Polaroid picture

 I’m finding the stress of my life cutting into my sleep. I seem to sleep long enough, but I can tell when I wake that I’ve been worrying about my responsibilities all night long.

With no school-aged children at home I often don’t follow weather forecasts. This morning I awoke before six a.m. vexed by a complicated issue. I got up to work on it on my laptop and when I glanced outside after about a half hour, something magical happened.

When I was a little girl I received a Polaroid camera for Christmas. (My granddaughter has a camera with the same technology.) I would take a picture and pull the seemingly blank photo paper from the camera. As I watched, a dim image in black and white would appear and details slowly sharpen before my eyes.

That’s what happened to me this morning. When I sat down at my desk, all seemed the same as yesterday. but at some point I turned my head to glance outside and realized the car seemed different. Peering down at the pre-dawn yard, I saw a blanket of white on my car. Over the next hour, each time I glanced out details of the scene deepened and sharpened into a wintry landscape. In the windless air a dusting of snow covered every maple twig. Since our coachhouse is white with grey trim, my west window framed an old black and white photo with a touch of dull brick in the Greeley Village apartments beyond and to the south a tinge of dusty pink at the office condos peeked through the branches.

David A. Bednar, an apostle of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, spoke of "the tender mercies of the Lord," small blessings that we can learn to recognize and appreciate in our daily lives. As I sit here, wondering at the beauty that developed before my eyes this morning, it truly is a tender mercy. The stresses remain, the challenges abound, but there is beauty to be seen if I just lift my head and look.

Drinking from a firehose

 I just got back from a religion class at our chapel. (Adult religion classes offered during the week are called “Institute.”)

It was inspirational and reminded me of my one experience with BYU Education Week back in 1993. Brigham Young University opens its campus each year for a week between spring and summer semester. BYU professors and others offer free classes and lectures on a huge variety of subjects. I saw Stephen Covey give a lecture on Joseph Smith, using the same paradigm as he uses in 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. I attended a college-level art history class. (I’ve often regretted not taking one as an undergrad.) I literally ran from one venue to the next, 'drinking from a fire hose,’ to borrow the metaphor a speaker in the opening meeting in the Marriott Center used. And today I had another sip.

Shauna Seamons is generously sharing her wealth of knowledge and deep understanding of the restored gospel. The topic for this semester is “Temple Text in the Scriptures.” I’ve always been fascinated by the idea that our temple experience can be enriched by a deeper understanding of temple references in the scriptures. (For me as a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, these are the Bible, the Book of Mormon, the Doctrine and Covenants, and the Pearl of Great Price.)

Shauna has been a religion teacher for over twenty years and I was blown away both by the content of her lesson and her teaching style. I decided at the last minute to bring a new notebook. (With my hand tremor my handwriting is sometimes illegible, especially in public.) I’m so glad I did. My left hand behaved itself admirably and now I have notes to refer to as I study this week.

I love taking classes and expanding my horizons. Thank you, Shauna! And thank you to all the women who came out on a winter Tuesday morning to share in the class and contribute to my day.

Latest Autumn

 The yellows are fallen and browned. A few stubborn dark leaves, chiefly oaks, hold on.

I lived in a little town in central Pennsylvania until I was nine. I loved the rolling hills surrounding our little Susquehanna River valley. To me, after the leaves fell, the hills were covered with soft brown fur. As I grew older I realized that my impressionistic view was a fantasy. Bare tree limbs and twigs catch your jacket and scratch your face. But the childish fancy won't give way to reality. The sight of a late autumn wood is comforting and cozy.

My oldest cousin, Lola, owned a sugar beet farm in eastern Montana and we visited them in 1995, the summer of our cross-country trip, after stopping at my Dad’s old stomping  grounds in Choteau County and Fort Benton, Montana.

Lola and her husband Dick were gracious hosts. They took us in their pickup truck to view the sugar beet fields and their oldest son gave my kids rides on his horse.

Their oldest daughter had moved to West Virginia. She was quite homesick and one day called Lola and said, “Mom, the leaves have all fallen off the trees. It is so ugly here!”

Because of that report I have pondered late autumn. It would be a shock to first experience an Eastern late autumn in adulthood. I’ve grown up with them. I love the contrasts and the continual change in color and texture all through the year.

Out my kitchen window I see trees, a few small ones in the foreground and a large maple tree a block to the north. It has a pleasing rounded shape and I’m reminded of a poem I once wrote. I visualized my brain, which had failed me so utterly, as a large deciduous tree with thousands of branches and twigs. My marvelous brain, for all its failings, was as glorious as a mighty oak.

I’m very proud of the fact that I can say and even spell deciduous. I’ve often felt it was a pretentious adjective for such a familiar object. I just learned that it comes from the Latin: to fall down or off. So prosaic.

Sunglow, burnt sienna, and honey

 I’m sure I’ve mentioned this before. For the past thirty-eight years I have reveled in the simple but deep pleasure of living in New England: a place other people go to on vacation. In the fall, I enjoy walking and driving, day after day, watching the colors change from the deep augustal green through reds, oranges, yellows, and browns.

