A Change in Vision

The aftercare counselor held up a magazine and said What do you see? I said a Queen's Guard at the same time my husband said Jack Daniels. The counselor smiled and said And you're both looking at the same picture. Aftercare counselors can be such wise asses but he'd made his point about how we all the see the same world so differently and therefore react to it in such different ways.

I try to keep this in mind as I go through my days but it's tricky since my natural reflex seems to be to expect everyone to see things as I do. Horseracing, Nana would say, would be a damned pitiful sport if we all thought the same. Sometimes the simplest concepts are the easiest to forget.

Nana wasn't much for frills.She never went a day without stockings and her corset. She and her sensible shoes descended the stairs each morning, dressed and made up, tied on her ever present apron and went straight to work. To do otherwise would've been an insult to the work ethic. She made breakfast - dry toast, orange juice, coffee - then washed the dishes. She swept, mopped, dusted, did laundry, scrubbed the bathrooms, changed the linens and baked. She had her hair done and a manicure once a week, she answered mail and watched an occasional soap opera at lunch. Your problem, Jan, she would say to my mother, is that you're not useful. Usefullness was a cardinal virtue to my grandmother and idleness a serious lapse if not a potential sin. God dislkes idle hands but He despises an idle mind was one of her favorite sayings. My mother and grandmother did not get along well. Although they spent considerable time together as adults, they saw the world very differently. Play the hand you're dealt, Jan, Nana advised her, stop wishing for different cards. My mother was rarely out of her nightclothes until noon, she bathed every other day or less, and after one or two visits to our house, Nana put her foot down and came no more. She couldn't abide the lack of housecleaning.

I didn't know it at the time, but each summer when we were in Nova Scotia, my daddy cleaned house from top to bottom, a solid year's worth of grime and dirt was attacked and removed. But he was very careful about the process because if my mother had discovered these goings on, there'd have been hell to pay. He needn't have worried - she never noticed. She cleaned with a lick and a promise, a practice my grandmother found despicable. I raised you better than this! she would snap at my mother, look at this floor! My mother would snap right back about not living a privileged life and there they would stay, two hard women, spitting venom and worn out with each other. It might've been comical if it hadn't been so unrelentingly sad.

Nobody gets along with everybody all the time but it seems to me that we can stay at odds with the world or make peace with it, depending on how we see it.