Write for God

Mahatma Gandhi, 1869-1948

A Facebook friend posted a reminder of Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination 62 years ago on Jan. 30, 1948. The apostle of nonviolence influenced Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and countless other advocates of peace long after a zealot’s bullet felled him during the bloody days of the creation of the modern states of India and Pakistan. That these two nations are still on a hair-trigger away from pointing their nuclear weapons at each other is a sign of how deeply tensions ran and still run in the region.

Gandhi died a martyr’s death at 78 after decades of using the principles of satyagraha to defeat the British without ever resorting to violence. His only weapons were truth, courage and persistence. Gandhi was once asked if he was a Hindu. He replied, “Yes I am. I am also a Christian, a Muslim, a Buddhist and a Jew.” His philosophy of nonviolence adhered to the purest principles of every religion that has love of one’s neighbor as one of its tenets. He went beyond dogma and divisions.

Oct. 2 is the Mahatma’s birthday and it’s a more apt day to remember his legacy than the anniversary of his assassination. As we mark another year since his death, we can remember the other victims of the bloody 20th century:  John and Robert Kennedy, Malcolm X, Archbishop Oscar Romero, Father Ignacio Ellacuria and the murdered Jesuits, the casualties of endless massacres and wars, Dr. King and John Lennon. We still mourn their loss to senseless violence, but their deaths have energized so many of us to take up causes that serve to create a better world.  One of my favorite singer-songwriters, the Panamanian Ruben Blades has sometimes introduced a song based on the murder of Archbishop Romero by commenting, “In Latin America, they kill people, but they can’t kill ideas.” Each of these martyrs was silenced by bullets, but their message spoke louder after their blood was spilled.

Archbishop Romero’s last Gospel reading was also his own epitaph:

Amen, amen, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains just a grain of wheat; but if it dies, it produces much fruit.  Whoever loves his life  loses it, and whoever hates his life in this world will preserve it for eternal life.

As we remember Gandhi and the other martyrs, our commitment to continue their work can also produce much fruit. The next step is up to us.

“A lotta water under the bridge.” (Sam to Ilsa in Casablanca)

We’ll always have Paris, or at least we’ll always have this blog. Nazi tanks may roll in and life may intrude on my ability to post, but my blog has continued to exist since the first entry on December 28, 2007.  There’s indeed been a lot of water under this bridge.

In late August 2009, I started a new job that I love. I now use my PR and media skills on the side of good to educate my community about public health and services for the poor and uninsured. The days when I stroked the fragile ego of an ignorant, self-important elected official are long gone and seem to have been part of another incarnation. (I think that I must have been a slug back then.)

I drive more than three times the distance of the job I had prior to this one, but I’m happy when I arrive at my desk and when I leave. Today I’m buzzing because I was able to publicize a county program that cares for the poorest of the poor in Pinellas County. Now that smells like victory! (In previous jobs, there were days when a PR success just smelled like napalm.)

I usually walk to my office past very poor people of all races who come to our health department ill and desperate. Some are homeless, ragged and foul-smelling; others are the working poor who are here before they have to be at a job where they are uninsured. Many have little children fed by the federal funds of the WIC program that supplements daily diets. The parents beam when I notice how beautiful their child is. A very young man with a patchwork of tattoos on his neck and head shows me his curly-haired infant with pride, his tough exterior melting at the sight of his child. And so another good day at the office begins.

My hours are long and don’t bring extra pay and the commute takes almost two hours out of my day, which means that personal writing and blogging have to be strained through a cheesecloth of the hours in my day. It’s easier to fit in Facebook updates than it is to write an entry or an essay. The quick and dirty is easier than the well thought-out and pure.  Still, I am the Terminator stomping to my goal until the red glow in my eye is dimmed.

My writing was reinvigorated in December 2009 when something of an epiphany led me to return home–metaphorically speaking. On a day when I had a bit of free time, I suddenly began thinking of attending a writer’s conference. Since money is tight and travel time even more strapped, I thought of the premier writing conference near my home in the Tampa Bay area.  A quick Google search led me to Eckerd College’s Writers in Paradise conference, which was coming up in mid-January.

