Margie Bennett

 Margie Bennett was my friend, my co-worker and my traveling partner on so many journeys of life. It was my honor to have her walk beside me in the halls of three different schools but she and I would always say that our best work was done at Nativity, bar none.  It was the school from which she would at long last retire. But that was not the end of her teaching career.  She continued subbing for several years and could not have been happier just to be in conversation with adolescents and guiding middle school students on their academic path.  It is rare to find a teacher who stays in it beyond the 4th decade just for the fun of it and to be in relationship with kids.  

Margie was one of the strongest women I have ever known. She stood up for herself, her staff, and her students no matter the outcome. She was always willing to stand in the breach to do what was right and suffer the consequences, come what may .  When the benefit of her students was at stake, she went head to head with fellow teachers, principals, presidents, pastors and even this vice principal. She knew our friendship could withstand it and it grew stronger because of her honestly and forthrightness. No one ever had to worry about what Margie would say behind your back; she said it all face to face. She promoted social justice from her first day in the classroom with the "No uvas" movement until her last with her fight for our DACA students and interns.  Sometimes the lesson plan took a flying leap out the window in deference to her preaching on racial or gender injustice.  You had to be ready for anything when walking into Margie's classroom; you would either encounter a hands-on math or science lesson or a deep conversation on civil rights.  

Her faith was a driving force in her life and she easily shared it with all she encountered. She called herself a "retired Catholic" but she never stopped living as Jesus modeled in the gospels and expecting the same in her students. As much as she wanted to leave the Church behind, it appeared to have been inborn. Her love for Notre Dame and Mother Mary guided her throughout her life.  Some would refer to her as irreverent but you could never argue that she was wrong about her stance on clerical abuse of children or even the sin of poor homilies.  More than anything, I will miss her witty quips about the Church.  

Visiting Margie after her stokes was one of the more difficult things I have ever done.  The person sitting before me in the wheel chair seemed only to be an image of who she had been; more like a vague memory than this actual human person.  Margie never lost her sense of humor.  I don't think that I ever laughed harder than the first time I saw her in rehab.  I was out of her line of vision and she queried, "Is Miss Allen still smiling?  If Miss Allen is still smiling we're OK." Oh yes, Margie, I'm still smiling.  With every visit she would begin our conversation with the demand, "Tell me a story.  What's been happening?" There was nothing she loved more than a good story of juvenile antics in or out of the classroom. 

It is the laughing I will miss the most.  We were never in each other's presence when we didn't laugh together and sometimes we shouldn't have been.  Faculty meetings are not always fun but she could bring levity to almost any presentation or difficult conversation.  I will miss our Happy Hours, our monthly breakfasts, her updates on graduates and the pride that we shared in the work we did together.  I will miss her irreverence and her spunk.  I pray that I will always hear her laugh ringing in my head and remember the good times we shared together.  Our friendship was a true blessing and I will carry these memories forth with love and devotion for Margie, my dear and loyal friend.   

In Thanksgiving

 From the beginning, Thanksgiving has always been my favorite holiday. Even as a child, stepping into the warmth of my grandmother's kitchen was better than endless candy at Halloween and even ranked above Christmas presents from Santa. Thanksgiving was the only day of the year that the Allen Family and any other wayward souls came together to celebrate the abundance of our lives. As a whole, our family was not especially religious, but this day, apart from all others, definitely felt like the most profound of rituals.

My grandmother was an amazing cook; many of my memories settle on the sights and smells of the dishes that seemed to appear out of thin air from her tiny oven. It was like a miracle each time I witnessed the process even though I clearly knew what was coming. The menu was always the same: turkey, two kinds of stuffings (sage and oyster), mashed potatoes and gravy, two or three vegetables, cranberry sauce, and at least two kinds of pie. And somehow, each dish was cooked perfectly. The hardest day I ever had was Thanksgiving of 1972 when I was unable to go home from college for the holiday. It was my first Thanksgiving away from Grandma's kitchen. The next few didn't get much better either. I remember very few Thanksgivings that did not end with tears of missing the Thanksgivings of my childhood. One thing that Ralph and the kids could always count on was the best Thanksgiving dinner I could replicate and a bittersweet wife and mother. I never stopped missing Grandma's kitchen and the memories it held.

Time has passed and Thanksgiving continues to take on a variety of permutations with each passing year. I easily handed over the reigns to Maria long ago, knowing that she had grown up bathed in the importance of thanksgiving and creating and sustaining family traditions. There were a few years of alternating locations between the Carter-Giannini home, Half Moon Bay, and Lake Tahoe. Then I found myself flying back from Washington and Florida until I was back home in California again. Each of these holidays had its own beauty to it. But the Thanksgiving of 2021 now ranks high on the list of memorable holidays because of the addition of our beloved Tessa. We all descended upon Dave's house for the weekend and commandeered his entire kitchen, no holds barred. I still marvel at how patient he was with all of us; no utensil or appliance was off limits. "Help yourself" was his word of the day. Dinner was amazing but the dessert with Tessa was definitely the icing on the cake. For the first time I sensed a feeling of completeness and wholeness to our family. Dave had at long last found his great love, and within minutes we had fallen deeply in love with her as well. Last year Dave and Tessa made the trip west and committed to making plans for the annual family tradition. So as I joyfully anticipated Thanksgiving 2023, it was with a feeling of contentment and anticipation, knowing that our family would once again gather around the table giving thanks for one another and the blessings that brought us together.

