Something to Fall Back On

From a pretty young age, I wanted to be a writer. Once I became relatively good as a French horn player, I decided I wanted to be a musician, as well. My brothers and I were always told that we needed something to fall back on rather than pursue a career in art, music or writing. Go ahead and take the art classes, the music classes and write stories. But, more importantly, learn a trade, a skill, or pick a profession where you had something to fall back on. This has been the same advice given to countless teenagers starting out in life.

In college, I took classes for both music and English with a focus on education. I would become a teacher. That was my fall back career. During my senior year in college, I realized that I would not be able to graduate with my class and still receive the teaching certification because I hadn't completed enough credits to take a full quarter off to do the required student teaching. I also hadn't planned where my student teaching would even be or where I would live if it wasn't there in Greeley, Colorado where I attended school. I also realized that it was more important to me to graduate at the designated time, meaning in exactly four years, than to get the degree and the credentials to teach.

Of course, ever since I had made a girl cry during my teacher aiding experience I was shaken over not having either the rapport or the authority over the students I thought I would have. In the end, I easily sacrificed the teaching credential for a straight Bachelor of Art degree and graduated in June four years after starting college. I figured I would pick up the certification requirements later and even thought seriously about getting an advanced degree in order to teach college level students.

On the one hand, I disagree with the advice given to every young adult that they need a college degree regardless of the career they choose. Paying for a college education today is certainly not a small thing. Unless you have a career that requires a college education, the burden of the debt from student loans simply does not make sense. Having a college education also does not mean that you will instantly be qualified for any job you choose. I have seen far too many times where people have earned degrees and have no experience and become over-qualified for the job they are doing and yet still under-qualified for the job they want. On the other hand, I know that in the career I ended up pursuing not having a degree would have greatly reduced my salary potential.

I often think of career choices as each being ladders. For some career choices, a higher education is required in order to ascend the ladder. But the lower rungs on that ladder usually require related work experience. If you want to switch ladders, there are some careers that are similar enough that the experience you get from the one ladder can help you branch off into a different one. Many others, though, require both the experience and associated degree from the same ladder. Getting experience without the degree won't help you ascend the ladder and getting the degree without the experience also won't help.

Recently, I wondered what would have happened if I had just started writing and not worried about the career part of that equation. While I don't regret not becoming a teacher, I do wonder if all the while I pursued the degrees, certifications and work experience, I was simply avoiding the hard work of sitting down to write rather than establishing that "something" to fall back on. Of course, I will never know the answer and any advice I might have to give others is far too dependent on the individual and personal life circumstances to be of any use to someone else. I do know that, now at the age of 53, I have that "something" to fall back on pretty well established and have just started to do the things that bring me the most joy in life. My only advice to others is to not postpone doing the thing you love in pursuit of the thing you simply need to do.

Thundershirts and World Peace

At seven months now, an update on Sophie is in order. Dogs reach adulthood at different ages based on their breed. At seven months, Sophie, a terrier Beagle mix, has clearly entered adolescence, which similar to human adolescence is marked by limit-testing and rule breaking. Things that Sophie had learned as a young puppy seem to be conveniently forgotten. We see this teenage rebellion mostly in the house when she attempts to push boundaries we have set for her. Sneaking up onto the couch is our current challenge. More on that another time.

However, there are some things that we have never moved past puppy phase on. Outside on a walk with every imaginable distraction, (e.g. other dogs, birds, squirrels, blowing leaves or an interesting piece of tar on the road), if Sophie isn't trying to break free, she fixates on the distraction until she bumps into the back of my legs. This rubber necking, pulling and jumping at every variety of moving object varies from day to day, but has sadly been fairly consistent. We see other puppies and their human parents walking and are jealous of their low energy, stress-free walks.

To combat Sophie's distraction problem, we have tried several solutions, each with varying degrees of success, but nothing that closes the gap completely. The first strategy was to enroll in obedience training. This was good, but not good enough. The little spray bottle which I wrote about previously was also a big improvement for big distractions.

