Suzanne’s Sense of it All

Gary and I were honoring his late mother’s birthday on December 2 when I received a call that would catapult us into a surreal odyssey. My mother had quietly passed away in Chicago.

I secured airline tickets for us to leave Seattle Monday morning and to return on Saturday. Over the weekend, there were many telephone calls with my brother and sister as we made preliminary funeral arrangements and notified people of her passing. Monday through Wednesday was a buzz of activity, meetings, and decisions. The viewing at the funeral home was scheduled for Thursday.

Then we were notified on Thursday that my father’s second wife, our stepmother, was taken to the hospital following a massive stroke. Emotionally, we added shock to grief as greeted and spoke to the people who came to my mother’s wake.

Following the funeral service on Friday, the children and grandchildren went in three full cars to the hospital to be with dad and stepmom. As per her health care directive, stepmom entered hospice with a Do Not Resuscitate Order. The physician’s best estimate was that she would likely pass away in two or three days given the severity of her stroke. With that said, family members cancelled their flights home on Saturday and started planning funeral number two for early the following week.

Stepmom entered a hospice facility on Friday evening and the vigil began. Nobody told stepmom that she was only expected to survive for two or three days, so she remained on this side of the veil until the following Friday afternoon, eight days after she was moved to hospice. And because she transitioned late in the day, the funeral we thought might happen as late as Saturday was moved to the following Monday, December 20.

Because there were so many family members in town, Gary and I opted to stay in a hotel for five nights and, because most of them remained in town for the second funeral, those five nights turned into eighteen nights. We lived our own version of the movie Groundhog Day. Every day we woke up in the same hotel room. Every day we went down the same elevator and heard the same loop of Christmas Carols being played throughout the hotel. Every day we ate at the same breakfast buffet and had the same server (except on his days off). And every day we looked out the window at the snow and wished that we were home.

The day before the second funeral, Gary developed a nasty head cold with a fever. On the morning of the funeral, I felt his forehead and announced that he was to stay in bed that day, and I went without him. On Tuesday, I talked to the nice folks at the airline to arrange for the best flight to Seattle that I could get. It turns out the best flight for us would be Friday afternoon, Christmas Eve. I knew by Friday that Gary would be well on his way to being…well.

No such luck. We arrived home Christmas Eve to no tree, no decorations, no presents (except for the two Kimberlee gave us when she picked us up at the airport), no signs of Christmas any where, and Gary’s hacking away because his head cold took up residence in his chest.

But just being in our own place made us feel better. As a famous Dr. Seuss character once said, “It came without ribbons. It came without bags. It came without packages, boxes, or bags. Maybe Christmas doesn’t come from a store. Maybe Christmas means a little bit more.”

To all of you who are not having the best Christmas ever. For those of you who lost loved ones this year. For those of you who lost jobs this year. For those of you who have challenges in your life whether financial, relationship or health-related. You are not alone. Be kind to your fellow humans for you just don’t know what they are dealing with today. A blessing to all this Christmas Day for we all need one.

Yes, it has been a year since my last blog. Here goes.

Two Sundays ago, Gary and I were both hungry and keyed up from three hours of good guests and good talk radio. We drove to Bothell to one of the few restaurants open until midnight and sat at a high-top table in the bar area enjoying several appetizers and iced tea. As Gary surveyed the room, he noticed a man seated at the bar with an open wallet under his barstool. He strode across to the man and pointed at the floor where the man’s wallet lay. After a brief exchange, Gary returned to our table where we finished eating, boxed up the remainder of our appetizers, and prepared to leave. Our server then came over to let us know that the man at the bar picked up our bill. It took me several seconds to realize what the server was telling us. We then handed the server a tip for service and went to thank our benefactor. He politely waved us off, not interested in the heaps of praise we were wanting to shower on him. It was a matter of honor for him and not a business transaction. Outside, Gary and I blessed him and called on whatever is good in the universe to pay him ten times over for his generosity.

