Mari Donne's Blog

They say you don’t appreciate what you’ve got until it’s gone, but when it comes to colors, I’ve found you don’t appreciate them until you get them back.

I had cataract surgery recently, and one of the many benefits is I can see colors clearly again. While my eyes were healing and I had a hard time reading, I watched a lot of movies where things blew up, just because the colors were so pretty. “Cosmos” also became a favorite.

I sit outside and stare at the sky. I sit in my cubicle at work and stare out the window. (It’s lucky my boss sits several states away from me and can’t see me.) I picked up a piece of knitting and realized that what I thought of as a bland green yarn was full of different shades, beautifully heathered.

I find myself staring at people’s eyes now, possibly disconcertingly. What I’d thought of as blue eyes in some cases turned out to be gray. And instead of being dull, grays are mysterious, smoky, or calm, all beautiful in different ways. The truly blue eyes blaze. And, oh, the variety of brown eyes, and the many facets that go into what are called green eyes.

I had the operations because I wanted my eyes back. And, in a sense, I got everyone else’s as well.

I just dropped a knitting needle. I turned to pick it up, and I couldn’t find it. I waved my hand around, and it was right there. I should have seen it immediately. But it’s close enough in tone to the floor tile that I couldn’t perceive it until I knew it was there and focused on it deliberately.

I finally got a diagnosis stating that my cataracts are unusual. Although I test at 20/20 vision with my glasses on, I have problems with contrast. This means I can read a page in black and white, but the databases I work with, which have a variety of colors, are a challenge. I try to avoid driving at night, not an easy thing in winter.

I have another appointment in two weeks, and I’m hoping that the surgeon will be able to convince my insurance company to foot the bill for at least part of the surgery. Thanks to my crappy, high deductible plan, I’m going to wind up paying several thousands out of pocket. But it will be worth it. I’m tired of cleaning my glasses to make the fog go away before I remember they’re not the problem. I’m sick of always having tired eyes.

Two years from now, the Iowa caucuses will be wild things, as confusing as the caucus race in Alice in Wonderland. At caucuses, Democrats don’t just vote. You have to show up in person, and you’re expected to make your voice heard.

But this is an off year, so only a couple of dozen people came to elect delegates to the country convention, sign petitions for prospective candidates, and decline to serve on committees.

There were no stump speeches, although a few candidates, including one viable contender for the U.S. House of Representatives, came by to shake hands, fail to remember if they’d met us before, and offer us t-shirts. Also, there were cookies.

I’m going to the county convention, which should be better attended, not least because it’s going to be held in March and the temps should be above 0 by then. It will still be relatively low key, except for that guy. (The guy with the single issue that no one else gives a fuck about, who drags the meeting out for an hour longer than it needs to run. It’s a different guy each time, with a different issue, but there’s always a guy.)

It’s a far cry from six years ago, when we were selecting a presidential nominee. We milled around in groups, each one supporting a candidate, and each group playing a game of Red Rover, trying to get people from the smaller groups to join ours. There were four voters in our household, each one supporting a different candidate, and two of us were precinct captains. My older daughter’s candidate was a surprise winner who went on to become president.

Tonight’s meeting was quiet, and I spent most of it knitting and wondering what the Republicans were doing in their conclave. I kept reminding myself that the few people in that room, apparently doing nothing but chatting, were on the ground floor of an important process. We were making an unobtrusive but important effort to have our voices heard by the powerful. We showed up.

It was a good holiday. A friend was able to visit, and, as usual, my husband did something amazing and wonderful to the turkey. This year’s masterpiece involved an apple glaze. Even though the kids didn’t make it home this year, we’ve been lighting the menorah each night. (I also have an ongoing Hanukkah giveaway.) We decided to get the whole family together over the longer Christmas holiday instead, and after seeing all the travel delays on the news, that appears to have been a good call.

