up and attum (sp?)

went to bed pretty late but woke up at 4:30am with energy. like liz says, the body has energy for what it wants to do. i decided to go to 6am hot yoga for the first time. liz is never really surprised, but it was a good thing i went because there was a young girl there for the first time, and she would have been practicing alone if i hadn't come. also thinking about going on a bike ride to get in the groove for the ride tonight.

was thinking about way more than is supposed to go through my head while doing yoga. but, i try to use that calm time with my thoughts to distill what i might write, get it processed and out.

i was thinking about carolee. carolee might have said "up and attum," but today liz said that with glee to describe my energy. she's witnessed my increased energy over the last week and said "must be great!" sure is...

my family met carolee in 1975 when my mom placed an ad for a housekeeper. carolee came to our house every thursday of my life. today is thursday (even though susan miller got tuesday/thursday confused, but it happens to the best of us). carolee is basically the one who told me the meaningful stories about my mom. they were good friends, really good friends, the kind of friend i wanted to have so in case i died and had a kid, that friend could pass on such stories.

my mom was always curious how carolee kept so happy. there my mom was with her husband and big house, and yet carolee was the one buzzing around the house with a vacuum, a single mom with three kids. i got to understand carolee's strength the older i got, even though initially it turned me off because it resulted in making me do things i didn't want to do like clean my room. but i wasn't the only kid she told what to do. she had her three, two of whom she had adopted when she and her ex-husband were stationed in england. at the time, she wasn't able to have any of her own so she adopted her friends' two babies when they couldn't keep them. later she got the unexpected surprise of daniel, her biological son, but her two adopted ones, gary and kathy, always seemed closer to her and ended up back in nebraska with her, which they were glad for when she died before we expected, in her early 70's.

i couldn't talk at carolee's funeral. i couldn't give some kind of speech, even though if i could have, it would have been something. my dad got up there and gave a great speech. he told the story of how he found her biological father for her by playing a detective game he had learned in counter-intelligence. her dad was in florida and was so grateful to know carolee for the rest of his life. at her funeral, i was dumbfounded by how quickly carolee died and that i hadn't been allowed to see her in the hospital. i was in law school, and people didn't want to disturb me.

anyways, back to carolee's life... i listened raptly throughout my teens, hungry for a woman's attention, and promised i would write about her. i think a pivotal moment for carolee was when she divorced her first husband, bill, late in life. she had met sam, a married man, at a bar where she and bill went. she got along with sam really well. bill, on the other hand, didn't really make carolee a priority. he re-married after they divorced.

carolee never remarried (although some people thought she and my dad should get married, but that never would have happened). she did maintain a long relationship with sam, though. he never left his wife, jenny, who was often very sick. they had kids together, and he didn't want to upset the kids. but he never wanted to let carolee go. she told me that there was a sexual dimension to their relationship for years, maybe into carolee's early 60's. my grandma called sam carolee's sugar daddy (i guess her husband was one of those to another woman, too). nobody would judge carolee, though. she just wasn't the kind of person you judged. she was the kind of person you loved and admired. she seemed too strong to be judged, and she would give people a piece of her mind when necessary. but she was also so loving. at the funeral, one of the grown kids of the huck household, another family in our neighborhood who she worked with, gave a speech for himself and for his sister, in college in arizona. i was surprised by how similar his story was to the one i would have told: that she was a second mother to them, too.

carolee's relationship with sam always intrigued me. i always asked for updates. over the years, it changed a lot, and she could feel bitter toward him. she would occasionally let him come over and have coffee while she smoked her cigarettes. sam made sure she always had a new used car when she needed one. but i think carolee was really proud when she was finally able to save her own money. she took me out to red lobster, smoked her cigarette, had a lemon drop, and in her sweet and raspy voice told me about the money she'd invested, like she was right up there with my dad. she remodeled her kitchen right before she died. it made the house really easy to sell.

jenny was in the same hospital really sick at the time carolee was there. carolee's daughter kathy worked there as an administrative assistant and made sure her mom got the best care. kathy knew jenny was in the building, too, and she would see sam visit jenny. but no one said they ever saw him visit carolee. i don't think he could take it. he wasn't at the funeral.

i wonder how sam is. i think jenny died. i don't think he could find anyone like carolee. none of us will. but occasionally i see glimpses of her in women working really hard without much financial pay-off but with a good attitude toward their own lives. i am grateful to them. and carolee will always be with me. when her funeral brochure had the poem about "i'm in the blooming flowers...." and all of that i'm in nature stuff, for the first time i believed that comforting saying that no light, no energy, no love is ever lost from the universe . . .