Tomorrow morning I leave for a week’s vacation in Mexico. I’m going to sit by a pool, steps from a beach, for five days. Time will slow down, and then when I return it will feel a million years ago that I was away.
This month marked the 19th anniversary of my father’s death. He had been hospitalized for months at Mass General in Boston when my sister called me at school just before my holiday break. The good news was that Daddy was coming home for Christmas. The bad news was that he was not expected to get better. It was just a matter of time.
The hospital bed was set up in the annex off the living room we called the “sun room” because it was surrounded by windows on all sides. Fittingly, I suppose, it was a remarkably sunny day on the day he died. I was 18.
This year marked my now having lived more than half my life without him.
The summer before I began 8th grade, my family moved from Brussels to a small New England town. Our house was four miles from the ocean. We all embraced this new, luxurious, proximity. The back of the station wagon soon housed the beach umbrellas, chairs, towels and gear to accompany a leisurely day at the beach. We quickly adopted habits of regular beach goers, shaking the sand out of all nooks and crannies in the sweltering parking lot before getting in the car, learning the shortcuts that enabled us to bypass the bumper-to-bumper traffic heading back to the highway. We proudly became the locals.
Two weeks before my father was hospitalized, never to recover, he and my mother dropped me off at college in Illinois. We had driven cross-country with all the belongings I deemed too precious to leave behind. My assigned dorm room was tiny, my allotted half allowing for a fraction of the boxes I had packed. In my mind, my father’s stature filled the remaining space. It was the last time I saw him standing, and the last time he hugged me.
Tonight, hours from my early morning flight, I’m thinking of my father at the beach, his toes digging into the sand with an ill-fitting sun hat barely keeping his forehead from getting too red. Tomorrow I will take a walk along the Pacific Ocean in his memory. Just maybe, time will slow down enough for me to remember him in ways I haven’t in a long, long time. If that happens, maybe it won’t feel like a million years ago since he went away.
Kibette & Kibettoo. Early Days.
Saturday, January 29, 2011
Monday, January 17, 2011
Little Stories
Somewhere in my early teenage years, I discovered my mother's photo album - the one of her life before my dad. I should add that she had many, many albums of life with my father and with us, but I was endlessly fascinated by this idea of her having lived a life before us. After she finished high school in Sweden and finishing school in France (yes, finishing school), she moved to Jacksonville, Florida for a year to practice her English. There are black and white photos of her at parties in 60s style cocktail dresses (it was the 60s, after all), lounging in the grass with a gaggle of friends, and lounging around the pool in bikinis with cocktails. And – this really caught my attention – of men. There were men before my father? This was a brand new concept for me.
Sometimes my mother would tell me bits of her stories. Of living in her own apartment in Stockholm and sitting down to her dinner for one and a glass of wine; she loved it. Of working in Florida for a grumpy patent lawyer. Of previous loves. There was one German man in particular with whom she fell madly in love. As she told it, he went away for some reason and she missed him horribly. When he returned, she rushed to the train station to meet him and the moment she saw him she knew – she knew it was over. There was no feeling left.
I remember thinking then that I wanted lots of my own stories. (Greek chorus chimes in: Be careful what you wish for.) What I did not know at the young age of fifteen is that life is a collection of stories. Some are short stories, some are vignettes, some feel like epic novels and others are sequels… whether we want a Part Two or not.
Despite my desire for many stories, I’m not one for change. I prefer the comfort of the known. I take pleasure in routine. I am loyal to United Airlines because I know what I’m getting (though they keep changing those snacks-in-a-box options and I really miss the Classic). I know where to get my favorite coffee in Maui and favorite Indian in New York, and it throws me for a loop when I can’t. I like being a regular. I do. I do.
It is ironic, therefore, that my life is often full of self-imposed change. This is because even more than being uncomfortable with change, I am even less comfortable feeling stuck. And when the character gets stuck in a story, the writer must change something to move the tale forward. I am my own character and I am my own writer.