But the story doesn’t end there. Yes, I felt very moved by this stranger who I will likely never see again. It was an experience that touched me and stayed with me long past leaving the restaurant. The rest of the story is what I remembered the next morning when I awoke. Like a string of pearls, I connected this precious pearl to another pearl on Saturday when we were treated to a fine dining experience with a dear friend from California. Then I recalled how stunned we were in May to receive an unexpected $100 in the mail from a friend in Colorado. Prior to that was another wonderful dinner and gift from an angel here in Washington. Before you say to yourself, “Well, isn’t it great to be Gary and Suzanne?” STOP. Please don’t let your mind lead you down the road to a bad place. It’s not about how good someone else has it.

Goodness is all around us all the time, in obvious ways and in not-so-obvious ways. What are we thinking about? If we sleepwalk through our days and don’t take time to recognize the good things, our days will be filled with the tragedies, disease and death that somehow make us feel a little better when we watch the news and think our lives are at least not as bad as all that. We all own those precious pearls, unexpected gifts given by people who live their lives in gratitude, not greed. Remember something good this day that someone gave you. Remember something else good. Wear your good experiences where everyone can see them. And send love to the givers.

One of my favorite sayings is, “Everybody’s on their own path.” Usually, I say this with a shrug of my shoulders. Underneath saying this is my wondering why some people have made the choices that they have made. To me, their choices make no sense. They seem to be shooting themselves in the foot or cutting themselves off from their good. Often they’re not happy with the outcome.

My saying “Everybody’s on their own path” facilitates my letting go of judging them badly. I believe that people are doing the best that they can most of the time. I also believe that we mostly react emotionally instead of thinking things through. There are times when we need to get angry. But those times aren’t nearly as often as we do get angry, are they?

Psychology has given us a path of least resistance to identify the malfunction in thinking and pigeon hole the perpetrator. She was neglected or he was abused as a child. How pat these answers are, and how fast we can dismiss poor behavior. But looked at from another way, perhaps the challenges in our lives are meant for a purpose. Perhaps they are meant to potentially strengthen us, not weaken and victimize us.

Gary and I have talked about individual challenges in each of our lives and choices we’ve made – sometimes against ourselves and sometimes for ourselves. One of my favorite scenes in the movie Capote was when Truman Capote was answering the question about his obsession with one of two murderers. His answer was that it was like they grew up in the same household and he went out the front door while the other guy went out the back.

It’s a fact. No one gets out of this life alive. It’s also impossible to direct someone else’s life. We don’t need to get caught up in the drama of someone else, unless we choose to. It’s okay to acknowledge that everybody’s on their own path and let them walk it to its logical conclusion. What is my path? Am I living my best life? That is mine to know, and I wish you godspeed on your own.

Gary and I are both readers. I read one or two books on average a month and so does Gary. It has been only recently that we’ve read the same ones together in preparation for the show. We finished Origins of the Specious by Patricia T. O’Connor and Stewart Kellerman prior to interviewing Patricia. We thoroughly enjoyed this book about words because we are both lovers of the language and we find word origins interesting. Patricia and Stewart debunk many of our myths about words and phrases by researching their true origin, and the truth is far more fascinating than the common knowledge about these words.

Take the term GI, as in GI Joe and GI Jane. Most people, according to O’ Connor and Stewart, believe that GI, “which refers to an American soldier or things military, began life as an abbreviation for ‘government issue’ or ‘general issue’”. Not so. The term, dating back to 1907 was an army abbreviation for galvanized iron “used in military inventories to describe iron cans, buckets, and so on….” Ten years later, in World War I, it began to refer to all things military.

