Quitting: Giving Thanks Not far Off the Grid

By Suzanne Danforth

November 29, 2007 6:00 AM

Two moose, one curious beaver, one owl and one power outage add up to equal my first handful of hours along Moose River in Rockwood, Maine, where I retreated for Thanksgiving weekend.

It got cold last night. I couldn't get the woodstove properly stoked, the power went down and the sheer surface area of the Palladian window in my loft overlooking the river guaranteed a chill. Even Atticus needed his own blanket. It's hard being off the grid.

Please. This comfortable cabin is about as far off the grid as I could easily and knowingly go at this point in my life. I am wretched at certain endeavors, including roughing it and home improvement projects.

For years, my brother has entreated me to learn how to change my own oil, replace a showerhead, or properly hang a picture. I don't even feign interest anymore. He weatherproofed my back door recently and when the inevitable invitation came to learn how, I countered that I would be happy to learn how, and would do so just after I teach him the cranial nerves.

Back to giving thanks. The ride from the New Hampshire Seacoast to the Maine Highland region is long. Really long. I had good company for the journey in my niece, Katie. She demonstrated amazing knowledge of the area, pointing out snowed-in logging roads and navigating our way far beyond the highway.

In preparing for this trip, I got caught up in the romance of the prospect of being entirely smoke free and breathing simple pure piney air while traipsing through the woods. I left Portsmouth without any cigarettes. I'm down to none or just a few a day, most days. Not bad, considering that when I turned 43 at the end of July I was smoking nearly a pack every day.

Along about exit 157 (that's right, exit one hundred fifty seven) my sister called us to check on our progress. It was when Katie said "We'll see you in a couple of hours" that I crumpled. A couple of hours? A couple more hours? Hours? Plural? As in more than one?

Exit 157 used to be exit 39. Psychologically, I like exit 39 a lot better, let me tell you. Perhaps if it were still exit 39 I would not have pulled off the road to purchase a nasty pack. But I did, and I smoked, and I stayed calm, amiable and alert on the road as a result.

This was a good thing, because I began to white-knuckle the wheel 50 or so miles later in response to the signs warning me of the dangers of crashing into a wandering moose.

I found myself employing a methodical visual sweep of the vista in front of my headlights; near left, far left, far right, near right. Katie and I discussed identifying a "moose word." She is an exuberant person and she gasps for the smallest of reasons, including in response to her own thoughts. I knew a gasp in this situation might result in a rollover, and we finally settled on the single word "moose" as our verbal signal. Katie informed me that we would surely utter the word reverently, if we were lucky enough to see one.

Miles later, in the high beams in the near left quadrant, I saw a twinkle at the road side. That reflection was followed by a looming outline that took shape first into one moose, then two. One was a bull of proportions I have seen only in pictures, peering at us and turning slowly toward the woods, as if he owned them.

Which, I suppose he does.

The gasp that followed belonged to me, and I was suddenly catapulted into the holiday spirit; excited, hopeful and on the lookout for magic.

At dinner, we remembered to give thanks and be grateful out loud. But feeling grateful inside is even nicer. I spent some time in the past several years trying to be purposefully grateful and it didn't work so well. I often felt like I was being sent to bed while everyone else who got to stay up was having a picnic, party or worse, pony rides.

I am grateful for many things this year; for my cozy little house in Portsmouth, for the children in my life, for my family, friends, neighbors and community. It is good, too, to know some things about myself; that I will never trade my name, even if the right someone eventually dances by; that I don't have to stay in a job that doesn't fit, that bad things do pass, even if it takes years.

Suzanne is typically bah-humbug around the holidays. Perhaps her heart has grown three times. Ask her at suzanne.danforth@gmail.com.

Quitting: Trash Talk and Sexy Stewardship

By Suzanne Danforth

November 22, 2007 6:00 AM

Listen up, Earth citizens. You will generate 25 percent more trash between today and Dec. 25th than you do all the other months of the year. You will haul it weekly to your curb and it will disappear. Catalogs, boxes, mailings, ribbons, wrapping paper, holiday cards, glass and plastic, gone, our detritus whisked away. There will even be live trees at the curb (sob) waiting for incineration.

There is nothing magical about what happens to the trash after it leaves your neighborhood. It goes from the curb into one of Portsmouth's 12-ton capacity garbage trucks and up the highway to a big garbage pile (aka landfill) in Rochester. There, Portsmouth's 12.5 million annual pounds of garbage join recycling and trash from surrounding communities for sorting.