And just like a reader has no idea how the chapter will end, nor do I. For instance, I had no idea I’d be married at 25, nor divorced at 32. I could not foresee both my parents dying too young, one of a broken body, the other of a broken heart. If you told me that one story had me living in Manhattan for so long that I would call that urban island of 1 million people my home, and in the next I'd be living on a hunk of volcanic rock in the middle of the Pacific, I’d have laughed. HA HA HA!
And if you’d told me that one day I’d be roommates, simply roommates, with the young man with whom I had - until recently - been in a relationship, I would have shook my head. Don’t be silly, I would have said. That would never happen. But it has.
You just never know how the story will end. Nor when the next will begin.
Tuesday, January 11, 2011
On Creativity
Today I spent three hours, as part of my boss-endorsed Professional Skills Certification Program, in a video-conference room surrounded by materials to support the course ‘du jour’: namely, the Creativity and Innovation Effectiveness course.
This might be the least creative name for a course I’ve ever taken.
I was assigned homework prior to showing up this morning. It was comprised of a survey: seven sections of twelve questions each, whereby I was asked to rate statements on a scale of 1 to 5, 1 being Least True and 5 being Truest (or something like that).
Example: Was I interested in lateral thinking? I googled “define lateral thinking” and came up with a Wikipedia entry telling me about the guy who coined the phrase. I decided if I didn’t know what it was, the answer was likely 1 or 2. I put 2.
Example: I take great interest in other people’s ideas. Hm. Well, that really depends, doesn’t it? There’s one attorney at the office who galumphs down the corridor with leftover cans of soda from his last meeting stuffed into all his pockets. Dude, they cost 60 cents at the vending machine. How badly do you need to save those $3? If his idea is to create a bottomless faucet that pours only Diet Coke, how much interest am I going to take? I’d venture a 1 on that one.
Example: Can I think of twenty ways to use a paper clip other than for its intended purpose? I came up with five. To be fair, I was a little rushed, having saved the survey for ten minutes before I had to leave work. All the same, I berated myself for only coming up with five, and - for the record - none of those included using it to scratch my inner ear. Someone else came up with that one.
Anyway, there I was in the training room, staring at the video-conference screen, shouting my scores back to them through our ceiling-hung microphones. It seems my creativity and innovation scores were pretty abysmal.
I thought, how far I’ve come from the days of pursuing a career in acting.
This is a dangerous road to go down. For starters, the pursuit of an acting career did not make me more creative, other than finding ways to manipulate my checking account to last me to my next paycheck. Being stressed about having no money and no career and a bummer of a boyfriend and a weird roommate does not lend itself to creative efforts. On the other hand, my most recent heart-to-heart at the office was with a woman twenty years older than me informing me of her high-sodium condition and how she could no longer eat soup.
One of the things I relished about the pursuit of acting - and I do make a distinction between acting and trying to make a living at it (the difference for me was about how much time I spent doing both) - was all the others just like me who were also struggling but reaching. The desire was there for all of us, and that was our shared language. Working full-time in the “real world” without the desire to be there means that I now share my days with two kinds of people: the kind where their aspirations match their jobs, and the kind where people have set the retirement alarm and it has been ticking down for years. “Eighteen more months,” someone said to me yesterday of his turning 65.
I chose to leave acting behind me because it was decidedly not making me happy, nor did it promise ever to do so. Now, I wait for that moment when I know what to do instead.
My company requires me to change my log-in password every eight weeks. The password is required to have no fewer than eight characters that must be comprised of numbers, symbols and letters, of which at least one should be lowercase.
THIS is where my creativity blooms.
My current password is Aha!in100. It’s shorthand: I aspire to have my Aha! moment - by which I realize my true calling - in 100 days.
Every morning upon logging in, I get a prompt: “Your password is set to expire. Do you want to change it?” I keep clicking on the ‘No’ button. I haven’t had my breakthrough yet.
In the meantime, I’m going to finish this certification course, spend too much time on Hulu and, if there’s any time left in the day, I’m going to come up with a new password.
