As the gulls circled overhead and sailboats glided across the bay, I asked myself if I was the son I could have been. Should I have been more helpful forty years ago as he struggled to raise six children alone following my mother’s premature death from cancer? What could I, as an eleven-year-old, have done to support him more? Did he know how much I emulated him as a child? Did I say the things I should have said before Alzheimer’s systematically fragmented his memory? Did I ever tell him what he taught me about commitment in marriage?
As I sat in that lawn chair and surveyed my father’s life, I realized when my mother died, a piece of my father died too. Perhaps that’s why he never gave himself permission to marry again.
I remember preparing for my wedding fifteen years after my mother’s death. I noticed my father never lectured me on the importance of commitment. He never pointed to himself as an example to follow, although I’ve never seen a better one. He just quietly lived a life committed to his children and their mother’s memory, and his life spoke volumes.
Shortly after I was married I stopped by to visit him. As we chatted about my job, I slid my wedding ring off my finger.
“What did you just do?” he asked abruptly.
Surprised, I said, “Nothing. I just slid my wedding ring off my finger.”
“Why did you do that?” he pressed.
“What do you mean, Dad?”
“Do you take your wedding ring off often?”
“No. Why?”
Then I realized my father was about to take me to a sacred place — his heart.
“I told your mother at our wedding that when she placed the ring on my finger, it would never pass the end of my finger again as long as she lived,” he said quietly, looking down at his hands.
I knew the rest of the story. Seven years after my mother died, a jeweler had to cut his wedding ring off his finger because it was so tight it affected his circulation. For twenty-five years his wedding ring had never passed the end of his finger.
As I looked out at the horizon, I realized today was like many days I’ve spent in a lawn chair over the years. The locations have changed but the mission has remained the same. Pause and reflect. By inserting pauses into my life and taking time to reflect, the events of my life have paraded before my eyes again, providing a second chance to appreciate them fully.
By pausing in a lawn chair, I wrestled through the decisions to have my then four-year-old son undergo three surgeries. From a lawn chair, I made the decision to leave corporate America and become a freelance writer so I could be home more and watch my children grow up. From a lawn chair, I helped my sons sort through their college choices. And from a lawn chair, I planned the best way to move my father out of his home of forty years and into an assisted living center.
Today, I believe that a simple lawn chair, placed in a beautiful setting, has become a sacred place for me. A place to recall my past. A place to pause. And a place to reflect on the things that matter most in life.
And to think, it all began with some friendly advice from Gregg Levoy and a hot cup of Chicken Soup for the Soul.
~James C. Magruder
Power Lounging
Take rest; a field that has rested gives a bountiful crop.
~Ovid
I used to think of Sisyphus as the patron saint of workaholics, one of whom I provisionally consider myself to be, though more out of economic necessity than compulsion. That is, freelance writing is a heavy stone, and demands a steady labor to keep it rolling.
Lately, though, I feel I’ve been overlooking the true instruction of Sisyphus’s life, which is that each time his great grindstone rolls to the bottom of the mountain, he is granted a rest while he walks back down to retrieve it. Though he must work for all time, according to the myth, he does not work all the time.
Nor, I decided recently, should I.
Having completed a book that took me fifteen months of twelve-hour days, I suddenly hit a wall I had never hit as a working man and a freelance writer — burnout. The thought of doing another day’s work on anything even remotely related to the machinations of career-building, income-producing or generally “getting ahead” was nearly enough to buckle me at the knees. As it was, in the waning days of the book project, I pulled myself up to my desk each morning as if to a chin-up bar.
After such an intemperance of work, no trip seemed too extravagant or protracted, no binge too vulgar, no amount of goofing off too unreasonable.
So I decided to take a break. In fact, I decided to extend the spirit of Sabbath to outlandish proportions — by taking four months off, living off savings and for a brief period here in the middle of my work life, seeing what it would feel like to simply not work, to make time for the kind of creative idleness that an acquaintance of mine calls “power lounging.” For someone who had just finished a book about how to survive as a freelancer, taking a break of such duration seemed contrary to my own advice, but I simply had to do it.
Toward the end of the book project, in fact, I discovered that writers have their own patron saint, Saint Francis de Sales, who exhorts his flock to practice “simplicity, simplicity, simplicity.” And I felt that when the disparity between my work ethic and my desire for simplicity and balance grows too large, as it had during that year spent writing the book, then I begin to feel like a man with one foot on the dock and other foot on a boat that is slowly drifting out to sea.
What I needed was what people so obliquely refer to as space, a distance from what was pressing in on me, a penetrating quiet inside. And I needed to hold that silence up to my ears, like an empty shell, and listen to the roar of my own life. I needed time to reacquaint myself with some non-work modes of expression, to open myself to some of the things that gave me joy as a child, to savor the benediction of play, to read a novel again — and to await further instructions.
And I wanted time, unencumbered by economic concerns, to experiment with my writing — a luxury I rarely grant myself when on the treadmill of earning a living — and by doing so to make out what direction my writing wanted to take next, and where I was willing to be led.
