Like most things of a destructive nature, it arrived with little notice. Sitting on the front porch reading, I sensed a change in the atmosphere, something advancing from the southwest. The hair on the back of my neck didn’t stand up, but it should have.
Lily and Tamar didn’t need to be out in whatever was coming so I drove the hundred yards up the road to Mama and Daddy’s where the two dogs were lounging on the deck. I’d gotten Tamar inside the house and had just gotten Lily into the Escape when the first of the uni-strikes of lightning and thunder lit up the yard.
By the time Lily and I pulled into the carport at Sandhill – two? three minutes? – hail was throwing itself into the back windshield like gravel popcorn and the Escape was rocking jerkily from side to side. It was a good ten minutes before it was safe to get out and, even then, Lily had to be dragged by her collar.
The electricity was off and, in the light of dusk that had reappeared with the rapid passing of the clouds, I walked through the house arranging candles, locating flashlights. The heat of the day was been trapped inside so I opened the front and back doors to get some air circulating and started the long wait that accompanies being located so far off the main grid.
A few minutes later, at Keith’s invitation to check out the condition of the roads, we discovered what the weather had left in its wake – Daddy’s center-pivot irrigation system tossed onto its side, wheels up in the air like a wrecked tricycle and twisted like an aluminum pretzel; Mama’s Bradford pear tree split in two vertically with only a third of its trunk left standing, the rest having crashed to the ground and taken down the fence; and, heartbreakingly, most of the big oak lying in a two-story-high mound of limb and branch and leaf.
The big oak was there when we came to the farm nearly 40 years ago and, according to a neighbor who had grown up in the community and was nearly 80 at the time, it had been there since before he was born. It was probably close to 150 years old. Three generations of my family’s women have shelled peas under that tree; four generations of its men have stood in its shade, leaning against the hoods of various pick-up trucks and talking yield and price and politics. Adam and Kate had a rope swing that hung from one of its bodybuilder biceps branches and Mama had said just the other day how she was looking forward to seeing Adam’s soon-to-be-born son swing there, too.
No one, gratefully, was hurt. None of our houses – including the pond house, sheltered as it were by towering pines and oaks that simply fell to their sides, hoisting their entire root systems into the spring night like strange bouquets – were damaged. Along with good neighbors from down the road, we spent the next couple of hours of falling darkness working our way steadily toward the highway, chain-sawing fallen trees and pulling them to the ditches in the arc of headlights, the neighbor’s diesel drowning out the crickets and frogs who were nonplused by the chaos.
It was an amazing night of one amazing thing, thought, sight after another. I’ve not processed it all, not pulled in all the edges of the cloth to tuck under my feet and around my shoulders to create any kind of comfort. But there is one image that keeps floating back to the surface of my consciousness.
About a year ago I bought a glass ball, about as big as a grapefruit, painted pale aqua to mimic mercury glass. There was a hanger on its top, like a Christmas tree ornament, and I decided to hang it on the eave outside the bay window of the kitchen at Sandhill. A screw was drilled into the masonry eave and a long strand of 20-pound test weight fishing wire looped through the hanger to leave it dangling from the screw, swaying in the breeze, reflecting the light.
Sunday night, in the wind that we know was a tornado whether called as much by the National Weather Service or not, the screw came out and the ball became airborne. I didn’t notice at first. The big things – butchered trees and contorted metal – had my attention. But later, in the quiet and stillness that inevitably follows wreckage, I found it, all of it – screw and fishing line and glass ball – lying in the tall grass, unbroken and attached.
Someone, having read my Facebook post about the storm, sent me an e-mail asking about the farm. I replied: "Farm is wet. Landscape has changed. We will, as always, make adjustments."
Today I’m thinking that I should have added, "And as soon as I can get a ladder, the glass ball is going back where it belongs."
Copyright 2010
Monday, May 24, 2010
Tuesday, May 11, 2010
Perennial Favorite
I planted hostas last spring. They were, according to the little plastic-coasted stakes in the pots, well-suited to the shaded spot right outside the back door at Sandhill. I planted four, realized that I had greatly underestimated the number needed and planted eight more. They were green, so very green, and about half of them were a variety that had a thin yellow trim along the leaves.
To have been planted by someone who really doesn’t know a lot about gardening, the hostas did pretty well. Toward the end of the summer, though, a couple browned-up and died. Just died. I was disappointed. I’d been prepared by Martha Stewart, who turned the lowly hosta into the rock star of yard plantings, to expect hardiness. I’d convinced myself that out of the reach of the scorching sun and with water dripping off the roof directly onto their heads after every rain shower the hostas would survive.
It was difficult not to see it as some kind of sign.
The year turned and as spring made her leisurely way back to south Georgia, I became acutely aware of how ugly was the empty bed where the hostas had lived. I started wondering if maybe I should just load up on some pea gravel and spread it out like one big hosta headstone.
