February 27, 2013

Mr. Ashbury has a new best friend.

As you know, I was absent from home last week - away on a writers' retreat that had been more than a year in the planning. Mr. Ashbury himself had gone to the Caribbean in October for a week with our daughter. This is not unheard for us, to take separate vacations. We've never lived in each others' pockets. As a matter of fact, many nights at home we spend a fair bit of time in the course of the evening involved in our individual pursuits, rarely talking. What might seem odd to some people works for us, and has for more than 40 years.

When I returned home on Saturday, my daughter intimated that her father had been unusually lonely while I was gone this time. She had been concerned because he told her that he went to bed each night before 10. That's really not unusual for either of us, but she was worried. And she took the opportunity to reiterate to me that daddy really, really needs another dog.

At the dawn of this new decade, and then again just last year when my beloved and I were talking about our animals, and acknowledging that our faithful Rochie was getting old, my beloved stated, most emphatically, that once the poor pup was gone, there would be no more dogs in this house. I happened to agree with him, for we've had dogs consistently throughout our marriage. He wants to continue to travel, and having animals that require care by others when we are gone is a challenge to that.

The reality of the situation, however, has proven to be quite different than the hypothetical discussions. My husband, pure and simply misses his dog greatly. He misses the routine of a dog, and the companionship. He'd been getting some of that with my daughter's Chihuahuas. And as she has been thinking, out loud, about breeding her dogs, my beloved has been discussing—with her—the possibility of his taking one of those pups.

But that is a year or more in the future, and, it seemed to our daughter that her father was lonely now and needed a new best friend as soon as possible.

Sunday she came over and showed her daddy a picture of just the kind of dog he'd said he'd like this time - something small and fluffy. The puppy was a "Morkie", which is a Maltese/Yorkie cross. I had never heard of the breed before but the little guy sure looked cute. She asked me if she should get it for her dad, and I told her to discuss it with him.

One two-part rule that my beloved and I both hold sacred: neither of us presumes to speak on behalf of the other, and neither one of us ever tells the other what to do.

In light of our past discussions and recalling in particular his vehemence, I expected my husband to say no, but he surprised me and said yes.

Now here is where you learn just how old fashioned a wife I really am. Even though we'd agreed, and even though I'm not certain this is a commitment that I want to undertake, my husband wanted that puppy. Because he wanted it, he should have it. Period.

The little guy arrived a few hours later, joining our family Sunday afternoon. The new addition is 8 weeks old, and has come complete with his first and second set of “shots”. He doesn’t weigh much more than a pound, and will not, when fully grown, weigh much more than 5. Mr. Ashbury has named him "Tuffy", short for "tough guy".

My beloved's sense of humor is finely honed, and I can report to you, that when the two met face to face it was a case of mutual love at first sight.

I think my beloved would take the little guy to work with him if he could.

Love,
Morgan
http://www.morganashbury.com
http://www.bookstrand.com/morgan-ashbury

February 20, 2013

First, I would like to make one thing perfectly clear. I did not bring the cold weather of the last few days to Florida with me. If I thought for one moment that I had, I would indeed stand up and say so, because I do believe in taking personal responsibility for myself, and my actions.

Yes, these words on this Wednesday are coming to you from the great state of Florida. I am currently in Cocoa Beach. I’ve been in Florida since Saturday and had been staying with one of my writing friends for a few days. We’re having a visit and a writing retreat all rolled into one. We’ve moved to a hotel so that we could take in the ocean. Nothing invigorates me like being near water!

As I’ve said many times, there is nothing that quite compares to being with fellow authors, and so I seize any chance to surround myself with like-obsessed individuals. People who will not turn a hair if you say, “huh, who knew my character was going to say that?” When you’re an author spending time with fellow authors, you don’t have to explain yourself. When you’re chatting –about writing, of course—and then suddenly that bit of inspiration hits, and you turn to your keyboard and begin, really quite frantically, to pound those keys, leaving that conversation in mid sentence…well, that’s ok. Nobody minds, or holds it against you.

I need these breaks more than I have words to express. I need to feel surrounded by and immersed in the compassion of my fellow wordsmiths. Writing is a damned lonely profession, for all that it is the great passion of my life. I really don’t have many friends, because I really am a shy introvert at heart. Except for two long time girlfriends that I touch base with from time to time, my writing friends are it for me.

As the youngest child of three, I became the lonely, withdrawn one—my sister and brother are six and ten years older than I am, respectively. After my father’s passing when I was just 8, I felt that sense of being alone even more keenly.

