Beware the Ides of March

Convergence.  The state of being converged upon.  Intersecting demands.  The art of scheduling becomes more a mastery of juggling.  Just don’t drop the most important ball.  Which one is that?  Exactly.

I’m an organized person and actually enjoy planning my ‘to do lists’ and calendars for work and home.  But lately it’s become a bit more challenging.  For quite unexpectedly my working life has become like an advanced algebraic problem gone awry. 

I’m always working on several project teams at once.  They typically involve completely different groups of people and the work usually is fairly hectic at the beginning and the end of a project period. Of course, there is a rather lengthy cast of quirky characters involved.  Gathering information and coordination, endless meetings and conference calls at the beginning and then it levels out to a manageable pace in the middle with a lot of documentation.  The end is another flurry of activity with determinations, recommendations, written reports.

Well, at the moment, I am working on the end of two projects and the beginning of three more.  And my boss retired a couple months back and the new one started this week.  Yes, really.  And you know what that has meant?  Interim status reports.  So, picture each segment of work as curves on an X and Y scale.  Now circle the points where the multiple curves intersect.  That subset of points is my current work existence.  And you thought you could live your life without understanding algebra, right? Suffice to say it’s not a pace that is sustainable in the long run but perhaps for a month or two. 

Then there is the bevy of usual doctor’s appointments.  At this stage of life, there is a fleet of medical professionals to keep happy.  This past week was the dentist, orthodontist and ophthalmologist.  So I’m actually attempting to schedule conference calls and meetings around the medical appointments and the schedules of everyone on each of those project teams.  I am one person who is looking forward to May- my best estimate of when this will all settle down. 

How am I taking care of myself, you might be asking?  Very carefully.   Getting to sleep early, healthy meals, exercise and lots of lazy, unplanned weekends.  Long phone calls with people who care.  There has to be somewhere I exist with no schedules to juggle.  No demands being made upon me.  You know all those things we all know we should be doing, but don’t always?   For now, they are my mainstay as I continue on my grief and cancer journeys.  And I am looking forward to spring flowers.  So yes, beware the Ides of March.  And keep an eye out for convergence.  You might want to practice your juggling, just in case.

My Father’s Voice

When I was young, the voice in my head was my father’s.  You know what I mean – that voice telling you to handle this situation a bit differently.  Such as:  ‘make more than one trip’ as I walked by with arms over laden- ‘you’ll drop something or fall on the stairs’.  Or the driving comments- he taught me to drive, you see.  Such gems as ‘don’t follow so close’ or ‘yes, you have the right away but that guy wasn’t looking.  Would you rather be right? or dead?’  I admit that to this day, every time I take a huge armful of something and carry it anywhere, I think of my dad. 

My dad was an advice-filled man and as reluctant as I was to listen to him, inevitably he was right.  How annoying is that, right?  But I’m showing you my stubborn side now.  Later in life my dad found it highly amusing that I fell in love with another advice-filled man who was inevitably right.   Robert was known to exclaim ‘stop typing so fast- no wonder your hand hurts’ or ‘be careful with that knife- I don’t want to take you to the ER if you cut yourself’ or, my favorite, ‘why are you carrying all that laundry in one trip?  Put it down.  I’ll take it upstairs.’   See, I really do have a stubborn side.  And for the record, I never cut myself while slicing veggies other than a one-time very small nick.  But, now I hear his voice too, every time I pull out that paring knife and cutting board.  And I think – gosh, now I’d have to get myself to the ER.  I better be careful.  And I picture him in heaven, smiling at me. 

As you may have surmised, today is the anniversary of my father’s passing.  Thirteen years ago he died on the 13^th of March.  The date is not without some family significance.  My parents were married on a Friday the 13^th and nearly two years later I was born on a Friday the 13^th.  My dad always said that day was ‘our’ lucky day – him, mom and me.  In recent years I have begun to wonder how true that is, but I like to cling to my dad’s belief.   As he was nearing death, he lingered in a coma and passed just a few minutes past midnight on the 13^th.   Coincidence?  I think not.  

I remember that week- in the midst of my grief  - just knowing that I would spend the rest of my life and never again would the phone ring and be him.  If I was having a bad week, at random the phone would ring and I would hear Dad’s voice saying ‘I’ve been thinking about you.  Are you okay?’  Or back in the 80s when the Bell Phone system was in place and they had frequent commercials with people saying ‘I just called to say I love you.’  Well, you guessed it.  My dad used to do that too.   Or the times he would tell his funny stories- with some facts created out of the blue with such skill that you couldn’t tell truth from fiction.  Consequently, Dad rarely met a stranger he wouldn’t engage in conversation.

And his utter pride the time I wanted shelves made for this tiny kitchen cupboard and he made them for me remotely.  I measured and told him the numbers over the phone.   ‘Yes, I checked them twice’, I said.  Then he cut out the wedges to hold the shelves and predrilled the holes for the screws.  He carefully used his saw and finishing tools to make the shelves.  He tossed it all into a box and mailed them to me.   I called him when it was being successfully put into place.  He was so proud of himself that it worked.  He had included a mini-level in that box so I could get the shelves mounted properly and he told me how to use it.  I still have that tool in my toolbox.  It was one of the few that got moved to the condo.

He loved to laugh and spend time together as a family.  And when we couldn’t visit – well, he picked up that phone to check in on his kids.  And at the end of those phone calls, then he would say, ‘Well, Karen Marie, I’m out of words.  I love you.  Goodbye.’  Right back at you, Dad.