And, then, a couple of Sunday afternoons ago, home from a weekend trip out of town and headed outside to refill the hummingbird feeders, something caught my eye. Something green. And pointy. Looking closer I could tell it was one of my heretofore-assumed-dead hostas pushing up through the dirt.
Glory be!
I looked closer. There was another one. And another one. Six in all! I sat down on the edge of the carport and cried. It was a week after Easter, but I was witness to a resurrection! By the next morning, a total of 10 plants had, in varying heights, stood up from their slumber, stretched their arms and yawned into the sunlight.
Enthusiasm seized me. I rushed to town to buy four more to fill in the gaps in the bed. It was beautiful. I counted them twice like a child with her Easter eggs.
The next morning I hurried out the door, briefcase and pocketbook and gym bag dangling in a tangle from my arms, and, once again, something caught my eye. This time, though, it wasn’t a hosta in broad-leafed glory, but a hosta in gnawed-off ruin. I couldn’t be sure which of my neighbors had made a salad bar of my perennials, but thought it might be the armadillos who had already, in the side yard, produced more holes than the sales staff at Claire’s.
Upon consultation with Daddy, however, it appeared that the uninvited dinner guests were more likely to be rabbits than armadillos. After discussion with my friend David who, for reasons that cannot be explained, knows about such things, I found myself on Sunday afternoon sprinkling cayenne and black peppers over the flat green leaves, preparatorily dampened so that the spices might stick.
It was hard to tell the next morning whether the garnish had deterred any munching. What was easier to tell, though, was the fact that the first-chewed plants were already re-emerging. Once again the rolled up leaves were thrusting themselves into the open air. Once again they were reminding me that apparent death is often just that – apparent, not actual. They had survived the natural cycle of the seasons and now they were surviving predation.
People are a lot like plants. Some are annuals – showy and fragrant, but needy. They throw themselves profligately into the landscape and, with the fading of their season, gently die. And some are perennials – unobtrusive and subtle and sturdy. They soften the edges and thrive in the shade and, with the fading of their season, they die back, but they don’t die.
Annuals. Perennials. Neither a garden nor a life is complete without both.
Copyright 2010
To have been planted by someone who really doesn’t know a lot about gardening, the hostas did pretty well. Toward the end of the summer, though, a couple browned-up and died. Just died. I was disappointed. I’d been prepared by Martha Stewart, who turned the lowly hosta into the rock star of yard plantings, to expect hardiness. I’d convinced myself that out of the reach of the scorching sun and with water dripping off the roof directly onto their heads after every rain shower the hostas would survive.
It was difficult not to see it as some kind of sign.
The year turned and as spring made her leisurely way back to south Georgia, I became acutely aware of how ugly was the empty bed where the hostas had lived. I started wondering if maybe I should just load up on some pea gravel and spread it out like one big hosta headstone.
And, then, a couple of Sunday afternoons ago, home from a weekend trip out of town and headed outside to refill the hummingbird feeders, something caught my eye. Something green. And pointy. Looking closer I could tell it was one of my heretofore-assumed-dead hostas pushing up through the dirt.
Glory be!
I looked closer. There was another one. And another one. Six in all! I sat down on the edge of the carport and cried. It was a week after Easter, but I was witness to a resurrection! By the next morning, a total of 10 plants had, in varying heights, stood up from their slumber, stretched their arms and yawned into the sunlight.
Enthusiasm seized me. I rushed to town to buy four more to fill in the gaps in the bed. It was beautiful. I counted them twice like a child with her Easter eggs.
The next morning I hurried out the door, briefcase and pocketbook and gym bag dangling in a tangle from my arms, and, once again, something caught my eye. This time, though, it wasn’t a hosta in broad-leafed glory, but a hosta in gnawed-off ruin. I couldn’t be sure which of my neighbors had made a salad bar of my perennials, but thought it might be the armadillos who had already, in the side yard, produced more holes than the sales staff at Claire’s.
Upon consultation with Daddy, however, it appeared that the uninvited dinner guests were more likely to be rabbits than armadillos. After discussion with my friend David who, for reasons that cannot be explained, knows about such things, I found myself on Sunday afternoon sprinkling cayenne and black peppers over the flat green leaves, preparatorily dampened so that the spices might stick.
It was hard to tell the next morning whether the garnish had deterred any munching. What was easier to tell, though, was the fact that the first-chewed plants were already re-emerging. Once again the rolled up leaves were thrusting themselves into the open air. Once again they were reminding me that apparent death is often just that – apparent, not actual. They had survived the natural cycle of the seasons and now they were surviving predation.
People are a lot like plants. Some are annuals – showy and fragrant, but needy. They throw themselves profligately into the landscape and, with the fading of their season, gently die. And some are perennials – unobtrusive and subtle and sturdy. They soften the edges and thrive in the shade and, with the fading of their season, they die back, but they don’t die.