The cost was way out of my budget and the January 16-24 timeline could only mean that I had missed the deadline to apply. Just when I was ready to quit in disappointment, I noticed that the deadline for an application packet was the following day, December 1, and that the conference offered the chance to apply for scholarships to fund attendance. The genius of the last minute has always been one of my most reliable tools, which I’ve honed working on deadline in newspapers and finishing term papers the night before they were due. I become more brilliant as the clock ticks toward the end of the period. I excel at the writing equivalent of buzzer-beaters and Hail Mary passes. Take that, Doug Flutie!

In a few hours, I pulled together an application for a scholarship, 25 pages of my writing and a statement making my case to be accepted. If the conference poobahs turned me down, I would only be out a $25 application fee and maybe a few days of feeling like Y.A. Tittle at the end zone–bloodied, stunned and on my knees.

Something ineffable told me that I was being guided during the application process. I printed 25 pages of my personal writings and applied for the narrative nonfiction segment of the conference. My request for a scholarship outlined many of the financial and life difficulties I’ve tried to make sense of in this blog. Losing my job, months of unemployment that left us penniless, my husband’s traumatic brain injury (TBI)  less than two months before our daughter’s even worse TBI and her 10-week hospital stays seemed so Dickensian as I told it on paper, like an Oprah version of Little Dorrit’s story, but I continued.

On December 1, the deadline date, I drove to Eckerd College to drop off a packet that must have still had wet ink on its pages. A guard at the gate guessed where I was to leave my envelope and I parked my car and walked in my work heels in the dark to find the writing center. A peek at the writing center revealed kids at workstations, which told me it wasn’t what I was looking for.  Out of ideas, I turned and saw an office with the lights still on. I knocked on the glass and a pleasant middle-aged woman who couldn’t have been anything other than a college professor gave me directions to another building. With the help of yet another security guard, I walked into an empty building where everything seemed to be open: an auditorium, elevator and second-floor suite were all unlocked.  Cosmic, if you like find symbolism in the most mundane details. (The good Lord made sure that I was the one entering and not someone with a Jones for pawning laptops and electronics.)

As I walked through an empty office suite, I was ready to give up when I saw a door with the name of the very person accepting applications for the conference. The office was dark, but the space between the floor and the door were just big enough for my envelope of writings, applications and letters. I slipped it in, left the matter in God’s hands and got in my car for the hour’s commute back home.  If I was meant to attend, then there was nothing else for me to do except trust God.

Nine days later, an email bursting with attachments told me I was one of only about 80 writers accepted and everything except $75 of my conference fee would be covered. Meals and lodging would be on me, but my home is less than 30 miles from Eckerd College and I am the queen of cobbling lunches  out of tuna cans and Progresso soups.  I can live on saltines and Slim Jims if a project is interesting enough.

On January 16-24, I’ll have the opportunity to work with a group of nine women who have narrative nonfiction projects that will tell their own stories. We have shared our 25 pages via email and I’ve read the other women’s essays. Some discuss their family histories, others their journeys through cancer or life stages. It will be a privilege to study with the women whose work I’ve read. Our instructor is Ann Hood, a renowned writer of fiction and nonfiction who detailed the loss of her little daughter and her own healing in Comfort: A Journey Through Grief.  As someone who almost lost a daughter in 2008, I know that I will cry through every page of the book when it arrives in my hands this week from an online seller.  Mothers who lose a child or almost lose a child belong to a club no one wants to join because the emotional dues are so high.

During each session, we will look at one or two essays and offer our thoughts. I’m up on January 19 with another participant. Two weekends and a week of focusing on my writing will be a luxury beyond my imagination. They were certainly beyond my comprehension before last December 1 when something led me to consider the possibility of receiving this gift.

