Always a welcome guest.

Ahhhh...the spectacular dog-days of summer. Well, they're almost gone where I live, but I'm pleading with mother nature right now to keep squeezing a few more weeks out for me! I have to tell you, I really don't mind the heat (so I rarely have to get out of the kitchen...) I really don't- the humidity bugs me, but I'll take what I get when it's finally warm.

This summer has been rich with fun little weekend trips to bodies of water and the associated lonnnggg car rides to get there and back. Reminds me of my family summer vacations of yesteryear... My mom was always determined that we get to go SOMEPLACE for a summer vacation. Now, as my memory recalls, it seems like we went to some city named Carbonville or something on one of these trips. I don't remember there being much in that town. Maybe dinosaur bones, which I was VERY into at that time. But WOW, what an enterprising name for a city! I also remember going camping and there being these huge moths on all of the trees- some migration thing I guess- I don't think they bothered me as much back then as they did my sister? (Feel free to comment sister). Regardless of where we went, there was always a "delicious" potted-meat lunch to look forward to at our rest-stop picnic table (I still shudder at that). There were also at least 3 vacation-like trips that involved moving cross-country, and taking my sister to her first year of college. Those trips also entailed the extremely long car rides, where there was a distinct line down the middle of the back seat where sis and I sat, and crossing it meant really nasty glares and stuff. Of course I crossed it often.


And I'm not forgetting the every 4 year AIRPLANE trips to my parents' home state of Florida to see all the relatives. Those were great fun as a kid. You can't beat a plane ride to a warm, tropical type place. Especially since we lived in very non-tropical places growing up. We spent lots of time around my Granddad then, playing around in his plant nursery with golf carts and he always was willing to buy junk food treats for us when we were there! Not sure if mom knew that or not?
It's hard to "grow up" and not get summers off anymore. No matter what age I am, I'm still wanting to be riding my bike all over the neighborhood and playing in sprinklers and pools and laying around eating popcicles and soaking up the sun. Up here especially, if you don't take advantage of it while you got it- it's gone in no time and you're right back to wishing for it all over again! You can almost come close to "summer overload" (I know, it does actually feel almost blasphemous to say it). But you have to be outside absolutely as much as possible, from dusk til dawn, and believe me, you need those sun vitamins up here! But, I would absolutely NOT complain, and besides, my tan is certainly not suffering! (Though my mother reminds me often that my skin may suffer from excessive wrinkling later in life....). I think the essence of summer is the permission to be tranquil. It's a season of (hopefully) balmy indulgence. And who doesn't like a little of that! Even my dog enjoys her dog days, once she gets a little "coolin off". Probably what we ALL really need is a good splash of cold water to remind us not to take life too seriously. But please don't experiment on me to see if that works.

The great thing about getting older is that
you don’t lose all the other ages you’ve been.


~Madeleine L’Engle

One of these things is not like the other....

Different, an adjective, is defined by Webster's as: 1: partly or totally unlike in nature, form, or quality : dissimilar; 2: not the same: as a: distinct; 3: unusual, special and;
Oriented: intellectually, emotionally, or functionally directed.

