Month: January 2024

I have bad bones. I suspect that I was born with DNA that has led me to the disturbing reality of having osteoporosis. Three of my aunts had it. My paternal grandmother had it and some of my female cousins are afflicted as well. A doctor first diagnosed me when I was in my forties, but I suspected that such was the case far sooner. I watched my mother’s three sisters becoming increasingly crippled by the disease and I noticed similarities between me and them. Hearing the words from my doctor was devastating.

I was once one of the tall girls in high school at five feet six and one half inches. I took pride in having a long waist and strong legs. I did not even notice that I was shrinking until my clothes began to fit differently. The first time a technician measured me as part of a bone scan I broke down into tears when she told me that I was only five feet four inches tall. I asked her to check her measurements again but the results were the same. I was not surprised at all when the scan showed that I had osteoporosis. 

I initially panicked and went into a funk. I am an energetic person to the max. I like to hike in the mountains and work all day without stopping. Knowing that my three aunts all ended up in wheelchairs inside nursing homes made me shudder. I began to imagine a greatly constricted life that was so contrary to the way that I like to be. I eagerly embraced exercises and medications designed to keep me walking as long as possible. I endured a two year experience of injecting myself with Forteo every single day for hoping to build new bone in my skeletal structure. Luckily I did not have any of the side effects that lead to having to stop the process. 

The Forteo did in fact work for me. For the first time in years I was no longer classified as having osteoporosis. I was ecstatic but only a year later I had lost much of the progress that the drug had made. Once again I became incredibly defeated. I felt the clock ticking until the time when I would no longer be able to perform all of the tasks that I so loved doing. I sobbed like a baby in the presence of my doctor who assured me that times were changing and new research was providing answers and therapies to keep those with my disease upright and moving around. He put me on a regimen of Prolia injections twice a year. I visit an infusion center to get the medication and so far it has stalled the progression of bone loss in my skeletal structure. This has been a big win for me. 

I suppose that I began to take it for granted that I am going to be okay and that I can do anything that I want to do. I ignored suggestions from my family that I should not be climbing in and out of my attic to procure decorations for holidays. I ignored pleas that I no longer climb ladders. I have been determined to stay strong and keep demonstrating my high energy demands even as I began to notice that my aches and pains were increasing. I learned to ignore the twinges in my hips and knees and shoulders that urged me to rest a bit more. There are always so many chores to do, so much to accomplish. I carried on with a dose or two of Advil. I was not going to let osteoporosis win the battle for my freedom to move around. 

Then it happened. I was decorating for Christmas and I banged my ankle into the hard edge of a table. An hour or so later I was unable to put any weight on my foot. For the first time in my entire life I had to visit an emergency room. I felt stupid and uncomfortable there. I kept telling the nurses and doctors that I am a strong person who knows how to ignore pain. I did not want to be treated like an elderly invalid. I needed to get better and get back to work. Only that is not what has happened. 

Nothing was broken but I was quite banged up. My entire foot and much of my lower leg was so bruised that it looked as though someone had beaten me with a baseball bat. I was only able to walk if I wrapped the foot in an ace bandage and wore an orthopedic boot. I spent a day in bed with my foot elevated. I kept an ice bag nearby to limit the swelling. Things seemed to be doing well so with the aid of the boot and some Advil I went back to all the activities associated with my teaching and my preparations for Christmas. I even spent a day shopping for gifts. By the end of the week I was in intense pain and unable to walk comfortably so it was back to a day in bed again. 

My anxiety and depression returned as I read posts from friends who were baking cookies and preparing for Christmas with same kind of abandon that I always put into the effort. My daughter sent my grandson to help me and then suggested that I scale back my Christmas dinner this year. I began to imagine myself sitting alone in a wheelchair inside a nursing home once again. I held a bonafide pity party for myself as I wondered what I was going to do if I was no longer able to climb the stairs in my home. My father-in-law now resides in the downstairs master bedroom and I worried that I would have to sleep on on couch if I became limited in my mobility. I lay awake for several nights overthinking the entire situation when all I actually had to do is admit that it was okay to slow down and not be so intent on aiming for perfection in all that I do. 

