Headlamps

If you happen to be people of the Snow Globe, let me explain a great mystery. Those twin bobbing lights on Notus Road at 7:30 p.m., like headlights but no, too high to be headlights, those are us. Tom and I. Walking at quite a perky pace with headlamps on our heads. He thinks it’s not only practical, but clever. He’s always wanted a reason to buy me a headlamp. Better yet, matching headlamps! His, however, stays nicely in place over his no-nonsense Carhart beanie. Mine struggles to stay still over my busy hair which is covered by a shifting variety of hats from my soft-as-a-cloud crocheted hat to my left-over-from-Halloween cow hat. Usually it is sliding down over my eyes. This is an annoyance I gamely endure to support my Love in his fitness mission. Tom has had heredity hypertension and high cholesterol since high school, like his dad, and then just before Christmas he was diagnosed with diabetes.

He tells people his doctor called him Fatty and told him to get out of his office, which gets a chuckle from most. But what the doctor really said was “take an Aspirin every day so you don’t have a heart attack until we get this under control,” which does not get a chuckle from me. In fact, I swallow a bit of panic every time I hear the bottle of Aspirin chink-chinking in his coat pocket and I have a collection of stashed Aspirin bottles myself, just so one is always at hand.

Walking quickly seems as manageable a way as any to out distance panic, and typical of Tom, we haven’t stopped there. He processed the news himself first, and by the time he shared it with me he had a membership at the YMCA, an appointment with a dietitian and a personal trainer, a Fitbit, and a plan to lure me with new workout clothes. Do you realize how expensive workout clothes can be? Even more so at the beginning of the year, when so many of us have made a resolution involving our health and we need moisture-wicking, figure trimming, support lending, speed enhancing gear to keep that resolution. Apparently, there must be added benefit if said gear is electric green or intensely coral, because to find understated colors in our sizes at any local store or across the world wide web was a pre-challenge to the challenge.

Anyway, we’re finally outfitted and working out, being proactive and positive. I mostly manage to shovel away the feeling of being stuck in the center of the Globe, the snow falling around me in the form of a fear named diabetes. It helps that at the YMCA we encountered a favorite used-to-be employee from our gas station, who now enthusiastically teaches water fitness classes. We also chatted with our former neighbor, a young basketball star from the Globe and recently returned college graduate. She teaches people how to master the fitness machines. They make the YMCA feel down right homey.

I’ve always thought I’d be a good fitness person, after all I took aerobics for college credit. I lost all the baby weight from my first child with a devotion to Cher’s exercise video on VHS. I actually and honestly enjoy yoga, Power Yoga mind you, if only on PBS. I fully expected to be good at working out. This is not the first time I’ve felt smugly more qualified than Tom for an undertaking I was in favor of. I should know by now I am usually wrong, given the skiing-actually-sucks incident and the West Coast Swing tangle up, both things he tried because I begged, only to discover he was infinitely better at it than I. So it shouldn’t have surprised me, three weeks in, to find myself in the closet one morning, having crawled there in determination to start my day only to find I was unable to quite get up off the floor, due to my lower back being not a fan of some unspecified thing I did at the Y the night before.

Not a problem really. I’m walking almost completely upright again and he’s doing great at his workout, losing steady weight and feeling so much more energetic; He’s all about earning those fireworks on his Fitbit (although that damn thing has a graph and I seriously refuse to take part in certain activities that create peaks on the graph ever again unless it’s not on his wrist for goodness sake!). I’m certainly not ready to give in and let him buy me my own, try as he might, but I’m glad he has people. In and around the Globe are other people who get it, who can share their experiences and lighten the load.