We then tried a harness that hooks the leash at her chest. Why this works, I don't completely understand. But the idea behind the harness is that it eliminates a natural tendency for dogs to pull when tension is placed on their back and neck. Perhaps we humans would be the same way if someone pulled at our necks, I don't know. While there was great improvement with the harness, it still was not nearly enough. Next, was the gentle leader collar which has a nose loop that fits loosely around the muzzle. With the smallest gesture to direct her, she is under far better control. Still, walking past a big distraction like another dog still leads to a bit of jumping or prancing around, so again it isn't perfect. If we revert back to a leash around the collar we quickly regret it with her hard leaning and pulling when she wants to go somewhere different than where we want to go.

Now, we do understand she is still a puppy and some things will be solved only through time. Yet, seeing other dogs the same age remain calm and attentive causes us to puzzle over what goes on in our little Sophie's head that is so vastly different. We don't want to assume that these behaviors will disappear and then discover too late the things we should have been doing all along.

With the weather growing colder in Minnesota we decided to try out a doggie jacket to keep her warm since Sophie is a short-haired coat breed. When we put it on her she looked up at us and didn't move. We watched her and waited. She watched us and waited, not moving an inch. The change in her demeanor was instantaneous. Although calm, she also wouldn't sit or lie down and seemed almost catatonic even though the jacket didn't constrain her movements whatsoever.

I spent nearly an hour trying to get her to just sit, a command she knew from almost day one as a puppy. She would simply stand looking patiently at me as I repeated the verbal sit command and hand signal, or tried to lure her with treats of all varieties, all to no avail. Jacket on, no sit. Jacket off, perfect sit.

When I tried going for a walk with her jacket on, she would walk a couple feet and then stop. Even with a tug, she wouldn't budge. This was what she had done early on as a puppy. Finally, puzzled and defeated I turned around and headed back home. I found it interesting that she walked just fine in this direction. It was a little like overshooting the target. Calm, I wanted. Comatose, not so much.

After returning that to the store, we decided to try the ThunderShirt, which is a lightweight sweater that fits around her chest from her neck down her back. It advertises calming dogs who have fear of thunder, but also a myriad of other issues, like leash pulling and car anxiety. The man at the checkout told me he was optimistic. He told me that a couple hours before a thunderstorm, just put the Thundershirt on her. Dogs sense storms much earlier than we do, he informed me. I said nothing. It is November in Minnesota and we aren't likely to get thunderstorms any time soon, so not quite sure why he thought we were buying this for thunder exactly. But, he was optimistic and so were we, but obviously for different reasons.

The Thundershirt is based on research done by Temple Grandin, the renowned doctor of animal science who studied sensory processing in animals and applied her theories to induce a calming effect on humans, particularly those suffering from autism, panic and anxiety disorders. She herself has autism and based much of her research on her own experiences.

Once home from the store, we were anxious to try out our new purchase. Very quickly we had the verdict. Sweater on, little Sophie is calm, transformed into an attentive and obedient dog who mostly walks by my side looking up at me during our walks. I don't know exactly what goes on in her little head now, but how she sees the world when wearing this sweater has been transformed. If only there were a magic sweater for humans that could transform people's view of the world by putting this on. If it calms anxieties, general fearfulness and reactivity in dogs, why not something for humans. Why, we could send truckloads of human Thundershirts to the Middle East. That little piece of fabric might actually finally lead to world peace.

Neither this nor that

It is easy to get caught up in black or white thinking.  How quickly we decide that someone is either nice or mean, good or bad, right or wrong. And, many times we apply the same judgements to ourselves. I'm a good mom or I am a bad speller. Often we never question labels we give ourselves even years after they no longer apply. Yet, ironically when others attempt to pigeon hole us into one category or another we reject this notion vehemently.

It becomes amusing to watch the shape shifting and pretzel twisting we do when others try to label us. You're so lucky, someone tells me. Yes, I am lucky, but luck alone wouldn't have gotten me where I am today. You work so hard. Yes, but I am also lucky. You're such a calm person, people tell me. I let this one go even though my hands are cold and clammy. We simply do not want to be labeled and put on the shelf as if there is no more to us than our labels.