Annuals. Perennials. Neither a garden nor a life is complete without both.
Copyright 2010
Tuesday, April 27, 2010
TIll We Have Faces
I have this friend. We’ve known each other for over thirty years. We don’t see each other often, but when we do we don’t have to reacquaint or search for topics of conversation. We tease and laugh and remember easily.
At least we used to. About five or six years ago my friend made some changes in her life, changes that she assumed I would find difficult to accept. I found out about those changes from someone else and so our encounters, always brief, became stiff and contrived.
A few days ago we ran into each other at one of those events where every moment is meant to be celebratory and no one is allowed discomfort of any kind. One of those events where putting on a happy face is practically the cost of admission.
Looking at her face across the room, seeing a teenager and not a middle-aged woman, I made a decision. The two of us would not go home pretending.
She was surprised, a few hours later, when I took her by the arm and pulled her away from the group with whom we’d been chatting. In the quiet of an empty hallway, having decided that subtlety would be irresponsible, I looked her in the eye and said, "Love is unconditional or it is nothing at all."
My friend, once an awkward girl and, at this moment, an equally awkward woman, blinked her eyes and asked, "Does this mean I can stop hiding from you?"
Ah, yes. Hiding. It is what we do when fear besieges the fortresses of our hearts. It is what we do when the facade of competence and self-sufficiency begins to crumble. It is what we do when doubting truth seems easier than facing it.
In the trek from forest to farm to city, we humans never lost the instinct for camouflage. We are born with a bent toward blending in. We wear uniforms and make-up. We join clubs and wave flags. And we do it because the world is a dangerous place.
Or so we pretend.
The reality is that that from which we are hiding is rarely evil or life-threatening. The reality is that that from which we are hiding is nothing more than the conviction that we are not worthy, that our value is insignificant, that we can not measure up. And whether the disguise is a fig leaf or a forced smile, it is never enough to hide our nakedness.
C. S. Lewis’s last published book, Till We Have Faces, a retelling of the Greek myth of Cupid and Psyche, is the story of two sisters – one beautiful, one hideously ugly. Living behind a veil so that her ugliness cannot be seen by the people she rules, Orual must eventually face the gods and their charges against her. And she must do it without the veil.
Orual says, "When the time comes to you at which you will be forced at last to utter the speech which has lain at the center of your soul for years ... you’ll not talk about the joy of words. ... Till that word can be dug out of us, why should [the gods] hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?"
And, so, finally mustering the courage to reveal herself, what the gods see is the beautiful face of her sister."Does this mean I can stop hiding from you?"I wish I’d had time to prepare an answer. I wish I’d had some instant flash of insight. I wish I’d been quick enough, then, to say something about camouflage and fig leaves.
Instead, I looked my friend straight in the eyes and said only, "I love you."
We embraced and she walked away."
Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds," William Shakespeare wrote. Yes. Yes. A thousand times yes.
Copyright 2010
At least we used to. About five or six years ago my friend made some changes in her life, changes that she assumed I would find difficult to accept. I found out about those changes from someone else and so our encounters, always brief, became stiff and contrived.
A few days ago we ran into each other at one of those events where every moment is meant to be celebratory and no one is allowed discomfort of any kind. One of those events where putting on a happy face is practically the cost of admission.
Looking at her face across the room, seeing a teenager and not a middle-aged woman, I made a decision. The two of us would not go home pretending.
She was surprised, a few hours later, when I took her by the arm and pulled her away from the group with whom we’d been chatting. In the quiet of an empty hallway, having decided that subtlety would be irresponsible, I looked her in the eye and said, "Love is unconditional or it is nothing at all."
My friend, once an awkward girl and, at this moment, an equally awkward woman, blinked her eyes and asked, "Does this mean I can stop hiding from you?"
Ah, yes. Hiding. It is what we do when fear besieges the fortresses of our hearts. It is what we do when the facade of competence and self-sufficiency begins to crumble. It is what we do when doubting truth seems easier than facing it.
In the trek from forest to farm to city, we humans never lost the instinct for camouflage. We are born with a bent toward blending in. We wear uniforms and make-up. We join clubs and wave flags. And we do it because the world is a dangerous place.
Or so we pretend.
The reality is that that from which we are hiding is rarely evil or life-threatening. The reality is that that from which we are hiding is nothing more than the conviction that we are not worthy, that our value is insignificant, that we can not measure up. And whether the disguise is a fig leaf or a forced smile, it is never enough to hide our nakedness.
C. S. Lewis’s last published book, Till We Have Faces, a retelling of the Greek myth of Cupid and Psyche, is the story of two sisters – one beautiful, one hideously ugly. Living behind a veil so that her ugliness cannot be seen by the people she rules, Orual must eventually face the gods and their charges against her. And she must do it without the veil.
