The Harry and David Christmas Miracle

A Harry and David Christmas

It’s been a Harry and David Christmas at our house this year. We have pears coming out of our ears.

A week ago, Rob’s bookkeeper gave us a beautiful box of 12 pears from the iconic holiday fruit packager. Then, two days later, one of my sweet clients gifted me a box of Harry and David pears! Rob and I laughed, and I started giving them to neighbors.

A couple of days later, Rob got a package from his insurance agent—a box of Harry and David pears, apples, caramel corn with chocolate pieces, delectable chocolate truffles, and sugar cookies! At least it offered some yummy chocolates.

Yesterday, another business associate of Rob’s gave him another box of pears—from Harry and David! Our pear cup runneth over. I’ve started giving them to friends as well as neighbors. A friend suggested peeling, cutting them up and freezing them for future smoothies. Did that, too. Rob re-gifted the latest box of pears to one of his employees.

My sister and brother-in-law live in Medford, Oregon, so I’m familiar with Harry and David. The company, which was started by a guy named Samuel Rosenberg in 1910, has pear orchards that date to 1885. Rosenberg’s sons, Harry and David, took over management of the company in 1914, and it grew into one of the country’s greatest success stories.

Today, it’s a small miracle they are still in business. In 2004, Harry and David was acquired by two investment firms—Wasserstein & Co. of New York and Highlands Capital Management of Boston—which then saddled it with unbearable debt, forcing layoffs. In 2011, Harry and David filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, but managed to emerge from it just six months later. The company was sold again in 2014 to 1-800 Flowers, and from all appearances seems to have recovered.

Harry and David has been a huge employer for the Southern Oregon region, so all of this abundance of fruit is a good sign. Not just for Medford and environs, but for the national economy. If a victim of takeover greed can come back from the brink, there’s hope—truly a Christmas miracle.

Review - The Book of Someday by Dianne Dixon

The Book of Someday is Dianne Dixon's second novel, and like her first (The Language of Secrets, 2010-11), it's a great read.

Her latest interweaves the stories of three women who share a disturbing history but don't know each other.  

The book opens with Livvi Gray, a shy and insecure writer with a dark past who is haunted by a recurring dream about a woman in a silver dress and pearl-button shoes. Livvi is experiencing some success with her writing and meets a new man who is everything she wants, except she has a feeling he's withholding something from her.

Meanwhile, we meet Micah, a hard-driving and wildly successful photographer who's kept people at bay all of her life. She has just been diagnosed with terminal cancer, and suddenly she feels it important to visit several people she has slighted in the past. She begins a cross-country journey to make amends. At least that's her intention.

Then Dixon takes us back in time twenty-six years to tell the story of Anna Lee, a new mother whose husband can't seem to hold a job or make her happy. Despite her misgivings, she agrees to take in her husband's troubled teenage niece for the summer. Fireworks ensue.

A former screenwriter, Dixon is a skilled storyteller. Her characters come alive on the page and we begin to care about all three women. But it's not until the final pages of the book that we discover how these three women are connected. For me, that was frustrating, even though the resolution was more than satisfying.

If you like stories with mystery and a twist at the end, you'll enjoy The Book of Someday. 

A Wonderment of Earth

My friend and gifted writer and photographer, Sandra Hunter, emailed our AROHO writing group this morning and said that in the 16th century, earthquakes were called "wonderments of earth." 

What a delightful way to describe the upheaval of earth and plane, the disruption, the stab of fear when you first sense the ground's movement. 

If we consider similar upheavals in our lives - emotional, psychological, mental, or physical - as wonderments of earth, it allows for a very different experience, doesn't it?

Instead of panicking, or reeling from something unknown and frightening, we can see it as a wonderment, a reminder that wondrous life is always about change, shakeups, the unexpected. And we can imagine them, then, as gifts - opportunities to view life differently, to embrace the change that is inevitable, to roll with the earth and trust that the ground will eventually stop moving.

It is, truly, a wonderment.

Inspiration Knocks

“Creativity is a scavenger hunt. It’s your obligation to pay attention to clues, to the thing that gives you that little tweak. The muses or fairies – they’re trying to get your attention.” – Elizabeth Gilbert

When I read Liz Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love, I was going through a similar life transition and deeply resonated with the book, as did millions of others. Since then, I have been intrigued to see her interest in creativity become a passion, and I have learned a lot from her. (See her amazing TED talk.)

The quote above, from the October Oprah magazine article about Gilbert and her new novel, The Signature of All Things, is a great reminder to be aware as writers.

Prompts from the universe, your muse, fairies – whatever you want to call them – are real. But hearing them requires slowing down and listening, being receptive to the creative gifts that come to us. Several times I’ve had powerful experiences like this.

More than 20 years ago I wrote a scene in a creative writing class. I really liked it, but didn’t have a clue where to take it. So I put it away and only very occasionally looked at it. I just didn’t know how it would fit into a larger story.