So this year, I again give thanks for my many happy memories of Thanksgivings past while looking forward to those that lie ahead. I have been deeply blessed with a grandmother who taught me the joy of gratitude and have been able to pass on that same commitment to my children. In the end, this is what matters: come together as family, enjoy the food and drink with which we have been blessed, laugh, love. 

Pilgrim by David Whyte

 PILGRIM is a word that accurately describes the average human being; someone on their way somewhere else, but someone never quite knowing whether the destination or the path stands first in importance; someone who underneath it all doesn't quite understand from whence or from where their next bite of bread will come, someone dependent on help from absolute strangers and from those who travel with them. Most of all, a pilgrim is someone abroad in a world of impending revelation where something is about to happen, including, most fearfully, and as part of their eventual arrival, their own disappearance. 

The great measure of human maturation is the increasing understanding that we move through life in the blink of an eye; that we are not long with the privilege of having eyes to see, ears to hear, a voice with which to speak and arms to put round a loved one; that we are simply passing through. We are creatures made real through contact, meeting and then moving on; creatures who, strangely, never get to choose one above the other. Human life is contact; getting to know, and a moving beyond which is forever changing, from the transformations that enlarge and strengthen us to the ones that turn us from consuming to being consumed, from seeing to being semi-blind, from speaking in one voice to hearing in another. 

The defining experience at the diamond-hard center of reality is eternal movement as beautiful and fearful invitation; a beckoning dynamic asking us to move from this to that. The courageous life is the life that is equal to this unceasing tidal and seasonal becoming: and strangely beneath all, stillness being the only proper physical preparation for joining the breathing autonomic exchange of existence. We are so much made of movement that we speak of the destination being both inside us and beyond us; we sense we are the journey along the way, the one who makes it and the one who has already arrived. We are still running round the house packing our bags and we have already gone and come back, even in our preparations; we are alone in the journey and we are just about to meet the people we have known for years. 

But if we are all movement, exchange and getting to know, where a refusal to move on makes us unreal, we are also journeymen and journeywomen, with an unstoppable need to bring our skills and experience, our voice and our presence to good use in the eternal now we visit along the way. We want to belong as we travel. We are creatures of movement, but we have something immutable in the flow: an elemental, essential nature that gives a person a name and a voice and a character as they flow on. We take our first bubbling source and our broad, subsequent confluences and grow in the conversation between them, all the way to our dissolution in the sea. 

We give ourselves to that final destination as an ultimate initiation into vulnerability and arrival, not ever truly knowing what lies on the other side of the transition, or if we survive it in any recognizable form. Strangely, our arrival at that last transition along the way is exactly where we have the opportunity to understand who made the journey and to appreciate the privilege of having existed as a particularity, an immutable person; a trajectory whole and of itself. 

In that perspective it might be that faith, reliability, responsibility and being true to something unspeakable are possible even if we are travelers, and that we are made better, more faithful companions, and indeed pilgrims on the astonishing, never to be repeated journey by combining the precious memory of the then with the astonishing, but taken for granted experience of the now, and both with the unbelievable, and hardly possible just about to happen. 

Whyte, David. Consolations

This Season of life - More of the Challenges of being 70

 No matter how I look at the numbers I can't help but find myself in the winter of my life. This season has presented very few personal challenges to me but it certainly has made them apparent to those with whom I accompany.  I have moved beyond hospital visits to my parents' and grandparents' generations and the decline of the elderly is now looking me square in the face. Just this year, I have watched two dear friends suffer the effects of cancer and now a stroke.  I have to say that now following my first visit to see the stroke victim, if given a choice, I would opt for cancer, organ removal and chemo therapy.  I know that neither is optimal but nausea and exhaustion would win out over being keenly aware that you are no longer making sense.

As we age, the experience of being placed in Rehab appears to be the great equalizer.  All of us who have prided ourselves on regular hair cuts, daily makeup regimens and exercise to keep us "healthy" are in for a terrible shock. Given the state of our medical system, it is very likely that we will once again be relegated to the space of our college dorm room during rehab. Your friends will struggle to recognize the new longer hair length you're sporting or the freckles that have always lay hidden beneath a thin coat of ivory beige foundation. But the greater challenge is simply caring on a conversation about the simplest of things.  

So, what is all this preparation for the golden years about?  Everywhere we are told to take vitamins and supplements, stay fit, challenge yourself with puzzles to keep your brain alert.  And then somewhere along the line, you are blindsided with disease and disorder of a serious magnitude.  The stroke is especially debilitating.  It can take out an entire side of your body, your voice and any coherent thought you may ever again have.  It is like the insides of your brain have been broken into pieces and it is now up to you and your therapy team to put the puzzle back together again, one piece at a time.  

My recent changed mantra of "It doesn't matter" may take on a more pleasant, "Let's have dessert." If the end is uncertain and we never know when the unforeseen may take us down, let's find ways to enjoy this moment that we do have and all that it holds.  Let's take the time to be with our friends and family for as long as possible. Let's linger together for just a bit longer.