Orual says, "When the time comes to you at which you will be forced at last to utter the speech which has lain at the center of your soul for years ... you’ll not talk about the joy of words. ... Till that word can be dug out of us, why should [the gods] hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?"
And, so, finally mustering the courage to reveal herself, what the gods see is the beautiful face of her sister."Does this mean I can stop hiding from you?"I wish I’d had time to prepare an answer. I wish I’d had some instant flash of insight. I wish I’d been quick enough, then, to say something about camouflage and fig leaves.
Instead, I looked my friend straight in the eyes and said only, "I love you."
We embraced and she walked away."
Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds," William Shakespeare wrote. Yes. Yes. A thousand times yes.
Copyright 2010
Monday, April 12, 2010
Anything But Over Easy
They were just eggs. Ordinary eggs. Scrambled for breakfast, fried hard and slapped between two pieces of white bread with mayonnaise, broken into pound cake batter in fat gold globes.
But once a year they were anything but ordinary.Lowered gently into coffee cups with the thin wire egg holder that came in the Paas box with six colored disks that could have easily been mistaken for SweetTarts, they magically turned yellow like dandelions in morning dew and purple like verbena scattered across the churchyard. They became pale pink like dogwoods, brighter pink like azaleas and deep rose like camellias, the hues varying according to how long we could stand the smell of vinegar.
There were no adhesive stickers, no peel-off graphics, no stand-up cardboard caricatures. There was no glitter, no puff paint. We created Easter eggs with nothing but color.
But then we had to give them up, had to relinquish our beautiful treasures, into the hands of the those who would hide them before giving us the chance to reclaim them by demonstrating our skill and patience and cunning. We were, without knowing it, being introduced to the concept of quest – desire and pursuit.
Except for one thing, one thing that had never occurred to me until Easter Sunday afternoon when I drove past a yard where a single child was weaving slowly through the grass, basket in hand, eyes down.
Every Easter egg hunt in which I ever participated was started by an announcement, usually by the thick-chested Sunday School Superintendent standing on the steps of the social hall, as to the boundaries of the hunt. "Go back as far as the fence and over on that side as far as the ditch and on the other side up to the dogwood tree. Don’t go past the cars. No eggs over there." He told us, in essence, where to find the treasure.
And in a real quest, the kind that requires single-mindedness and the forsaking of all else, it’s never that easy. In a real quest, the object of longing having been identified and the heart having been given over to the consuming desire to have it for one’s own, one can’t know ahead of time the limits of the search. In a real quest, the kind that can take a lifetime to accomplish, the hero, the heroine has to ignore the fences and ditches and head straight toward the horizon.
A few weeks ago "Man of La Mancha" arrived at Sandhill in a red Netflix envelope. I’d never seen the movie, though I knew something of the story of the crazy old man who saw a giant in a windmill and a noble lady in a prostitute. Ridiculed and taunted by most and simply tolerated by his only friend, Don Quixote neared the end of his life tired and weak, but never wavering in the pursuit of his desire.
"This is my quest," he sang, "to follow that star, no matter how hopeless, no matter how far. To fight for the right without question or pause, to be willing to march into Hell for a heavenly cause."
Hell, I think, is probably way past the fence, way past the ditch.
I understand the need for boundaries and for consequences for violating those boundaries. I understand the need for limits, in society and in an individual life. What I also understand, though, is the need to stretch those limits in pursuit of one’s own heavenly cause.
And, maybe, if we started with an Easter egg hunt, some child somewhere would grow into a man or woman who – like Don Quixote scorned and covered with scars – teaches us all something about reaching for the unreachable star.
Copyright 2010
But once a year they were anything but ordinary.Lowered gently into coffee cups with the thin wire egg holder that came in the Paas box with six colored disks that could have easily been mistaken for SweetTarts, they magically turned yellow like dandelions in morning dew and purple like verbena scattered across the churchyard. They became pale pink like dogwoods, brighter pink like azaleas and deep rose like camellias, the hues varying according to how long we could stand the smell of vinegar.
There were no adhesive stickers, no peel-off graphics, no stand-up cardboard caricatures. There was no glitter, no puff paint. We created Easter eggs with nothing but color.
But then we had to give them up, had to relinquish our beautiful treasures, into the hands of the those who would hide them before giving us the chance to reclaim them by demonstrating our skill and patience and cunning. We were, without knowing it, being introduced to the concept of quest – desire and pursuit.
Except for one thing, one thing that had never occurred to me until Easter Sunday afternoon when I drove past a yard where a single child was weaving slowly through the grass, basket in hand, eyes down.
Every Easter egg hunt in which I ever participated was started by an announcement, usually by the thick-chested Sunday School Superintendent standing on the steps of the social hall, as to the boundaries of the hunt. "Go back as far as the fence and over on that side as far as the ditch and on the other side up to the dogwood tree. Don’t go past the cars. No eggs over there." He told us, in essence, where to find the treasure.