No matter how hard we try to eradicate our formative years from our psyches, I do believe we carry a tiny bit of the child we were inside of us for the rest of our lives. Sometimes—and often without our conscious awareness or consent—that inner child emerges.

In addition to the shy child I was, for some reason, I never really had many girlfriends during my growing up years. Being shy is not conducive to making friends. In addition, I seemed to have the worst luck with picking girlfriends, most of the time.

I would inevitably choose as my friends girls who, for reasons I could never fathom, seemed to need to play games—power games, I guess—and the next thing I would know, I’d be cut out of the “herd” and once more be on the outside, looking in.

Once more reduced to that lonely and withdrawn child I once had been.

That trend followed me into adulthood, much to my annoyance.

Looking back over my life now, I believe my naiveté persisted and yes, persists, in making me believe that everyone was and is as open and transparent as I [y’all know me by now, warts and all]. I could never really see those warning signs, those tells, and thus I was and continue to be unprepared for the inevitable “surprise” when someone I counted a friend does something very un-friend like.

For the most part however, life really is terrific now. I may still get the occasional unpleasant surprise, but I am learning the lesson I needed to learn all of my life, and that was to not let the barbs, or the machinations of others affect me, personally. I have in recent times been rewarded with true friends. I know who they are! And I can count on them to remind me, when I need reminding, to “be the duck”.

And I’m especially lucky that my true friends are also authors, and Christians, and finally, and at long, long last, the beloved sisters my heart has hungered for.

I am, as I have said many times, blessed and highly favored.

Love,
Morgan
http://www.morganashbury.com
http://www.bookstrand.com/morgan-ashbury

February 13, 2013

You’ve got to love that guy, Anonymous, don’t you? What a clever fellow he was! If you Google “sayings by anonymous” there’re quite a few, really. If you’re a fan of irony, as I am, you’ll love this one, attributed to him: write a wise saying and your name will live forever.

Mr. Ashbury and I got quite a chuckle out of that one.

My personal favorite saying/quote/maxim of all time from anonymous is one I heard about twenty years ago and have repeated to myself periodically ever since: life is 5% what happens to me and 95% how I deal with it.

I guess this quote is my favorite because I am a great believer in personal responsibility—in standing up and taking the reins of my life in my own hands. For those who may be reading this essay who aren’t, I give you the following testimonial. I am 58 years old and I have often been wrong, or made mistakes. I’ve said, “I’m sorry, I was wrong,” and, “I’m sorry, I screwed up,” and even, “I have no excuse. I just messed up.” And guess what? It didn’t kill me, or hurt me (well except in my pride but I generally need a good swift kick there every once in a while anyway). I suffered no ill effects from saying, basically, “it’s my fault, I did it.”

I’ve discovered that honesty and apologies cost me nothing whatsoever, and even have the side benefits of not only making me feel better inside, but garnering me some invaluable goodwill from others.

Unfortunately, owning up and making amends is a dying art, apparently.

Can we please get back to that place where everyone’s taking responsibility for themselves and their actions was the norm? Can we get back to using common sense, and to helping others just because we can and because it’s the right thing to do? And can we please put a lid on our bitching about how hard everything is, and open instead the box marked “Innovations and solutions found here”?

Can we accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative, just as that old song suggested?

Life is hard. I happen to believe it is meant to be hard. That’s how we grow, that’s how we learn the lessons we’re meant to learn. There is work to be done, and in the process, we’re going to get tired, we’re going to ache, and we’re going to suffer frustration.

Those are the real facts of life.

But we don’t need to let those harsher aspects of living define us. We certainly don’t need to let them limit our possibilities.

I loved my mother. She wasn’t at all what you’d call a nurturing kind of woman. She had difficulty expressing her emotions—I can count on the fingers of both hands the number of times she hugged me. She put the lion’s share of her energy into her job—she was a registered nurse—but she did that because her husband—our father—had died and she felt keenly her responsibility to provide for us. She was a widow who, for the rest of her time on earth, before she joined my father—just 13 years—mourned her husband deeply and unceasingly.

She had many very fine qualities. I learned from those. I also learned from the one or two aspects of her personality that weren’t quite so stellar.

My mother suffered from severe osteoarthritis. Hers was so bad in her knees that her legs became somewhat deformed. In the last couple of years of her life—she died very young, just two months shy of her 57th birthday—she underwent surgery to correct this condition.

