From the Mouths of Babes

Back when I was in seminary, I remember having to drop something off for my friend, Doug. When he met me at the door, he was laughing so hard he could barely stand up straight. “What’s so funny?” I inquired. Gasping for breath he opened the door and motioned me inside. “Come here, you’ve got to see this. I’ve been rewinding it and watching it for the last 20 minutes.”

This was the late 80s so “rewinding” is the correct term. He was a big CNN fan and would daily record a particular show to watch later, usually taping over the previous day’s program for each new day’s addition. What had tickled his fancy on this particular day was the story of a little girl, maybe three, not more than four, who had saved her epileptic mother after a seizure that had left her unconscious by calling 911. A local journalist was interviewing the child, praising her for her quick thinking and gushing about how lucky her mother was to have such a smart and brave little girl. The child looked directly into the camera and, quite matter-of-factly and with guileless purity, stated, “I’m pretty proud of myself.” It was adorable, and delightful, and very funny, necessitating several more rewindings and viewings before I left.

I think about that little girl, and particularly her declaration, a LOT. “I’m pretty proud of myself” has been a tremendously helpful tool over the years. And not just for me. I’ve shared this with numerous friends, one of whom is a therapist who has shared it with several of her clients, who love to be able to begin a session with “I’m pretty proud of myself” before launching into whatever breakthrough occurred for them that week. Try it. “I’m pretty proud of myself.” Doesn’t that feel good?

I channeled this child the last few days as I’ve tackled a leaking toilet. Let me preface this story by saying that I am NOT handy when it comes to plumbing issues. I grew up with a dad who could fix anything (and I do mean anything) so I seriously never understood how people like plumbers, electricians, or carpenters made a living. Didn’t everyone’s dad know how to fix everything? Once I was launched and living several states away, I quickly learned how people like plumbers, electricians, and carpenters made a living. And it was the desire not to have to pay for a plumber for this toilet issue that summoned within me the little CNN girl from 35years ago.

I took the lid off the tank and saw that one side of the flapper seemed to be loose, perhaps having worn away just enough of the plastic to make fixing it impractical. So, off to the hardware store to buy a new flapper. Cheap enough. Good. And, installing it was easy, so easy, in fact, that it didn’t even warrant an “I’m pretty proud of myself” … especially when, in short order, it became clear that the tank was still leaking into the bowl, triggering the bobber to open the water valve to bring the water level in the tank back up to its proper level every 10 minutes or so. Damn.

Removing the lid to the tank once again, I pressed down on the flapper and the added pressure seemed to do the trick. But I obviously couldn’t keep standing there throughout the day pushing down on the toilet flapper so I duct-taped some foreign coins, unspent from various travels, to the center of the flapper. That didn’t work either. Hm … this new flapper was rubber, not hard plastic like the previous one. Maybe the added weight only to the center of it was causing the edges to bow up just enough to unseal the lip and let water escape. So I took off the coins and super glued decorative stones (the kinds used for glass bowl centerpieces) around the rim, while still keeping a few in the middle just for good measure. Still didn’t work. Damn!

I made my way back to the hardware store to ask for some advice and was told I probably needed to replace the whole flusher valve mechanism. Great … how much was that going to cost, and would I even be able to do this myself? “It’s really easy,” I was reassured, a sentiment echoed a few minutes later by a friend who had done this on one of her toilets at some point.

I checked a YouTube video, and it really did seem easy. So I drained the tank, sopping up the inch or so of water on the bottom with a towel, and carefully unscrewed everything and removed the tank. The rubber gasket connecting the tank to the stool had definitely seen better days. Ah … that’s probably the root of the problem. I should have this fixed in a jiff.

Well, it wasn’t fixed in a jiff! The new flusher valve I’d bought didn’t have a rubber gasket so I had to go back to the hardware store. I decided to take the tank with me just so they could see the size of everything I was working with. (This was no small feat considering I live on the third floor of a walk-up and my parking space is all the way around the connected rowhouse stretch of five buildings in the back and I drive a compact VW Beetle!) Turns out they hadn’t sold me the right sized flusher valve, so I swapped that out for one that was the proper size, one that also came with a rubber gasket, and returned home.

This time the rubber gasket didn’t seem to fit – it was too big, not resting flush (no pun intended) with the top of the porcelain stool. DAMMIT! So, back to the hardware store, armed with measurements of the hole. They said that the gasket I had was the only one they had that would work for me. I just needed to apply enough pressure to get it in there, perhaps rubbing a little dish soap around the outside to lubricate it.

