories of my grandma, too. My sister, brother, and I spent a lot of time with Grandma making unforgettable memories. She baked oatmeal cookies. And her specialty, spice cookies. Nobody else made spice cookies. If they tried, they were never as good as Grandma’s. Her technique, along with the recipe that she kept in her head, went to the grave with her.

And pasties. Grandma made Cornish pasties filled with meat and potato wrapped in an out of this world flaky crust. She made trays of them and the whole family came for dinner.

Grandma fixed Sunday dinner. Every Sunday morning, she set her dining room table. She never knew who would be there, yet every seat at the table was taken. “Grandma’s Sunday dinners were an act of faith,” Mom said.

Grandma and Unkie (my dad’s oldest brother) gave me a radio for my seventh birthday. It think it was an Arvin radio. It had a red metal case with a cream colored dial. There was an antenna wire that hung from its back. When I held the wire between my fingers the sound and reception was clearer. I put the radio on a table next to my bed. There were lots of radio shows I listened to: Our Miss Brooks, Big John and Sparky, Let’s Pretend, and shows I don’t remember the names of: like the detective who reminded his sidekick, “Keep your eyes peeled.” I didn’t understand what that meant and it sounded silly, if not painful. When I was older—eleven or twelve—I began listening to Lucky Lager Dance Time, a program that played the latest popular music. It aired at 10:00 p.m., so I had to keep the volume low and the radio next to my head so my parents wouldn’t know I had the radio on that late.

For my tenth birthday, Grandma gave me a copy of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Little Lord Fauntleroy. The book has beautiful color plates and pen and ink drawings by Reginald Birch.

Grandma died six days before my fourteenth birthday. We went to Auntie Beth’s house after the funeral. Auntie Beth handed me a five dollar bill. “This is for you,” she said. “Before Mom died, she said ‘Give ‘Dennis five dollars for his birthday.’”

Grandma thought boys should know how to sew on a button and how to cook. She always had scraps of fabric, buttons, needles, and thread and would let me sew buttons on pieces of fabric. She taught me how to crochet. And, she taught me how to cook, often letting me have her kitchen to myself. Once, I bought a Butterfinger candy bar and discovered a recipe for Butterfinger cookies on the wrapper. I showed it to Grandma.

“Next time we go up the street,” she said, “we’ll stop at Rata Brothers and pick up the things you need to make those cookies.” “Rata Brothers” was Arata Brothers Market, but to Grandma it was “Rata.” She often left the first syllable off of a name and some times she would drop the last syllable.

Grandma lived in the Oak Park section of Sacramento, and “going up the street” meant walking up 35th Street, Oak Park’s main street. Going up the street was an event because Grandma knew everyone on both sides of the street. All of the shopkeepers knew Grandma, too. At one time or another, she lived on just about every street in Oak Park. For a time, she lived at the Oak Park Hotel. Auntie Vera and she had a room with a bathroom but no kitchen. They ate in the hotel dining room. Usually, Grandma lived in an apartment.

In the 60s, there were race riots in Oak Park. I remember seeing the television news pictures of burning buildings on 35thStreet. “Grandma would be so upset to know that Oak Park is not the friendly place she loved,” Mom said. Today, apartments line both sides of the 2900 block of 35th Street. There are no shops.

Grandma didn’t have a lot, but she gave me a lot: the gifts of her time, her attention, and, most of all, her love, gifts that created the unforgettable and “nonesuch” memories of childhood.

I think Michelle Jackman is right: Somehow nothing is ever as good as when Grandma did it.

“What do you mean,” I asked, knowing what she would say; but, I love hearing her say it.

“You’re so hamish” she said, “so easy to be with. What can I tell you?” I smiled, enjoying the glow of her compliment.

“You know,” I said, “every time you say that, it only confirms my belief that I was switched at birth and my Jewish parents, my real parents, took the wrong baby home from the hospital.”

“You’re a real beauty,” said Eileen, shaking her head.

