This week my husband celebrated his sixtieth birthday. It was a big day for me! Astounding and humbling, to tell you the truth. I have known this man for most of my adult life. I had one of those, ‘where have all the years gone’ moments. We certainly have much to be grateful for in our lives. But, wow, fast forward in the life lane. The years they do fly by; all the adages hold true.

My birthday wish for him was that we could truly enjoy the next decade together. Take it for us, to explore, experience and live fully; If not now, when, certainly chimes with resounding certainty as well.

I gave him 6 quotes to embrace, and one for good luck, representing his six decades and the one to come. They are not my words, they are a selection of Oprah’s on the occasion of her 60th, and I like them all.

1. I don’t believe in accidents. I know for sure that everything in life happens to help us live.
2. Be thankful for what you have; you’ll end up having more. If you concentrate on what you don’t have, you will never, have enough.
3. Surround yourself with only people who are going to lift you higher.
4. The greatest discovery of all time is that a person can change his future by merely changing his attitude.
5. The thing you fear most has no power. Your fear of it is what has the power. Facing the truth really will set you free.
6. Follow your instincts. That’s where true wisdom manifests itself.
7. Breathe. Let go. And remind yourself that this very moment is the only one you have for sure.

An ahhhaaa moment. Yes, actually. Don’t wait. Live life now and enjoy every single moment. I want to wake up each morning and say thank you for this beautiful day.

This is my friend Debbi Moses, and this is a painting from her Warrior series: her response to her Breast Cancer. When I received these images in my in-box I was blown away. The courage, the expression, the beauty. Debbi is a colourful, creative, embrace life kind of a girl, and she has chosen to interpret her journey through paint and photography, using both the traditional mediums and her body as her canvas.

The result is a spectacular explosion of life washed in broad and bold hues of pink.

When I think about how much we keep inside, and the power we unleash when we accept and articulate our stories, it is truly incredible. It’s brave. It’s connecting. It triggers a response. It allows others to see that piece of us that is extraordinary. It’s our slice of the light. And sometimes it is wrapped in a package that we would certainly not have wanted, not have imagined or wouldn’t pray away if we could.

I am amazed and humbled when people have the courage to share their journeys and bare their souls. When faced with sheer honesty. When staring in to the eyes of that potent intermingling of fear and hope. It makes us still. It forces us to recognize. It turns the mirror on our own lives, and makes us think about our blessings and our personal trails. We are all warriors in some way. And, we are the champions of our own stories.

I made a sponge cake last week. I only have a hand mixer and sat on a stool by the counter for 15 minutes beating 9 eggs. I longed for one of those cake mixers, you know, those retro ones in robin’s egg blue and chrome, that I could just turn on and leave so I could continue my multi-tasking life. Instead I sat on a stool and watched the time on the microwave as the eggs turned to lemon yellow.

Have I turned in to Mrs. Cleaver? I grew up in the sixties, in the generation of peace and love. I’m groovy! Who is this woman who now sits on a stool holding a hand mixer?

It’s an interesting transition. Practical. I mean, we have children, careers, are involved in community, host family and friends, cook, and maintain the house, as well as our other pursuits. Hmmmmm – what has really changed? Some of my friends are playing bridge once a week. This was something that my mother did! We are involved with our children’s lives in a much deeper way than our parents, that’s for sure! I think that is because our life experience and theirs are so similar. We know exactly what they are doing! The Beav certainly didn’t invite Mom to the ACC to see the Stones…

In any case, it seems that our roles as women are, as they say in Thailand, “ same, same but different.”

I have gone from hippy to Boho chic, and not just in fashion, but in attitude as well that can be applied to various aspects of my life. Idealistic roots elegantly intermingled with New Age thinking, cultural trappings, and life 101. From aspirations of road tripping in a VW van to country excursions in a Mercedes sedan. The domestication of Jacqui happened so seamlessly that I didn’t realize it was happening. I’m actually really good with it! I treasure my home and family role.