Prior to that, she was in a tremendous amount of pain, and I can recall vividly listening to her moaning and/or crying in the evening. I would be upstairs in my bed, and she downstairs at the kitchen table. I can recall her saying, many times, “this sure isn’t much of a life”.

I understood it wasn’t just the physical pain that made her say things like that. To be a teenager bearing witness to this broke my heart. I wished, with all that was in me, that I could have helped her in some way. I even remember praying and asking God to take her pain from her and give it to me. Of course, I never really expected to be in a similar position, suffering from the same affliction and dealing with unremitting pain, so many years later.

But I am, and I understand her and what she went through a bit better now, but my attitude is different. Because I’ve discovered that focusing on the pain doesn’t relieve it; it exacerbates it. And I’ve discovered, too, that I could say to myself, “this isn’t much of a life”. Or I can choose not to. Of course, there are moments, especially if I’m tired, when my resolve falters, and it all seems a bit too much to take. But those are only moments, and I keep them to myself.

It’s okay to sit on the pity pot for a few minutes every once in a while, as long as I flush when I am done.

Because my life really is 5 per cent what happens to me, and 95 per cent how I choose to deal with it. And I choose, whenever anyone asks me how I am to say, “I’m terrific!”

And I mean it, too.

Love,
Morgan
http://www.morganashbury.com
http://www.bookstrand.com/morgan-ashbury

February 6, 2013

As much as I manage to “keep up” with the changes in technology in these modern times, there are still moments when I am held completely in awe.

There was an item online the last couple of days. You may have seen it. It wasn’t even really immediate news, and yet there it was taking up cyberspace. Apparently, last year, in the city of Leicester, in England, human remains were discovered under a parking lot. I guess that sort of thing happens a lot in England and Europe. Their recorded history is far more extensive than ours.

Most often here, in North America, if someone is demolishing a building or digging a new foundation and they discover bones, the question that comes most often to mind is, “did I just find a recent murder victim?” Over on the other side of the pond, where recorded history stretches much further back, other questions come to mind.

They must have had some suspicions on who those bones belonged to, because they conducted DNA tests in order to be sure. Those tests have now confirmed that the remains discovered are of King Richard III.

That in itself is pretty impressive, don’t you think? That hundreds of years after a man is dead, his descendants (how many generations removed is that, anyway?) can provide a sample to prove genealogy.

Better yet, and what certainly gave me a few creepy moments, was the fact that the bones included the skull, and with modern scientific means, experts were able to perform a “facial reconstruction”—giving us a fairly accurate likeness of what this not-so-glorious king actually looked like.

Holy time travel, Batman.

When I first set eyes on that reconstruction, knowing that it wasn’t a painting created in his day and influenced by the painter’s own bias, I shivered. It just seemed so other-worldly to me that such a thing is possible—that I could be looking at the actual face of a long dead person.

Of course, I’ve long known about the science of facial reconstruction. I know it has been used to help identify bodies when no other means has worked. I understand the concept. Heck, I’ve even read fiction in which the heroine was just such a scientist/artist. It’s just that to use this method to give us a picture of someone dead for so long—someone I studied in high school and who Shakespeare used in a play, is eerie.

At least it is to me.

I’m kicking at the gate of 60, and the world has changed so much just in my lifetime. It’s no wonder to me that older people begin to feel disconnected. It’s really hard to keep up.

The most notable area, of course, where the enormity of this “change” has become manifest, is in this thing, right here. The computer. I joke with friends and family that my first computer was an abacas.

Only it’s not a joke.

Thirty years ago, there was no Internet. The significance of that for me is profound. Today, I make my living on the Internet, and in fact, this computer of mine and the various places and people it connects me to quite literally make up my life.

Of all the things for which I’m grateful, this is the biggest: that for the most part, if I’m not right on top of all the new developments coming down the pike, I’m at least connected.

I can at least see the contrails of the speeding jet before me.

Love,
Morgan
http://www.morganashbury.com
http://www.bookstrand.com/morgan-ashbury

January 30, 2013

My oldest grandson turned 21 on Monday. 21! Never mind that I really don’t feel old enough to be the grandmother of a 21 year old man. And never mind that another of my grandsons—my eighteen year old—is going to be a father himself this summer, making me a great-grandmother. The thought that has dominated as I think about this milestone is that time has moved way too fast for me.

It’s like I’ve just blinked my eyes and little Nick has gone from being a babe-in-arms to a very buff, good looking man. He’s in his final semester in college, studying police foundations, security and investigations but isn’t one hundred per cent sure what he’s going to do when he graduates. There are many options open him, including one that could see him joining one of the area police forces. He’s also into fitness in a major way and was thinking of pursuing something in that field. I look forward to learning of his choice, confident that whatever he chooses to do, he’ll be successful.

