Musings of a Restless Mind

I’m not quite moved yet, and am still disposing of things I no longer need. Most of the stuff was Sharon’s of course, and I’m trying to help as much of it as I can to find useful homes. I wrote about some of it in my Proof of Life post. I’m still finding more craft stuff, which will continue to go to the local schools until they throw up their hands and tell me to stop. Then it will go to the Goodwill or the Disabled American Vets.

I’ve already given away most of Sharon’s everyday clothes to the Goodwill, but that left her good clothes. If you follow the link, you can see pictures of SOME of them. I wanted a less anonymous home for those, so I took them to church today and gave them to some pretty young women in their early twenties. Some may go to their friends, and that’s perfect too. They had never met Sharon, but said they knew from what I’d shared about her that she had good taste, and they were not disappointed. I couldn’t tell them which was handmade because it’s been too long, but I’m sure some of it was.

That led me to an unusual observation. Sharon was a plain woman. If you think that means she wasn’t beautiful, you haven’t looked at her picture on the main page. She had wonderful taste in clothes, jewelry, accessories, tchotkes, food, and everything else except, inexplicably, me. :) So why do I say Sharon was a plain woman? Despite the beautiful clothes she bought, she could almost always be found wearing one of her unadorned hand-tailored 4-tier blue-jean skirts, simple blouse, and the silver Eye of God piece she made and turned into a necklace.

She did add to that with a solid jade bracelet, her pick of earrings and, occasionally, an extra necklace. Still she almost never wore the other beautiful jewelry she made or the other fancy clothes she bought. As a chemist, she learned to not wear nylons or pantyhose since they would erode away after a few hours exposure to the random chemicals of the lab. (Being a chemist is not the kind of profession where you live long and prosper.)

Life did not deal fairly with Sharon. She didn’t believe she would live past 18 because of the many credible threats from her alcoholic father about killing her and her mother, yet rather than giving in to despair or drugs, she planned a life as a chemist and writer. When she graduated with a BA in Chemistry with honors after only 3 years of college, her father’s comment was, “I thought you had to be smart to be a chemist.”

She was denied her PhD because her dissertation advisor insisted she lie about the research he had her doing, and she refused, but she found her Masters degree granted her a lifetime community college teaching credential in California, and she became the best chemistry teacher ever, and the best teacher ever some of her students insisted. She may have been the reason many of her students were able to pass Chemistry and get their Registered Nurse degrees despite their fear of the hard sciences.

She was plagued with ill health her entire adult life, starting with mononucleosis, and then fibromyalgia from her childhood PTSD. She survived hemorrhaging for 12 years that eventually led to cancer. If finally took a second heart attack to kill her. Yet, through it all she never let it stop her from dreaming, and they were not idle dreams despite her limitations. She managed to write an amazing novel, and then we spent 12 frustrating years trying to get a traditional publisher to buy it. The Amazon-led self-publishing revolution eventually allowed her to reach an audience, albeit a small one. Still, everybody loved the book, and she received a lot of amazing compliments on it.

Her health problems never allowed her to finish the two sequels she had planned, nor Hermit and Vulture, the Comic Book that Isn’t. I hope to finish that last one for her. None of that led her to stop dreaming of the life she could have. They may have been frequently frustrated dreams, but they were not idle dreams, as her finishing her novel showed.

Her health might have put restrictions on her, but she never let it stop her. When life closed a door on her, she jumped through a window. At one party at a folk music restaurant she organized for many of our friends, one, knowing her health problems, asked her, “Are you in pain now?”

“Yes,” she said, “but it helps to be doing something I enjoy with friends.”

So, Sharon was a dreamer, but never an idle dreamer. She constantly worked at making her dreams come true, and, if life or her health blocked her path, she just plotted her way around it, or moved on to the next dream. With her there was always another beautiful dream. So, I’m happy to spread some of her dreams to people who at least know of her, even if they never got to meet her in this life.

So dream. Dream big. Always work towards your dream. If there are obstacles, go around, go through, invent a new way of doing things if you have to. If you find your dream truly blocked, move on to the next one. If you don’t have a next one, you’re not dreaming big enough.