I am still walking with my boot. I don’t know how long I will have to wear it but I do know that I have to be circumspect in how much I do each day until my injury is adequately healed. Dust is settling on my furniture and my home no longer looks like something out of a magazine. I am trying not to think too far ahead because none of us can know exactly what the future holds for us. Learning to just enjoy the moment without all the frills is a new challenge for me. Letting others help me instead of always being the helper is an uncomfortable role that I am doing my best to learn how to do. Accepting my current limitations and finding joy in what seems like chaos to me is my new goal. This old perfectionist is learning new tricks. Maybe it won’t be so bad but my learning curve is going to be quite steep. 

My Grandma Minnie Bell was a pioneer woman. She was the kind of person you would want to have around if you suddenly had to survive off the grid and on the land. She was a tiny woman at about four foot eight inches tall who never weighed more than eighty pounds, but she had the strength of a highly trained warrior. She handled large animals as though they were toy poodles. Her knowledge of plants, animals and survival skills was uncanny given that she was unable to read or write. She was composting and recycling long before it was popular to do such things to save the planet. She carried an encyclopedia of nature and botany in her head. 

I always loved Granda Minnie Bell because she was a gentle soul who appreciated everything about the world and its people. She and my mother both taught me the importance of honoring every person that I would ever encounter. Those two ladies regarded even the humblest soul as a person equal to kings or presidents. They often reminded me to look for beauty where there sometimes appeared to be only ugliness. 

I suppose that those two incredible women gave me an incalcuably valuable gift when they demonstrated by their own behavior how to genuinely respect all of the people I would ever encounter. Somehow they looked beyond superficiality to find the character of the souls who share this earth with us. Those two women seemed to be filled with boundless and unconditional love. 

Once my grandmother took me to visit one of her neighbors in the hills of Arkansas. I suppose she realized that I might be stunned by the visible poverty of the woman who had invited us to her home, so she prepared me by describing the lady as someone that she greatly admired. Grandma insisted that I remember to show the utmost respect for her friend. 

I understood why Grandma had prepared me as soon as we turned down a drive leading to the woman’s home. It was a dreary place in need of paint and repair. It looked as though the people who lived there had abandoned all hope. Nonetheless children ran happily in the yard laughing and seeming not to be aware of their dire circumstances. 

The house was so tiny that it seemed hardly sufficient for one person much less a big brood, but it was tidy inside and filled with the aroma of a pine based cleaner. The woman greeted us with a beautiful smile and a sense of excitement on having guests. She wore a threadbare dress that had once been lovely but now showed signs of age. Still she was neat and beautiful even though the years of want had aged her more than might otherwise have been the case. Her hands were raw and calloused from hard work but her eyes were still bright even as they showed the worry that stalked her as she attempted to keep her household running and her children fed. 

She gave us glasses of room temperature water, serving them as though she was offering a fine expensive wine. She sat primly across from us chattering gaily with my grandmother. The two ladies exchanged news and stories like two school girls. I learned that the woman’s older sons were serving in the army. She proudly boasted that they wrote her letters every week and now and then sent her money to help with the rest of the family. She thanked Grandma for the canned vegetables and fruits that had been a big hit at family dinners. She seemed so happy to be pausing from her chores to entertain us. I saw how right my grandmother was to hold the woman in high esteem. 

So too it was with my mother who seemed to find something quite wonderful about every person she encountered. Like Grandma Minnie Bell my mama looked past all of the artificial ways that we often use to evaluate the worth of a person. She was unimpressed with material achievements. She would expound on how important each of us is in the grand scheme of the world. 

I spent most of my years in education working in schools with the children of immigrant parents who often spoke no English and had little formal education. Some of those parents had to work sixteen hours a day. Their jobs were those that require stamina. They did those things for their children. They wanted their sons and daughters to one day enjoy what they saw as the American Dream. I valued those wonderful men and women for their love of family and their willingness to do the kinds of jobs that few of us would want to do. I saw beyond their poverty and lack of formal learning. I often told their children how fortunate they were to have such wonderful parents. I sincerely valued and respected them just as my grandmother and mother would have wanted me to do.