We're talking trash this week, folks. Today, we lie on the floor and bemoan our overlarge appetites and give thanks for our privileged citizenship in the world's premiere military industrial complex. Tomorrow, watch out, we hit the stores.

I kicked off my holiday season by attending a trash lecture a few weeks ago hosted by municipal employee Silke Psula (known to her Portsmouth colleagues as the recycling queen) and others from nearby communities. (Please don't feel left out if you are from Dover, or Eliot or Greenland. Call your municipal people Monday for your numbers.)

Trash, says Psula, needs to become sexy. She quickly follows that comment with reference to a biblical verse about stewardship to the earth. I don't know about you, but I have never successfully mixed sexy with stewardship. Sure, stewardship involves passion, but it's not necessarily the sexy kind.

Anyway, the harbinger of the holidays has been showing up in my mailbox for some weeks now. I don't even look at the catalogs, much less save them. I put them into the paper recycling box in the kitchen and haul them out to the curb when Tuesday comes.

But I think. I think. I think about garbage and food and resources.

I began to eat local this summer, bit by bit. I attended the farmers market every week, got to know the angry farmers and the friendly farmers, figured out how some got their greens so clean (old washing machine agitation cycle), and bought fresh meat for the first time in my life (sorry Bessie). Eating with a local purpose led naturally to wondering about trash.

I have recycled since 1986, when I moved to California and got to know Greg. He ran one of San Francisco's early recycling centers, and educated the community tirelessly (if grumpily) on the necessity of recycling. I thought it was cute, quaint and quirky.

I was young.

Now I am old and I worry. I worry about the burden our biological need to procreate places upon the earth. I worry that the leaves did not seem to fall this year until about three weeks after I thought they should. I worry that about the startling reduction in the size of the polar ice cap as photographed from space. I don't need science to point the way, and I don't need politics to equivocate.

There is succor in the data, however. The average bag of trash is 20 lbs., before categorical recycling. We can reduce that to just 4 lbs. by separating materials. And yes, it is important to separate the plastic 1's and 2's from the other numbers.

The 1's and 2's literally boil down to a different substance than the others. Because there is an aftermarket ready to purchase them, they can't be contaminated by other types of plastics. They get purchased, turned into a raw resource, sold to someone who creates a product and eventually your trash is marketed back to you in the form of a recycled product.

Sorting is not just a feel-good green act. The consequences of poor sorting are almost as dire as the consequences of not sorting at all. New Hampshire is not siting new landfill beyond 2018. By 2020, we will have no further capacity for old-fashioned dump-it-in-big-piles-somewhere-out-of-town-where-I-don't-have-to-think-about-it style landfills. We must reduce the scope of our throwaways, and become more creative in our day to day living. It's a crowded planet. We've had the indulgent luxury of a new cup every day for our coffee, of disposable diapers, of commercial cleaning products.

It's time to get back to vinegar and lemon juice to clean the bathroom, to drink our own perfectly good tap water, to support projects like the UNH Ecoline and to purchase responsible technologies as they become more widely available to us.

Regardless of our politics, we're all in this together.

Suzanne is out of town and cannot attend any musical festivities at our local red retailer tomorrow. She is available for bail bond duty, however, at suzanne.danforth@gmail.com.

Quitting: The old life, starting anew

By Suzanne Danforth

November 15, 2007 6:00 AM

In preschool, we always began our day in circle with a tune or two and a greeting. It really did a body good to pointedly acknowledge everyone in the room and tell them "hello, so very glad to see you." I'm not talking Romper Room memories either. I spent the past two years in preschool, exploring the world of developing language.

It seems I have two jobs: a day job and a night job. As a reader of Quitting, you know all about my night job as writer, in which dispatches from my head make their way to the Herald every Thursday. My day job (which by the way is completely, wholly, unaccountably and diametrically antithetical to smoking) is as a pediatric speech-language pathologist.

I came to pediatrics by way of adults. I was a neurodegenerative specialist (don't choke on that) at a large urban hospital in Massachusetts for years. I loved my work, my colleagues, and the opportunity to watch grace happen on a near daily basis. I traded degeneration for development when my own mother turned up with a nasty withering disease and I found I needed more hopefulness and whimsy in my daily work life.

Well let me tell you, hopefulness and whimsy is just what you get when you hang with a bunch of four year olds every day. You also get a front row seat to observe developing social skills like conflict resolution, when to tell the teacher, when to ask for help and why it's not OK to hit someone else, even if they deserve it.