I’ll be working on a project that I’ve mulled over for many years, but never had the clarity of thought to outline. It will take in my childhood in communist Cuba and my early years surviving Irish-German nuns in Queens, NY. Fidel Castro and Dominican sisters are formidable life-changers, let me tell you. It would be interesting to see one pitted against the other in a sort of Godzilla vs. Mothra Tokyo cheapie.

Preparing more of my writing for publication has been my focus this past month, even as our unheated Florida house continues to give us fits during an Arctic cold spell that is setting new weather lows in our region.

A slab leak meant we lived for a few weeks with only certain periods of water in the pipes until we could afford a plumber who jackhammered two holes in our living room and finally found a piece of pipe with a pinhole in it. If you like fine dust on your books and two holes patched with cement near your couch, then our living room looks lovely.

The water heater and indoor heating system picked the same auspicious time to go on the fritz, which means we’ve been freezing indoors since before Christmas. We wear knit caps and gloves indoors and huddle under layers of blankets to sleep. For warmth, I have a new comforter and my husband, whom I now call my “old comforter.” Only he would find that funny!

As I look forward to the first day of my writing conference at the end of the week, I am also looking back at all the water that’s gone under the bridge in the past year. Some of that water has been stormy and some of it has been a placid stream after the storm. It’s been a many things, but uninteresting has not been of them.

May everyone’s wishes, dreams and aspirations come with the new year and, to quote Tiny Tim, may God bless us every one. (Either that or, to quote the other Tiny Tim, find your own tulips to tiptoe through in 2010!)

Hundreds lined up for a health event in Appalachia (NPR.org)

My kids call me a book nerd because I love to read. As much as I enjoy reading, there are some genres I don’t cotton to. Mass romance novels and science fiction don’t do much for me unless they transcend all of the conventions that are the very qualities their followers want in these books. What turns me off about these mass genres is that keeps them coming back.

I used to work in a bookstore years ago and the large number of romance readers who had no idea if they had read a particular number always amazed me. Are they all that similar and disposable that they would run together in their minds? You would never confuse Of Mice and Men with Anna Karenina, for example, but that all-purpose cover illustration of a bare-chested man embracing a woman with cleavage might make you wonder if you’ve read that book before or if was one of the hundreds you’d read before.

Live and let live, so romance readers are entitled to their choice of books without my opinions. Read what you like, I say.

My problem with some genre readers today arose from a Facebook post by a romance author whose list I joined on a whim because I liked how she was able to write while living a normal life with her husband and kids. I would never read her books, but her small slices of life about the struggle to finish 10 pages while life intrudes were sometimes interesting to read. A woman who writes is very different from a man who writes, after all.

In her Facebook post, the author asked her readers to educate themselves about HR 676, the United States National Health Care Act. Immediately, readers posted horror stories backed by information from conservative sites with political agendas as bare as the chests of those guys on the cover of romance novels. One site was called RedState, for goodness’ sakes. Talk about objectivity!

Socialism, fascism, old people Soylent Green-ed…you name it and these romance readers who aren’t sure if they’ve read a particular, semi-sordid tale of ill-written sex between women with cleavage and bare-chested men were offering their scenarios of how our nation will cease to exist if everyone had access to doctors.

July 28 must have been  HR 676 D-Day. On many other Facebook posts, people calling themselves Christians were railing against those who won’t go to work, who need to show humility by taking menial jobs listed in classified sections and who don’t want to be told how their taxes are spent for health care. (Italics mine as actual quotes I glanced at today.) All well and good if you’re employed and have adequate health care you can afford. It’s easy to be pharisaical if all the folks you hang out with are your fellow Pharisees.

The truth is that there are millions who want to work and can’t find a job because jobs are non-existent. For every one of those classified ads, there are hundreds of applicants. The majority who apply for any job they see never hear anything in response to a well-crafted resume backed by years of experience. I know an unemployed real estate professional who works 18 hours a week for just above minimum wage. Because she is 58 and has some health problems, she has looked for jobs in three states and is lucky to have found those 18 hours in Florida, she says.