The book is literally filled with dozens and dozens of examples, most of which were new information to us. But that is not the point I want to make here. The interview took a detour, as many of them do, into a disturbing area. Grammar has not been taught in the United States, generally speaking, since sometime in the 1970′s. For those of us who were in school earlier than that, we learned how to identify the parts of speech in a sentence and diagram them on the blackboard. In the U.S., we now have almost 40 years of people who are clueless about a subject and a predicate. AND (O’Connor said starting a sentence with a conjunction is okay), as English has become more commonly spoken around the world, people learning English as a second language in other countries, speak and write our language better than we do! What??!!

As I gaze at the many books in every room of our home (magazines only in the bathroom), I think about the great ideas  and stories that people have put in print over hundreds of years. Sometimes when Gary and I are reading, one of us will stop and say, “This writer could really have used a good editor. The ideas are okay but the grammar is atrocious.” Great thoughts, however, may not make it through the language barrier. When I read poor writing, I dismiss the writers as ignorant and uneducated. Well, they may not be ignorant but they may certainly be uneducated.

The day after the interview with Patricia O’Connor, I checked with my friend Nancy, a teacher about my age. She strongly agreed and told me a story about teachers who had to surreptitiously answer grammar questions because they would get reprimanded if they got caught teaching it! I could hardly believe what I was hearing. Not allowed to teach grammar? Not in the approved curriculum? Send your children overseas. They will get a better education about our language there than here.

Our language is an international one. I am sorry that good English is not spoken here.

You’ve got to pay attention to your life. Prayers do get answered and, like the philosophers say, not always in the time or the way in which we would like. Some time during the first year or two that I knew Gary Mantz, I began praying that we would work together. My pictures were of two people on the road, calling in stories from everywhere in the United States. This combined Gary’s desire to be on the radio with our mutual love of travel, especially road trips.

My desire did not diminish; however, as a practical matter, he went to work at one location and I at another. Like many couples, we saw each other at brief times before and after work. Then two years ago, Gary took his career into his own hands and contracted to do a radio show called Give and Take with Gary Mantz at noon on Tuesdays. He called me his producer and I told people that the title meant I drove him to the station and screened the callers.

I still wished that we could work together when the company I was employed by closed its doors abruptly and I found myself without a job. After Gary gave his Tuesday show time to Howard Bono so that the two of them could co-host The Money Thing, Gary realized months later that he missed doing his own show about topics that have intrigued him since he was a young boy. Thus, The Gary Mantz Show was re-created and a place was found on Sunday evenings to air it.

All of this brings me back to answered prayers. During this second start of The Gary Mantz Show, I actually became a talk show producer. We plan the schedule together, I book many of the interviews, I edit the shows and burn copies for our guests, I act as liaison with our web master, interact with our sponsors, screen the callers, and come on air to say hi. And, yes, sometimes I still even drive Gary to the station. It was no small thing when Gary caught a flu bug and couldn’t make it into the station for the April 26th show and I agreed to be a guest host. I watched Gary for two years mastering his craft and I figured I would just do my best to follow the example he set, making sure that the guests felt welcomed and that the show ran smoothly.

I appreciate the atta-girls I received and I know that it takes a village to put on a talk show. Audio wizard Mike Roberge was the foundation for having the sound go out over the airwaves and Janice Smith didn’t hesitate to lend her support and enthusiastic voice as call screener for the evening. Guests Lauren Archer and Karen Cornell are both such consummate speakers that there were no gaps in the conversation, and my thank you would not be complete without mentioning the wonderful people who called in to the show, adding an element that we can only get in that special way.

Gary is now feeling great once again and was back in the host’s chair last Sunday. It is his show and we missed him. His generosity of spirit in trusting me with guest hosting cannot be over emphasized. And my heartfelt prayer from years ago was answered even bigger and better than I imagined.

Every once in a while, something really captures my attention and holds it. I told Gary I wanted to read Jean Haner’s Wisdom of Your Face book in advance of his interview with her. I read it in three sittings because it was just too hard to put down. In fact, the only time I did put it down was to run over to the mirror and see how my features compared to the photos in her book. February 1 was Jean’s second time interviewing with Gary and her first time in the studio. I felt like I was meeting a dear friend, except that my friends don’t look at me in the studied way that Jean did. I knew she was sizing me up using her knowledge as a face reader.

