Friends

I had coffee with my good friend Ben today. We had a great conversation about what was going on in our lives and about theatre. It was as if we'd picked up where we left off months ago, the last time we had time to talk.

Ben is my brother. The kind of brother most girls dream of having. Challenging, always asking us to do our best, and, at the the same time, totally supportive. Ben saw my potential as an actor and helped me to recognize it. I've been committed to his vision of theatre for years because his aesthetic is exquisite. We complement each other in outlook and temperment. You don't come upon many friends like that.

I've been blessed with so many good friends. Friends who are my family. I don't who said that we are blessed with two families in our lives--those we are born to and those we gather around us. I've been truly blessed with both. My friends are my treasure.

As I look to 2010, I want to find more time for my treasures. I've been reclusive, especially this last year. I need more face time with my friends. I think that's a good beginning on my resolution list.

Audrey Hepburn

Audrey Hepburn has always been my ideal of feminine beauty. I envied her long beautiful neck, her doe eyes, her dancer's poise. She was simply elegant.

As a pudgy, round-faced girl child, I longed for her waifish, yet womanly figure and her innate sense of style and sophistication. She looked beautiful even with her tattered raincoat, wet hair, and make-up smeared by rain and tears in the closing scene of "Breakfast at Tiffany's." I yearned to be beautiful like Audrey Hepburn.

I was a large-sized, short-necked, round-faced woman when I discovered Audrey's inner beauty--her devotion to her family, her service to the world's children through UNICEF. I envied her again--this time for her ability to hold a child limp from hunger, bone thin and cover with flies and to look on this tragedy with loving compassion. She embraced the children the world would throw away. She loved them and gave them hope.

There she was, my feminine ideal, surrounded by dirty, chattering, rail-thin, disease-ridden children, all smiling at this beautiful woman, no longer young, but still poised, elegant. In spite of the heat, the dust, the despair, she glowed.

Audrey Hepburn said about beauty, "For beautiful eyes, look for the good in others; for beautiful lips, speak only words of kindness; and for poise, walk with the knowledge that you are never alone.” It does not surprise me that she would speak these words. She seemed so comfortable with herself.

If I were to pursue Audrey's beauty, it is the beauty of her soul that I would seek. I do pursue beauty in my own way, but too often I get caught up in the desire for long neck and elegance. I get caught up in the illusion of perfect figure, hair, face. But occasionally, when my grandchild cuddles into my ample breast with a sigh of comfort or a child giggles at my joke or asks for a hug, I can see a glimmer of Audrey in my soul.

If truth be told, I'd rather have Audrey in my soul than on my frame. Physical beauty is ephemeral, here today and gone tomorrow. Beauty of the soul lasts a lifetime. It improves with age. Beauty of the soul can carry you places physical beauty never can--through heartache, disappointment, despair. Beauty of the soul turns you outward into the world not inward into yourself as physical beauty does.

I wonder, if Audrey Hepburn had not been such a beautiful soul, would the world have considered her to be the beauty it did? I'm glad we didn't have to find out. I wish we had more of her beauty in the world today.

And I am delighted that, even as a child, I could discern true beauty.

I still dream of looking like Audrey Hepburn, but that dream is no longer skin deep.

Beyond Tired

There is a point when you can't get any more tired than you already are. Beyond fatigue. Beyond bone weary. Beyond beyond. I've reached that point.

When I was younger, I could burn the candle at both ends and in the middle without any physical consequences. Lately, I've lost that resiliency and I miss it. I like being busy. I like being over-scheduled. It makes me feel alive.

Just in the last six month, I've found I don't rebound so easily from a spate of busy-ness. I find myself needing the heavy equipment just to get out of bed. I guess what I'm saying is that I'm feeling old.

My friend, Lorrie, says I've been calling myself old since I was in my forties. And she's right, I have. But that was a way to pat myself on my back for all my activity and energy. People would say, "Oh Royce, you're not old. Look at all you do!" What a sneaky way to get a compliment!?!