As for being humble, I know professionals who would take a $10-an-hour job if it came with health benefits. They can’t even find those $10-an-hour jobs because of their age or their health conditions.

In 2007-2008, I spent five months looking for any job that would allow me to support my family. I sent hundreds of resumes, networked and practiced interviewing tips daily. In the end, I found a job that was never listed in the classifieds and which came via a friend of a friend who was hiring. It paid $11,000 less than I’d been making, but it was a job and I needed it.

A friend who lost her job just last Friday joked that she would be selling any makeup or home decor line she could find to make a living while she looks for another job.  Despite her many health problems, she could be uninsured soon if she can’t afford the $507-a-month COBRA coverage she qualifies for.

Instead of spreading horror stories about socialized medicine (did anyone say Medicare?), it might behoove those Facebook romance fans to take the author’s tip and educate themselves about the health-care bill and any alternative plans. In fact, all of us should read the text of this house resolution for ourselves without a political filter.

It’s easy to call a plan socialist if you have private insurance you can afford or if you are still well enough not to need health care. It’s more difficult to put yourselves in the shoes of a family that is either uninsured or has to forego health care they can’t afford.

Would you like to meet one of those families? Allow me to present ours, a devout Catholic family with a father, mother, two children still at home and two adult children who care for themselves.

After I lost my job in October 2007, we didn’t have the money to continue COBRA for two adults and the two children still at home. We were all very healthy anyway, so it wasn’t a huge concern at the moment. For five months, no one in the family was insured and we just trusted God to take care of us.

I found another job five months later when I accepted the first position I was offered. I could then afford to cover myself for about $67 a month. Coverage for my husband and our two children would have added about $500 to our monthly health-insurance bill, so we turned down family coverage. 

Thanks to the State of Florida’s KidCare program, I was able to insure the children for $20 a month. This socialist program is part of the state’s Medicaid system and works like Medicare for seniors. My kids were finally able to see a pediatrician selected by the plan and to go to a dentist to have their teeth cleaned.

My husband was another story. Adding him to any health insurance plan was again beyond our means. He’s much too young for Medicare and we were just above the poverty line for Medicaid. He remained uninsured despite his hypertension. Again, we just trusted God to keep us healthy.

In July 2008, my husband fell in the middle of the night. We don’t know what happened, but I awoke to a thud outside our bedroom door. I found him on his back and couldn’t rouse him. Blood and tissue poured from his right ear, so I called 911 immediately.

My husband was transferred by helicopter to the nearest trauma center. He remained in the hospital for the next few days with a skull fracture — and no health insurance. After leaving the hospital, we couldn’t find a neurologist who would see him without insurance. When I called the office of the doctor who had asked us to follow up with him the week after discharge, I was told that he needed an MRI to be done before he would see my husband.

The hospital wouldn’t schedule him for an MRI unless we had some sort of insurance to cover the procedure and they suggested applying for Medicaid. After some months of huge medical bills, Medicaid finally covered him as a short-term patient for the month when he was injured. Again, we couldn’t find a neurosurgeon who would accept his particular kind of temporary Medicaid for a follow-up. While I was at work, I made dozens of calls that yielded no results. We found one ear, nose and throat specialist who accepted cash. For $75, he told my husband that he was acting like a “goofball” and that he couldn’t do anything for his symptoms.  

To make a long story very short, my husband never had medical care after his skull fracture. He continues to pray and has adjusted pretty well to having lost his sense of hearing in one ear, his sense of taste and some vision on the affected side. He cannot smell the food he eats or the flowers in our front yard.

We felt thankful that we had ridden out his health problems when another medical emergency almost destroyed us.