When I told a colleague what I planned to do now that the book was done, he asked, “What are you, rich?”
“No,” I replied. “Desperate.”
The first phase of my vocational celibacy was marked by the postpartum depression that followed the delivery of the book. A big project, to say nothing of a lifetime of working, generates a tremendous momentum that doesn’t end just because the work ends. It’s a bit like a head-on collision. The car stops, but the passenger doesn’t.
This seemed to set the tone for my entire sabbatical: a delicious and bewildering freedom marked by a maddening restlessness that routinely propelled me back into my office as if in a trance, despite my policy statements to the contrary. There I would sit for sometimes hours, twisting slowly back and forth on my chair and pulling anxiously at my lower lip, listening to the blathering traffic of noises in my head, while my legs vibrated like tuning forks.
“This is what it must be like when men retire,” my partner Robin declared after a morning of watching me pace around the house aimlessly, opening the refrigerator half a dozen times.
The pull of work, the rhythm of the nine-to-five world, exerts a force that is nearly tidal in its irresistibility. Cut off from it, I felt adrift. This was exacerbated by being in a profession in which there is such a thin, porous line between life and work. Simply to be a writer is to always be at work. Vacations turn into assignments, lunches with friends become interviews. I study movies instead of just enjoying them, and my office is at home. As a writer, to be is to do, and without a clear sense of where one leaves off and the other begins, it is almost impossible to punch out.
Thus, unconsciously and instinctively, I began reestablishing order, ebb and flow, routine. Before I knew it, I had managed to fill half my time with busyness that looked suspiciously like business: sending manuscripts out to magazines, doing market research, feelin
g behind, worrying about what would happen when the four months were up. I felt as though I were cheating on a fast, or taking my briefcase with me on vacation.
What I began to realize with crackling clarity is that I come from a long line of doers, starting with a workaholic family that hardwired me to excel, to stay on top of things, to expect that hard work and material wealth would put me in line to receive the key to the cosmic washroom. On his deathbed, my grandfather asked my mother what day it was. “Tuesday,” she said.
“Pay the gardener,” he instructed her.
His obituary was like most others, betraying the compulsive preoccupation with work, and helping me to understand why I had such a devil of a time not working. Obituaries are little more than posthumous résumés, lists of accomplishments: books authored, titles held, military ranks attained, degrees earned. They are summary statements of our lives, testaments to what we hold in esteem, and there are no hallelujahs for idleness, for time spent with family, for afternoons given over to long, dreamy walks.
Droning away in the boiler room of the culture is a juggernaut of a machine, one that heaves out a message strong enough to pump cement through my veins: Work! Value adheres to what I produce, so I’m constantly doing. And when I’m busy doing, I don’t have to be busy feeling — feeling that maybe I’m burned out, that I need a change, or that my work, which normally offers me a sense of control over my life, has instead made my life feel like a parody of being in control, like I’m frantically trying to shovel coal into a furnace that’s burning it up faster and faster.
About a month into my leave of absence from writing, I had a dream that was to prove pivotal. A Zen monk gave me a large block of wood to sand down to nothing. As I neared the end, and began to look forward to the project’s completion, the monk came back and took my sandpaper away, telling me to use only my fingernails. The point, he said, was the process, not the goal. Every life ends the same way, I understood him to be implying — the hero always dies — so why be in such a hurry to get to the finish line.
With that dream, something shifted inside me, and I became determined to not only take the full time off, but to use it well — to return the free to freelancing. Although it was a tremendous discipline to not be disciplined and goal-oriented, to stop looking for work, to stop feeling like I was wasting time (when really it is time that is wasting me), I slowly began immersing myself in the kind of activities I had originally intended for my sabbatical.
The day after the dream, I succumbed to the lazy lure of a spring afternoon spent in my own backyard, watching the shadows of clouds bend in the folds of the hills, the hawks and vultures sweep into view on long, slow arcs, the tomcats stalk birds in the low branches of the fig. And for a brief spell I was released from being pinned to the ground by the gravity of my endeavors.
Over the next three months, as the days flicked by like white lines on the freeway, I took great long walks by the sea and in the forests, lost myself in epic novels, wrote poetry again, traveled, and stopped postponing jury duty. I went surfing, joined a men’s group, got to know my friends better, and even did my exercises with greater observance, not so grimly and perfunctorily. I felt expansive and that life was full of possibilities.
I not only discovered that I can stop work for months at a time and my life doesn’t crumble, but that having my nose to the grindstone, my ear to the ground, and my shoulder to the wheel is, for long periods of time, not the most comfortable position. Sometimes lying in the bathtub is.
As my time off drew to a close, and I prepared to reenter the world of work, to start writing in earnest again, I felt as I usually do at the end of vacations: not ready to come back, but renewed nonetheless. And though I saw that I’m not quite the master of my fate that I claim to be, I also realized that my life utterly belongs to me, and that it is meant to be savored and not just worked at.
~Gregg Levoy
How I Learned to Read a Chicken Soup for the Soul Book
You learn something every day if you pay attention.