The truth is that I don’t really give much consideration to my age or my role as a woman. I’ve never had to stake a claim to the feminine journey. It has all been very organic. I think that’s why I was taken aback when I noticed myself with the hand mixer and the attitude it reflected. I’ve enjoyed all the decades of my life, each with virtues and vanities.

This week we celebrated Passover. Every family has their traditions. At the end of the Seder there is a rhyme called ‘Only one Kid’. It’s a children’s rhyme that begins when the father brings home a goat, and then sees various animals, objects and characters added on in succession. The cat came and ate the goat, and the dog came and bit the cat… you get the idea. In any case, we substitute sounds for the animals and characters as we go around the table chanting this tale. This tradition began many years ago, when my Mom was still with us, and she was quite old at the time. What took us all by surprise and delight, was that she impersonated the goat, with a joyful ‘baaaaaaa’! And she chimed in at just the right times throughout the rhyme.

The next year, we were equipped with a video and a camera in anticipation of capturing the moment, but it didn’t happen quite the same. Now, each year, we all picture that time with her as we sit around my sister’s table. It is etched in each of our imaginations, and makes us smile. We didn’t need the video or a photograph. We all shared that intimate, magical moment and we remember.

Are those memories that live only in our imagination the most powerful of all? As it turns out, according to a study by Fairfield University Psychologist, Linda Henkel, published in Psychological Science, our obsession with documenting every moment through a lens doesn’t necessarily help us remember them. Her study reveals that we actually remember things with more clarity and detail when we have experienced them first hand, rather than capturing them with a camera.

It makes me think about how we remember. There are some things I know about my childhood, but I can’t say for certain that I remember them as they actually happened, or if I know them through the photograph or the telling. Some memories are hearsay and some are absorbed. And, some are memories that we experience collectively, that remain in our psyche and our hearts that are intensely powerful. Certainly, that’s how I felt at our Seder on Tuesday night. We sat together, all the children and grandchildren that were with Mom that night, and we shared the story with her great grandchildren as well, as we continued the tradition.

Memories flourish in our experience, storytelling and personal remembrance. Memories, may be beautiful and yet…

Thought you might enjoy this live video of Barbara Streisand, 1975, The Way we Were

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-KPGh3wysw

There was a time when I did not understand the need to tell our stories. I couldn’t make sense of why anyone would want to share the cherished, often tragic, sometimes philosophical, and deeply personal aspects of their lives with others. Matilda changed this for me.

She was a small pretty woman, a member of Sisterhood at my Synagogue. The one who would knit baby gifts for new mothers, volunteered in all sorts of ways, and sang in the choir. She and her husband had immigrated to Canada escaping from religious persecution in Cairo and painstakingly started over. Then she lost him, then her son, and then her daughter to Cancer, and yet she still maintained her faith. I couldn’t understand.

I talked to her about it, and she asked me to write her story. It was so important for her to leave behind an account of her life for her grandson. She wanted to be heard, her story to be told. I spent many afternoons recording her memories. I sat on her couch, surrounded by her photographs and keepsakes, with the sun streaming through the same windows she had shared with them all, as she exposed the intimacies of her life. We laughed, sat still in silence, held hands, and cried.

So much time has passed since then, and I don’t know if she is still around. But her story has remained in my heart. The inspiration of her smile and her gentle, sweet faith in life is something that had a great impact on me.

I think in many ways she allowed me to consider and confront my own life story; pieces of which I had meticulously tucked away in the top drawer. You know, the one with all the junk that never seems to get cleaned out. She taught me that when we share our lives with others we not only connect them in our narrative, but we clear space for them to share with us. It’s brave. It’s beautiful.

Joan Didion says, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live… We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the “ideas” with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.”

We are collectors of memories and the keeper of our anguish and treasures. We all have a story. What’s yours? One that in so many ways defines us; is like the spine of our hardcover memoir, but the pages inside, well, that still awaits our narration.

David Hartman wrote, “ Passover is the night for reckless dreams, for visions about what a human being can be, what society can be, what history may become.”