And in a real quest, the kind that requires single-mindedness and the forsaking of all else, it’s never that easy. In a real quest, the object of longing having been identified and the heart having been given over to the consuming desire to have it for one’s own, one can’t know ahead of time the limits of the search. In a real quest, the kind that can take a lifetime to accomplish, the hero, the heroine has to ignore the fences and ditches and head straight toward the horizon.
A few weeks ago "Man of La Mancha" arrived at Sandhill in a red Netflix envelope. I’d never seen the movie, though I knew something of the story of the crazy old man who saw a giant in a windmill and a noble lady in a prostitute. Ridiculed and taunted by most and simply tolerated by his only friend, Don Quixote neared the end of his life tired and weak, but never wavering in the pursuit of his desire.
"This is my quest," he sang, "to follow that star, no matter how hopeless, no matter how far. To fight for the right without question or pause, to be willing to march into Hell for a heavenly cause."
Hell, I think, is probably way past the fence, way past the ditch.
I understand the need for boundaries and for consequences for violating those boundaries. I understand the need for limits, in society and in an individual life. What I also understand, though, is the need to stretch those limits in pursuit of one’s own heavenly cause.
And, maybe, if we started with an Easter egg hunt, some child somewhere would grow into a man or woman who – like Don Quixote scorned and covered with scars – teaches us all something about reaching for the unreachable star.
Copyright 2010
Monday, March 29, 2010
Teeter Totter
At 1:32 p.m. last Saturday, after a winter that was long and hard and heavy, spring arrived. At that moment, known as the vernal equinox, the center of the sun was on the same plane as the equator of the earth and there was a perfect balance of light and dark.
Or so they say.
Balance is a tenuous, ephemeral thing. It is achieved when my checkbook and the bank’s records agree. It is executed when an elfin woman-child throws her body into the air in some stupefying combination of twists and turns and flips and lands steadily on a 4-inch piece of wood. It is attained when, the life coaches and self-help gurus tell us, one’s physical, relational, professional and spiritual lives are seamlessly integrated into a whole.
I repeat: Balance is a tenuous, ephemeral thing.
My friend Margaret is 81. A few years ago her doctor, explaining that as people age their ability to balance wanes and that it is this declination that most frequently results in bone fractures, gave her an exercise to do every day. For two minutes she was to stand on one foot and, at the conclusion of the two minutes, switch to the other foot for the same length of time.
Margaret shared this with several of us not just to receive kudos on the ease with which she accomplished this (She did, in fact, get a enthusiastic round of applause.), but to encourage us to do the same. And I have. Not every day, not even once a week, but often enough.
This is what I have learned: It is more difficult to balance in bare feet than in shoes. It helps, starting off, to use your arms as ballast. And it, that is, perfect balance doesn’t last for long.
Which brings me back to the vernal equinox. One moment it was winter; the next spring. One moment the earth was tilted; the next it wasn’t. One moment everything was the way it had been; the next it was, suddenly, the way it is.
I saw, the other day, a clock face with no numbers, only a minute hand. On the left-hand edge of the hand were block letters spelling out "the past." On the right-hand edge of the hand were block letters spelling out "the future." The fairly obvious point of the artist who designed it was that everything except this moment is either the past or the future. All the time that ever was and ever will be is balanced on either side of the moment we call the present.
So, in a way, every moment is the vernal equinox. Every moment is perfectly balanced between light and dark, good and bad, what was and what will be.
I spent most of the winter complaining about the weather. Complaining and wishing for temperatures and conditions more to my liking. Complaining and using the weather as an excuse for my general malaise. Complaining and walking through most days oblivious to the fact that I was – in my cold, bare feet and, at times, with my arms waving wildly to avoid falling – exactly where I was supposed to be.
I can say with some assurance that the checkbook kind of balance isn’t ever going to be a problem for me. I can say with greater assurance that I will never perform a successful "flight element" on the balance beam. What I can say with no assurance, but with a great deal of faith, is that, with the spring sunshine on my shoulders and the spring breeze in my hair, I’m going to try really hard for that seamless integration kind of balance. And, with any luck, it will last for more than just two minutes.
Copyright 2010
Or so they say.
Balance is a tenuous, ephemeral thing. It is achieved when my checkbook and the bank’s records agree. It is executed when an elfin woman-child throws her body into the air in some stupefying combination of twists and turns and flips and lands steadily on a 4-inch piece of wood. It is attained when, the life coaches and self-help gurus tell us, one’s physical, relational, professional and spiritual lives are seamlessly integrated into a whole.
I repeat: Balance is a tenuous, ephemeral thing.
