Uma Reclining on Her Throne

Last week, when I said to a colleague, “see you Tuesday,” she replied, “where are you going?”  It was as if simply to enjoy where I live or rest or quietly take care of house and garden was not within the range of possibility.  Is it that I am somehow not worthy if I have not planned to do something I could talk about when I returned to the office?  Or is it that pervasive societal sense that happiness lies only in finding new and more experience?

I think that it is important to have episodic time away from doing.  I used to get sick when I’d been running around non-stop with work and errands and exploration, etc.  Now I try to take some quiet time at decent intervals.  It does not need to be a full day.  Just a couple of solid hours without engaging in a planned activity every couple of weeks makes all the difference in my mood, my health, and the quality of my work.

My Grandma Rose (for whom the name of this blog is partly in tribute) was a very important part of my childhood. She had a small, but lovely apartment in Brooklyn Heights, and I spent about a weekend a month for most of my childhood with her. One day when the family was visiting and I was no more than seven or eight, I took a carton of her cigarettes and destroyed them. She was very angry, and I got in a lot of trouble with my parents for the deed. I had just learned in school about all the horrors of smoking (that was the very early years of starting to admit and warn of the hazards of smoking), and I wanted to protect her.

When my grandmother died at age 76 from her heart unexpectedly stopping, I was in 10th grade. They found she had advanced stages of emphysema. Occasionally I wonder how my life would have been different and think about how much she would have enjoyed seeing me grow up if the smoking had not shortened her life.

Although I was too young to know that we cannot change our loved ones by force or even by the force of our love, I hope she knew that my childish act of destruction was borne from love.