This weekend I turned my attention towards our Passover Seder, took all my Hagaddah’s from the bookshelf, brought up the ‘plague masks’ from the basement, and looked at the envelopes of additional readings that we have supplemented over the years. What to do this year? How to honour the Seder with historical context, and modern relevance?

I actually love Pesach. That first breakfast of matzo with Tempte cream cheese is delicious! Taking out precious keepsakes like my mother’s silk, tasseled and embroidered matzo cover, the Seder plate my sister bought me from Israel. Not the cleaning, or shlepping all the dishes upstairs, polishing silver and preparing the house. I am losing more and more interest in this aspect as the years go on. But I do love the idea of our family around the beautifully table set with crystal, silver and glass, integrating blessings and story-telling into an evening laden with wine and good food.

The seed for our focus this year came from my daughter, Jesse, who said that this holiday is about story telling and we should tell of those who have journeyed from oppression to freedom. There are many. Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, The Freedom Writers, the Ethiopian journey to Israel. Some are struggles of ideals, some of territory, and some resonate from the personal turmoil that lies within. But, we are all striving in some way for peace and freedom. Eckhart Tolle teaches, “Liberation can arise from a feeling of connectedness.”

When I am away on vacation and see the moonrise, or the three stars of Orion’s belt, and consider that this is the same moon and the same stars that my children can see, and people all over the world, it is a humbling bond. When I sit at our Passover table, and realize that on this night Jewish families everywhere are gathering around their tables weaving the stories of our exodus from Egypt into our modern perspectives of freedom, hope and dreams, I am again in awe of how we are all connected. Just like the moon and the stars. It’s quite a powerful expression. It makes me feel small, but at the same time relevant. As if what we do, the legacies we create, the stories we recite echo through generations; those “reckless dreams for what we might become.”

**The photograph, One Love, is of Rachel Saffer, published in the Toronto Star on March 23, 1992, The Anit-Racism Rally at Queens Park

I read Dear Life, by Alice Munro, and I am, as is the literary world, intrigued by her last four stories, the ones she describes as “not quite stories,” because they are in fact fragments and memories from her life. I was struck by her relationship with her mother, a woman suffering from Parkinson’s, and a woman who in some ways was placed in a life to which she always felt there should be more, that she was a different woman trapped in the life she had.

It made me think about my mother. The voice of our mother remains in our heads and our hearts, regardless of the kind of relationship we had. My mother embodied the essence of that word. She was goodness. I hear my mother’s words, sense the touch of her hand, still, even after almost five years since her passing, I carry her in my comings and goings, and she is the voice that guides me.

It wasn’t all tea in the rose garden. I remember how it was towards the end. She wasn’t putting on any airs, contrary to her British upbringing, and her loving designation as Queen Mom. That was part of her metamorphosis, her struggle toward the end of her life when she couldn’t recognize herself. When the woman she had been, and still felt somewhere inside, became trapped in the agonized body of age.

But, there was always a glimpse of my mother. Her fingers, crooked with arthritis were still somehow tender. The same touch as when she sat on my bed, singing a lullaby, “….they’re lighting a stairway to heaven… sleep my little one sleep…” and she traced the shape of my eyebrows, and tucked my hair behind my ears. Her brown eyes, that grew old with flecks of green, and smiled at me. Kind, unquestioning eyes, that understood that love was the only thing that mattered. The calm when I put my hand on her chest, and her breath softened and her shoulders sighed.

We found peace in one another. We had survived the death of her husband, the death of her son, and cancer, and we held our pain like a secret that hung as a hammock between two stoic trees; it lingered, unspoken, felt, with no touch, honoured, so we could get through each day. We were a teepee – her, me, the past – fastened together with ropes and knots at the top, and individually knocked firmly in to the ground, dependent on one another to remain intact. That’s how it was.

As I arrive at her ages, I often recall what her life was like, what her experience was, and how she must have felt as a woman. I can look at these times differently now, not as a child, a teen, a young woman, but through the lens of a woman who too, has experienced love, children and the joys and aches of each passing year.