~Ray LeBlond
I am an avid reader. My mother said that as a child I always had my nose “stuck in a book.” I have been a fan of Chicken Soup for the Soul books since the very first one was published.
I already had about 100 Chicken Soup for the Soul books in my collection when my first story was accepted, for Chicken Soup for the Soul: Thanks Mom. The day the book arrived I read the first story, by Brad Meltzer, entitled “What My Mother Gave Me Before She Died.” Brad’s bio was in the back of the book in a section called “Meet Our Contributors.” As soon as I read his story I flipped to the bio section. I had never heard of Brad Meltzer, but I already felt like I knew him a bit from his story. I imagined Brad talking to his mother on the phone. She wanted to know if he was taking his vitamins and getting enough fresh air and exercise. I visualized a small lady with a tall son. She was worried he was writing too much and not getting out. He needed his vitamin D.
After letting my imagination run amok, I went to his website and immediately recognized the names of the bestsellers he had written. I had a new author to read!
Brad Meltzer’s story was a great contribution to me personally. It was an “a-ha!” moment in my own life when I realized that as each mother is bound to her child, they also bind us together as authors who all owe something to our mothers. It was also an “a-ha” moment because I realized that I had been missing out on a crucial element of the Chicken Soup for the Soul experience. Now I look up the author’s bio after I read each story. I am in awe of the lineup of authors and I am humbled that I am one of them! These people are all so very special.
The author list is as long and as varied as the stories in each Chicken Soup for the Soul book. Now I need to re-read each of the 140 Chicken Soup for the Soul books I own so that I can meet the contributors.
I didn’t know how to properly read a Chicken Soup for the Soul book when I first started. You see . . . I only read the stories. I missed the endings . . . the part about the authors. To me, they are the most important part.
~Linda A. Lohman
What My Mother Gave Me Before She Died
God could not be everywhere, so he created mothers.
~Jewish Proverb
She’s the kind of woman who would say, “Ucch, what a depressing funeral.” And so the obvious thing to say is that I want to celebrate my mom. But what I really want to do is share my mom. Not the person who was here the past few months, but the woman who was here the past sixty-three years.
My mother fought to have me. She tried for three years to get pregnant. And I think that struggle always left her feeling thankful for what she had. It is, to this moment, the only rational way to explain the never-ending love she gave to me.
As I entered grade school, my father, who breathes baseball, signed me up for Little League. I lasted one year. But it wasn’t until a few months ago that I finally found out just who saved me from year two. Stewie, don’t make him play if he doesn’t want to play. Even back then, she knew me. And for all of childhood, she nurtured me, growing my little artsy side and always making sure that I could find my own adventure. And she fed it with one of the greatest seeds of imagination: Television.
This will sound silly and trite, but in my mother’s honor, I’m not apologizing for it. One of my clearest memories of childhood is sitting at the side of my mom’s bed — the side that faced the TV — and watching show after show with her. To be clear, TV wasn’t something that watched me — she didn’t put it on just so she could go do something else. My mother watched with me. Or rather, I watched with her. Old movies like Auntie Mame, and modern classics like Taxi, Soap, MASH and, of course, our favorite for every Wednesday night, Dynasty. (Please, what else are you gonna do with a son who doesn’t play baseball?) Some mothers and sons never find anything they can truly share. But my mom always treated me like an adult, always let me stay up late to watch the good stuff, and in those moments, she did one of the best things any parent can d
o: She shared what she loved with me.
When I was thirteen, my mom faced the worst tragedy of her life — the death of her father. My Poppy. Poppy would do anything for my mother, and when he died, I remember being at his funeral. My mom was screaming and yelling wildly because the funeral home had neglected to shave him and she wanted him to look just right. It was a ferocity she saved for people messing with her family — something I had never seen before and would never see again. And I know she put that one in me, too.
When I think of my mom — more than anything else — I think of the pure, immeasurable, almost crazy love she had for me. I remember the first time I gave her The Tenth Justice. It was my first published novel, my first time ever putting real work out for anyone to see. I was terrified when she said she’d finished it. And then she looked right at me and said, “Bradley, I know I’m your mother, but I have to be honest with you. This book . . . is the greatest book of all time!”
When someone was recounting the story to me a few days ago, he called my mother the queen of hyperbole. But as I think about it, he had it wrong. Hyperbole is a deliberate exaggeration. My mother never used hyperbole. My mother actually believed it. In her eyes, I really did write the greatest book of all time.
A few years ago, I went to the headquarters of Borders Books up in Ann Arbor. And when I was there the main buyer for Borders said to me, “Guess where your books sell more than anywhere else? Straight sales, not even per capita.” So of course I said, “New York.” That’s eight million New Yorkers in one city.
“No.”
“Washington, D.C.? I write about D.C.”
“No.”
“Chicago, the flagship superstore?”
“No.”
The number one place my books sell was the Boca Raton Borders, two miles from the furniture store where my mother worked. That means my mother single-handedly beat eight million New Yorkers. Messing with the power of a Jewish mother is one thing, but never ever mess with the power that was Teri Meltzer.
Chicken Soup for the Soul: Reader's Choice 20th Anniversary Edition Page 11