Even Sesame Street tried to tell us that it was okay, but nobody truly likes to be different. I think it's because our human nature prefers what we are familiar with or have experienced to be like us. So that which is farther away from our "norm", becomes uncomfortable. I think different is not an easy thing to accept on the whole- but especially not when it has to do with us personally. I've tried to remember my first experience of meeting someone who was atypical from the usual line-up of everyday people. I'm sure it was someone from the inner-city Massachusetts church where my Dad was pastoring when I was between the ages of 2 and 9. You really could meet just about any walk of life, culture, age, shape, smell, and so-on there. My bad memory tells me that it was probably someone from the street that first caught my "Oh wow that's peculiar" eye, and probably their not-so-fresh aroma that put the exclamation point on the end of it. Needless to say, that kind of semi-alarming differentness sticks in the memory as being not too appealing, not very normal, and certainly not desirable. This my friends, sets the tone for future encounters with those of an "alien" nature- whatever orientation that might be. Our own culture has been telling us it's better to look, act, think and feel a certain "acceptable" way, for ages. And that's pretty easy to buy into when you're surrounded by so many others who ALSO want to align with that. I observed from an early age the kids that can't afford or maybe even choose not to ascribe to the social status symbols necessary to help you get through school a little more unscathed. They are the left-outs, the name-called, the weird kids with a myriad of stereotypes, and they eventually flock together to help feel a little less ostracized, a little less unusual. So you end up with a lot of groupings of sameness. And for whatever reasons, some of the groups are "better" than the others, and some are not. But what about the kids that don't fit into ANY of those? The ones that seem to gravitate toward the extreme of "freak" and "weird"? I guess I call that an attempt to embrace their differentness- they make their own place amongst all of the social haves and have-nots. And most of the time that evens out eventually, and sometimes it doesn't.

Even into adulthood we find names to describe the different. Eccentric seems to be a polite term for someone that people would call a "few fries short of a happy meal." Or there's offbeat, whimsical, unconventional, and one of my favorites, quirky. Oh yes, and let's not forget queer... I think we learn early on how we're going to respond to what seems unusual either by how we choose to interpret the behavior of the person, or by choosing to believe the collective societal say-so's about those atypical orientations. In selecting the first option, that means ignoring whatever name and stereotype someone is given, and seeing what they're actually like. That seems to be a difficult concept for a majority of people, unless the unorthodoxed person effects them personally in some way. I just love when this happens, because now all of a sudden, those that could be so far removed, are no longer behind the front lines anymore. Because now all of what goes along with those stereotypes may possibly apply to them as well- if they apply to the one you know, or love or are related to.

This word has been a part of me personally for as far back as I can remember. And for many reasons. One of these being that I intrinsically did not want to do what everyone else was doing, or wanted me to do, from a very early age. This unfortunately resulted in a few less friends in the neighborhood ( which certainly helped to develop my "creative side")and also apparently encouraged a few bratty kids to hold a little "Lynn protest march" out in front of our house one day. And let me tell ya, that's not an easy thing to forget. But I didn't like those kids, and wasn't willing to be bossed around by them, so thus was an introduction to my first feelings of being different at around 7 or 8 years old.
I would say next to follow in the different line-up would be moving to a place where no one is the same religion as you are- and most all girls are raised to be as feminine as the day is long. So I was already going in with 2 strikes- and the older you get, the weirder you seem if you don't act like everyone else, especially when A LOT of the everyone elses have a specific thing in common. So I was "weird" and "strange" and it was hard to find that group to fit into.
Now when you start to realize that you are, indeed, peculiar- thoughts rush back to all of those people you thought were weird and strange and smelly and whatever, and you really do panic for awhile wondering why you have to be the one that has a permanent freak flag flying? And of course, there are different levels of dissimilarness which some of us can change if we want to, and some of us cannot. And when you end up with one of the cannots, there's either a long process of finding acceptance within yourself for that, or a life-long battle of never really knowing who you are and why you have always felt...different. It's a wonderful thing to figure out why you're different, but unfortunately, not much that is unusual is celebrated. To finally put together all of the feelings and interactions and thoughts with an explanation- to find that "missing link", is a monumental figuring-out moment in the "different" life. But no one throws a party for something like that. It's no easy thing to embrace being "strange or odd from a conventional viewpoint." We would be a world of bland, insipid people without the different. No Einsteins or Da Vincis or Tchaikovskys. And somehow, someway, there's got to be something that assists those that are afraid of the divergent to realize that they are just as strange to those that have been in social exile.

I will admit that no matter how much you work to discern and deal with the nature of our humanness, you still can't take the human out of the nature. Because no matter how many times I have been left out or set aside or presupposed there are still times when I struggle to accept and or understand those that are exceptionally foreign in their orientations to me. So I too have to remind myself, that we are all searching for our own definitions within our different orientations.

