A BOOK OF ESSAYS ABOUT MY LIFE AND FAMILY AND WORK, about the aging process and the fun of fighting to stay healthy in an increasingly undisciplined culture.
This book includes a diary I wrote during my winter vacation near my family on the Mississippi coast. I am trying to learn to love the undisciplined members of my family even though they scare me because they remind me of my own undisciplined youth. I learned. I got smarter and more disciplined. So will they. I hope.
The family members I was worrying about are a man and woman, both related to me. The rest of my progeny are healthy and well and productive. But the squeaky wheel still gets the grease, as my daughter-in-law reminds me.
Since the time when I was spending sleepless nights worrying about these two, here is what has happened. The woman has gone to a new doctor and had her blood pressure medicine lowered and changed. Now she is back to her usual, wonderful, brilliant, productive self. She is well. Did it do any good for me to have worried about her? You bet it did. We send strange vibrations to people we love when we worry about them. My messages always say, I’m mad at you for harming yourself. I’m worried and can’t sleep. Stop hurting yourself because it is hurting me.
The man I was worrying about was grieving for his dead father and two close friends who died in accidents they did not cause, one in an automobile, the other on an oil rig.
He went to AA meetings for two hundred days in a row, went back to church in a meaningful way and has completely recovered from the depression that caused his drinking. I know it helped him for me to worry about him. I am a logical positivist, but there are things we know that we cannot prove.
“For the heart cannot live without something to sorrow and be curious over,” Eudora Welty wrote. I try to let that lead me when I am worrying about my progeny. Waking up all night worrying about your children is a losing battle but we do it whether it is wise or not. The brighter and more creative you are the harder you worry.
The thing that infuriates me is that I can’t concentrate on the two dozen young men and women in my family who are beautiful and intelligent and hard working and ambitious. I love to look at them or be in their presence. I look forward to seeing them or writing to them on Facebook or just knowing they are alive.
If one of them calls and tells me her landlord forgot to pay her water bill and she woke that morning to no water, I get very wise and tell her that most of the people in the world have always and still have to walk to the river or the well and carry water home in heavy buckets. She liked that answer and told me later she thought about it and told it to people all day.
What treasures children are. How divine when you can be useful to them.