It is in part because I am exposed daily to the breathtaking innate creativity of children that I began writing again. The other part is time; since my mother's passing there is no more need to meet with lawyers or nursing home administrators, no need to get medicines, seasonal clothes that fit or manage the paperwork that comes with being someone's legal representative. When she died last year, I was grateful in my head that she was not suffering any longer, but it was a stilted cerebral gratefulness that had nothing to do with my heart. I was decidedly un-grateful that my mother went like she did and that she was gone forever.

That has changed slowly over the year. Not only do I have a developing relationship with her as most-important-and-honored dead person in my life, I have the time to explore my own creativity, with the help of the little ones I know. Since I can't draw worth beans, I don't set goals like "I'm going to run a marathon" like my friend and neighbor Amy Wallace, and since I'm not very good at making stuff, that leaves writing. Massaging the written word, crafting a thought over and over until it comes out just rhythmically so can make me sigh with pleasure.

My choice of tagline, Quitting, has been like a needy dog lately, poking its nose into my side, nudging me, sending me powerful-strong silent messages. It's as if Quitting is my smoking baby and my smoking baby got extinguished along with the bathwater. Throw out smoking? Sure! And while you're at it, why not quit everything else you know about your life!

Yes, reader, I am preparing to quit my entire old life. I have decided to leave my profession as a speech pathologist for one year, during which time my job will be to establish enough of an income stream as a writer to justify going forward into a second year, and hopefully a third.

I do not naturally ascribe to the school of life idea that believes "everything happens for a reason." I am more from the drama school of "why the heck did that happen and how long can I ponder and gnash over this before the people in my life want to kill me."

New age-isms notwithstanding, there have been unmistakable signs from the universe that this is supposed to be happening for me; there is my chance New York City meeting of a person who is highly placed in a very large and recognizable international media outlet, there are the two separate offers from published writer friends to introduce me to their editors, there is the reconnection with the first editor who ever gave me an assignment back in San Francisco in 1987.

There is also the children's character and story that came to me almost fully formed during a meeting (sorry about that attention wandering).

Children's songs and old tunes are equally great for pointing the way. I like this one lately: Enjoy yourself while you're still in the pink, enjoy yourself, it's later than you think.

Suzanne is smoking not much at all, in the big picture. She remains the engine that could. Encouragements and writing assignments accepted at suzanne.danforth@gmail.com.

Quitting: Trigger Happy (and dangerous)

By Suzanne Danforth

November 08, 2007 6:00 AM

Oh it might be a clunky column this week, reader. In the spirit of the haunted holiday just gone by, be warned before you read on! There could be scary syntax, ghoulish grammar or dangling participles here.

I am writing to you from a hamlet in Western Massachusetts, Northampton, home of Smith College and my closest friend, who shall be known here as Trigger.

Although Portsmouth and Northampton have no formal municipal relationship, the two towns in my mind are sisters. I've been coming here for nearly 25 years, or as long as I've known Trigger, and I have come to think of Northampton as Portsmouth without the ocean. They may be "cities," but these girls give off a real hometown vibe. Their backdrops are different (mountain hamlet versus coastal community) but the similarity of their souls is unmistakable.

Despite my love of the place, I am not in my usual writing space, a spot also known as my bed, where it is comfy and warm. I don't dispatch my thoughts to you as much as smuggle them out of my brain. I write wrapped in a down comforter with my laptop propped just so, coffee to my right and my dog at my side. Doesn't sound much like a big deal; writing is the ultimate in portability, right? Wrong. I have been staring long enough at this blank document to realize that I have begun to attach my writing to place and creature comforts.

Writing may be a higher order behavior, but as a behavior, it really is just like any other repetitive act. Thankfully, the products of repetitive writing are more novel and generative than my other favorite repetitive behavior, smoking. Enter Trigger, aka many other names and nicknames; Marya, Myra, Ouij, Zekebird to list a few. We decided last night that I am a trigger for her and she is a trigger for me. In analyzing this positively, I figure someone can only attain trigger status if they actually trigger something. Even though in this case what is triggered is an undesired behavior, we can work to change it to something better, or focus on what is already there. Myra is also my trigger for moving my body (shhh, don't say the E-word).

She began to teach me years ago, when moving my body was somewhat more of a chore than it is these days, that walking in the woods is fun, interesting and smells good too. She taught me how to dribble, kayak and how to ski on the slopes at Stowe (that last just four years ago).

For several years, when I was commuting from Dover to Boston for work, I stayed with Myra two nights a week. This afforded us a grown-up opportunity to somewhat share a slice of day to day life, like we did all those years ago in college.