I did all that … but was also very aware that the YouTube guy, the written instructions, and the hardware men had all firmly stated NOT to tighten things too much for fear of cracking the tank. I also know myself to be a bit of a bull in a China shop, so I was quite nervous about pushing the tank down too hard in order to force that gasket into the hole. I checked and double checked and concluded that this was simply a different style, and it wasn’t supposed to completely fit inside. This meant, however, that the tank would “float” a tad over the stool. Could that be right??

Only one way to find out. So I screwed in the two big screws, making sure they were snug without overdoing it, connected the water pipe to the clip, and attached the flapper chain to the handle. And guess what? It worked! Am I pretty proud of myself? I’m pretty DAMNED proud of myself!

So Much for Conventional Wisdom

Conventional wisdom tells us that it’s young adults who are idealistic and progressive and that the older one gets, the more conservative they become. That has not been the case with my 87-year-old dad. He just keeps getting more and more liberal, open, and progressive the older he gets.

Case in point: he called me this past week to share a part of the Easter sermon his wonderful pastor, Don, had preached. Apparently, Don provides a mini worship service with communion each Tuesday morning for the folks in downtown Canton. I think the participants are mostly homeless. Or perhaps they’re part of the addiction recovery clinic across the street. Anyway, he had noticed a woman coming to the weekly service but always leaving just before communion. He made a point to finally speak to her before the service one Tuesday to make sure she knew she was invited to communion.

Turns out the woman is trans and had been made to feel less than welcomed more than once with other churches so hadn’t wanted to stir the pot. Don told her that would not be a problem for him or his church. So, that day, she stayed. And when he gave her the bread and cup, stating the usual liturgy of “broken and spilled” for her, he suddenly had the impulse to add, “Just as you are.” My dad’s voice broke as he got to this part of the story.

So much for conventional wisdom …

Has Tracy Risen?

Christ is risen, he is risen, indeed! Hallelujah!

Among other things, this means that Lent is now over for 2023. Six+ weeks ago I came up with a plan to gradually change my habits with the goal of getting a step or two closer to being a healthier being. I think that was accomplished if we’re allowing for the celebration of baby steps. Considering where I started, a sedentary blob of COVID inertia, any improvement is a reason to rejoice!

One of my big objectives, as the earlier sedentary comment probably reveals, was simply to move more. Our bodies are meant to move. Period. Use it or lose it isn’t just a catchy rhyme. I read once about a study that was done on college swimmers. These athletes were in excellent physical shape with strong, toned muscles. The experiment was simply to measure their muscle mass and then do so again after they’d gone 4 days without working out. Keep in mind that they weren’t lying around in bed for the entirety of those 4 days; they were living normal lives, just lives devoid of their usual aquatic workouts. The result? An astonishing loss of muscle mass. I was stunned. Of course, the cynic in me thought, “Well, if your baseline is much more modest and not on the level of almost-Olympic athletes, then maybe just living a normal life with normal physical activity wouldn’t result in the same kind of drastic change.” (It’s also the excuse I’ve used for years about not participating in strenuous workouts—I didn’t want to set my body up for the inevitable “failure” once I’d grown too old to sustain that level of activity! ?)

Excuses aside, here’s what I observed over the last few weeks.

The first day I stretched, lying on my back with my legs up in the air, gently being pulled toward my head, my hamstrings were very tight, and the minimal tugging was painful. But it honestly didn’t take very many days, not even a week, before I could fairly easily reach my big toes and use them as the contact point for applying the mild pressure. And a week later I was then able to easily grasp the arches of my feet to continue stretching the hamstrings by decreasing the angle between my toes and shins. I’m no Olympic gymnast but I’m definitely more flexible. Hallelujah!

While I didn’t achieve an easy and guaranteed 10,000 steps every day by Easter, I’m certainly walking more, even if it’s my Fitbit’s 250 steps an hour reminder and I do feel better as a result. I’m not sure why that truth somewhat annoys me, why I don’t want the fitness experts to be right about the importance of moving. It’s a practice I even advocate in my storytelling classes, giving personal testimonies to how much easier it is to learn and then recall stories if they’ve been learned while moving around rather than sitting on your butt or lying on a couch. So what’s my problem?

One of Newton’s laws of physics states that a body in motion tends to stay in motion and a body at rest tends to stay at rest. My body largely stayed at rest for the almost-3 years of COVID. Maybe it’s too much to ask that after only 6 weeks, 1/26 of the span of our COVID lives, that my body and its habits would be transformed. All I can do is keep at it and maybe at some point I’ll be able to more fully declare “Tracy has risen, she has risen, indeed! Hallelujah!”

Life-Long Conversations Regular Game Night

As my siblings and I are slowly going through the MANY piles and files at Dad’s house, most everything is going into the trash or recycling. But I came upon several file folders of games and ice breakers Mom had stored in one of the filing cabinets and I tucked those into my backpack to peruse at a later time. As someone who leads retreats and workshops, I’m always looking for those types of activities.