When I bought my condominium in Pasadena, Eileen and her sister, Phyllis, gave me a mezuzah as a housewarming present.

“It’s beautiful,” I said, “I love it. I’m going to put it on the front door-jamb.”

“Don’t do that,” said Eileen.

“Why not,” I asked.

“You’re not Jewish,” she said. “People might misunderstand. Put it by the bedroom door.”

I agreed and that is where my mezuzah lived until I moved two years later.

In my new house—a townhouse—the master bedroom was upstairs. As soon as the movers left, I unpacked my mezuzah, went to the garage for my hammer, and climbed the stairs to put the mezuzah in place on the bedroom door-jamb. The installation took only a few minutes. I went downstairs and out to the garage to put away the hammer.

Upstairs again, I looked at the mezuzah only to discover it was upside down. I went downstairs, out to the garage, retrieved the hammer, went upstairs, removed the nails, turned the mezuzah right side up, replaced the nails, went downstairs, and took the hammer to the garage.

Coming up the stairs for the third time, I noticed something small and white on the floor near the bedroom door-jamb. On closer inspection, it turned out to be the mezuzah scroll. I went downstairs, out to the garage, retrieved the hammer, went upstairs, removed the nails, replaced the scroll, nailed the mezuzah in place again, went downstairs, took the hammer back to the garage, and went upstairs.

I checked the mezuzah. Satisfied that everything was in order, I called Eileen who laughed when I told her the story of installing the mezuzah.

“Ei,” I said, “I’m exhausted. Who knew being Jewish could be such hard work!”

I know I do.

Gratitude is not only thankfulness, but also consciousness  or mindfulness of being thankful for the gifts and resources that fill my life. The idea of gratitude with mindfulness reminds me of my dad whose motto was “Be grateful” and who encouraged me always to think about what I was doing as well as why I was doing it.

The significance of my dad’s mindfulness reproof became clear when I happened on a quotation from the French philosopher, Michel Foucault: “People know what they do; frequently they know why they do what they do; but what they don’t know is what what they do does.”¹

Mindfulness enables me to pay attention to my feelings and to the ways I respond to my environment and to the people around me. Mindfulness allows for that critical space between action and reaction in which I can make a choice.

I choose equanimity rather than anger or other emotional responses that keep me off balance. Yelling at someone who cuts me off while driving on the freeway serves no purpose other than to raise my blood pressure; and, I don’t like the way I feel after that kind of reaction.  Besides, I don’t know what is going on in that person’s life. Preoccupied with whatever is important to him at that moment, he may not be aware that he cut me off. Stuff happens. I’m willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.

My dad didn’t need a research study to prove the importance of the gratitude attitude. I don’t know how he came by that wisdom. I do know that it is a gift he passed on to me. I am grateful he did.

The word “resolution” implies constancy in carrying out a course of action. Constancy is critical to success in achieving new year’s resolutions. My new year’s resolutions (goals) come, in part, from reflecting on goals met and unmet at the ending of the old year. As I look forward to the beginning of the new year, I find that some resolutions continue into the new year because of awareness gained in the previous year. New year’s resolutions, however, are not a matter of rolling the previous year’s resolutions into the new year. A resolution can be modified to reflect what I learned from attempting to achieve it. But, new ways of thinking about a resolution are needed for the new year. In this way, resolutions become organic, growing and maturing as they are refined through experience and constancy.

“Last year’s words belong to last year’s language,” wrote T. S. Eliot,¹ “and next year’s words await another voice.” The words that describe next year’s goal will come from constancy in the pursuit of that goal. What we learn from pursuing a goal is what gives it voice and meaning.

New years resolutions are intimately linked to self-awareness. Making new year’s resolutions, setting goals, refining goals, and evaluating progress toward goal achievement are responses to the dictum: “Know thyself.”  News year’s resolutions are about self-exploration, about knowing who we are. Thus, as Eliot tells us,

We shall not cease from exploration.
And the end of all our exploring
Shall be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

Working full time, along with “everything else” that had to be done, provided the excuse needed to justify the site’s neglect. When I retired a year and a half ago, I planned to get the site up to date and to keep it current.  Six months, seven months, a year passed. I did nothing.

