Organizing the Bathroom and Other Life Essentials

January cover stories on organizing your life and home are as predictable as political ads in an election year. Maybe that’s because after the chaos and clutter of the holidays we long for order again. A place for everything and everything in its place. (Trust me, young moms – that’s never gonna happen.)

But January came in August for me this year. Knowing that I’d be combining rigorous grad classes with full-time work and ministry this fall was a powerful incentive to get my house in order. My life – not a chance – but my house had potential.

I started with the bathroom my husband and I share. “Master” bath is too grand a word for the 5 x 7 closet attached to our bedroom, but it’s plenty big enough to scrub us up in the mornings. My husband requires space only for his razor, shaving cream, toothbrush and deodorant. What the master bath cannot contain, however, is the missus’ assemblage of hair styling tools, congregation of creams and lotions (what she considers essential preservatives), and messy collection of cosmetics (after all, life is a battle and a girl needs her war paint.)

Thus the Problem: his stuff is neatly stowed away but hers overflows every available flat surface.  And then an idea from Better Homes and Gardens came to the rescue: a nifty little shelf nailed above the unused real estate of the door with wicker baskets to hold the missus’ paraphernalia. Cheap, simple and practical. Voila!One less mess to face on a daily basis.

Our new bathroom shelf that corrals all my stuff

Ah…if only all of life’s disarray could be resolved so easily. Don’t you sometimes wish you could just pitch  your problems in a basket and consider them dealt with? Out of sight and all. But life has a way of upending our baskets and leaving the mess on the floor. We have a choice, though. We can clean up our own messes or leave them for others to manage.

Our nearly century-old grandfather clock stopped sometime this past summer. When Mike took it in for service yesterday, the technician noted that it had not been thoroughly cleaned in over 35 years.  Sure enough – there was a note on the back with “1976” in my dad’s distinctive handwriting.  Dad was meticulous both about record-keeping and the maintenance of our house and farm. If he were still alive, the clock would still be running.

But now it’s our responsibility to care for the clock that once belonged to my grandparents. Its care has passed through my parents’ generation to ours. It may seem like a small thing, but it hit me hard last night that Mike and I likely will not be alive in another 35 years to arrange for the clock to be cleaned again. It will be our kids’ turn to keep it running.

The lesson is not lost on me. I will clean up my own messes.  I will maintain to the best of my ability that which is mine to manage. I will designate a place for everything.

But everything in its place? Not in this lifetime.

That would be heavenly, after all.

Being Known

I won’t even pose the question: the rhetorical one asking how many of you are caring for family members with degrees of memory loss. Two close friends have lost their fathers in recent weeks, and in both instances the loss was preceded by years of cognitive decline. “We lost my dad by inches,” is how one friend put it on Saturday when she called to tell me of her dad’s passing.

So perhaps that’s why I took the time to read a blog today about the privilege – and heartbreak – of caring for a parent with Alzheimers, and that’s where I found the following story that moved me so:

It was a busy morning, approximately 8:30 am, when an elderly gentleman, in his 80′s, arrived to have stitches removed from his thumb. He stated that he was in a hurry as he had an appointment at 9:00 am. I took his vital signs and had him take a seat, knowing it would be over an hour before someone would to able to see him.

I saw him looking at his watch and decided, since I was not busy with another patient, I would evaluate his wound. On exam, it was well healed, so I talked to one of the doctors, got the needed supplies to remove his sutures and redress his wound.

While taking care of his wound, we began to engage in conversation. I asked him if he had a doctor’s appointment this morning, as he was in such a hurry. The gentleman told me no, that he needed to go to the nursing home to eat breakfast with his wife. I then inquired as to her health. He told me that she had been there for a while and that she was a victim of Alzheimer Disease.

As we talked, and I finished dressing his wound, I asked if she would be worried if he was a bit late. He replied that she no longer knew who he was, that she had not recognized him in five years now.

I was surprised, and asked him. “And you still go every morning, even though she doesn’t know who you are?”

He smiled as he patted my hand and said. “She doesn’t know me, but I still know who she is.”  - Author Unknown

Don’t you love this?

I was still thinking about this story when I went to my Old Testament class earlier this evening. Chris, our prof, is passionate about historical covenantal theology and the great story of redemption in the biblical accounts. As he lectured, we were reminded of how easily the children of Israel forgot who Yahweh truly was, but he never forgot them.

Whatever our age, many of us suffer from cognitive spiritual impairment. In the press of life’s constant problems we forget who our Father is and all he has done for us in the past. We act as if we don’t know him. But He knows us.  We often mistake God’s silence for his absence, yet He’s caring for us even when we are unaware of his presence.

And that’s a fact I hope I never forget.

The Hardest One to Forgive

A friend who knows me too well gave me this sign that I keep in my office.

For about six weeks this summer I sported a black air cast on my left leg. I didn’t own bragging rights to a pity-producing injury or accident. The cast was simply a corrective measure prescribed by my podiatrist to alleviate a pesky case of tendonitis. But when friends and strangers alike queried, “So what did you do?,” telling the truth quickly grew tedious. Tendonitis is nothing if not boring. And then two separate incidents one stormy Thursday morning in June supplied me with a better answer.