Sometimes the most industrious and determined people are almost invisible to us. They toil each day without much notice. They are the people who clean and dig and gather the refuse that we blithely throw away. The tend to be nameless and faceless to us but without them our world would be chaotic. They are the women who sweep the floors and clean off the tables in our favorite restaurants. They are the young men who take extra care to bag our groceries. They are the cashiers who politely listen to harangues from unhappy customers, the men digging trenches to drain our streets. They are incredible people. See them. Smile at them. Thank them. Respect them. Grandma Minnie Bell and my Mama would also tell you to honor them.

It was not that long ago in our nation’s history that rooming houses were part  of the national landscape. These were places where individuals or couples might rent a room in a house for an indefinite amount of time and pay by the week for the privilege of having a place to stay that was furnished with a bed and linens. My grandfather came to the United States from Austria-Hungary in 1912 by way of Galveston, Texas. He immediately found his way to Houston where records indicate that he stayed in a rooming house on Crawford Street near what is now Minute Maid Park, home of the Astros baseball team. 

My paternal grandfather often spoke of moving around the country in the same era to find work. More often than not he stayed in boarding houses where he paid for a single room and shared bathroom facilities with others like himself who lived there temporarily. In fact, he met my grandmother in such a place in Oklahoma. She was a widow at the time and supported herself and her daughter by cooking for the residents who found shelter there. Her pay was meager but it included a safe place for her to live with her child.

My mother and father rented a room from one of the professors at Texas A&M College back in the nineteen forties just after they were married. Mama often spoke of how wonderful it was to have a place to stay with a nice family. Since the room was upstairs she and my father had to be inside by a certain hour at night or they would be locked out. They noticed a tree next to the window in their quarters and learned how to climb up its limbs to get inside whenever they were too late to use the front door entrance. 

Homes such as those my grandfathers and parents used for housing were quite commonplace across America at one time. They not only provided an inexpensive place to stay for those with limited incomes, but also gave the owners extra funds from the renting of rooms that they did not use. In fact, my paternal grandfather spent the last years of his life renting a space from a widow who found a way to stretch her budget by providing a space to sleep to him and to one of her sisters. The three of them lived quite happily together, sharing chores and paying the household bills for a monthly price that allowed them to still have personal spending money from their social security checks. 

Recently Houston, Texas has been featured in articles in The New York Times for its efforts in reducing homelessness in the city. The drive to help individuals without the means for either purchasing or renting a house began in City Hall at the beginning of the twenty first century. Since that time local officials and charitable groups have reduced the city’s homeless population by sixty percent. One of their tactics has been providing low cost places to stay. Rooming houses have been a significant help.

A developer from Atlanta came up with the idea of resurrecting the old practice of using a single family home as a place to board many people. The houses are redesigned to provide furnished bedrooms for multiple people who share bathrooms and kitchens. The cost is far less than inexpensive hotels and rent is collected by the week. Even those with extremely low incomes are generally able to pay for a room with a heavy door that can be locked for privacy. Such places are chosen in areas where there is also mass transportation so that residents will be able to get to jobs and medical care that social workers help them to find.  

I wonder why the concept of boarding houses went away. I suspect that there has always been a need for them but somehow they went into disfavor. Instead short term hotels sprang up to fill the void. Unfortunately the cost of such places was generally more expensive than those most in need of a place to stay were able to afford. I find it heartening to know that there are good people who are working to assure that the homeless have a place to stay other than outdoors under a bridge. 

In this most holy season when we recall the birth of Jesus, we should remember his parents searching for a place to stay when Mary’s pregnancy was coming to term. The young couple was turned away form many inns before someone offered them shelter in a manger with the animals. It was there that Jesus was born. I suspect that the compassion for all of humanity that Jesus taught us to have began with his own humble beginnings. He was not a king or a rich man. He was not even as well off as many of us are today. He wanted us to understand the worth of every person on this earth, regardless of circumstances. 

