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Alan C. FoxAuthor. Entrepreneur. Game-changer.
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My Trip to Bountiful

by Alan C. Fox 7 Comments

 

Bountiful-PeopleToolsI’m reflecting on the play A Trip to Bountiful, in which an elderly lady escapes the slammer of her son’s big-city apartment to revisit the rural home of her youth.  Tom Wolfe, who wrote You Can’t Go Home Again, published after his death, might have forewarned her to expect a ramshackle building rather than the childhood home in her memory.  Tom says it all changes, leaving only a remnant in each of us.

A woman named Jill and I lived together more than forty years ago.  We never intended to marry, though I think Jill would have preferred that.  Jill now lives by herself in Harbor, Oregon, formerly Brookings.  I suppose the name change to ‘Harbor” means that Brookings will gradually join, in the mist of fairy tale memory, the village of Brigadoon, a hamlet in the highlands of Scotland which appears only once every hundred years.

Recently Jill was tabled for back surgery, recovered in her daughter’s house for a year, and is now nailed to her own home by a titanium pin in her back, living in a forest of trees, memories, and love.

I send Jill a little money every month to supplement her meager social security.  She asked me recently if I minded her using part of her wealth to buy a walker for a friend, or donate to the local food bank. Unlike her back, Jill’s love is not stuck either to her home or to her past. Jill’s love for everyone is profound, pervasive, and unrestricted by time, loss, or fear.  Jill’s open heart is why I love her.

I brought with me my father, my wife, and Jill’s daughter, granddaughter, and son-in-law who live four hundred miles, a heartbeat, away in San Diego.  We brought lunch, a Gnome for Jill’s garden, and a small lightshow box which responds to music.  Jill gifted to me her electric back stimulator, saying “maybe it will help you, it doesn’t help the pin in my back.”  She gave to my wife a beautiful sweater. And she gave to both of us a photo of my son Craig, taken on a camping trip back in 1972, when all of us were children.

Our afternoon passed, as the best times do, in a single breath or two.  While Jill and the others chatted away in the kitchen I enjoyed a passionate conversation with her son-in-law.  My father slept in a cozy chair as Jill’s nine-year-old granddaughter played in the garden, in the laundry room, on the computer – everywhere she moved.  Beneath the canopy of the trees we shared a time of comradery, laughter, reminiscence, a party that began when we were born, or when we first met, or when we fell in love.

Paradise-PeopleToolsforBusinessSoon it was time to leave.  Jill and I hugged goodbye–a long goodbye with the full body contact, intimacy, and tenderness of two human beings who once shared their lives and, in the more important ways, still do.  I might agree with Tom Wolfe that you can’t return to your home of memory, but you can revisit the home inside yourself, your loves who will remain, your treasured and treacherous remembrances.

What is Bountiful?  The companionship and encouragement of family, of strangers, of friends.

Where is Bountiful?  In the nurturing earth, the forest shade, and in your pulsing spirit.

You do not have to travel far to visit Bountiful, for Bountiful, just as the fairy-tale village of Brigadoon, exists for you, and for me, in our hearts, always and forever, anywhere and everywhere we are.

Alan

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Long Ago and Far Away

by Alan C. Fox 2 Comments

Beach-PeopleToolsOne Sunday afternoon when I was a kid, my family drove to the beach. I had more energy than sense, swam out into the ocean, and was promptly slammed to the sand by a huge wave. I ran, crying, to my mother.

“Mommy.  Mommy.  I have something in my eye.  I have something in my eye!”

She examined my right eye.  “I don’t see anything.”

“It’s there.  It hurts, Mommy.  It hurts me.”

“Maybe it’s a grain of sand.”

She took me by my hand to a drug store, bought some eye wash, and showed me how to use it. Finally, with wash streaming down my cheek and a red right eye that had no white, she showed me a grain of sand.

“See, Alan.  Here’s the grain of sand that was in your eye.  It came out.  See?  It’s right here in my hand.”

“But it still hurts.  My eye still hurts.  It’s still in there Mommy.”

“Alan, it’s in my hand.  It might still hurt for a while because your eye remembers that the grain of sand was there.  But it won’t hurt for very long.”

It did hurt for very long.  For two hours.  I kept crying until the pain disappeared.

Switch to the present.

Two hours ago I received the following message from a close friend, with startling news about her daughter.

“Just wanted to let you know that we are in St. Joseph’s ER with Brita.  She has very high blood sugar and we think she may have diabetes.  Her sugar reading was at 211 this morning. I am devastated.  So sad that I can’t even describe.  —Rina.”

Ten years ago my daughter, then seventeen, had a blood sugar reading of 398 when she was diagnosed with Type I diabetes in the emergency room at Encino Hospital.

Rina’s immediate fear is of what this diagnosis might mean for her four-year-old daughter, Brita. She sees a life filled with needles, sleepless nights, and physical vulnerability. Today, that fear is immediate and real.  My daughter was almost an adult when she was diagnosed.  Even so, my wife and I spent many nights slipping into her room to make sure she was still alive and not in a coma.  She has Type 1 diabetes today, and has learned to live with her disease. So have we.  I in no way minimize the impact of Type 1 diabetes.