Incident #1:while backing my minivan down our driveway in a deluge, I accidentally sideswiped a houseguest’s car. Incident #2 four hours later:  I inadvertently double-booked business lunch commitments. While I was sitting at the Red Apple Restaurant reviewing a PR plan with one author, another was waiting for me in the foyer at work.

I wish I could say that I spent hours blaming myself for both blunders, but it was more like days. Weeks even. Why didn’t I wait to navigate the driveway until the visibility improved? How could I have failed to note that I had scheduled two business lunches on the same day?

“I didn’t have an accident,” I told the next person who asked about the cast on my leg. “I got this from kicking myself.”

So it’s gotten me to wondering why I find it so hard to forgive myself. Did either of these incidents qualify as sin? No. Carelessness? Not really. I pride myself on being a cautious driver and on not forgetting appointments.

I can cut others slack or extend them grace when they blow it, but it’s harder to do the same for myself. It’s ludicrous. Do I think God can’t forgive a fender-bender or a memory lapse? Of course not. So why did I continue with the flagellation and self-recriminations over the dented car (which a body mechanic fixed good as new) and the missed lunch appointment (which the author graciously allowed me to reschedule.)

I finally figured it out. It’s pride. That ugly five-letter word with the ego-centered “I” smack in the middle. I didn’t think that I was the kind of driver who damages other vehicles. I’m not the kind of employee who forgets appointments. What a bunch of hooey.

Like every other person on the planet, I am going to make mistakes. Not intentionally maybe (what’s the point of that) but because God made me fallible, finite, human. And if I can forgive others their trespasses, I sure as shootin’ better start forgiving my own as well.

 In the gospel of Matthew, Jesus told his disciples that there’s nothing said or done that cannot be forgiven. There is no one beyond the reach of God’s grace. There is no sin so heinous that, once confessed, cannot be cleansed (I John 1:9.)

Are you in need of a little forgiveness today? Are you thinking if only I woulda, coulda, shoulda…?

Take it from me, who’s had more than one taste of humble pie recently.  When you find it hard to forgive yourself there’s might be an ego lurking nearby, and it could be yours.

REUNITED….and it feels so…

In the auditorium at SHS where I spent many hours

Last Saturday Mike and I attended my 40^th high school reunion. My inner child cannot comprehend that I graduated from Streator High four DECADES ago already, but the grownup that my kid runs around in truly looked forward to the chance to reconnect with old friends.

Interestingly enough, an op-ed piece on this very subject (no, not how old I am personally) appeared in the Chicago Tribune just last week. Clarence Page, a member of the Trib’s editorial page, wrote thoughtfully about why class reunions matter so much.

“I used to wonder why high school reunions seem to mean so much more to people than other reunions,” Page commented.  “High school is where we begin to shape the adults we are about to become for the rest of our lives. It is a monstrous task confronted by complete amateurs. I would not face it again if you paid me in Powerball winnings.”

As Mike and I walked through my old high school, I wondered:  would I do it again if I could go back plus the peace I have now and minus the baggage I carried back then? Some sage once wrote: “If youth only knew – if age only could.”

At the casual supper that followed the tour, the most common queries had nothing to do with location or vocation. Instead there were the furrowed brows of now-who-were-you –back-then—followed by the light of mutual recognition.  As we sat around the table, one after another of my former classmates spoke up. “Whatever happened to…?”  “Has anyone heard from…?”

“After 40 years,” wrote the Tribune columnist, “you’re happy merely to see who’s still alive and able to show up.”

For me, the highlight of the evening was the slide show our former class president put together of pages from our yearbook, the Hardscrabble.  We gathered as a group of  57 and 58-year-olds, but when we watched the photos light up the screen we were 14, 16, 18 again. Names were shouted out of classmates long gone, but  they lived again on Saturday night.

“We were such babies then,” my friend Peggy said. “We just didn’t know it.”

Now the Class of ’71 contains many grandparents – our babies have babies of their own. But in each older face I saw quite distinctly the young women and men we were then – teenagers trying to find our future place in the world.  And as Mike and I left the hall I felt a bit bereaved. My classmates and I share collective memories no one else on the planet owns. Good, bad or ugly – they are our stories and they have shaped us into the adults we have become.

The late Chicago advice columnist Ann Landers once wrote, “At 20 we worry about what everyone thinks of us. At 40 we don’t care what they think of us. And at 60 we realize that they weren’t thinking of us at all.”

But today I am thinking of the people who stood grinning and begowned with me on that football field in June of 1971 – the ones who wrote in each others’ Hardscrabbles, “Never forget…” and “Always remember…”

I did and I haven’t, but one thing I know for sure: I am out of high school, but high school will never truly be out of me. Those experiences – the painful and the proud – are buried deep within, like a small ring in an old-growth tree, but who would I be without them? I am grateful.

For one weekend the Class of ’71 was reunited, and it felt so…good.