Other people are one of the Snow Globe’s best features. More than once I have been on the edge of spitefully, hopelessly cooking and drowning in a fat filled cheesy lasagna paired with a whole loaf of butter-soaked garlic bread (oh, the carbs, carbs!) because my mind cannot process one more weird diabetic recipe with obscure ingredients. I mean, only so many times can you follow no less than three Wal-Mart employees around the produce department in search of shirataki spaghetti (low carb, low carb) because the mobile app says they carry it even though no one there has any idea what it’s made of or where it’s hiding. Carb, my friends, is a four-letter word. But some people in the Globe know this. One of them talked me off the edge via Messenger, by sharing how he kicked his diabetes into control with foods I can locate on my own. Another provides a manageable challenge by posting recipe links for the successful low carb dinners she cooks for her husband. If she can do it, then maybe I too can avoid death by lasagna.

Life is too good to let it end that way! Other people in Tom’s online support group are getting on with their good lives, and they're a humbling reminder of how little we have on our plates in comparison. We don’t have to continually prick the finger of a sobbing two-year-old who will live with a damaging disease his whole life. We are not battling physical limitations that make it nearly impossible to exercise, we are not without health insurance or good medical care. When I get angry because despite my best efforts to walk this path with my partner, I cannot share the burden of the nerve pain that keeps him awake at night, I turn to gratitude. I’m thankful for a strong and determined husband; I’m thankful there are people who understand; I’m thankful red wine has only 4 carbs per glass (thank-you, thank-you!), and I’m thankful for matching headlamps.

To Begin Again

I watched a video recently by a motivational speaker.  His topic was happiness, and he challenged the idea that being successful will make us happy, contending instead that being happy will make us successful.  At the end he listed four simple things we can do to promote our own happiness, and one of them stood out to me as the answer to a prayer:  keep a journal, and write about one positive thing that happens to you every day. 

I used to be a journal-keeping fool.  As a teenager becoming a young-adult, it was how I worked through things, and often how I got to enjoy the best of those things again and again.  Somewhere along my way, I began to over-think my writing, and I lost the ability to just write.  Since I began Scenes from a Snow Globe, I’ve been looking for ways to give it boundaries, because it seems the most successful bloggers have a theme, and because I went to college and in my writing classes I slowly accepted the idea that you must “narrow your topic!” 

I know I want to capture the everyday, ordinary-extraordinary moments of small town life, but still I struggle to let my thoughts flow;  I tend to want to assign too much meaning to the entries, to over-stuff them with emotion instead of letting them speak for themselves.  What I realized when the speaker suggested his journal idea, was that the moments I really want to remember are the ones that make me slow down and smile.  If there are moments of pain or anger or melancholy, I want to balance them, surround them, wrap them up in beauty.  It’s exactly those happy things floating around, lingering in the air, that can make my world a snow globe in the first place.  So today I begin again, Scenes from a Snowglobe…

February 26, 2012

I love people!  I’m a people-watcher, a kind-spirited eaves-dropper.  People amuse me, amaze me, make me think.  In my mind, I give out high-fives and hugs to strangers all the time.  But what I don’t do is actually talk to or touch people.  My husband is my hero in that regard.  He’s a talker-toucher.  He holds doors, makes jokes, gives out compliments.  While I hear and see more little details about the people all around me than he does, he interacts with the people right in front of him far better than I.  So I’m trying to learn from him, and today my efforts paid off by giving me my “one positive thing” to journal.

In line in front of me at the grocery store today was an elderly man all alone.  I shop in a big warehouse style store where you bag your own groceries.  He was getting out money to pay the cashier in that slow and careful way the elderly do things, with a patient determination to do the things that they’ve done with ease for many years, but which now present a challenge for them.  Everything from his baseball cap to his worn and tidy wallet reminded me of the years when taking my grandpa shopping was a regular part of my life.  I could imagine him changing from denim overalls to his “waist pants,” like my grandpa used to do when we “went to town.”

Normally that would be all there was to it.  I would notice those little details and I would get a nice memory and a smile out of them.  But today, while he was slowly paying, I quickly bagged his groceries, which meant I was going to have to explain myself to him in a real, live interaction.  So when he looked up, I placed his bags in his cart and said, in what I hoped was a bright and cheerful voice, “I got them for you.”

“Well, I’ll give you a hug for that!” he glowed, as he proceeded to do just that.  For one quick, warm moment in the grocery store, I got so much more than just a smile, I got my grandpa back.