This might be the least creative name for a course I’ve ever taken.
I was assigned homework prior to showing up this morning. It was comprised of a survey: seven sections of twelve questions each, whereby I was asked to rate statements on a scale of 1 to 5, 1 being Least True and 5 being Truest (or something like that).
Example: Was I interested in lateral thinking? I googled “define lateral thinking” and came up with a Wikipedia entry telling me about the guy who coined the phrase. I decided if I didn’t know what it was, the answer was likely 1 or 2. I put 2.
Example: I take great interest in other people’s ideas. Hm. Well, that really depends, doesn’t it? There’s one attorney at the office who galumphs down the corridor with leftover cans of soda from his last meeting stuffed into all his pockets. Dude, they cost 60 cents at the vending machine. How badly do you need to save those $3? If his idea is to create a bottomless faucet that pours only Diet Coke, how much interest am I going to take? I’d venture a 1 on that one.
Example: Can I think of twenty ways to use a paper clip other than for its intended purpose? I came up with five. To be fair, I was a little rushed, having saved the survey for ten minutes before I had to leave work. All the same, I berated myself for only coming up with five, and - for the record - none of those included using it to scratch my inner ear. Someone else came up with that one.
Anyway, there I was in the training room, staring at the video-conference screen, shouting my scores back to them through our ceiling-hung microphones. It seems my creativity and innovation scores were pretty abysmal.
I thought, how far I’ve come from the days of pursuing a career in acting.
This is a dangerous road to go down. For starters, the pursuit of an acting career did not make me more creative, other than finding ways to manipulate my checking account to last me to my next paycheck. Being stressed about having no money and no career and a bummer of a boyfriend and a weird roommate does not lend itself to creative efforts. On the other hand, my most recent heart-to-heart at the office was with a woman twenty years older than me informing me of her high-sodium condition and how she could no longer eat soup.
One of the things I relished about the pursuit of acting - and I do make a distinction between acting and trying to make a living at it (the difference for me was about how much time I spent doing both) - was all the others just like me who were also struggling but reaching. The desire was there for all of us, and that was our shared language. Working full-time in the “real world” without the desire to be there means that I now share my days with two kinds of people: the kind where their aspirations match their jobs, and the kind where people have set the retirement alarm and it has been ticking down for years. “Eighteen more months,” someone said to me yesterday of his turning 65.
I chose to leave acting behind me because it was decidedly not making me happy, nor did it promise ever to do so. Now, I wait for that moment when I know what to do instead.
My company requires me to change my log-in password every eight weeks. The password is required to have no fewer than eight characters that must be comprised of numbers, symbols and letters, of which at least one should be lowercase.
THIS is where my creativity blooms.
My current password is Aha!in100. It’s shorthand: I aspire to have my Aha! moment - by which I realize my true calling - in 100 days.
Every morning upon logging in, I get a prompt: “Your password is set to expire. Do you want to change it?” I keep clicking on the ‘No’ button. I haven’t had my breakthrough yet.
In the meantime, I’m going to finish this certification course, spend too much time on Hulu and, if there’s any time left in the day, I’m going to come up with a new password.
Saturday, January 1, 2011
Why This Blog Is Late (or, The Nelson Sisters Wrap-Up 2010 with a quick U.S. Tour) by Kibettoo
SATURDAY DECEMBER 18
Maui - L.A. - New York.
Spend days 5th Avenue window viewing, Rockerfeller tree awing, glogg drinking, pool playing, Christmas shopping, hat/glove/scarf wearing, friend seeing.
FRIDAY DECEMBER 24
New York - Atlanta.
6:30 am - Off to see siblings, niece and nephews. First travel experience with O. S. discovers that he does not feel the same need she does to get to the airport early. S. threatens to leave without him. H., peacemaker, sits between them in the cab.
Christmas Eve - Meatballs, presents, wine, etc. (Meanwhile, the news forecasts snow in Atlanta and pending blizzard in the Northeast.)
SATURDAY DECEMBER 25
Snow in Atlanta!