Now I've reached my golden years, I'm wishing I could have the resilience of my forties back. To be able to leap from bed ready to face the day instead of hitting the snooze bar for another nine minutes of sleep would be a rare gift indeed.

It is an unfortunate reality that the old saw, "youth is wasted on the young," is so true. My head doesn't believe that it's 61, but my body reminds me of my age every minute of the day.

Ah, sweet bird of youth. You have flown by so fast.

Crispy Critter

Days flow in and out with numbing regularity. Papers have to be graded, grades recorded, tests given, presentations observed, routine following routine ad nauseum. I am fried. Getting up in the morning is a battle. I have to practice tough love on myself to get myself out of bed, bathed, dressed and on the way to work. I don't believe I've even been this burnt out.

I am counting the days until Christmas break. I'm going to disappear to Club Royce. I won't answer my phone or my door. Email will be verboten. No alarm clock. Just some time with me, myself and I. Maybe I'll remember who I am.

Intersecting Lives

Today a student blurted out in class that the only time the people around her were happy was when she isn't. Then she abruptly left the room. I knew what she was feeling. It is not that the people in my life wish me unhappy, it is that I don't seem to be able to grasp the happiness for myself.

My student doesn't recognize her worth. She has embraced an attitude of worthlessness and doesn't seem to be able to see her value. Surprise! I'm right there with her.

I am afraid of success. I don't know it even when I achieve it. I can't value my accomplishments because I made them. What's the old Groucho Marx quote? "I wouldn't want to belong to a club that would have me."

Now don't feel sorry for me. I do that enough for myself. Besides, I'm learning to recognize my value bit by bit. It is mainly when I see a student with ability sabotage herself and cut herself off from help that my own demons raise their ugly heads and hiss at me. They taunt me with my failures, my limitations, my mistakes. They know I embrace failure because I know how to deal with it. It is success I don't know how to work with.

After sixty-one years, you might think I'd have a clue. But I'm clueless. Maybe by the time I'm seventy-one I'll get a glimmer.

Learning to Float

I am a doer. When things are difficult, I make a plan and full steam ahead to solutions. Sometimes, making plans is not the right tactic. Sometimes, you just have to float.

What do I mean by float? Floating is when you allow the circumstances to play out without trying to push a solution. Floating is seeing what happens naturally. Floating is allowing the universe to decide on the proper action. Floating is just floating.

I learned to float when I went through some financial hard times. I couldn't figure a way out. I looked for solutions and couldn't find any. I was stuck. It was a new sensation. I usually am very focused. I know my path and I follow it. This time I was pathless. I kept begging the universe, "Send me a sign! A big neon sign! I can't find my way." And the universe was silent. There were no signs, not even tiny little scratchings on a piece of scrap paper. I didn't know what to do.

Into this empty, silent, signless black hole came an image, a remembrance of being in the ocean and floating. The sea would take me wherever it wanted. I would bob like a piece of flotsam on the tide. It was a peaceful, liberating feeling to be going nowhere, to be a part of the ebb and flow of the water. There was no stress to make shore, no need to drive in any direction.

This memory became my mantra. "Just float Royce," I'd admonish myself when I became anxious over a lack of goals. "Just float, enjoy the ride. No need to make plans. They will eventually emerge. The tide eternally rolls into shore. You will find your way."

It took me six months to learn to embrace floating. At first, I struggled. You can drown when you struggle in the water. I almost did a couple of times. But as the floating took hold, I learned to love the weightlessness and peace of floating. I could sit and let life rush around me without anxiety. And mercifully, I floated into shore and onto the path of my graduate education.

Well, I'm at that point again--directionless, without a goal. I have to begin again to float. I thought the second time would be easier, but I'm a fighter--I want to blaze away. So I have to learn to float again.

Good things come out of floating. I try to remember that as I thrash in the water. A time at sea makes port much more appreciated when you arrive. One must remember that it is in the journey not the destination where the adventure lies.

Okay Royce, just float. Let the water take you where it will. Just float until you find your way.