So, why wouldn't labels be good? After all, they save us a lot of time. We feel comfortable when we have put a label on something. We no longer need to expend energy thinking about it. Yet, with labels it is easy to slip into thinking in terms of extremes. There is little room for ambiguity once something has a label. Often, the problem occurs when we realize that our label doesn't work any more. Then, we become even more angry when the person we labeled as being on our side speaks up against us. We feel betrayed.

In the Woody Allen movie Stardust Memories the studio heads change the ending of  Sandy Bates' movie, the character played by Woody Allen. Instead of ending up in a garbage heap, the characters end up in "jazz heaven." One studio head says, "I thought you'd like it, Sandy. You love jazz." Absurd, but true.

It's never that we want to experience a single pole of anything: routine and no variety, all freedom and no structure, asserting our will and never respecting the will of others. We want perfection, but we need to remember we are human. And, sometimes what worked for us yesterday no longer works for us today. It's like the joke on comedy shows, where the good news that someone just got married is really bad news because she's ugly, which is really good news because she is rich.

In the end, it all really just depends. In order to not fall into the trap of labeling and missing out on what's real in life we need to stay awake. Be in the moment. Expend the extra calories of brain power needed to not only allow but to discern the shades of gray in our lives.  And I don't mean the fifty shades you might read about. When we find ourselves dismissing what someone is saying because they fit a certain label of ours, stop and listen. We might be surprised. And, just know that we are never only one thing or another. We are complex pretzel twists of people that come in all sorts of shapes and sizes where no two are ever exactly alike. We are neither simply this nor that. True that.

A Place Untouched

Growing up I would watch my grandfather play the accordion, intermixed with spitting his chewing tobacco into a can next to him. Not only did he have a good ear for music, thankfully he also had pretty good aim. When grandpa finished playing, he always broke out into a big toothy smile that sometimes revealed traces of tobacco leaves still lingering between his teeth. I have a picture of me somewhere being hugged by my grandpa where I am visibly pulling away, not wanting to be so close to the source of that nasty juice. When Grandpa finished playing, his laughter was so contagious it made everyone laugh. Years later, I realized that my dad punctuated the end of his playing with the same hearty laugh and self-conscious grin.

The last time I saw my dad, it was at the assisted living in Durand. The next day, Jim, my older brother by a year and a half, and Marianne, the caretaker from the assisted living, would be driving Dad across several states down to Indiana to a nursing home. It was a difficult decision to move him to a nursing home, but unfortunately Dad had become too much to handle at the assisted living.

We had a going away party for Dad, although he never quite understood what the occasion was. With a full audience including two of his four kids and spouses, several of his sisters, of which he had seven, and a few of my cousins who lived nearby who managed to get away for the day, Dad was able to play things on the accordion no one even knew he remembered.

Earlier, he had been unintelligible. He mumbled something about some contraption that he described more with his hands than his jumbled words. Every time he came over, he tried to describe this to me. It seemed to hold such significance to him, but I was clueless as to what he was even remotely talking about. I smiled back at him because he was so intent on me knowing about this thing. At some point he just looked at me and laughed, as though I was in on the joke. But, despite his inability to communicate verbally with people, there was much communicated in his smiling eyes that day. And, his love for humor was still razor sharp with his rapid fire banter with Marianne.

As he played for us, his fingers just moved of their own accord, playing from a place in his memory still untouched. At times he wouldn't get through the song all the way or the song would merge into a different song. But, the music he played was beautiful and lifted our spirits. I knew this would be the last time I would see my dad.

Just as he finished playing the accordion, he caught my eye and laughed just like Grandpa used to. The twinkle in his eye and the bounce of his laughter was akin to the one you might catch Santa doing if you caught him before he snuck back up the chimney. This memory was my own little present that would last the rest of my lifetime.