My friend Margaret is 81. A few years ago her doctor, explaining that as people age their ability to balance wanes and that it is this declination that most frequently results in bone fractures, gave her an exercise to do every day. For two minutes she was to stand on one foot and, at the conclusion of the two minutes, switch to the other foot for the same length of time.
Margaret shared this with several of us not just to receive kudos on the ease with which she accomplished this (She did, in fact, get a enthusiastic round of applause.), but to encourage us to do the same. And I have. Not every day, not even once a week, but often enough.
This is what I have learned: It is more difficult to balance in bare feet than in shoes. It helps, starting off, to use your arms as ballast. And it, that is, perfect balance doesn’t last for long.
Which brings me back to the vernal equinox. One moment it was winter; the next spring. One moment the earth was tilted; the next it wasn’t. One moment everything was the way it had been; the next it was, suddenly, the way it is.
I saw, the other day, a clock face with no numbers, only a minute hand. On the left-hand edge of the hand were block letters spelling out "the past." On the right-hand edge of the hand were block letters spelling out "the future." The fairly obvious point of the artist who designed it was that everything except this moment is either the past or the future. All the time that ever was and ever will be is balanced on either side of the moment we call the present.
So, in a way, every moment is the vernal equinox. Every moment is perfectly balanced between light and dark, good and bad, what was and what will be.
I spent most of the winter complaining about the weather. Complaining and wishing for temperatures and conditions more to my liking. Complaining and using the weather as an excuse for my general malaise. Complaining and walking through most days oblivious to the fact that I was – in my cold, bare feet and, at times, with my arms waving wildly to avoid falling – exactly where I was supposed to be.
I can say with some assurance that the checkbook kind of balance isn’t ever going to be a problem for me. I can say with greater assurance that I will never perform a successful "flight element" on the balance beam. What I can say with no assurance, but with a great deal of faith, is that, with the spring sunshine on my shoulders and the spring breeze in my hair, I’m going to try really hard for that seamless integration kind of balance. And, with any luck, it will last for more than just two minutes.
Copyright 2010
Monday, March 15, 2010
Pants On Fire
Spring is always a flirt. Occasionally a tease. But this year, ah, this year Spring has been nothing short of ... well, a liar.She pranced into town with a two hundred-dollar haircut wearing 4-inch Jimmy Choos and trailing Chanel No. 5 just as the puddles of melted snow dried up. All of us, every last one of us, ran outside stripping off coats and gloves, tilting our chins into her scent and holding out our bare arms to the laser-beam sun that streamed in her wake.
We woke up the next morning to clouds as thick as meringue, rain as heavy as a fallen pound cake and our girl having vanished sometime in the night.
Another week of morning frost and evening chill, another week of resigned bundling up, another week of landscape colored in every shade of gray and she appeared again – strutted down the sidewalk with nary an excuse or apology for her bad manners. And we, fools that we are, took our lunches outside, went running in shorts, tried to cajole her into staying by calling out to each other, "Isn’t it a beautiful day?" and "I’m so glad that spring is finally here."
But she would not be charmed, would not be swayed by compliments. One warm and sunny afternoon was all to which she was willing to commit.
When I was a little girl I was pretty sure that the worst thing a person could be was a liar. I didn’t know about murderers and rapists and terrorists. I was not, thank God, conversant with infidelity or abandonment. I lived in a world not unlike that of Beaver Cleaver and, in that world, speaking an untruth would have resulted in the immediate infliction of corporal punishment and, worse, the proclamation that my parents, indeed, the entire world was "disappointed."
Which is why I never lied. Never. I would, in fact, go to great lengths to avoid even the appearance of lying. Once, I came home from school and told Mama that a friend’s mother was going to have a baby. Surprised at the announcement, Mama asked, "Are you sure?"
Confronted suddenly with the possibility that I might have misunderstood and determined not to be that most horrible of miscreants, a liar, I responded, "Uh, I don’t know. Maybe I made it up." Even now, forty-something years later, Mama laughs when she tells the story. There is probably a mental health professional somewhere who thinks I need therapy.
I don’t live in Beaver Cleaver world anymore. I live in a world where elected officials lie about everything from campaign contributions to paternity. I live in a world where professional athletes lie about performance-enhancing drugs, where celebrities lie about domestic violence, where religious leaders lie about everything that everybody else lies about. I make my living in a profession where my job some days is doing nothing more than trying to convince people to admit that they are lying.
You would forgive me, then, if I confessed that I don’t believe much of anything anybody says anymore.
But I won’t say that. Because it’s not true.
I believe people when they say they are going to call me back. I believe people when they say they would like me to come visit. I believe people when they tell me they are sorry.
That is not to say, however, that my belief is always well-placed. Some people never call me back. Some people find reasons to rescind their invitations. And some people aren’t really sorry. But the burden of the lie – And it is a heavy heavy burden. – is always on the liar, not the believer.