According to The Boston Globe, “Summer 2023 was the second-rainiest on record in Boston,” with more than 20 inches falling in three months.

In drought years the trees turn color early, and this year they turned late. I was happy to see that even though we were in England until October 12th, we hadn’t missed the peak in New England. Two weeks later Jim and I took a drive west to Petersham and ate supper in Barre at Red Tomato Pizza, enjoying delicious Italian food. We’d been to the town before: Barre is the terminus of my beloved Route 62.

As we headed home on this late afternoon, the sunlight on the leaves nourished our souls.

Two days later we drove to Manchester, New Hampshire, where we lived for seven years. Four of our six children were born there at Elliot Hospital. I’ve always loved the mix of deep forest green pine trees and deciduous trees in New Hampshire.

As I’ve been driving around the past few weeks, composing this post in my head, I’ve paid especial attention and tried to name all the colors of late fall. I’ve been surprised at the vibrant reds: I think of red as an early fall color. And it is. These deep scarlets are mostly single trees, obviously from a nursery and not native to the soil.

I’m also surprised by the yellows still on the trees. How to describe the colors? I went to a website website for some linguistic help. Here are some of the colors I’ve been trying to describe:

Burnt sienna, golden brown, amber, autumn gold, sunglow, golden puppy, harvest gold, sandy taupe, antique gold, cognac, aspen gold, dark goldenrod, maize, candlelight gold, saffron, honey, and caramel. Good enough to eat.

Anniversary: November 5, 1995

 On November 5th of 1995, I went crazy, bonkers, insane, out of my mind. Literally.

I once heard Kurt Vonnegut, author of Slaughterhouse Five and other sixties (and seventies) classics, talk about his family history of mental illness. “Bats in the belfry,” he said cheerfully. I loved his bluntness. I don’t judge anyone else’s sensibilities, but I personally don’t like euphemisms, if for no other reason than that they don’t have the intended effect. New terms for old conditions can’t keep up with popular culture turning them into insults.

So on that first Sunday in November (I’m on deadline here), I stood outside the kitchen in the warm autumn sunshine as a kind older mother combed out my long hair to remove head lice nits. I stayed home from church, a very rare occurence, because some of our family were infected with lice. Later that afternoon I started wandering around the house making no sense to anyone but myself. I was convinced evil men were trying to kidnap my daughter. I thought I could read Jim’s mind by studying his facial expressions (and did pretty well with that). When my bizarre behavior escalated a good friend took me to her house. Later a few friends drove me on Route 2, a four-lane highway, to Lahey Hospital. On the way I unbuckled my seatbelt and said I’d get out. Luckily I still could be persuaded by my friend as she said, “You don’t have to do this, Mary,” reaching across my body and calmly buckling me back in the minivan seat.

I spent several hours in the emergency room and then about four days in the psychiatric unit on the 5th floor of Waltham Hospital. I was so naïve that it took me a day to realize the doors were locked.

It was a memorable weekend. I review parts of it most weeks at the newcomers meeting of my support group: DBSA Boston: Depression Bipolar Support Alliance. Just this past Wednesday I told part of my story again. Later, as the other Zoom participants introduced themselves, a young woman thanked me for my story. It gave her hope to hear me share and see that I had survived and flourished despite my illness.

When I woke up from the anti-psychotic-drug-induced sleep twenty years ago, I was in my right mind and shattered. I knew no one, NO ONE, with mental illness. Intellectual disability, (we respectfully called it mental retardation in my childhood), I was intimately aware of. My little brother, Michael, was born severely disabled and I lived with him daily. I knew his classmates and later I trained as a special education teacher.

But I had no such history with mental illness. Soon after my first hospitalization, a woman we met at church generously shared her experiences with Jim and me. I vowed that I would be open about my illness. I wanted to be the person a 'young Mary Johnston’ could turn to. I often have that privilege at DBSA Boston.

I talked on the phone today with my brother, who has been sober for as long as I’ve been married. He started an NA (Narcotics Anonymous) meeting in Butler, PA, many years ago. He told me, with passion, about a man he knew whose life was changed by NA. It reminded me of something I sometimes forget in the administrative throes of being president of DBSA Boston. We do what we do because it changes lives. It makes a difference. That’s what we are here for.

Prayer

 As a young girl, I was quite a Pharisee. I wanted very much to be religious but even more I wanted to be seen as religious.

When I was about 10, our pastor at Holy Trinity Church in Westfield, NJ, where I lived from age 9 till marriage, gave everyone a challenge: spend more time praying in church. Wanting to be spiritual and very attuned to challenges from teachers (I was a pathological grade hound), I made a promise. I’m sure I wanted to please my parents, and was disappointed that they never mentioned it.

So, on Sundays, before Mass started, I stayed kneeling longer than my parents and siblings did. Unfortunately, I didn’t know how to pray for more than about two minutes, so I just knelt in mind-silence, wondering if anyone knew I was faking it.