I finally got around to checking them out this past weekend and they brought back a lot of memories. When we were growing up, Mom and Dad had been very active in our church’s Methodist Mates, a social group for young-ish married couples that long ago went by the wayside, for obvious reasons. But in the 70s, there weren’t many young adults at my church who were single—either through divorce, death, or personal choice—so Methodist Mates was a thriving monthly option for fun.

Couples divvied up the year, volunteering to oversee the festivities for one of the months. Sometimes it was as simple as making reservations at a restaurant. Those organizers clearly lacked creative imaginations! When my parents were in charge, nothing so pedestrian and uninspired would do. At the very least, for certain months, the evening might be holiday-related: February might include pink hearts scattered around the house with love-related trivia questions on them; March might send you through our home searching for as many hidden green construction paper shamrocks as you could find; October might require dressing up like a well-known couple … you get the idea. Regardless of the month, brains were often tested (or teased) with letter equations like “8D – 24H = 1W” (answer: 8 days minus 24 hours = 1 week), rebus puzzles like “|r|e|a|d|” (answer: read between the lines), or Famous Couples Fill in the Blank like “____________ and Delilah” or “Abraham and __________ Lincoln” or (talk about a weirdly dated clue) “Donald Trump and ____________   _____________” where the answer was Marla Maples!

One time, the invitations—yes, Mom actually made fancy, official invitations for this one—made it seem like the group would be coming to our house for a five-course meal with my sisters and me as waitresses servicing the card tables spread around the dining room, living room, and basement of our small home. The guests were given menus with a list of somewhat mysterious items like “Baby tree” and “Popeye’s preference” that they had to try to figure out so as to properly place their order for each course. Most people thought Popeye’s preference was spinach, but it was actually a drop of olive oil. And the baby tree was a toothpick. After the five “courses,” most people hadn’t had much to eat at all but my sisters and I acted like nothing was out of the ordinary, clearing the tables and asking if they’d enjoyed their meal. We kept up the ruse just long enough for everyone to start getting a little worried that that really was all they were going to be given to eat before bringing out the plates of spaghetti, the baskets of garlic bread and the bowls of tossed salad, much to everyone’s relief and delight.

Another time, my dad—always the engineer—constructed a long wooden beam with a curtain hanging down from it that ran the length of our living room. He got all the men to go in the dining room while the wives gathered against the far wall in the living room. Then my sister, Jill, and I carried the curtain in (we had to come through the front door because the beam was too long to manage the turn from the dining room into the living room—and even then, it was a very tight fit). We stood on chairs at either end of the living room, resting the beam on our heads (it was kind of heavy) thus dividing the living room lengthwise with the wives on one side. The husbands had been instructed to remove their shoes and socks and then they filed into the living room and lined up against the curtain with their feet sticking out underneath into the lady’s side. The wives then had to identify their husband’s feet and stand in front of him. Jill and I then lowered the curtain for the big reveal.

Because a good bit of work had gone into creating that curtain, Dad naturally wanted to get more use out of it. So a similar game was played the following year, where horizontal slits were added about 2/3 of the way down the curtain. This time the wives, after removing all jewelry, filed into the living room and inserted their hands down through the slits and the husbands had to identify their partners by their hands only. I remember being impressed both times by how well they all did, more than 90% getting it right. And everyone, of course, had fun.

Several years ago I was reminded within a six-month period by three different, and totally unrelated, people that I needed to have more fun. The reasons behind all that are much too involved to go into here but the long and short of it was that I had gotten so into “survival mode” as a single (no Methodist Mate for me!) freelancer that fun had gotten sacrificed. It had happened so incrementally, like the frog in the slowly heated-up water, that I hadn’t even noticed. But it had definitely impacted me, and not in a positive way. The good news is that I’ve improved that reality—and, as a result, my sense of wellbeing—during the ensuing years. The bad news is that I may not have gone far enough and would certainly benefit from additional infusions of regular, intentional fun. Perhaps a monthly game night.

After six years of battling a rare form of lung cancer, a divinity school classmate of mine, Doug Gestwick, wrote a book in 2022 about his journey and the subtitle is SurThriving after a Cancer Diagnosis. Discovering Mom’s file folders of games (and reliving the memories they awakened) is a good reminder that surviving and thriving are two very different things. And just this week I was made aware of a book by Catherine Price entitled: The Power of Fun: How to Feel Alive Again. I think the universe is trying to tell me something! Mom is now gone, survived by, among others, me. Perhaps one way—one enjoyable, delightful way—to honor her memory is to make fun a more essential part of a thriving, not just surviving, life. After all … “All ______________ and no ___________ makes _______________ a _________________ girl!”