In September 2008, my children and I were in a devastating auto accident. My son and I were able to walk away with minor scrapes, but our daughter was badly injured. The worst affliction was a traumatic brain injury (TBI) that left her in a coma for five weeks at a pediatric intensive care unit. The KidCare insurance that covered her paid for her care — thank God for socialized medicine there! Her additional five weeks of rehabilitation were paid by another form of state Medicaid which took over when KidCare would only cover two weeks of rehab. We are still receiving thousands of dollars of medical bills for expenses outside her KidCare coverage.

After our daughter’s injury, we strapped our belts even tighter and purchased health coverage for my husband at a cost of $177 out of every biweekly paycheck. We were living on a reduced income that was then cut 9 percent by my employer in January of this year.  At least I am still employed, which wasn’t the case for a co-worker whose job was downsized after our pay was cut.

My source of extra income, freelance writing, dried up during the months we spent caring for our daughter. Newspapers and magazines aren’t buying as much freelance as they used to, or so I’ve been told by editors.

We purchased private insurance for my husband and all seemed well. When we tried using it for checkups, but discovered that we had been misinformed when we purchased the coverage. Our plan had a high deductible that made any sort of medical visits other than emergency care out of reach on our budget.

The materials that we reviewed mentioned all the “well care” that was covered and the very tiny print we missed said that we had to pay $1,500 out of our own pockets before we could actually see a doctor to stay well. In essence, we had health insurance that we paid a lot for and couldn’t afford to use.

Because our family is struggling to put food on the table, we cancelled my husband’s health insurance this month and he is uninsured again. We are just praying that God keeps him in His care while we think of other options. Florida has a new adult program similar to the KidCare that covers our children and we are looking into that as an option for him as soon as he is eligible. Darn! There goes that socialized medicine again!

As it stands, I am covered by private insurance that I can’t afford to use to stay well, my husband is uninsured and our children are covered by Florida’s Medicaid-lite for children. Our son just had a checkup and his vaccines were updated; our daughter can see doctors that accept her brand of  Medicaid for TBI care. My husband is out on his own trusting in God only. In fact, sometimes all we seem to have left is God.

I love hearing all the complaints about HR 676 from people who actually consider RedState and groups like them viable sources of information. The rights and freedoms they tell themselves will be lost when everyone has access to health care are just so precious to hear about.

Never mind that a lot of working families can’t afford health insurance: It’s those lazy people who won’t work and those who can prove President Barack Obama was born in Hawaii who are trying to ruin this nation. In the end, it’s not as much about health care for the poor as it is about profits and the status quo for the rich.

The doctor who circulated that offensive picture of President Obama as a witch doctor with a bone in his nose happens to practice in our county. I recall seeing the good doctor at county commission meetings as he clamored for lower taxes. A fellow county employee used to call his tirades Neurosurgeons for Tax Relief.

The Tea Party folks who enjoyed seeing President Obama as a witch doctor with a hammer and sickle in the copy really think that they will hold back the tide on the national health care that is coming in some way or another. Their arguments against it are about as realistic as seeing the average romance reader in a clinch with a muscular, bare-chested man who wants to kiss her throbbing lips and whisk her away to his well-appointed ranch.  (Edwardian mansions are out now in those novels, I hear.)

NPR ran a report this week about hundreds of people who camped out to see doctors and dentists during a health event in Appalachia. They began arriving days in advance to wait in line for basic health complaints: pulling out aching teeth or having someone look at a suppurating sore. It’s a good thing they didn’t lose their freedom to suffer from rotting molars and cancer.

I have not gone through all of  HR 676 yet. The sections that I’ve read have contained good and bad points. I know this nation needs national health coverage for all, but I’m not sure that this resolution will provide the best option possible. It may be time to go back to the drawing board on some areas, but so many people are willing to dismiss the very idea of accessible health care just because they have theirs locked in via private insurance they’re lucky enough to afford or because their health care comes from socialized medicine that is part of their retirement package.

Many of us can see that the opposition to HR 676 is rooted more in political agendas than in a genuine concern for the fates of those who are less fortunate. A mishap here or there and those well insured folks could be on the other side. HR 676 is not a perfect plan, as I’ve gathered from a partial reading of it, but it shouldn’t deter this nation from formulating a national health care initiative that restores dignity to each American.