Being a grandmother is the best role I’ve ever had, period. And I’m really experiencing it in several different forms. With my eldest’s family, I’ve been a granny whom they see regularly, but not all the time. I’m not really involved in the day-to-day of their lives, and never really have been. Not for lack of interest or desire to be on my part; but bowing to the constraints of time, and distance, and the pure fact in life that sons tend not to come home as often as daughters do.

Old sayings become old sayings because they contain truth. “A son’s a son till he takes a wife; a daughter’s a daughter for all of her life.” That is the way it seems to be in our western culture. I’ve seen it with friends, and relatives, and it’ so in my own particular experience. Our son’s family spends more time with his wife’s people, and have from the first.

Our second daughter, who is the mother of my late son’s children, is very much a daughter in that tradition to us. We have those two children here a lot, providing the backup primary care-giving she needs to be able to go to work—she’s a nurse—at an area hospital. Nurses, as you may know, often work 12 hour shifts. So if she’s working days, we have the children here after school and for dinner; and if she’s working nights, we have them overnight, and I get them up and going for school the next day.

Our daughter and her one child—my 18 year old grandson—lived with us for a time, while she went to college and became a registered PSW (nurse’s aide). Even when they weren’t living with us, we saw them a lot. A week barely went by when we weren’t together for at least a few hours. Now, of course, she’s here nearly every day. And while her son has his own life he’s around quite often, too.

It’s interesting, this life I lead, getting to see the different family dynamics of my children with their children, observing the similarities and the differences between them, and comparing that to how things were in this family when my own kids were all still at home.

The truth is, though, they are all growing up very quickly, and changing, and becoming their own people.

My son, my daughter, and my second daughter are all better at parenting than I ever was. When I look back, I see too many times when I was too busy; I worked outside the home because I had to, and I never seemed to have the energy or patience that in hindsight I would have liked to have had. I don’t beat myself up over this. I did the best I could at that time, and in those circumstances. I just wish things might have been a little different for us—that the stresses of occasional unemployment and uncertain times might have been less.

I really wish I’d not let time slip, unawares, through my fingers.

I hope those of you who have younger children will take the time to appreciate your young ones, even when you feel driven to distraction by the work of life. “Taking time to smell the roses” is another old saying, and one we should all take to heart.

I promise you, they’ll be grown and gone in the blink of an eye. And you’ll be left to wonder how that all could have happened so very quickly.

Love,
Morgan
http://www.morganashbury.com
http://www.bookstrand.com/morgan-ashbury

January 23, 2012

There can be no doubt whatsoever that we’re smack dab in the heart of winter. Extreme cold has blanketed much of not just where I am, but a good portion of the United States west and mid-west this past week, too. It promises to continue for at least another week.

When I consult a weather service online and see that the current temperature, with the “wind chill” factored in is sitting at minus 15 degrees Fahrenheit, I swear, even my shivers shiver.

I grew up learning weights and measures through the Imperial system, with inches and feet, ounces and pounds, pints and quarts and temperatures in Fahrenheit. While I was still in school our Prime Minister, Pierre Eliot Trudeau, decreed that we would switch to the “metric” system. This “metric conversion” was quite the controversy in its day, prompting all sorts of general grumbles of protest and snarky one liners. My personal favorite: can anyone tell me the metric equivalent for ‘crock’?

I’m afraid I don’t much care for the use of metric. When I see the temperature listed in degrees Centigrade I still have to do the math in my head to convert to Fahrenheit to know how cold or hot it really is. Now that I have a fair bit of white hair showing, I figure I can get away with ordering a pound of bologna at the meat counter, instead of a half a kilogram, without feeling guilty.

It’s a testament to Canadian stubbornness that 43 years after metrification became the law of the land here, no one at any meat counter blinks at giving you pounds or ounces instead of grams or kilograms—not even the young staff members who have in their lifetime never used anything but metric measurements.

I understand the imperial measures better. They’re automatic to me. I know exactly how cold it is outside when I see “feels like” minus fifteen. I don’t have to convert, I just have to shiver and stay indoors.

We are, at this moment, just ten days away from Groundhog Day. Yes, that wonderful non-holiday holiday we’ve celebrated for years as the day when there is light at the end of our (imperial or metric) winter tunnels. I have to be honest and tell you, I’m not feeling as sick of winter as I used to at this point in the year, simply because while we still get these arctic blasts, winter simply isn’t as toll-taking as it used to be.