Then, about three years ago, I was in a dream state in the early morning, barely awake, and the story came to me. I watched the entire novel unfold in my mind’s eye. The scene I had written was clearly a prologue, and I knew the entire narrative from that beginning. I woke up and went to my desk and wrote a brief synopsis and a chapter outline. I’ve been working on the novel ever since.

More recently, I needed to work out a problem with a new nonfiction book idea. Once again, the solution – vivid and detailed – came to me in an early morning dream state.
These moments of revelation, bursts of creative genius, happen all the time, perhaps in small ways we might not necessarily recognize as divinely inspired. But I know they are.

From the perfect word suddenly popping into one’s head, to the discovery of a title for that article or book that had remained elusive.

The muse exists. It works. But you have to let it in, be receptive, invite it to inhabit your creative space. Meditation works, so does journaling. I do both. Listening to music, walking on the beach or through the woods also is effective. Any immersion in Nature will invite your muse to visit. Thoreau went to Walden Pond. Wordsworth walked the English Lake District and gazed upon fields of daffodils.

Muses don’t like to be rushed and they don’t come on command. But with a little openness and invitation, they will come.

A Dog's Life

My dog, Chevella, on the beach near Stearns Wharf in Santa Barbara. She blasted down the beach to where hundreds of birds were settled on the sand. The birds rose as one, swarmed her and circled around, cawing and crying. She was beside herself, jumping and racing into the waves. It's a dog's life.

Trust

We have a blind cat. She’s just out of the terrorism of kitten-hood, fifteen months old. When my daughter called me from Chico last fall and said, “I’m thinking of adopting a blind kitty,” I said, “No, don’t do it!” Those of you who know Kendall will not be surprised to hear that when she came home at Thanksgiving, it was with the blind kitten.

Maya-Roo, the blind kitten. 

Her name is Maya-Roo. The Roo was my contribution, because she leaps into the air like a kangaroo anytime someone walks past her, launching herself into the unknown. I think it’s a self-protective thing; she doesn’t have a clue what might be approaching.

When the dog comes close, she springs into the air and comes down on the dog’s shoulders or back. The dog is always game, and soon there’s a tussle, a back and forth between them of paw bats and guttural sounds and pouncing that at first made me fear for the cat, since the dog outweighs her by at least forty-five pounds. Over time, they have become fast friends and playmates, and an endless source of laughter in the house. 

I have watched Maya-Roo a lot these past months. Adjusting to the house, figuring out where things are, and boldly trusting that objects will stay where she remembers they are. It doesn’t always work. Sometimes a chair will be moved, or she’ll misjudge the distance to the arm of the couch and launch herself into the air, only to fall short or hit another piece of furniture. Sometimes she runs headlong into a doorway or a wall. Then she sits for a minute, almost as if she’s shaking it off, and then she’s off and running at full speed in the other direction.

She is teaching me much about trust. She wants to be outdoors in the worst way, and our yard isn’t fenced. So several times whoever is supposedly watching her (Kendall and I have both been guilty of this) has forgotten long enough for her to wander away from the house and out into the parking lot, or worse, down the driveway toward the street. Then there’s a panicked frenzy between us, frantically searching, calling her name and hoping she hasn’t gotten into the road. We’ve found her as far as a block from here, always appearing out of nowhere, it seems, as we're racing around the neighborhood. She comes to us willingly, as if to say, “Hey, I’m right here! Where have you been?”

It’s hard to fathom what it would be like to go through life without the gift of vision. Her other senses are acute. Her hearing is extraordinary. I have watched her in the garden detect a bug flying past, jump at it and almost catch it. Her sense of smell is impeccable, as well, and she uses it to find her way about the house and yard, sniffing the air and following her nose.

Again I think, How would my life be if I couldn’t see? It is hard enough to trust that a certain chair will be where you left it when you are sighted. What if you couldn’t depend on that? What if you couldn’t depend on anything being the way you remember it? What if everything you knew was subject to change? I sometimes watch Maya-Roo race through the house. She is still so kitten-like, and will suddenly bounce up and run through the room, leaping into the air where she thinks the couch should be, where the bookshelf was yesterday, where the dog seems to be given the jingle of her collar. She just assumes it will be where it was the last time. And if it isn’t, that doesn’t seem to faze her. She doesn’t become cautious. It doesn't keep her from blasting into space once again, trusting that the couch pillows will be there to grab with her claws, or the books on the shelf will still be a wall she can leap over and hide behind.

She has never been fearful. And that makes me wonder if she is fearless by nature. Are other blind cats and dogs naturally cautious? Since she was blind at birth, does that make it “easier” for her in the sense that she’s doesn’t know what she’s missing?

I try to emulate her sense of adventure and belief in what exists. I try to trust that life will always be something new, and that sometimes what I expect will shift and change, and I will have to adjust. It’s a powerful lesson from a small creature that delights in the world around her. She’s not missing a thing.