Stress and Snails

I have been incredibly stressed these past few months for a variety of the usual reasons--conflict at work, worries about family, aging, blah, blah, blah. . .


I had a routine stress test with my cardiologist last August, and she said, looking at the pictures of my heart at work, that she wouldn't have known from the evidence that I had suffered a heart attack.  Good news, she said, but added that I had to learn how to manage stress better--though I'd said little about that to her.  I guess she reads minds as well as hearts.


So I've been doing a few things to try to reduce stress.  Conveniently, reconstructive knee surgery in late July means I've been going to rehab twice a week, where the PTs work me over pretty well--the exercise has felt good.  And I try to get in for a massage session once a week.  My wife tells me that recent reports show that massage lowers blood pressure, and that, combined with increased exercise and quitting smoking (umm, well until last week), must explain the lowest blood pressure reading I've had in a long time at my recent doctor's visit, 118/60 (by the way, my family doctor, John Duhn, is the greatest; he listens well, explains well, and is fellow fan of universal, single payer healthcare).


Another thing I've started just recently is to sit down with a book of poetry while I eat breakfast.  I read this one a couple of days ago, in a collection that might make the more sophisticated poetry readers cringe, Garrison Keillor's Good Poems for Hard Times.  It's called "For a Five-Year-Old," by Fleur Adock, a New Zealander who ended up in England.  Turns out she was born the same year as my father, 1934.  Knowing that makes me read it as both the child and the parent.

A snail is climbing up the window-sill
into your room, after a night of rain.
You call me in to see, and I explain
that it would be unkind to leave it there:
it might crawl to the floor, we must take care
that no one squashes it. You understand,
and carry it outside, with careful hand,
to eat a daffodil. 

I see, then, that a kind of faith prevails:
your gentleness is moulded still by words
from me, who have trapped mice and shot wild birds,
from me, who drowned your kittens, who betrayed
your closest relatives, and who purveyed
the harshest kind of truth to many another.
But that is how things are: I am your mother,
and we are kind to snails.

I had those snail moments, too, as a child: We are not the kind that hits others.  We are people for whom silliness is a virtue.  We are not to cheat at games, or throw tantrums when we lose.  We believe music to be beautiful and essential, along with wandering through forests, climbing mountains, and sleeping by rivers.  We absolutely do not, whether angry or not, call our best friend, a Japanese-American, a nip.


As a parent and grandparent, and watching my daughter raise two of her own, I am fully aware of the baggage we bring to raising children, and the detritus of daily life that swirls around our answers to a child's question, worry, or upset.  Lord knows I have had, and have, my inconsistencies--the little rages hovering around my moments of gentleness--and that I have betrayed and displayed my harsh edge, yet "that is how things are."  Or as Bruce Cockburn sings, "that's the burden of the angel-beast."


I treasure those childhood lessons, and that gives me hope that some of that treasure has been passed on despite myself.