Then, too, it’s really easy to ignore the weather if you don’t go out into it very much. As you know, I no longer have that daily trek of a hundred miles all told to take Mr. Ashbury to work and pick him up again. At present, I’m only making the drive to bring him home on Tuesday afternoons.

It’s very easy to pretend the winter doesn’t exist when you stay inside most of the time.

We’re not taking any mid-winter vacations this year to escape the wintery state, either. Last year we were blessed to be able to fly to the Bahamas in February. This year, wonder of wonders, Mr. Ashbury has decided we should, perhaps, show a little restraint when it comes to “getting away from it all”. He actually admitted to me that maybe, just maybe, we had a few too many trips last year.

He had one more than I did, but I’m still reeling from the surprise that he would say such a thing. I didn’t ask him if he was feeling all right. I’m smarter than that. I just nodded my head and told him that he was right.

Of course the day is coming when we will have to consider the possibility of an annual migration away from Canadian winters. When Mr. Ashbury retires, and when our two youngest grandchildren are old enough they no longer need us to care for them while their mother is at work, we’ll likely become what our American neighbors call snowbirds.

It only remains for us to decide, whether we’ll choose one place to go to each year, or if we’ll try different locales with each winter solstice.

Love,
Morgan
http://www.morganashbury.com
http://www.bookstrand.com/morgan-ashbury

January 16, 2013

For the past few years, it seems to me, our winters have changed dramatically. Oh, we still get cold weather, and a lot of it. Sometimes it is brutally cold. We still get snow—we had a dumping here on December 26th, the first real snowfall of the year. It continued to snow off and on for a week, and we ended up with about four to six inches, all told. But the winters are not like they used to be when I was younger—even when I was a young mother.

Used to be the snow would begin anytime after October first, and wouldn’t be gone until mid March, and sometimes April or May. There was a reason why you never, ever planted your garden before May 24th around here, and that was it.

In years past, if in the middle of January, all of the snow melted so that there was not a speck of it on the ground—like it did this past weekend—well that would have been an extraordinary thing, indeed.

But that very phenomenon seems to be the norm for the last few years or more here in my part of Canada.

I remember having enough snow in the yard, when I was a kid, to build an enormous fort with tunnels (no one ever told me that was dangerous). My older brother had to help me with stacking the “bricks”, the fort was so tall. I also recall sitting in the front seat of our car and marveling that you could not see over the snow piled up on the side of the road by the snowplows as you traveled down the road.

It was that way my second year of marriage, too, the year when we moved back out to the country from the city.

When my oldest was ten, I built an ice rink in our side yard. I took an hour or so every day for a week, spraying the area with the garden hose, which I had to then take into the house immediately after so it wouldn’t freeze. That rink lasted until the end of April!

With my own senses I know that the weather is changing; it’s different than it was. I cannot say with scientific certainty that this means global warming is real. I can’t because I am not a scientist, but I know it is true, nonetheless.

I understand, really I do, why so many politicians and officials fight this idea that we’re in deep kaka with Mother Nature. They have their own interests, their own agendas, and they cannot grasp that anything could possibly interfere with those things.

Businesses don’t want to acknowledge the change that is happening or admit culpability because it would cost them money; so they make sizeable contributions to political campaigns instead to ensure that nothing gets done, no new regulations get passed, and so they don’t have to spend more of their profits to fix the problem.

In the meantime, the damage we’ve done to the environment gets exacerbated every year. Eventually we will come to a tipping point. And then, these industrialists and nabobs will lose their profits anyway because there will be no one to buy their products.

There are things in this world that are infinite—like love and hope—but our resources, and our atmosphere are not. I personally believe that already there are holes in the ozone layer far more devastating than “they” want us to know about.

The sad part is that if everyone did what they could, if everyone did something, this damage could be reversed. We humans have so very much in our power in our hands; we have no idea! Together, there really is very little we cannot do.

But that’s the sticking point. We have to do these things together.

I don’t pretend to have any answers. Social awareness seems to be an ebb and flow kind of thing. Just when you think the collective consciousness is waking up, someone slips it a Mickey Finn and it falls comatose again.

But I worry about this on many fronts, not the least of which is our accountability to the Lord. We are not being very good stewards of the planet God gave us.

Love,
Morgan
http://www.morganashbury.com
http://www.bookstrand.com/morgan-ashbury