All that to say that the minute Spring comes back for good, the very second she crosses the county line carrying the azaleas and the fireflies and the baseball games in her Louis Vuitton bag, I’m going to be waiting for her with open arms. All will be forgiven and all will be well.
Copyright 2010
We woke up the next morning to clouds as thick as meringue, rain as heavy as a fallen pound cake and our girl having vanished sometime in the night.
Another week of morning frost and evening chill, another week of resigned bundling up, another week of landscape colored in every shade of gray and she appeared again – strutted down the sidewalk with nary an excuse or apology for her bad manners. And we, fools that we are, took our lunches outside, went running in shorts, tried to cajole her into staying by calling out to each other, "Isn’t it a beautiful day?" and "I’m so glad that spring is finally here."
But she would not be charmed, would not be swayed by compliments. One warm and sunny afternoon was all to which she was willing to commit.
When I was a little girl I was pretty sure that the worst thing a person could be was a liar. I didn’t know about murderers and rapists and terrorists. I was not, thank God, conversant with infidelity or abandonment. I lived in a world not unlike that of Beaver Cleaver and, in that world, speaking an untruth would have resulted in the immediate infliction of corporal punishment and, worse, the proclamation that my parents, indeed, the entire world was "disappointed."
Which is why I never lied. Never. I would, in fact, go to great lengths to avoid even the appearance of lying. Once, I came home from school and told Mama that a friend’s mother was going to have a baby. Surprised at the announcement, Mama asked, "Are you sure?"
Confronted suddenly with the possibility that I might have misunderstood and determined not to be that most horrible of miscreants, a liar, I responded, "Uh, I don’t know. Maybe I made it up." Even now, forty-something years later, Mama laughs when she tells the story. There is probably a mental health professional somewhere who thinks I need therapy.
I don’t live in Beaver Cleaver world anymore. I live in a world where elected officials lie about everything from campaign contributions to paternity. I live in a world where professional athletes lie about performance-enhancing drugs, where celebrities lie about domestic violence, where religious leaders lie about everything that everybody else lies about. I make my living in a profession where my job some days is doing nothing more than trying to convince people to admit that they are lying.
You would forgive me, then, if I confessed that I don’t believe much of anything anybody says anymore.
But I won’t say that. Because it’s not true.
I believe people when they say they are going to call me back. I believe people when they say they would like me to come visit. I believe people when they tell me they are sorry.
That is not to say, however, that my belief is always well-placed. Some people never call me back. Some people find reasons to rescind their invitations. And some people aren’t really sorry. But the burden of the lie – And it is a heavy heavy burden. – is always on the liar, not the believer.
All that to say that the minute Spring comes back for good, the very second she crosses the county line carrying the azaleas and the fireflies and the baseball games in her Louis Vuitton bag, I’m going to be waiting for her with open arms. All will be forgiven and all will be well.
Copyright 2010
Tuesday, March 02, 2010
You Must Remember This
Maybe in Reykjavik people can render an image of snow in cliche-less terms. Maybe in International Falls they can avoid words like pristine in describing the scenes outside their living room windows. Maybe in Kiev, where my Kate has been for five months, one can be so accustomed to it that it hardly merits mentioning.
But this isn’t Reykjavik or International Falls or Kiev. So if we Zone 9 dwellers acted the fool a little with our once-in-a-generation snowfall we should be forgiven. That our dogs didn’t know what to do with the crunchy white stuff beneath their feet, that there were far too many photos of dwarf snowmen posted on Facebook and that the people in those photos had on far too much clothing are things that should be overlooked.
The last time there was that much snow was Christmas Eve of 1989; Adam was 7 and Kate was 5. There was reason to stay outside until fingers and toes began stinging with, strangely enough, heat not cold. There were snowballs to mound and throw and the smallest of hills to slide down. There was magic in the dinosaur-tooth icicles that trimmed the eaves of the houses.
This time, on almost Valentine’s Day, I sat at my desk as the flakes began coming down, fluttering against the just-dark sky. They fell hard and fast like tiny swords slashing through the air and then settled quickly into glistening puffs of icy quilting on the leaves of the holly bushes.
Within a couple of hours the fields on either side of Sandhill, bumpy and lumpy with tractor ruts earlier in the day, were flat and even like the ocean on a windless day. Even in the darkness I could see the white shimmering under the navy blue sky.
I walked out on the deck to take a few photographs – the furniture, all its hard edges buffed away with a thick layer of snow; the limp brown stems of the Gerbera daisies that had lived all the way through December and finally succumbed to the January freeze; the spindles and railings and steps.
At first I didn’t notice the rosemary. Three large pots of tiny tiny leaves frosted like cupcakes.
Rosemary likes it hot and dry. I should have brought the pots indoors before the first freeze and I most certainly should have done something to protect them from the inordinate amount of rain we’d been getting. But I hadn’t.