Getting crowned today.......

Climbing- for fun.

One small aside before I start- I realize, as this whole blog thing moves along, that I am leading more and more into writing my own column I guess? Though it has no real direction- like some cooking or dating or advice column would. I would welcome suggestions on what a possible leading could be. But for now, I will just continue along with my random thoughts, constructed musings and occasional rantings.


When I was young(er), I used to climb a lot of things. I don’t remember specifically when this started, but my first recollection is of climbing a tree out by the street in front of our house in Worcester, Mass. I climbed it many afternoons to watch for my sister coming home from school. Her being 6 years my elder, I figure this went on for a couple years or so- and eventually I just climbed it because it was there and I could. My Dad seemed to encourage playful climbing because he rigged up some poles in our back yard, that also hooked into a tree, and I remember climbing around on those with my sister and various other friends as well.
Once we moved to Utah, my wonderful parents gifted with an amazing “jungle gym” in the back yard (now that I think of it, probably to help keep me occupied)- and I could get way up on top of that, and build and construct all kinds of things on and around it as well. But that didn’t seem to be enough as I eventually started climbing and walking along the 6 foot privacy fence, and then up onto the ten or so foot brick wall, and up onto the roof of the house. I made a game out of it by the time I was 10 or 11 and was provided the opportunity for hours of practice via numerous groundings which forced me to find things to entertain myself within the constraints of the yard. So the game was to somehow make it around the backyard on various objects without needing to touch the ground. Somehow, I miraculously managed to not prompt more trips to the emergency room in these escapades- I don’t know how though.
I provide all of this fairly mundane history to set the stage for today’s wondering about why we (I) lose sight of the fun of things in life(?) At what age does playing on the jungle gym become no longer acceptable? Man it is SO easy to get caught up and duped in the constraints of “adult” life. It’s no wonder even Hey-suess made a point to say we should be like little children, because it seems something VITAL often gets lost in the processes of “growing up”. We lose our interest in climbing trees for fun and start climbing those ladders in some career or social status that don’t really seem to lead to anywhere.
I’ve never been one much for ladder climbing of that sort - but there are situations where you can kind of get sucked in to that place of "status"; and my most recent induction into what that club is like, most certainly left me with even more distaste for it. I got to observe first hand how a large element of consideration for others seems to get lost once one "reaches the top." And no matter how masked in public this might seem, the absence is VERY apparent behind the scenes. I also see the absence of people being able to appreciate down time anymore- of being able to do nothing. DOING, seems to be ever so much more important for those that aren't able to stand having a void, what I've heard called the "overscheduled lifestyle."
It's amazing the kind of stress we can heap upon ourselves for a career or ambition or even "dream". By now you'd think I would have learned that once the stress from the job begins to outweigh the ideal of the job, it's not worth doing anymore. But noooooooo- I guess it had been long enough since I'd been in the thick of it to remember the signs. Things like on-going fatigue; lack of enthusiasm; a waning respect for those you are working for. And then there's the physical indications- for me, that almost always means the gut-rot. And this time it began to include high blood pressure and an occasional panic attack. But while all those things were familiar, and I was seriously considering taking the last train to Quitsville, for some reason I thought I should "stick it out" a little longer... to prove what, I'm not sure. Likely it was the Holden credo of giving it your all until it almost sucks the life out of you. And then came the Sunday night when I started crying because I dreaded having to go back to all that the next morning. That's when it's time to stop. That's when you feel the reality of how empty all that junk of status and prestige and who you know is. That's when you realize that no matter how much you don't allow the mindset of others to change your mindset- if you fall under their "rule" (so to speak) that expectation for you to value what they think is important, is still there. So you either subscribe to it. Or get out of that box as fast as you can.

And that's when I remembered that the only climbing I've ever wanted to do- is for fun.

I don't believe I'll need to be reminded of that again. I may not climb trees too much today, but I'd be more than happy to hop on a jungle gym anytime.