Don: Everyday Hero in our Lives

We meet people in our lives who are extraordinary in ordinary ways. If we are lucky, they stay in our lives long enough for us to know we should thank them. If our hearts are in the right place, we remember to thank them and tell others about them.

This is an acknowledgment of Don, who has struggled against so much, I can’t believe how often I hear his big, full-meant laugh at the silliness of ordinary life.

Don in the old house

Don is a friend of my husband’s. They met in a transformational seminar, both in search of a new way of looking at their lives. Don has enough health challenges in his life to make most people quit. The shortcut to the real point of the story is that Don will not quit. Pills, monitoring, adjusting is simply part of his day. He never complains, he never pulls out the health trump card. It’s that very issue that gets him in trouble occasionally. He overreaches what his body can provide.

Don was going to ride across the country on the passenger side of the moving van, with Kent driving. We all assumed he was too frail to drive. When he offered to drive part way, it sounded like a good idea–carefully monitored, of course.

When the truck turned out too be too small to hold the motorcycles, and we rented an additional truck, Don quietly volunteered to drive the second truck. We accepted. With lots of rules to protect his health the way we thought it should be protected. Don carefully steered us to the idea that he was in charge of his health and in charge of knowing how much he could manage. And he would manage it. He did this so carefully that it sounded like a good idea.

I was relieved, as my job was to fly to Phoenix, pick up the cats that had been shipped already, keep them in my apartment, complete the purchase of the new house, and move as much as I could into the new house from my apartment. I’ve seen corporate board meetings with less logistics than this move.

So Kent climbed into one van, and Don into the other (after kissing Judy and telling her he’d see her soon) and headed West. A 26-foot rental van hauling a trailer on which sits our personal van, followed by another van carrying three motorcycles, a large ficus, and random leftover household goods is a caravan of two that can’t back up. So they only drove forward. For 2,400 forward miles–through the rolling hills of Virginia, the mountains of Tennessee, across the Mississippi river, the plains of Oklahoma and Texas, into the mountains of New Mexico and Arizona and then South onto the Sonoran desert floor. It took the better part of six days.

In the following week, Don helped unpack, cut down overgrown trees and vines, installed electric outlets on the kitchen islands, removed a chandelier from the ceiling of my office, and exchanged it for a ceiling fan, replaced toilets, fixed faucets, hung shelving in the laundry room. And to the joy of my heart, he and my husband got the motorcycles out of the van (after the effort it took to get them into the same van), put the handlebars into place, and made them road-worthy. I never heard him complain of the heat. I never heard him complain at all.

Don worked every day. Hard work in hot weather. Every night the three of us spent time in the pool, looking up at stars, grateful that all the logistics had worked, that the whole move was coming together. Don can make you laugh, and laugh hard. He can also make you think and explain how mysterious household devices work.

You may be holding your breath for a disaster here. But there is none. Only good news. In the truck, along with our motorcycles, we had brought Don’s. And after being with us a week and a day, Don fulfilled a dream that had driven him to climb in the van in the first place: he drove his motorcycle back across country. I was hugely worried, but Don, along with Dirty Harry, knows his limitations. He drove through sun, and unfortunately, through a good deal of hurricane-spawned rain. But he drove. Don lives riding a motorcycle like no one else I know. 2,400 miles back across the country. He arrived back to Judy in good health.

Everyone should be as lucky as to have a Don in their lives. He is an inspiration for everyone who has a life-threatening disease and a bigger inspiration for those of us who are healthy. It takes a big friend to do what Don did, and a big dream to ride a motorcycle across the country in sun and rain, wind and sand. And Don did what most of us put off till it’s too late: he went after his big dream, and he completed it.

So thanks, Don, for making the move possible. Not just for doing hours of work to make the house great, but just for being in our lives and serving as inspiration and a role model of what friendship looks like. And it looks great from here.

–Quinn McDonald is proud to know Don, and to call him her friend. She’s a writer and certified creativity coach who helps people dream big and follow the dream. She can take no credit for Don’s dream or his work. That was all Don’s character. (c) 2008 All rights reserved.

Feeling Like Home

Boxes are getting unpacked, more each day. The plastic walkways I put down to protect the rug are up, and each day looks a little more like home. My studio is the last to be unpacked, but I’ve got enough of the office equipment in place to run my business.