Annis, a friend who writes The DayMaker blog, inspired me to set a goal of publishing a blogpost every ten days or so. That works. In a blogpost entitled “Why Wait?”,  Annis talks about tying up loose ends in the last month of the year and the “wait until the first of…” syndrome. The subject and tone of the post resonated with me, creating what I call a “get going on it” conversion experience.

Last Sunday morning, I wanted to do something minor on my Web page in preparation for tackling the major reorganization I planned for after the first of the year. My recent conversion experience must have penetrated my subconscious. Before I knew it, the day was nearly gone and I had worked for ten hours on the site . Fueled by Sunday’s success, I spent another eight hours the following day. In those eighteen hours, I wrote my annual update and holiday greeting,  emailed them to family and friends, reorganized the Web site, deleted duplicate and unwanted or unneeded files, and organized an archive. The file structure for the site is lean and clean.

Within hours of clicking on the email send button, I began to receive replies thanking me for the holiday greetings and update and commenting how much they were enjoyed. Pamela, who I refer to as the “muse of my online life,” observed that an annual update is “all the things you would tell your friends if you had lunch with them.”

Achieving a goal is a good feeling. Achieving a goal ahead of schedule is like no other feeling. Staying in touch with people  I care about, even once a year,  lets them know I’m still here and that I care about them. The real payoff is being reassured they are still a part of my life and that they care about me.

Despite the excuses I can find for not doing something, I know it’s never anyone else’s fault that I am not accomplishing the goals I know I want to accomplish. So, I make a choice: “get going” or get miserable.

For a number of years, I journaled in 8-1/2 by 11-inch spiral notebooks. When I filled a notebook, I removed the spiral binding and put the pages into a loose leaf binder. After a year or two of dismantling spiral bound notebooks, I discovered it was easier to write on loose leaf binder paper and put the pages into a binder. What a concept! In 1992, I found a Blueline A9 composition book that I have used since. In addition to the binders and composition books, I have four years of “Morning Pages,” a daily writing technique I learned from Julia Cameron’s book, The Artist’s Way.

Journal writing led to an interest in other types of writing. In 1988, I came across Natalie Goldberg’s book, Writing Down the Bones, that introduced me to writing as a way to “penetrate [my] life and become sane.” Natalie gave me permission to write the “worst junk in the world” and to feel okay about it; she  introduced me to “writing practice.” The basic unit of writing practice is a timed exercise, ten, fifteen, twenty minutes, an hour, whatever works. The rules of writing practice are simple:

1. Keep your hand moving.
2. Don’t cross out.
3. Don’t worry about spelling, punctuation, grammar.
4. Lose control.
5. Don’t think. Don’t get logical.
6. Go for the jugular.

I keep a list of ideas for writing. Some writing describes memories and events I may want to add to my memoir. Other writing captures particular ideas or feelings I may or may not use in one of three novels I have begun or in the non-fiction book about a gay man and the extraordinary relationship he shares with his ex-wife and his family.

Though keeping a journal is a habit, there are days when I skip making an entry.

Why do I write? I found an answer to that question in the form of a poem in a journal entry from July 17, 1988:

Writing

makes visible my thoughts

feelings

emotions

peels away the layers of armor that separate me

from myself

from others

exposes vulnerability

risks intimacy

allows me to be seen

as I am

naked

raw

reveals me to myself

to those around me

teaches love

Writing is salvation

The place mat, one of six, was sewn by my mother from scraps, remnants of material for shirts she sewed for my brother and me, and dresses she sewed for my sister. Patchwork place mats. I look at them and I remember my mother. I look at the individual squares of fabric, and I remember the shirts my mother sewed. I remember how old I was when she sewed them. I remember when I wore them. I remember where we lived. I remember what grade I was in. In the fifth grade, I wore casino shirts. There were long sleeve and short sleeve shirts, striped shirts, plaid shirts, checked shirts. There were wide collar shirts, narrow collar shirts, button down collar shirts. There were shirts always in the latest style.