Just Nothing

I really have nothing to say tonight. But in the pursuit of discipline, I sit here before this screen and put a few words down to start the week with.

This will be a fractured week. YO takes Wednesday as the Veterans Day holiday and GCC takes Friday, so basically I don't get Veterans Day off. I'm not really whining, I'm just gritching.

At any rate, here are my few words, my homage to writing discipline. Maybe I'll actually have something to say tomorrow night.

Rambling

This is my space to practice. Practice the discipline of writing. I don't have any followers and that's okay. I have enough strangers following me on Twitter for God only knows what reason. I don't even tweet. So a lot of people I don't know are looking at empty space if they are looking for me.

So here I am blogging to empty space. No one's listening but me and that's just okay. I like what I'm writing. I'm just rambling, sending the words out into space to see if anything comes back. If I continue to write a few words, just a little each night, maybe I'll find the courage to write pages at some time in the future. There are pages stored up inside me, hordes of words looking for a way out. Perhaps this blog will be an escape tunnel for the imprisoned words.

In the meantime, it is a release to let the words flow and see where they go. It's practice and practice makes...well not perfect, but maybe better.

The Other Side of Lonely

For the most part, living alone is lovely. I get full custody of the remote control. No one's socks but mine are on the floor. If there are dishes in the sink, I put them there.

Sometimes, however, not often, but sometimes the solitude gets so quiet that the internal voices emerge just to fill the vacuum. It's then that regrets and dashed dreams surface like the mist on a bog and hide the path to contentment.

Tonight is such a night.

The woulda, shoulda, couldas have come out to play. They taunt and tease with "the road less travelled." The "why didn't Is" play tag with the "why did Is" scattering crumbs of dissatisfaction and despair in their wake.

On a night like this, I revert to old habits. Movies, books, food. Escape. I cuddle into someone else's story to evade the reality of mine. I plug the soul holes with carbohydrates knowing that it's, at best, a temporary fix.

The problem with old habits is that once we acknowledge their existence they no longer work as escape. Someone else's story is no longer a shelter and carbohydrate mortar is like toothpaste in picture holes decomposing as we watch. The discomfort is still there. It must be addressed, it must dealt with.

Sometimes you have to just ride through the loneliness and come out the other side. Embrace it as a friend. Look it in the face and call it what it is. My reality is that my aloneness is a choice. Most of the time, I am content with my solitude. Just some nights, like tonight, it would be nice to have someone else to talk to besides my demons.

Nobody is not a bad word

Some may think that by calling myself a nobody, I'm being self-deprecating. Not at all. I am a dyed-in-the-wool, card-carrying, proud nobody. Given our celebrity oriented society, our "I've got to be somebody or I'm nothing" mentality, it isn't easy to allow yourself to be a nobody, but I'm working at making it acceptable.

I wasn't always happy being nobody. When I was younger, I craved to be a somebody. I thought I wanted fame. But through the years, I've watched the unfortunate toll that fame has taken on people I have admired and I came to embrace being a nobody.

Nobody-hood allows me so much freedom. I don't have strangers wondering about my life. I can walk through the world without anyone invading my privacy. I can sit and enjoy a moment of silent contemplation in a public place without intrusion. No one wants to know what I'm eating, where I buy my clothes, or who I'm hanging out with. I can make a mistake without the world press creating banner headlines out of my embarrassment.

The people I love and who love me know what's going on in my life. They let me know I'm important. To them, I am a valued nobody. And being a valued nobody is really being a somebody.

Hurrah for nobody-hood and happy anonymity. I love being a nobody.

Getting Started

I've been needing to write for sometime. Lacking the discipline to sit down and actually put a story together, I thought I might jump into the 21st century technology and try blogging. With the thought that you can teach an old dog new tricks, I want to share some of the conclusions I've come to in my 61 years of being a confirmed nobody. I don't know if you can call it wisdom, but it is a way of life that has lead me to a relative contentment. If anyone reads these words and finds something that resonates, I'll consider that a bonus. For actually, I'm just looking for a place to let the words flow--hopefully with sense...and maybe some wisdom.