Last night it rained. Maybe the best way to know you are in a new home is the first rain. It sounds different than in the last home, and you look out windows to learn how to measure it. There isn’t a street light here that lights up the night rain. It drums on the skylight in the bathroom and sounds like more rain than I think. I feel new and inexperienced.

Aretha likes the sink

The bed is the same, but the dark is different. I wake up at 3:15 a.m. and walk slowly on the unfamiliar carpet, down the hallway that is longer, into the dim kitchen. There is work to be done; I am awake but exhausted. There is always tomorrow. I walk past the sleeping computer, its light dimming and brightening, calling me to write. I’ve ignored the blog for more than a week, too tired to think. Now it’s dark, and I’m not alone any more. We are our empty-nest family again. I have a life to rebuild, a career to re-start. I wonder if I was stupid or crazy to think I should start over at my age. Outside it’s lighter than I remember. Not close to sunrise, just the moon shining on the xeriscaping–crushed light desert granite. This is the desert at night.

The cats are adjusting, finding their favorite places. One likes to lie in the bathroom sink, another under the ceiling fan in the kitchen. There is always one on the tile in the entrance, none of them are used to the heat.

It’s dark and I go back to bed in the desert, to sleep a few hours so I can see what a new life looks like tomorrow.

–Quinn McDonald is a writer and a certified creativity coach. She is making a new life in the Phoenix area. (c) 2008 All rights reserved.

Recommendation: Pet Moves

You won’t find a lot of specific recommendations in my blogs. I’m not much for pushing products and services, but when I find something that is great, I will pass it along. And I found one.

We had to move our cats from once coast to another. There are several ways to do this: take them in the car, take them with you in the airplane, or ship them commercially.

All three of those were out for various reasons. The car was being towed behind the van; airlines will let you take one cat on the airplane, and not more than two on a flight; commercial airlines won’t take an animal in the hold if the landing temperature is 95 degrees or above.

It used to be my art desk, now it's a cat perch.

After asking (sigh) for advice and receiving an interesting mix of distasteful (“there are a lot of cats in Arizona, just dump them in Virginia”), impossibly complicated (“Post on Craig’s list for people leaving for Phoenix the same day you are, arrange to have them each carry one cat and you meet them all at the Phoenix airport and collect the cats”) and absurd, (“I’ll take one, just bring it to New York,”) we got a really good piece of advice–use a pet travel service. I didn’t even know they existed.

There are several, we used All Pet Travel. They arrange to place cats on climate-controlled, pressurized airplane compartments, using various airlines. The cats are watched as they make connections, collected at the destination and kenneled until you pick them up.

We took the cat to the airport to save a little money. The service isn’t cheap, but it is worth every dime. At the airport, the cats were taken by hand, not dumped on a baggage belt. We got a text message when they successfully made their connection in Houston. Then they ran into a bit of trouble.

There were monsoon storms in Phoenix and the plane was diverted to Tucson. This is where it gets

Staying cool in August

good. A representative from All Pet took care of them in Tucson till the cats could continue the flight to Phoenix. They arrived in Phoenix, were taken to a vet, who called me to tell me all three had arrived safely. Because the Tucson flight had required many cages to be close together, our cats were given a flea treatment and inoculated (all with my permission) against the upper respiratory infection that had nearly killed Buster a month ago.

I had been told that when they arrived in my apartment, they would stay under the bed for days. Not so. They cheerfully inspected the premises, tried out the tub for instant cooling, and learned about traction on the wall-to-wall carpet. These cats have lived with hardwood floors for the last seven years, this new experience was like having a full-length toy.

I might add that I purchased a tightly-woven sisal doormat and put it in the apartment for scratching purposes, and they took to it immediately. No scratching the rug.

On Wednesday, they will have one more move, but this one relatively short. They will be loaded back into their airline crates, put in the car and driven to the new house. They will have a lot more room, three sliders to look out of, and a hallway of carpet to race down.

While Aretha, originally feral, seems to have been spooked the most, she is eating and staying close to me. Other than that, they all three had a successful and healthy trip. And I’m happy to recommend the kind and helpful people at All Pet Travel. It was worth the expense to have healthy animals loving Arizona.