The pain from a grain of sand in my eye literally blotted out the sun many years ago, but time brings perspective.  Today it is a distant, not painful, memory, and I mostly remember my mother’s care and reassurance.

So, too, will the initial shock of Brita’s diagnosis fade, and the condition will become a part of her life.  As my wife told Rina, “Brita will never remember a time when she didn’t have to stick a needle into her finger to test her blood sugar.”  Until there is a cure, or a work around.

In situations like these, I suggest a perspective that I call “Long ago and far away.”  Pretend that you are on the moon, looking at yourself and your immediate problem from there.  Or pretend that you are on a distant star, a million light years away.  Your immediate condition will seem unimportant from there.

Of course, “long ago and far away” is much easier to write about than it is to put into practice—especially

when you’re right in the midst of a crisis. At this moment Rina’s catastrophe is up close and personal, and much larger than just a grain of sand in a tearful eye.  And this time it is her daughter, not mine, so I am not as close to it.

But even in the worst of times, struggling to maintain perspective can make all the difference.  The experience of Time-Is-Now-PeopleToolspain can give us a greater gratitude for joy.  The reality of illness can give us a better appreciation of normal health.  The prospect of death gives me a greater incentive to write today.That is why surgeons do not operate on close relatives.

We only have today.  Let’s make the most of it.

Alan

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I Want to Be Your Hero

by Alan C. Fox 4 Comments

 

Hero-PeopleToolsOh, my.  I woke up today with this idea in my head that I want to be your hero, and it won’t let go. Yesterday I was writing a blog entitled “Give Me a Compliment,” and part way through it became the question “Who Says ‘I Love You’ First?”  For me, writing is like living each day.  I usually know where I want to go, but discover my path as I proceed along the way.  There is no GPS.  I wander all over the map.  But it has always been an interesting journey.

Do I want you to reply to this blog and say, “Alan, you are my hero”?

That would be nice, especially if you give a reason or two, but that is not my primary focus.  I want to urge you to jot down the names of a few of your heroes and let them know by telling them today, in writing or out loud, “You are my hero.”

I shared this idea with a friend, who a few minutes ago emailed me to say, “In total frankness, you are my hero, maybe my super hero.  You have opened up a life and worlds unknown to me before.” My friend’s email touched me deeply and reaffirmed within me the importance of being valued.

And don’t we all need to have people believe in us?  Don’t we all need to feel valued?  And shouldn’t we tell each other exactly that, in a direct and unmistakable way?

Your hero could be a teacher or a parent, a friend or an acquaintance.  It could be Jason at the telephone company who spent hours recently solving a problem for my wife.

Is the word “hero” too strong?  I don’t think so.

Mrs. Agulia, who taught me Latin in High School, is my hero.  She taught me that I didn’t control the world, after I blurted out in class the “suggestion” that she had to raise my grade.  She said, “Alan, I don’t have to do anything.”

Mr. L. Day Hanks, my speech coach in high school, is my hero because he taught me how to express myself, and insisted that I speak to his home room about school events, after he discovered I had chickened out and failed to speak as scheduled in other home rooms.

Each of my nine children is my hero, because each is well-educated, has overcome obstacles, and is making his or her own way through a separate life.  I hope I have the courage to tell each of them exactly that in person when next we meet.

And it does take courage.  Daveen and I are treating one of our adult sons to dinner tonight for his birthday.  Like each of us, he has life challenges, but he is dealing with them in a thoughtful, energetic, and diligent way.

When I say at dinner tonight, “Craig, you are my hero,” he might smile, perhaps tentatively, and say, “Thanks, Dad.  What do you mean by that?”  And then I’ll have to explain.  I’ll improvise.  I hope I do it right.  (His response was better than I could have imagined.)

Perhaps I will call my daughter Jill today, and tell her she is my hero because she has raised three wonderful children under difficult circumstances and because, after working for others, she is now establishing her own law practice.

Perhaps I will email my son Steven who, after dropping out of college twice, now has six university degrees and is a professor in the USC medical school.

beatifulMInds-PeopleToolsWhen Alexis, who lives with us, is up and about, I may tell her that she is my hero because she has Lupus, is three months into chemotherapy, tired much of the time, yet perseveres in her job of helping immeasurably in youth philanthropy.

And to my friend who emailed to me this morning, you are my hero, only partly because you let me know that I am yours.

Please identify and tell at least one of your personal heroes today, right out loud or in writing, “You are my hero.”  And tell them specifically why.  Don’t be afraid.  They may respond badly.  Heroes may do that.  One of my all-time writing heroes is Ray Bradbury.  Once I approached him and said, “Mr. Bradbury, I have enjoyed your writing for more than twenty years.”  He harrumphed back, “Hmpf.  I’ve been writing for a lot longer than that.”  I guess he was having a bad day.  Heroes have bad days.  He’s still my hero.

And I want you to know that you are a hero.  You are reading this blog and trying to build a better life for yourself and for those you love.  For that reason alone you deserve my tribute.  You are my hero.

Alan

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