The news forecasts white-out and high winds in the northeast.
H & S prepare themselves for canceled flights and reschedule straight away. Nice sounding chap working the Delta phones in New Zealand rebooks S. to Monday morning. H & O reschedule on American Airlines. All is well.
Snow angels, snowballs fights, and game-playing ensues. Family time, well worth trip.
SUNDAY DECEMBER 26TH
Blizzard hits NYC. All airports closed. Storm predicted to end Monday morning.
S. attempts to reschedule flights again. Nice sounding chap working Delta phones in New Zealand becomes so overwhelmed he transfers S. without warning to an American woman who is exasperated from the get go and within a minute or two - wait for it – hangs up.
Call back. Nice lady in New Zealand answers. S. rebooked for Monday midday flight back to New York. Will make it in time to catch flight back to Maui on Tuesday morning.
MONDAY DECEMBER 27TH
Atlanta - Philly - New York.
8:00 am - Brother R. wakes S. shaking his head. Flight canceled. Delta shuts down phone and online booking. S. handles situation with less grace than desired.
10:00 am - S heads to airport with brother R. to deal with Delta in person.
Stands in Delta’s rebooking line while brother R. goes counter hopping to various airlines in attempt to rebook S. to NY or to make Maui connection. Booked. Booked. Booked. Unavailable. Unavailable. Unavailable.
S. observes that there are 8 open counters for pet-check in and unaccompanied minors and no lines. S. observes that there are 2 open counters for human check-in and a line 100+ people deep.
3:00 pm - Reach Delta counter. Offer to rebook to Philadelphia. Philadelphia??!! Nice young Indian couple one counter over assure S. they can help get her to New York. S. accepts boarding pass to Philly.
Immediately call Amtrak to reserve train ticket from Philly to New York. No trains running.
Run into young Indian couple at gate. They have bought tickets on Megabus. S. does the same.
4:00 pm - Text from H & O. Their multiple canceled flights = they are driving back to NY.
4:45 pm - The stand-by list numbers 199.
Announcement: delay due to late arriving plane.
Announcement: delay due to late arriving crew member (pause) - the captain.
5:45 pm - S. boards plane.
Text message: Megabus trip canceled.
S. heads to the loo. Sees man standing in the galley. S. tosses out the question, “Any chance you know how to get from Philly to New York?”
By george, he does! He has rented a car to come down from New York. Would S. like a ride? Yes! Yes! And, could nice young Indian couple join? Yes, they can join. Meet new travel companion - John.
S. has faith she will make her next morning flight to Maui.
8:00 pm - Land in Philly and meet driver, Mr. Singh.
S. hearts Mr. Singh & Mr. John.
Text message: flight canceled out of Newark in the morning. Brother R. has rebooked S. for Thursday.
11:00 pm - New York City. S. slips, slides and clambers through snow banks to reach warm, dry apartment. Victory!
THURSDAY DECEMBER 30TH
New York - Denver - Las Vegas - Maui
5:45 am - S. heads to aiport.
10:15 am - Land in Denver. All good. Light snow.
11:24 am - Board for Las Vegas on time. All good
12:00 pm - Still on runway waiting for a part (!), paperwork and the de-icing machine.
S. asks flight attendant if Las Vegas connections are aware of Denver delays. Flight attendant asks where S. is flying to. Kahului, Maui.
Flight attendant knows of no flights from Las Vegas to Maui.
S. presents boarding pass.
Flight attendant brings it to show other flight attendants. All are baffled and amused. S. is baffled. Not amused.
1:39 pm - S. lands in Vegas at exact time as planned departure for Maui. S. calls H from runway. H. searches online for flight details: Lucky! It is delayed. But, wait - what’s this? Flight 193 to Maui is actually going to San Francisco.
So: New York-Denver-Las Vegas-San Francisco-Maui.
4:12 pm - Land in San Francisco.
4:16 pm - Board for Maui. On time. Upgrade to first class. Wine promptly ordered.
Resolution for 2011, or at least for January. Stay put.
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