I always wonder what to do with house guests in the depths of Iowa, but my friend was thrilled when I offered to take her to WalMart on Friday–to protest. After our small crowd of sign-wavers was chased off corporate property and interviewed by the local news, we shopped at the co-op.

For Small Business Saturday, we went to a marketplace that showcases local businesses. After munching on some great food (blini, yum!), I found a charming young woman selling yarn and knitted items. My guest had requested I make her a wool hat for Christmas, so I was happy to find several skeins that would suit the project. The saleswoman described the alpaca who had produced the fiber for one hank, and told me another came from a sheep owned by a local vendor, Big Boy Meats. (Yes, we have a business here named Big Boy Meats.) She is personally acquainted with each sheep and alpaca whose wool she spins. We found this almost Portlandian, but also completely awesome.

So I called my friend over and had her select the yarn for her present. If I can follow the pattern correctly, she will have a hat that she has promised to call Nathan, after the sheep who produced it, by the end of the year. I’m terrified I’ll mess it up. I can’t bear to disappoint Nathan by ruining his wool.

Yes, a dreidel thong.

This is my first giveaway, so be gentle. I have two prizes. The first is a copy of my new ebook, A Small Miracle Happened, from Loose Id with cover art by April Martinez. It’s a Hanukkah novella about a lonely Jewish guy in a small town whose menorah is delivered to the house of a guy named Christian by mistake.

There’s a scene where they play strip dreidel, and when I joked about knitting something to give away with the book, Andrea Speed suggested a dreidel thong. Because I’m easily led, here it is:

It’s not quite finished, purposefully. I can adapt it for either a man or a woman, whichever the winner chooses. It’s made from DK cotton yarn mixed with beech wood fiber, which is machine washable. (Contrary to the expectations of many, wood fiber is soft and comfortable. I make no guarantees for the hardness or softness of any wood the winner choses to put in the thong.)

Note that the dreidel appears to have landed with the letter shin uppermost. This means, “Put something in.”

I’m going to write a Facebook post and Tweet about the giveaway. To enter the contest, 1) comment on this post or on Facebook, and 2) either share the Facebook post or retweet about the giveaway. Specify whether you want the book, the thong, or either. I’ll pick names from a hat when the contest ends.

The contest runs through Hanukkah, which starts at sundown today, November 27, and continues for eight days.

If you have trouble commenting on my blog, my Facebook is here, and I’m @MariDonne42 on Twitter.

In years past, my family celebrated the mashup feast of Christmukkah, which simply means lighting a menorah and setting it next to a decorated tree. Latkes were served during the holidays, sometimes next to the Christmas turkey.

But this year the first day of Hanukkah falls on Thanksgiving, which means the menorah is first lit on Thanksgiving Eve. It’s very unusual for Hanukkah and Thanksgiving to coincide, and I’ve read posts stating it won’t happen again for decades, thousands of years, or ever. (It all depends on whether you consider it an overlap in 2070 when the first night of Hanukkah is the evening of Thanksgiving Day, and if you think the Jewish calendar will be revised sometime in the next millennium to better coincide with the seasons. That is, if you think about it at all, which is unlikely, especially if you’ve got a turkey to stuff.)

The holidays are a good mix, and not just because they’re about food. Of course, it’s an old joke that most Jewish holidays are about food one way or another, the motivation boiling down to, “They tried to kill us. They didn’t succeed. Let’s eat!”

Hanukkah is about political as well as religious freedom. Thanksgiving is a secular harvest festival that is also associated with those values. So Thanksgivukkah is a celebration of family, freedom, and food.

My husband loves the menu challenge this presents. Now that I think of it, cranberry sauce should taste pretty good on latkes.

And I’ll have a fun reason to be thankful when we light those first candles this year. Loose Id is publishing my holiday story about two men who were, for different reasons, going to be alone for most of those eight days until a misdirected package brought them together. (See how I snuck that little plug into this post?)

This lovely cover is by April Martinez.