–Quinn McDonald is a writer and certified creativity coach who successfully relocated to the Phoenix area. She runs workshops in business and creative writing. See her work at QuinnCreative.com (c) 2008 All rights reserved.

Grace Under Pressure

The hard part of the move is over. The van is loaded, the extra van is loaded too and the gift of lessons has been presented.

What’s a “gift of lessons”? Life often takes interesting, unexpected twists. They are generally not fun. If we learn quickly from them, we can adjust and move ahead. If we fight the lesson, refuse to see it, insist it isn’t there, demand it to go away, it will still be there, but we will be exhausted and miserable.

Figuring out how to navigate those life lessons to get the nourishment and leave the stress is a rare gift. I had one of those gifts yesterday, during the height of the move. We had rented the largest van available. The plan was to load it and use the extra space to move the motorcycles. A friend built a special rack.

When you figure out how much of a van you need, you use calculators that ask for room size, special furniture (gym equipment, big screen TVs) and other bulky items. No calculator ever asks if you have books. They simply assume you have about 10 pounds of books. After giving away hundreds of books, I had hundreds more. Books that make good reading, art books, instruction books. The van filled quickly.

At first I thought it was a matter of deciding what to take and what to leave behind. But it wasn’t. The only choice was to rent another van. That wasn’t in the plan. It was more than I’d budgeted for. In a wonderful flash of understanding, I realized that it didn’t matter what I had planned, the reality was right in front of me–rent another van. The van in the driveway was full, the motorcycles weren’t in it yet, and there was still furniture in the house.

Much as I hated the option, it was the only really workable one. Even after careful pruning, there was too much I owned already loaded in the van. No use beating myself up, no beating myself up for not knowing (how could I have known?), simply quick and direct action–finding an available van and bringing it back. I did it.

And my reward? Less stress. A feeling of making a necessary decision. A feeling of mastery over my emotions. (Want to feel a lack of control? Do a cross-country move.) We can not control the occasional smelly fish-head life tosses at us. But we are in total control of the decision-making process and the reaction we have. We can choose to be angry, yell, make unreasonable demands, engage in attention-grabbing drama.

Or, we can cut the drama, control our emotions and move on. Doesn’t get as much attention, but gets the job done. The American author Ernest Hemingway (whose books are in the van), defined courage as “grace under pressure.” Choosing to make the best decision at hand now is not always easy, but it opens the road ahead for smoother travel.

–Quinn McDonald is a writer and creativity coach. She is moving cross country with more than 500 books, a husband and three cats. See her work at QuinnCreative.com

What we keep, what we toss

Stripping files is fun. The shredder hums continuously, making satisfactory chomping sounds. Bags fill up, not too heavy to carry up the stairs and out the door.

Packing books is not hard. Use small boxes, so they don’t get too heavy. Go through them first to get rid of the ones that can make someone else happier than you. Flip through the pages for photos, notes, etc.

Moving boxes

Then there is the hard stuff. The boxes that contain the torn and worn teddy bear from when I was three years old. The pencil box I tried to make when I was five. An ashtray from 35 years ago, when I thought smoking was cool, but the things that went around smoking–the lighter, the cigarette case, the ashtrays were the fun part. Keep? Why? Throw out? ARRRGH.

So I sat there and looked at the stuff. I haven’t seen it in years. It pushed all the soft buttons of memory and sentiment. Although I don’t really remember the teddy bear, there are photos of me holding it. I do remember the dog who chewed off the ear. Why would I keep this? After a while, it came to me–because I like the person I was when I had the teddy bear. That little girl had possibility. If I put the bear in the landfill, then the little girl’s hopes and dreams weren’t valid, or didn’t materialize. But a lot of her dreams did materialize, and in more interesting and diverse ways than she could ever have imagined. The bear isn’t the dream. Or the possibility. It’s just a torn-up bear with a moth circling out of it.

And the little girl grew up and gave up smoking. I think of living in a house without boxes of old dreams haunting me from the garage, a house where dreams can be lived as is, without guilt. I save the box of my mom’s letters and decide not to save the bear, the ashtray and the black-light posters. A few mementos are enough to last a lifetime.

–Quinn McDonald is moving from Virginia to Arizona. She is a writer and a certified creativity coach. See her work at QuinnCreative.com