Today we would do well to see the homeless people in our midst as our brothers and sisters rather than nuisances. We might join in the efforts of helping them to find decent places to live rather than looking away when we see them. I admire the city of Houston for making the care of the homeless a priority. I hope they continue to be a model for the nation. There is still much to be done, but having a safe place to sleep at night is a great beginning for those who can’t afford a place to call home. 

I’m certainly not one who should be writing about how to have patience because I admittedly sometimes have strong tendencies to hurry things up. I injured my ankle and pushed the envelope of healing by doing to much too soon. I found myself having an even longer period of healing than might otherwise have been the case. We humans all too often expect things to happen more quickly than is possible and then we get upset when they do not. I see this in so many aspects of society.

The whole world was affected by the pandemic. Many people died before we began to take hold of the situation. Doctors and scientists were sharing information to get things under control. It took time and as with any such situation mistakes were made. Sadly far too many people insisted on rushing as quickly as possible to return to normal, ignoring protocols suggested by professionals simply because they quickly grew weary of the sacrifices we were all being asked to make. More lives might have been saved had we demonstrated a bit more patience with the situation instead of expecting perfection from the get go. 

A situation resulting from the pandemic was the loss of learning among students. It was only natural that the youngest members of our communities would be negatively affected. They had more on their minds than just learning. As my mother wisely counseled me when I first began teaching, if the child’s situation at home is troubled they will have a very difficult time paying attention and focusing.

So many youngsters were experiencing the deaths of family members and struggling to adjust to remote learning. Little wonder that schools are still attempting to make up for the gaps in knowledge. Nonetheless, some states like mine insisted on very quickly testing students and holding entire school districts accountable for low scores. It seems as though nobody thought that it might have been more appropriate to be patient as the return to normalcy was taking more time than expected. Instead my state took control of a major school district when the better response would have been to support and encourage even small signs of growth. 

Our nation has been suffering from inflation but so has virtually every other nation in the world. In fact, our inflation rate is much lower than those in Europe. Instead of being thankful that people are working and that the worst is over we grumble that the improvement in our economy is not as fast as we would like it to be. Once again the lack of patience causes us to overreact to the slowness of recovery. 

I remember working in a school that was struggling to get decent student scores on the state test. The subject area supervisors came to our campus to help us devise a plan to raise the scores and improve the learning environment overall. They spent the whole first year teaching us how to analyze the testing data to know where our students’ difficulties lay. Then we had cross campus meetings with the schools in our feeder pattern to share what we had learned so that they might also emphasize our areas of concern as they taught their students. The second year we received extensive training in methodologies designed to make our teaching more focused and interesting. We also had long meetings to redesign our lesson plans and our pacing. By the end of that year our students were indeed performing better but we were not yet where we needed to be. It took about four years for our school to meet expectations and by the fifth year we were exceeding goals in all subjects. We did this because the district understood that getting to that point would take time. They were patient in watching our progress and not asking us to perform miracles overnight. 

Our world is riddled with problems but they are rarely solved by quick fixes. The revolutionary war that resulted in the United States appeared to be a hopeless cause initially. If those fighting for independence had lost their will to keep going simply because it was taking too long there would be no United State of America. The same can be said with the Civil War. Abraham Lincoln was not willing to accept defeat even as his army lost battle after battle in the beginning of that conflict. The willingness to stick with the plan to keep the union whole was not hurried or abandoned and we reclaimed the United States.

There is very little worth accomplishing that comes out well without patience and determination. We can improve education with patience and hard work. We might stop the march of climate change by patiently working to rid ourselves of habits that damage our environment. There are so many problems that take time and sacrifice to change. Ankles can heal only if there is not a rush to overwork them too quickly. So too it is with most projects that are worthwhile. We can solve the problems of mass shooting but not if we only say a few prayers and add more locks and gates to keep out the bad guys. Life demands that we do things right and sometimes that means we have to also make mistakes and rectify them in the process of moving toward a good solution for problems. It is much like the scientific method. It’s okay if we go down the wrong path as long as we find our way back to where we need to be. Everything requires patience. We would do well to learn how to develop a willingness to do things at the right pace. Most of life is not a race. 