The shirts my mother sewed, were not only sewn by her, but washed, starched, and ironed by her. My child self didn’t give much thought, if any, to the closet full of made-for-me shirts. I was in high school before I learned that shirts could be bought at a department store.

When I entered high school, my mother began working at a full time job outside of the house and was still ironing my shirts.

“This shirt isn’t ironed right,” my smart-ass-adolescent self said.

“Well, let me show you how to fix that,” she said.

Never tell your mother you don’t like the way she ironed your shirt, my mature adult self thinks.

As a white collar professional, I believed a starched and carefully ironed shirt made an important statement about me, about my commitment to my job, and about the quality of my work. Working full time, I did not have time to wash and iron shirts. I sent them to the laundry.  My mature adult self wonders how my mother accomplished all she did.

Shirts are outgrown, handed down, worn out. Mothers grow old, quit sewing, and die. A set of six patchwork place mats provide a tangible memory of a loving mother and the shirts she sewed.

November is National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). On November 1, I embarked on a journey into my imagination. With a suitcase packed full of creativity, conviction, and plenty of clean socks,  I set off down a road never before traveled…  into the realm of my own novel. On the journey, I met guilt monkeys, plot bunnies, and countless unspeakable creatures that tested my devotion to my story and called into question not only the wisdom of noveling at such speeds, but my sanity, as well. I pressed on, dirty socks and all—an intrepid traveler charting a path toward “The End.”

Twenty-five days later (five days ahead of my deadline) I emerged into the realm of authorhood with my fifty thousand word manuscript in hand. The NaNoWriMo staff, thrilled to see me cross the finish line, could not say enough times how very proud they are of my epic accomplishment! They congratulated me again and again on my NaNoWriMo 2011 win, directed me to my winner’s certificate, and assured me of eternal bragging rights. Better yet, for the first time, I was called a “Novelist.”

The  NaNoWriMo experience

• taught me a lot about the writing process
• introduced me to my Inner Therapist who I call “The Moderator.” He helped me escape the taunts of my inner critic (There is a cast of thousands of critics in my head!).
• assured me that it is okay to write over 40,000 words before the story tells me where it wants to go.

It’s been a great experience. I am grateful to all who encouraged me; but, especcially to Annis, my NaNoWritMo Coach and Bookend buddy, for her unfailing encouragement and support. Thank you everyone! I am already looking forward to NaNoWriMo 2012!

Standing at the rim of the Grand Canyon, mesmerized by its vastness beneath a brilliant blue sky, I thought of my friend, Mark, who visited there in the fall of 1992 after the death from AIDS of his partner, Philip. I was new to the travel business and Mark was one of my first clients. After Philip’s death, Mark told me he wanted a get away by himself to spend some time adjusting to his loss. When he said he wanted to do a cruise, I suggested that a cruise would probably not provide the experience he was seeking. Mark asked me to make a recommendation.

I suggested a train trip to the Grand Canyon, a place I thought would offer Mark the change he sought as well as the privacy I felt he needed to process his loss. He could take the train from Pasadena and spend several nights at El Tovar on the rim of the canyon. Mark thought the plan sounded good and asked me to make reservations for him.

On the night Mark left Pasadena, several of his friends and I met him at the station, where we gave him our good wishes and a basket full of things we thought he needed for entertainment on the overnight train trip.

Two days later, Mark phoned. “I just wanted to tell you,” he said, “that I awoke this morning and looked out of the window of my room to an exquisite view of the Grand Canyon. Dennis, it’s like the earth is responding to the enormity of my grief.”

I didn’t stay long in the travel business, but the memory of Mark’s trip to the Grand Canyon will stay with me forever.