This morning I went to the Bethesda Ward since I’m visiting my older brother, Steve, and his wife, Maria. I rolled into the parking lot at 10:07 a.m. for the 10:10 sacrament meeting. The lot was empty except for a row of about seven cars in the corner. The building had  a sign: Washington DC North Mission office down the stairs and in the rear, so I assume these are extra ‘mission cars’ up for sale.

I walked around the building to verify what I already knew: all the doors were locked and the chapel empty. Probably it is stake conference here, the semi-annual meeting of all the congregations in the stake (like a diocese). I pondered whom I would communicate with to suggest a change on the Church global website. I’m sure it would cause huge technical challenges to list stake conference dates for the 3,500 units worldwide. I know in our Cambridge Stake the dates change from time to time.

We’ve had this experience before. I guess it indicates how often we travel. A memorable time was in June of 2001. All eight of us flew to Paris on our way to Florence, Cinque Terre, London, and the Orkney Islands. We had found the address of the Paris church and found our way to the door. But it was locked. It was a commercial building, not a free-standing church building, and we wondered if we had the correct address. A large window in front with a curtain had a Book of Mormon on the windowsill, so we were confident of our location. But no meeting.

We did attend church in French once. We all were visiting Quebec City, one of my favorite places in North America, and found the small branch, also in a commercial building. The American missionaries were pleased to see us and became impromptu interpreters.

So, this morning, as I sit in an impromptu private devotional on a red metal bench with no cushion, I am creating a Primary lesson for my grandkids in the Bronx. They are about the age I was when I made a promise to pray more and then felt guilty for never fulfilling it. I want them to know that like a good conversation, sincere prayer takes effort and focus. A friend of mine once observed that God isn’t a ‘cosmic bellhop.’

In preparation for our lesson, I read an article on the Church website I happened to see after logging onto the chapel’s Liahona network. (Every church building I know of uses the same network name and passcode.) "God Knows and Loves You" It became the basis of my lesson. I'm also going to play a clip of Louis Armstrong singing "What a Wonderful World," and a karaoke "I Am a Child of God."

I'm still learning about prayer myself. I often 'shoot beyond the mark.' I'm not all that good at conversation, so I have that to overcome. But  I'll keep trying.

Smorgasbord

I was sitting in the ‘cultural hall’ (aka gym for those of you who aren’t LDS), waiting for stake conference (the semi-annual meeting of our stake (like a diocese: a group of eleven congregations in the Boston area)) to begin.

For some reason, I thought about service, and being the perfectionist I am, I focused on all the good deeds I’ve left undone.

A new and comforting thought came into my mind unbidden. Perhaps service opportunities are like a smorgasbord. (How often have you heard that word in the last fifty years? They were all the rage in the seventies.)

A smorgasbord is a Scandinavian way of serving food at a party. Instead of one entrée, many different kinds of food are presented at a huge table and guests are invited to sample those that look appealing.

When I was in college, a sweet and generous older man invited a friend and me to his favorite restaurant, which featured a smorgasbord. I was in seventh heaven. So many choices! I wanted to try all of them. The result was a memorable meal.

But in life, with that same attitude of trying to sample everything, I often feel discouraged and down on myself. When I fail to step up to a service opportunity, especially one that has no appeal to me or will be difficult or awkward to time-consuming, I feel like a failure.

I don’t mean to excuse myself for the things left undone that I really should have done. But life is a smorgasbord. There isn’t time to sample it all. A skill I’d like to develop is the ability to enjoy the fact of choices coupled with the wisdom that I must choose and that happiness lies in the direction of making good choices and being content with the outcomes.

In the October 2007 General Conference of the Church, Dallin H. Oaks gave a memorable talk, "Good, Better, Best." (I just googled Dallin Oaks and the first fill-in was ‘good better best.’) He talked about the many choices we have in life. Like the old Sears catalog he and his farming family pored over before Christmas in his youth, the choices can be labeled good, better, and best. The question is, are we making the best choices or are we satisfied with good ones.

I took the message to heart and I still recognize great good in it. But my interpretation can sometimes be toxic.

I recently listened to President Oaks’ talk to refresh my memory. It is interesting to note that much of his talk is geared towards official Church activities and over-scheduling children and youth. Those have nothing to do with my current personal life choices.

Jim and I often talk about choices, emotional paralysis, and time use. Since he is self-employed and I’m an independent homemaker, our schedules are largely our own. The freedom can be exhilarating; it can also be paralyzing. Sometimes we make a priority list and then avoid working on what we named as our priorities.

Today I have 328 unread emails in my inbox. It’s a backlog from our two-week trip to Oxford, Cornwall, and London. When I got home it was over 700. I also have undone DBSA Boston work (I’m president, remember?), an unpublished blog (obviously I chose to post if you are reading this), work to do on my memoir, as well as laundry, food preparation, and a myriad of other worthwhile time-use choices.

Writing that list raises my anxiety. Can I really relax and enjoy the smorgasbord?