Ears, forehead, eyes, nose, lips; all our features tell the world something about us, but what are they saying? I am so curious about this ancient Chinese art that I just have to attend the workshop in Kirkland April 4-5. I have spent so many years looking at my face that I had stopped seeing it. Jean’s book has me looking carefully at the lines in my forehead, the line above my chin, my joy lines, and my purpose lines. And what do all the parts mean when you put them all together?

There is a whole story, a whole life, right out there where everyone can read it if they know how. Like I said, I’m hooked. I want this information, and Jean Haner delivers the goods. Something new for me to learn this year, just in time for my birthday and a new year for me. If you want a taste of what to expect during the weekend, just go to our archived shows and take a listen. See if this is something that captures your attention, too.

It has been said that corporate radio stations are sinking the medium to a common denominator in the same way that most newspapers are written for a third grade reading level. Perhaps even worse is the preponderance of syndicated radio shows that limit even our choices of which bloated nothingness to give our listening. Not true of the live and local Seattle Gary Mantz Show. The interview with Michael Bogar on January 25 comes with a disclaimer. Only for the intelligent! Do not listen to this hour unless you are prepared for a deep, rich, thoughtful discussion about soul growth. Michael sorts through spiritual perspectives in a way that makes our life experiences seem right, sensible, and even necessary.

He talks about stages of the soul, humans growing in consciousness, and how we can see that growth in different areas of our lives. He explains and makes sense of high-level philosophical ideas and delivers them with popular culture examples and a touch of humor. Michael is a theological visionary with a practical side to his thinking. What he says about where we are as human beings and human becomings is an above-average conversation. Not for the uneducated. Not for the superficial. Not for the lowest common denominator. If you missed the original, look for this show when it is posted online in the archives.

Thank you Gary and Michael for a great hour of talk.

I don’t mean that surprises come in sizes and that there are small ones and large ones, too. I am talking about the experience I had with psychic medium Dale O’Malley when she visited The Gary Mantz Show on November 16. This was the second time that I was in Dale’s company. The first time I met her, she said that we were joined by the spirit of someone named Henry. She described my great-grandfather who I had never met and of whom I have a photograph. She said that he was family and it didn’t matter that I hadn’t known him when he was living.

During the course of the November 16 show, Gary asked me if I would join he and Dale in the studio and allow Dale to see if any spirits appeared to her. After a brief pause, Dale said that the spirit of Mary was with us. The only Mary in my family was a great aunt who I knew when I was very young. I was surprised that someone I hardly knew would appear and Dale said, again, that it didn’t matter because she was family.

In order for Mary to reveal her connection to me, Dale said that Mary was talking about the beautiful flowers. I was puzzled because I couldn’t put great aunt Mary with flowers. She lived in a high rise building in Chicago with no back yard. Then Dale pointed to her fore arms. Mary says she used to have bandages on her arms. She had thin skin in her later years that bruised easily. Gary’s mentioned that he was familiar with this because his mom wore bandages on her arms. I never knew my great aunt to have this condition but, again, I didn’t know her well. I kept trying to match up the face of my great aunt Mary with flowers and bandages on her arms and just couldn’t make the connection. Just when I thought I was just a thick-headed numbskull, I was struck by who Dale was talking about, and it wasn’t my great aunt.

“Gary, Gary, Gary,” I called out as he was talking. When he looked over at me, I said, “Gary, It’s your mom!” Dale wondered why the spirit of Gary’s mom came to see me and for a moment there was some confusion as we all contemplated the idea of Mary’s visiting me. Then Gary remembered something important that I hadn’t remembered.