Before the Information Age transformed our lives, family history research (genealogy) was a painstaking and time consuming pursuit. While the personal computer and the Internet have revolutionized the speed and ease with which family history information is accessed, gathered, organized, and stored, family history research remains a painstaking and time consuming pursuit. It requires the intervention of the researcher to evaluate information contained in a variety of records and to link that information to people and to events to establish facts that prove the relationship of people to one another and to property.

My family history research began with Gilbert Harry Doane’s Searching for Your Ancestors. Doane’s book gave basic suggestions about gathering information needed to construct a family tree, or pedigree. I made a list of the facts I had: the names of my parents and grandparents as far back as I could remember or knew. Next, I wrote letters to relatives who I thought might have any of the information I sought.

Some family members are reticent to talk about the family’s history and, in some cases, to talk at all about particular family members. I recall asking an elderly aunt about my grandfather, who died before I was born. “Oh, that sonofabitch,” she snarled, “Why do you want to know about him?” “Because the knowledge is relevant to who I am,” I thought. How can I know who I am unless I know where and from whom I come.

In 1977, I moved to Taft, California to a job as library director at Taft College. To my surprise, the college offered a course in genealogy through its community services division. I soon learned that the course would have a major impact on the college library. Course participants descended on the library in search of answers to their family history research questions. Knowing little or nothing about family history research, I was at a loss to meet their needs.

My family history research education began in earnest. A few more family history “how to” books were available by then, and I learned that the library was eligible to order census microfilm from the National Archives and Records Service.

I learned about the census, what information each census contained, and what census records were available. While several hundred reels of census microfilm flowed through the library over a period of five or six years, census resources are but one piece of the family history puzzle.

In the course of reading about family history research, I came across the suggestion that, as a nation of immigrants, locating an immigrant ancestor was a suitable goal for most Americans. Identifying the immigrant ancestor became my mantra for each family history researcher with whom I worked.

As the demand for family history resources increased, I studied harder and became more knowledgeable. Eventually, the instructor who taught the college’s genealogy course suggested that I teach the genealogy course. “You know more about the process of family history research than I do,” he said. “I’m sure you can do a much better job of meeting the needs of students and family history researchers than I can do.”

About the same time, a group of genealogy students and local family history researchers formed a genealogy club.

Those were exciting times. I began organizing field trips to area genealogy libraries. I spoke at meetings of the Kern County Genealogy Society on a variety of record types and was interviewed on a local radio talk program.

Two summers, I organized week-long field trips to Salt Lake City to use the LDS (Mormon) Church Genealogical Society’s library, each time escorting 15-20 avid family history researchers.

I taught week-end workshops for Bakersfield College’s Community Services program. The workshops included a field trip to the genealogy library of the Santa Monica Temple LDS Church or to the Genealogy Room of the Los Angeles Public library.

I looked at hundreds of rolls of census microfilm, searching for my ancestors as well as the ancestors of other family history researchers. It was fun and exciting work, particularly when anyone found an ancestor for whom they were searching.

I traced my paternal and maternal family history several generations. Early in my research, I found a genealogy of the Hine family–the family name of my paternal grandmother–that begins with the first person of the Hine surname in New Milford, Connecticut in 1640. To date, I am unsuccessful in locating the ancestor who links me to the Hine genealogy. Missing one or two generations that make the connection, I am thwarted by the mysterious disappearance of my third great grandfather. He died before 1850 and was, therefore, not captured by that U.S. Census. Born before 1790, he is not listed in the pre-1850 censuses as only heads of households were listed by name in the censuses of 1790 through 1840.

In 1976, Ancestry.com did not exist. Today, thanks to the wonders of modern technology, it is possible, with the click of a mouse, to find everything needed. I am amazed at how fast, easy, and inexpensive it is. The research practically conducts itself.

Family history research is interesting, rewarding, and enjoyable. As a librarian, I am naturally curious, enjoying the challenge of finding information to answer research questions. The greatest reward, though, is the satisfaction of being the member of my family who knows the family’s history and who loves sharing that history with other family members.