The Single Drive

Hi, Boomers,

I got up at 5 am today to drive back to Los Angeles from Las Vegas. I rolled out of bed and, sans makeup, dragged my bags into the car and took off in the dark of early morning.

I don't usually drive the LA to Vegas route. I'm a once a month Southwest weekend flyer. But there is something so appealing about driving at 4 or 5 am in the morning. I get to drive with the truckers and see the sun come up. I listen to Howard Stern and the drive goes fast. I've listened to the shock jock for years, ever since I introduced my sons to him on the morning school drive. It was one of the ways we bonded. Anyway, I think the guy is pretty smart and very funny. Not the smut part, but his "take"on the human condition is fascinating.

Along the way on this single drive, my mind flips back and forth between missing my family, especially those adorable grandsons, that I just left and missing David, my long ago significant other. I usually have a good cry, one of those missing cries, and it actually doesn't make me feel any better. It just makes me miss more.

Along the way, I saw that my new man friend had called me an hour after take off. I had told him we needed the clarity of space until he returned to his home in Montreal. But he didn't exactly adhere to our plan and I was secretly happy. It was sweet of him to call after me. I didn't mind because it felt good to be watched over by someone, to be cared for from afar.

I just read an article about loneliness. Loneliness can be a by-product of depression but not always. I am not usually lonely. I like my own company. But sometimes I bounce off a few walls, especially when it comes to waking up in the morning and I would really like a man's arms around me. Of course, the feeling passes and I get out of bed, make my espresso and get on with my day.

I get that feeling when I drive alone sometimes. The wide, flat expanse of the desert, the sun rising in faded orange and yellow colors reminds me of how small we are in the universe, how this journey is transitory, our lives merely borrowed for a time, and how important it is to honor the present.

Sometimes driving is good for the soul.

Namaste

Joan

Death Be Not Proud

Dear Boomer,

We're 60 now and we're beginning to lose friends, loved ones, parents, and the inexplicable becomes a zen meditation on daily losing.  There is no way to explain those feelings of loss.  My therapist would say, "Sit with it, Joan.  Be with the feelings for as long as you need to."  

I opened the mail yesterday afternoon around 5 P.M.  There was a letter addressed to me from a man I did not know but whose name I recognized.  He was the devoted son to my good friend, Doreen Kuhl.  When I say devoted, I mean that with every fiber of my being.  Doreen's two adult children, Philip and Diedre, set the standard high with love and devotion to their mother. Philip wrote to tell me that his mother died on March 30.

I knew she was going to die.  She told me so in an annual Christmas letter.  She said, "This is the last Christmas greeting you will receive.  I am dying."  I wrote her and we then exchanged a few beautiful letters.  Hospice had quietly entered into her apartment in Arlington, Virginia.  She told me she was not happy about that.  My friend had the most incredible sense of humor, dry, penetrating, sharp, real, raw.  "I don't them around me.  But they're useful, I guess."  She had C.O.P.D, a disease, which she probably had for years and didn't tell me or anyone.  

How a person perceives his or her own death is the mark of divineness.  Doreen had divineness is spades.

I think Doreen was about mid-70's.  I met her in Ls Vegas so many years ago I cannot remember.  But I was running a legitimate year round equity contract theater in a shopping center down the road from UNLV where my previous job as an acting instructor ended at the glass ceiling.  You remember those days.  I woman couldn't rise above her status because men were deathly afraid they might be smart, capable and better at their job than they were.  So I went down the street and opened a theater after I spent a year fund-raising and gathering around me the most capable, brilliant theater people in the business west of the Mississippi.

I met Doreen through her husband, Larry, who was my thesis advisor in theater at UNLV where I was getting my second master's degree.  Larry was brilliant, too, but difficult.  He died rather too soon of lung cancer, which freed up Doreen to pursue her passions after a decade of taking care of him with devotion.  She acted a bit in community theater after moving to Arlington, was a docent at The Kennedy Center and museums and did art work for just about anybody who needed it.  She was an amazing example of growing older gracefully and full and richly.  I remember directing her in "On Golden Pond" one fall season and she had just about the best instincts as an actress you could ever imagine.  She had it all over Kate Hepburn.  It was her shinning, glorious moment on the stage and I was able to witness it.  I don't think I even directed her.  She had it all together from the moment of her first rehearsal.

When I told her how brilliant her performance was, she said, "Oh, my darling, it was not, but it was the best I could do."  She always began every sentence with, "Oh, my darling."

Doreen is my role model for growing older.  She always kept active and fed her mind and soul with important things in life:  family, children, giving back to community.  She was selfless, loving and larger than her life.  

I will miss her.  

       Namaste

 

      Joan