I can’t imagine that we’ll stand before God and have a good excuse why we didn’t care for the least of our brothers. I don’t think God will accept the arguments RedState offers. The Father may ask what we did with the talents He gave us and, if He gave us more than He gave others, why we buried them in the field instead of multiplying them.

In the past year, our family has both given food and money to our church’s Society of St. Vincent de Paul and accepted food and money from the same source. I would like to think that what we gave when we were more prosperous a year ago helped others who are where we are now and that we may be able to repay their generosity as we’re able. Thank God that others in our church community donated food for families like ours.

The blood that I donated a year ago may have been given to my daughter when she was in intensive care last fall.  The homeless man I gave my last dollar to on the street a few weeks ago may find the help he needs to pull himself out of his circumstances. I guess I could have told him he was lazy instead of giving him the dollar in my wallet. I could have been guided by RedState’s rhetoric instead of by Matthew 25 before I placed a dollar in his calloused hand:

Then the king will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father. Inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.

35

For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, a stranger and you welcomed me,

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naked and you clothed me, ill and you cared for me, in prison and you visited me.’

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Then the righteous ¹⁶ will answer him and say, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you drink?

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When did we see you a stranger and welcome you, or naked and clothe you?

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When did we see you ill or in prison, and visit you?’

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And the king will say to them in reply, ‘Amen, I say to you, whatever you did for one of these least brothers of mine, you did for me.’

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¹⁷ Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you accursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.

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For I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me no drink,

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a stranger and you gave me no welcome, naked and you gave me no clothing, ill and in prison, and you did not care for me.’

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¹⁸ Then they will answer and say, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or ill or in prison, and not minister to your needs?’

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He will answer them, ‘Amen, I say to you, what you did not do for one of these least ones, you did not do for me.’

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And these will go off to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life.”

The animated film "WALL-E" depicts a bleak future for humans.

During my 9-to-5 life, I do communications for a research institute. This week, I had to prepare a presentation for some of our board members as a way of introducing my ideas for a new campaign.

I opened PowerPoint and did a snazzy 18-slide show with my ideas. Some of the slides were about our new Facebook, YouTube and Twitter marketing. The oldest board member uses all three, which was an indication of just how widespread these tools are.

Think about it:  Every detail of our lives can be posted on Facebook, our goofy moments end up on YouTube and Twitter lets everyone who follows us know when we’ve finished our morning coffee. The millions of YouTube  hits for Susan Boyle on Britain’s Got Talent in a matter of days is a sign that technology is making us a very small global village. Ironically, we can all look at the same video globally and yet never talk to our next-door neighbors.

I have to admit that I use YouTube as my personal jukebox. When I’m in the mood to hear Charles Aznavour, I can log in and call up his stunning performance of “She” in Carnegie Hall. It always puts me in a better mood.

Another clip in my favorites is from Will Ferrell’s Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy. The dimwit news reader accidentally pelts a biker with a burrito and the biker punts the anchorman’s pooch over an expressway as payback. (Trust me, it’s very funny and very harmless. The biker is Jack Black and Baxter, the dog he kicks, is obviously a stuffed animal as he’s plummeting from the overpass.) When I need a little jolt of laughter, I can watch Baxter sail over the guardrail.

Sometimes you need a shot of Aznavour and sometimes you need Baxter sailing over the expressway to make your day.

Technology is a fine thing and I love nothing more than to learn to use a new gadget or a new medium. I am concerned about the very young or the very lonely who use these tools as substitutes for human interaction. We are becoming a nation of tuned-in people who have tuned out of empathetic, one-on-one relationships.

My twins are of the opinion that text messaging is more personal than phone calls. After all, they are the first generation that has made this mode of communication theirs. Those of us who are older can’t understand how they can prefer terse, misspelled words from phone to phone over hearing someone’s voice on the other end. (Our great-grandparents probably thought the same about the advent of the telephone versus just visiting someone.)

