“You celebrated your birthday by telling your friends about a close call with death decades ago? Really?”

This was what I heard when I told a friend about an email message I wrote six years ago. Actually, the message is one I’ve saved and occasionally send to someone new when it seems helpful. It’s not my birthday today, but I’m reminded of  the message because I’ve just sent it out again.

From: Anne Focke
Date: 
May 6, 2011 12:09:03 PM PDT
Subject: Birthday musing

Birthdays have a way of reminding us of all the people we want to fold in and hold close. I know it’s a little unusual to send greetings to other people on one’s own birthday, but I thought I’d break tradition this time. Since you’re all scattered hither and thither, I’m grateful for electronic tools that allow me to at least throw a virtual loop around you all. I’m so lucky you’re all in my life. A few lines from Denise Levertov’s poem, “Complaint and Rejoinder,” say it well:

…you want to place all of it—
people, places, their tones, atmospheres,
everything shared uniquely with each—
into a single bowl, like petals, like sand
in a pail.…

Today I’m taking time to celebrate the simple joy of being alive, visiting gardens and seeing friends. It’s a cool, overcast Seattle day, crisp and gorgeous in its own way . . . and getting brighter at this point.

My celebration was given perspective by an email I opened this morning. It reminded me how close I came, at one point, to not being here for my day today. The video, “Dear 16-year-old-me,” is all about a cancer I had almost 40 years ago.

The melanoma (superficial, spreading, malignant) appeared on my back and looked like a mole gone a little crazy. There wasn’t chemotherapy back then; they just cut it out. Somewhere I have a little artist book I made about it. I called it “Healing.” The big scar that remains on my back and the pale stripes on my right thigh remind me how lucky I am to be here now. The video suggests sending the link to every 16-year-old I know, and I realized I don’t know many, but I could send it to family and friends who might have kids or grandkids who would. So I send it to you.

It’s an odd birthday greeting, I know, but it’s really about being alive!

Love to you all,

Anne

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(A forewarning . . . this is the kind of piece that grandmas have permission to post.)

We have many reasons, of course, to do what we do. But we often talk about wanting to leave the world a better place for future generations. This is, indeed, a grand aspiration. I hold it too.

In the close-up fabric of my life, however, these “future generations’ are embodied, tangibly, in my grandkids. I’m lucky enough to share two – Livia and Henry – with quite a handful of other grandparents. A few moments from the past few years reinforce Grandma Anne’s commitment to working for a better future.

A trip to the locks in the summer.

A water taxi ride to West Seattle.

Dancing in Grandma Anne’s former home in the last hour she lived there (2013).

Making gifts and funny faces.

Finding a new friend on a walk down the alley.

Sitting and sipping and watching the world go by.

Discovering the silliness of a selfie.

And a sister and brother who love each other.

 

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One thing I’ve learned in my 10 months of blogging, or as I like to say “writing in public,” is just how much any site, even a fairly quiet one like mine, attracts spam comments. Ads for medical treatments, sexual aids, long nonsensical posts where I suspect someone is being paid by the word, and many offers of help – to generate more traffic, solve technical problems, or improve the content of my site. You don’t see these comments because an internal process lets me “cut them off at the pass,” so to speak.

Every now and then, they make me laugh. My favorite so far is a comment posted to the page where I give some background on myself, “About me.”

I’m pretty sure of my source, though she still surprises me.

But the “conclusion”?

Well…I try not to pretend it won’t ever come, but ultimately it remains one of those big mysteries.

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It’s good to be reminded . . .

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Sometimes a sentence or a phrase jumps out of context and stands on its own. As I read an opinion piece in the New York Times recently, a sentence did exactly that. In a very short time it has settled into my mind as a useful signpost, pointing me to possibilities beyond the current moment. “A forgotten story,” the author wrote, “teaches history’s most beautiful lesson:

The world we know is not our only option.

In the column, historian Jon Grinspan wrote of the days in the 1830s to 1900 when young people in the U.S. voted in droves, “speechified,” and rioted in wild elections. “Reading 16-year-olds’ diaries,” he said, “you can see the way they bundled political involvement with their latest romance, their search for work, and the acne on their foreheads. Public participation soothed private anxiety. Youth politics worked because it was so messy, blending ideology with identity, the fate of the country with ‘fun and frolic’.” The forgotten story is captured in the title of his book, The Virgin Voter: How Young Americans Made Democracy Social, Politics Personal, and Voting Popular in the Nineteenth Century. “One of our political system’s weakest links used to be the strongest. Young people did vote. They could do so again.”

“The world we know is not our only option.” In more ways than youthful voting alone, the future opens up if we are convinced as we face it that new options are possible and that we have a part in creating them.

 

 

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Photo by Anton Trötscher, Houston, “Butterfly plant”

Jon Grinspan is a historian at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. His column in New York Times, “Virgins, Booze, and Politics,” ran on April 10, 2016.

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The setting sun lights up my library corner on the last day of 2015.

 

The morning sun shines on a determined rose blooming on the first day of 2016.

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Last month, my granddaughter Livia and I visited the Suyama Space, an amazing, one-of-a-kind space for artist installations, located in the heart of an architecture firm in downtown Seattle. The installation in the space was “Seattle Floor,” by Viet Stratmann, currently living in Paris. What would you do if you walked in?

This?

Or maybe . . .

Or . . .

Or maybe you’d inspire one of the architects to join you.

Happy holidays!

 

With many thanks to Viet Stratmann and the folks at Suyama Space!

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