I expected the news I got during my yearly eye exam. I will likely need cataract surgery within the next two years. I’ve noticed problems with my vision, especially distinguishing colors. A few months ago, I pulled a skein of yarn from my stash to continue a project and only realized it wasn’t a match for the stuff I’d been using by the feel of it. I couldn’t perceive the difference between two shades of green at all.

I was annoyed. My sister didn’t need the surgery until she was well into her sixties, and my mother not until she was in her eighties. But mostly the diagnosis made me think how lucky I am to have this happen now, when not only can it be fixed, it’s a very minor outpatient procedure. Not all that long ago, I’d have had to spend two weeks in the hospital with my head mobilized by sandbags after the operation.

Even if I were to lose my sight, and that would be horrible, I live in a world of audio books and other accommodations for people with disabilities. (Thanks in part to my retiring U.S. Senator Tom Harkin.)

I’m lucky. I’ll get that rainbow back.

I didn’t post anything on Mother’s Day. i didn’t have time. I was busy making arrangements at work and home so that I could fly down to Florida to stay with my mom. She’s 94, and she’s slowed down a lot over the past few years. (At her 90th birthday party, she danced late into the night with her students. Yes, students. She taught line dancing until she was 92 and still acts as teacher emeritus by critiquing when she’s well enough to go to classes.)

So I didn’t think much about Mother’s Day. I sent a present because I wouldn’t be down there on time to give it to her myself. I got phone calls from my kids, which was nice. But it was just a Hallmark Holiday. No big deal. Because I still have Mom.

Father’s Day is a different matter. I have no one to send cards to. Oh, I told my husband a few weeks ago he could replace the broken dishwasher. (It’s been broken for months, and I kept saying we needed to meet other expenses first, but he really hates having to do dishes by hand, much more than I. And, yes, I’m the one who makes most of the financial decisions because I have spreadsheets projecting income and expenses, and I do the taxes, and he only has a PhD and a broad understanding of macroeconomics.) I knitted him a pair of socks, one of which is not quite done. I made him breakfast and will cook one of his favorite dinners.

I did those things for my husband because he’s a wonderful father, but he isn’t my father. It’s the kids’ contributions to the day that matter most to him. I don’t really celebrate Father’s Day. I haven’t for a dozen years, since my father died suddenly on Thanksgiving morning. For me, Father’s Day is about the void he left in my life.

He was a wonderful father too. He was quiet, with a sly sense of humor. He wasn’t at home a lot, and often when he was there he was sleeping, and many of my memories are about being quiet so as not to wake Daddy. He did shift work, so he was only supposed to be on a typical daytime schedule two weeks out of six. In reality, he often worked sixteen-hour days. In the evenings when I was home from school, he might be at work, or he might be sleeping, exhausted because he’d gone in at midnight the night before and not gotten back home until after five.

I don’t recall ever resenting this, although I felt bad that he was tired all the time. Because when he was there and awake, he was everything later generations have insisted fathers should be. He spent time with us, encouraged us, and oh, was he wonderful with babies and toddlers! He understood the concept of quality time before it was invented. His love was such that it never once occurred to me that he was absent because he didn’t care or wanted to be elsewhere. He was absent because he believed he needed to be to provide for us. My mother worked too, but she arranged her schedule so that she could be there for us. That must have been a hard battle for both of them, juggling those hours and minutes. I know it was, because my husband and I did some smaller-scale juggling when our kids were small.

Dad had to take early retirement because the stress of that shift work hurt his heart. I was afraid we’d lose him, because without a job he seemed bereft at first. But once all four kids were through college, my parents moved to Florida, and I saw the man he might have been all along without that crushing weight of responsibility. He had a social life! He loved the retirement community that seemed like hell to me, right down to being on the bocce ball team. He adored his grandchildren and saw them as much as he could. One of my nephews called him his best friend ever. My younger daughter is in her twenties, and she still sleeps with the Pooh Bear he bought her.