And even though she actually biked to work in Somerville from her apartment in Newton every day, she could always be counted on to share a smoke and a laugh at the end of the day. I still count on her for so many things. Our mothers had the same bizarre form of dementia (frontal lobe) at the same time. We would shake our heads together at the improbability of it, or share in joint envy of our age-matched peers who still had their parents and their grandparents.

Now, despite our acknowledgement that smoking doesn't serve us so well anymore, it is still something that is triggered in each of us, simply by the presence of the other. I called her one night last week to report I was getting restless. It was the time of day when most people's bodies and minds begin to wind down, but my mind was stuck in the groove of smoking, wanting to smoke and seriously contemplating a trip to the store to purchase smoking implements. When Myra gives support, it rarely comes in the form of "no, don't do that" or even "I don't think you should do that." Make no mistake, she has an opinion and she expresses it, but she doesn't tell me what to do.

Her prescription for my restlessness that night? To put off buying a pack until tomorrow. Brilliant.

Suzanne is getting ready to trade "The Known World" for the unknown world. Watch it happen here. suzanne.danforth@gmail.com.

Quitting: Passing the Couch Moving Test

By Suzanne Danforth

November 01, 2007 6:00 AM

This week, we shall look at what cold turkey is shaping up to look like. My story will reference dreadlocks, cigarette caresses and how to be a witch, but in a nice way.

You may have noticed in the past few weeks that the tagline has changed from "Trying to Quit" to "Quitting." For all the ups and downs and slips and slides, I have never not once let go of my desire to become a non-smoker. In quits past, attempts were followed by failures and failures were followed by amnesia.

It made for a nice little parade; a bon vivant as marshal, pomping it up in front (Come one! Come all! See me quit!) with a smoky fugue state bringing up the rear (Who me? I said I wanted to quit? Really?).

This time, my grand marshal seems to realize that its rightful place is in the back of the line, eating humble pie and pushing fugue state along every time it holds up the works.

On day two of cold turkey, I had to move a couch. A big comfy sectional couch designed for a great room, not for the crooked Colonial space in which I actually live. My friend assured me (being male) it would fit and we undertook the project together. We commenced at the U-Haul on the Bypass where, waiting for my turn, the first murderous cold turkey urges occurred.

The completely appropriate and nice gentleman behind the counter had a beautiful head of dreadlocks, the more than 10-year kind, at least. For five awful minutes, I would have traded my soul for a big pair of industrial scissors. I envisioned myself leaping over the counter brandishing them as sword and slashing through each gnarled coil. When it finally came time in the real world for our turn, it was a terrible downturn to discover that I needed to return home to get proof of insurance.

The short drive afforded my frontal lobes the opportunity to talk to the rest of my brain, and I returned to U-Haul to confess my situation to the gentleman. He understood, he used to smoke himself, and quit after seeing evidence of the scam perpetrated on the populous by big tobacco. I was still antsy waiting for the rental truck process to play out, with lots of overflow movement in my limbs (dance anyone?) but my inner witch was at least demonstrating a modicum of sociability.

That lasted until we got the couch into my front hall, where it sat on the floor and refused to budge. You can't stay here, I admonished it. It curled its couch lip petulantly back at me and remained silent. Thankfully, my friend, joined now by my neighbor, knew how to take charge of the situation (taking charge in this case involved implements such as screwdrivers and brute force) and the couch finally made it into the living room.

Throughout, I didn't smoke. I can't say I have been 100 percent abstinent since Oct. 18, but I can say I have not smoked more cigarettes than I can count on one hand. In talking to people who have succeeded, it seems cold turkey can look different for different people. There is the lady at my coffee shop for whom cold turkey was just that. Done. Finis. "If you are smoking one a day, you don't need any at all," says coffee shop wisdom.

There is my friend Marge, who looks at life with years of accumulated experience, and who was my mother's longtime partner in jazz and smoking crime. She kept a pack in her freezer for a long time, and would take one out each night and hold it for a while before taking just one drag. There is my friend Andy, who quit after he got a cold and didn't smoke for one whole day because his body didn't want to. Then he didn't smoke for two whole days, and so on until that turned into 10 smoke-free years.

Finally, I seem to have spoken to a lot of men who quit on a bet (oh, lovely competitive natures...;.). So, bottom line is, I'm doing OK. Yes, none is best. None remains the goal. But for today, less is better than giving up my goal completely.

Suzanne actually forgot this year and had to be reminded about the Saturday night Halloween dance at the Jumbo Circus Peanuts world headquarters. Swear to God. suzanne.danforth@gmail.com.