When Mary passed on in late March of this year, Gary and I went, along with his brother Aaron, to bury her with her Gary’s dad who had passed on in 1984. Mary had made pre-arrangements and had pre-paid for her funeral with the exception of one item, funeral flowers. I told Gary and Aaron that I wanted to buy her flowers as my contribution. Mary was thanking me from the other side, just as she had always thanked me with a note and a telephone call for anything I bought her when she was alive.

Gary said I was the daughter she never had. She was happy to be the mother of two boys and happier still that she didn’t have to be responsible for raising any girls. In the last years of her life, she gave me her girly things, like jewelry, which I wear often and enjoy. We became close over the six years that I knew her, and she told me some of her most private thoughts and one very important secret about Gary.

To hear the actual interview from November 16, visit our program schedule page and click on the archived show with Dale O’Malley.

Life’s synchronicities are so amazing. I experienced one just this week that started over 30 years ago.

When I was working at my first post-college job in the Chicago suburbs, I met a woman named Pat who I liked instantly for her quick smile, open personality, and positive perspective on life. I met Pat’s husband, Mike, also an upbeat person with a ready laugh, and we began a friendship in the 70′s that has lasted these many years. Pat and Mike were thrilled beyond words when they brought into the world their only child, Kelley. I moved to Florida and Pat and I corresponded twice a year at Christmas and at our birthdays in April. The last time I saw Pat and Mike, Gary and I had dinner with them two years ago this month.

My sister, Nancy, and her husband, John, moved to Seattle about 30 years ago where they have been working and raising a family ever since. Their third child, Stacey, was born with a disability and one of the things they did for Stacey was to give her riding lessons for a time at Little Bit Therapeutic Riding in Woodinville, Washington. We have photographs of Stacey looking oh-so-adorable in her riding apparel astride a very large horse. She benefitted from her experience at Little Bit in ways beyond measure.

I moved to the Seattle area in 2001 from Florida to be in closer proximity to my sister. I met Gary and he introduced me to Patrick and Carol. He also introduced Patrick and Carol to each other and they got married on 02-02-02 at 2pm. Gary emceed their wedding reception, and we count Patrick and Carol among our dear friends here.

Are you ready for the synchronicity? Pat calls me from Chicago to say that her daughter Kelley will be in the Seattle area for two months doing a clinical rotation for her advanced degree in equine therapy for disabled children at……Little Bit in Woodinville. I tell Pat I will try to find a place for Kelley to stay during this time. I send out e-mails to which I get responses from several church friends that they will house Kelley. The only problem is that these angels live 20-25 miles from where Kelley will be working. Then one Saturday night, Gary and I are having dinner with (here it comes) Patrick and Carol and I tell them about Kelley. They call their friend, Lindy, and the matter is settled within days. Kelley has a place to stay only six miles from where she will be working.

Friends from Chicago for over 30 years. Niece at Little Bit 20 years ago. Friends in Seattle for 7 years. It is true that life is a mystery, its wonders to behold.

Astrologer Eileen Grimes came into the studio on Sunday evening with laptop in hand to give free mini-readings to our callers. I have found myself fascinated over the years by the labels ascribed to various sun signs and I stop to think if a particular person I know fits the label. I am an Aries and, it’s true, that many Aries I know are leaders. My girlfriend Ellie told me she is a Pisces born on the cusp, just one day before Aries begins. A couple of years ago, I ran her chart, and in the year she was born the sun was in Aries on March 20. She is a company executive and typical Aries leader.

Are Leos really self-involved? Scorpios secretive? Capricorns climbers? Pisces dreamers? Librans indecisive? I think one of the values of astrology is to know what your tendencies are. The better we know ourselves, the better we can relate to people who don’t think the way we do. If I have a tendency to always be first, what would it be like if that were not important? Perhaps expanding our sense of who we are and our abilities means not always defaulting to what’s comfortable. Perhaps this week I’ll try being last in line.

Do you know people who are typical of their sun sign? How in the stars can this be?