Dad had almost twenty really good years after he retired. But he still would say the best years were back when he was raising us. I wish he had taken it easier, looked after his health more and worried about our college funds less. But he gave us the great gift of knowing beyond the shadow of a doubt that we were loved, so I can’t second-guess his choices. I miss him.

I’ve spent the last ten days in Florida, helping out my mother. She’s in good health for her age, but at ninety-four she can’t live alone, and my sister, who lives with her, was called away to take care of her grandson. I enjoyed getting Mom to talk, except when the topics were digestion and her friends’ illnesses. Every time I make a long visit without a lot of other relatives around I learn new things about her life. (I never knew that before she dated my father, she’d gone to a prom with her gay best friend! That would have been around 1936.) I mostly regret that I had to bring my laptop so I could work at my day job much of the time.

I got back home with enough time to do laundry, make an appearance at work tomorrow after putting in a full day working remotely today, and fly to Boston, where my older daughter is graduating. She’s getting her MA. When I fly back, my younger daughter will be coming to stay for a few weeks before I help her move to Wisconsin, where she’ll be working for the next year.

My sister and I are currently in the sandwich generation, caught between the demands of our kids and the needs of our parents. I’m a lot better off in that respect than I was a few years ago, when my kids were in elementary and middle school and my father-in-law was living with us because he’d had a stroke. I didn’t have the option to work from home then, and often the only time I had to myself was my 45-minute commute to the office. Now my older sister has set her life on hold to move in with my mother. Sis seems to like living in hell a retirement community, something for which I am grateful even as I find it incomprehensible.

I thought once the kids were out of high school they wouldn’t need me any more, and I’m sure any parent of twenty-somethings reading this will laugh heartily at my naïveté. It’s not the everyday chore it was a decade ago, but the family responsibilities are still there, and even when I’m not doing something for them, they are on my mind.

So I’m still sandwiched. I suppose the question is: what kind of sandwich filler am I? Am I stale cheese and bologna past its sell-by date? Or am I fresh mozzarella and tomatoes with a tasty sauce? It’s scary to realize I don’t know the answer.

I recently watched the HBO documentary about the Loving v Viriginia case. I had no idea  so many photographs and so much video of this couple were taken as their case worked its way to the Supreme Court. It was fascinating to watch them together and interacting with their children.

The film details the landmark civil rights decision, of course. But this is also a love story about two people who are simultaneously ordinary and remarkable. Inarticulate Richard comes across as simple in the very best meaning of the word. He saw through or just ignored all the bullshit the culture loaded onto this issue. He wanted to live with his wife and near their families and saw no reason society should stop them. He told his attorney, “Mr. Cohen, tell the Court I love my wife, and it is just unfair that I can’t live with her in Virginia.”

Mildred was young, quiet, and immensely dignified. She and her husband must have seemed easy targets to the bigoted local police and judiciary. But she wrote to Attorney General Bobby Kennedy, who sent her to the American Civil Liberties Union. The lawyers who took the case were also young and almost terrifyingly inexperienced, but she clearly trusted them. Her resolution and bravery were remarkable; she seemed almost unfazed when someone burned a cross on her family’s lawn.

The story feels intensely personal, although it’s impossible to ignore its huge nationwide repercussions. There was even an apparent HEA. The Lovings were able to move back to Virginia and live together openly. But the ending is bittersweet, because Richard was killed by a drunk driver just a few years later. Mildred survived until 2008. She said this on the 40th anniversary of the Virginia v Loving decision:

“Not a day goes by that I don’t think of Richard and our love, our right to marry, and how much it meant to me to have that freedom to marry the person precious to me, even if others thought he was the ’wrong kind of person’ for me to marry. I believe all Americans, no matter their race, no matter their sex, no matter their sexual orientation, should have that same freedom to marry.  Government has no business imposing some people’s religious beliefs over others, especially if it denies people’s civil rights.”