On Facebook, you can poke a friend by sending a quick message.  I found out that my oldest daughter had cut her foot and gotten six stitches when I saw it on Facebook. She was going to call me after posting her news, but I saw the post first.

Twitter keeps those who follow you up on any detail you choose to share–in 140 characters or less. Most of the messages I receive run along the “having a vanilla shake right now” trajectory. There are only a few people I follow from my phone; I read everyone else’s updates on the Web. I would Twitter my day away on insignificant matters if I allowed every tweet to make its way to my phone.

How much time do we spend on technology and how much time do we spend reaching out to others with our undivided attention, a hug or a handshake? Humans are social animals and, without socialization, we become feral beings.

In the animated film WALL-E, our planet has been stripped of life and humans live in space stations where all of their needs are taken care of. They’re obese and overly dependent on technology and entertainment. You can watch WALL-E with your children and be entertained (the little robot is darned cute) or you can ask yourself how much of its techno-barrenness is at work in our lives now.

I’m just as guilty as everyone else when it comes to relying on technology. I send e-cards and emails more often that I visit those I love. Our lives are busy, I know. Still, we should make time for a little glimmer of human contact to induce us to take a break from beeping, buzzing things in the virtual world. An unexpected benefit of attending Mass is that everyone is asked to turn off electronic devices and concentrate on paying homage to God for an hour on Sunday.

Instead of a tweet or a poke or a text, reach out to someone you love in real time, face to face. Tell that someone that he or she matters to you–and mean it. It will mean more than an e-card, I promise.

In typical Facebook fashion, a friend sent me a list to amend and then forward to more friends on my list. Usually, the lists run along the lines of “what do you like to do on a day off” or “name your 15 favorite CDs.” Today’s list was more interesting.

The list I received today asked for 10 items on my “bucket list,” meaning things I’d like to do before I die. (The name comes from the expression “kicking the bucket” and was also the title of a recent Jack Nicholson movie about the same subject.) It didn’t take me long to think of things I may one day tick off my list. There’s altruism, self-development and a little selfishness in my 10 items:

1. See my three grandchildren graduate from high school, at least.
2. Travel to Europe with my husband.
3. Spend time in a really nice spa just getting pampered.
4. Publish a book.
5. See the Vatican and the Sistine Chapel.
6. Live on the beach permanently.
7. Run another marathon.
8. Open a Catholic Worker house.
9. Get a Montblanc fountain pen.
10. Read all the books on my shelves.

It struck me how some of these list items are in direct contrast to one another: How many Catholic Workers who live in voluntary poverty would even think of wanting to have a Montblanc fountain pen or being pampered in a spa–if only for a day? I thought of the entry in Dorothy Day’s diaries from The Duty of Delight where she writes that women are always interested in clothes, no matter how old they are. There’s a certain frisson in holding something so beautiful that it appeals to the senses without necessarily being something you would, or could, actually ever own.

Some of my choices made it on the list just because of curiosity. I love fountain pens and Montblanc is the epitome of fine writing instruments. One of their collectors’ series featured pens commemorating William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, three of my favorite authors. I can look through the Montblanc mall window like a child outside a candy store just ogling their elegantly crafted pens and dream about writing with one. I don’t think I could ever feel good paying hundreds of dollars for something to write with when my Parker fountain pens do a fine job, but looking doesn’t cost anything.

Wanting to improve my health by running again and being blessed with more years of life to see my grandchildren grow are honorable things. I would rather fulfill those two items than the other eight. Traveling with my husband would be a fine thing, too, since I enjoy his company now as much as I did when we first met in 1981. After 25 years of marriage, we still like working side-by-side and conversing.  

It was fun to write my list and to come to grips with choices that are so divergent. It’s not likely that I could ever check off all 10, but it doesn’t matter. Flights of fancy never require boarding passes.