When my grandchildren were young I enjoyed having them at my house for sleepovers. I told them stories that I created just for them. They were silly little tales designed to make them laugh which they almost always did. We had lots of fun together and I always hated when it was time for them to return to their parents after a fun time together. 

Over time the storytelling changed. They wanted to know about me and the members of our extended family. They interrupted my dialogues to ask questions as they probed into the information about my own childhood and the people in our family tree who came before them. They liked hearing about their great great grandfather, William, who died long before they were born. They asked about their great grandfather, Jack, who was little more than a phantom in the past in their eyes. They wanted to hear more stories about my free range childhood spent in a neighborhood environment that sounded strange to them. 

When we had enough time Mike and I drove them to see the houses where we grew up. Somehow the run down neighborhoods of our youth and the tiny homes in which we resided did not jibe with the tales of joy and adventure that we had described in those places. I saw that it was difficult for them to connect the weathered neighborhoods with our fairytale stories. Times had changed. The areas had gone out of favor. Our former homes seemed to be too small for families. Their rundown appearance was difficult to reconcile with our newer and more modern abode. They had a problem imagining the innocence of our own youth when faced with the reality of how much had changed where life had once been idyllic.

Even I struggled to understand how it was possible for my childhood home to seem so small. Surely the tiny structure sitting on a small lot was not the place that I remembered. My recollection was of a yard so large that it rivaled a city park. We played our games like lords of the estate. The house itself and those around felt spacious and lovely in the recollections that I had conveyed. Instead I spoke as thought describing a fairy castle but what I saw a little wooden structure in need of repairs and several coats of paint. The place seemed so forlorn and not at all like the home that had been filled with the laughter of family and friends. My grandchildren quietly stared at the scene as though it had revealed the calumny of my accounts of my Tom Sawyer like childhood. It was difficult for them to believe that I had felt safe in the area that seemed to have become neglected and forgotten. 

I never again took my grandchildren back to the old family homestead. I wanted them to believe in my memories and it was too difficult to explain to them how the area had not weathered well in the decades since I walked out the front door of my childhood home to start my new life as an adult. Seeing the reality of time and change had even made me question the memories that seemed so crystal clear in my mind. It was as though the world had moved on from that house and the neighborhood in which it stood just as I once had. It was painful to view the reality of what had happened to the little place. 

A time came after I had retired from my decades as a teacher and school administrator when I volunteered to tutor students in mathematics at a high school that had been created in the building where I once learned my pre-college lessons. Once or twice each week I returned to the scene of my youth and now and again I drove slowly down the street where I once rode my bicycle and played ball with my friends. The home that I so loved seemed to get more and more dilapidated as time passed. It was painful to see, so I began to avoid my nostalgic journeys and instead went straight to the school to interact with the teens who needed an extra push to do well in their classes. 

During breaks I told them of my own adventures in the venerable building where they were learning about mathematics and science and history. Since the school had been gutted and remodeled in beautiful ways they had no problem imagining me enjoying my teen years in the same rooms where they now learned. It was only when I spoke of living on Belmark Street and walking to school that they seemed to be confused. One day they mentioned that they were not able to reconcile the disconnectedness of someone like me living in the neighborhood that now seemed to be so downtrodden. I laughed when I told them that they instead needed to imagine a time when the whole area was shiny and new and filled with young families with children playing in yards up and down every single street. Somehow I felt as I spun my magical memories that they were still in great doubt that such a place had ever existed but they humored me nonetheless. 

After I no longer tutored at the school in my old neighborhood I did not see my family home again for many years. Recently I took a deep breath and traveled through the familiar streets to see how the place was doing. I almost shouted for joy when I saw that someone had graced the house with a bit of love and care. It had a brand new roof and a beautiful coat of paint that made it almost seem to smile. The yard had grass again as well. It was a beautiful and welcome site that told me that somebody had decided to take care of the building and turn it back into a home. It warmed my heart and became the image that I choose to hold when I think of the place now and then. It was beautiful again just as I had described to my grandchildren. It had come back to life as vividly as I had remembered it. I seemed to be the mansion that I remembered in the way that only children see things. Maybe one day I’ll take my now grown grandchildren back to see it again. For now I’ll just tuck that image in my heart.