And I felt bad. I suspected that the rosemary would succumb just as the plumbago and lantana had succumbed. I suspected that I’d walk outside in a day or two, after the snow had melted and the ground had dried out, and find wilted stems and brown-tipped leaves.
I took a photo anyway, knowing that once I got it developed I would feel even more guilty for my neglect.
What a surprise, then, this morning as I was leaving for the office in bright sunshine and without an overcoat to see the new leaves sprouting from the top of the rosemary plants – bright green and pointed straight up into the sky. Barely a week later and the hot-and-dry herb had shaken off the cold and wet and gotten on with the business of growing.
It’s easy, but not a good idea, to neglect something just because it is particularly well-suited to its surroundings. While low maintenance is preferable, in plants and people, you get better results when you pay attention. Better results when you remember.
"There's rosemary; that's for remembrance. Pray, love, remember."
Copyright 2010
But this isn’t Reykjavik or International Falls or Kiev. So if we Zone 9 dwellers acted the fool a little with our once-in-a-generation snowfall we should be forgiven. That our dogs didn’t know what to do with the crunchy white stuff beneath their feet, that there were far too many photos of dwarf snowmen posted on Facebook and that the people in those photos had on far too much clothing are things that should be overlooked.
The last time there was that much snow was Christmas Eve of 1989; Adam was 7 and Kate was 5. There was reason to stay outside until fingers and toes began stinging with, strangely enough, heat not cold. There were snowballs to mound and throw and the smallest of hills to slide down. There was magic in the dinosaur-tooth icicles that trimmed the eaves of the houses.
This time, on almost Valentine’s Day, I sat at my desk as the flakes began coming down, fluttering against the just-dark sky. They fell hard and fast like tiny swords slashing through the air and then settled quickly into glistening puffs of icy quilting on the leaves of the holly bushes.
Within a couple of hours the fields on either side of Sandhill, bumpy and lumpy with tractor ruts earlier in the day, were flat and even like the ocean on a windless day. Even in the darkness I could see the white shimmering under the navy blue sky.
I walked out on the deck to take a few photographs – the furniture, all its hard edges buffed away with a thick layer of snow; the limp brown stems of the Gerbera daisies that had lived all the way through December and finally succumbed to the January freeze; the spindles and railings and steps.
At first I didn’t notice the rosemary. Three large pots of tiny tiny leaves frosted like cupcakes.
Rosemary likes it hot and dry. I should have brought the pots indoors before the first freeze and I most certainly should have done something to protect them from the inordinate amount of rain we’d been getting. But I hadn’t.
And I felt bad. I suspected that the rosemary would succumb just as the plumbago and lantana had succumbed. I suspected that I’d walk outside in a day or two, after the snow had melted and the ground had dried out, and find wilted stems and brown-tipped leaves.
I took a photo anyway, knowing that once I got it developed I would feel even more guilty for my neglect.
What a surprise, then, this morning as I was leaving for the office in bright sunshine and without an overcoat to see the new leaves sprouting from the top of the rosemary plants – bright green and pointed straight up into the sky. Barely a week later and the hot-and-dry herb had shaken off the cold and wet and gotten on with the business of growing.
It’s easy, but not a good idea, to neglect something just because it is particularly well-suited to its surroundings. While low maintenance is preferable, in plants and people, you get better results when you pay attention. Better results when you remember.
"There's rosemary; that's for remembrance. Pray, love, remember."
Copyright 2010
Monday, February 15, 2010
A Winter's Tale
Sometime around Thanksgiving I heard a radio broadcaster announce that the meteorologists for the state were predicting a colder and wetter winter than usual. I say give those boys and girls a gold star. Winter won’t be officially over for another six weeks or so, but their prophesies have been fulfilled.
About this time every year I get my fill of the season, but this year the sensation is less wistfulness and more ache. I’m not just tired of the cold and wet; I’m exhausted by it. I’m not just shivering when I walk outside; I’m scowling. I find myself growling at other cars, which are always going either too fast or too slow, and rolling my eyes, figuratively if not literally, at the minor dramas of everyday life (the woman in the express lane who can’t find her debit card in a purse the size of a small suitcase, the puncture wound in the Styrofoam cup that leaves a puddle of Diet Coke in my cup holder, the annoying phone call from the telemarketer) that usually make me laugh at our commonality and fragility.
I think I reached my limit the other day. I was walking across the yard at Mama and Daddy’s and felt my feet sink into the saturated soil, heard a discernible squish as I lifted one shoe, then the other to slowly make my way to the front door. It was as though there was something under the ground that might suck me under at any moment. It reminded me of the scene from "The Return of the King" where Frodo, Samwise and Gollum are making their way across that interminable swamp.
There is a reason the earth needs winter. To rest, to slow down, to re-energize for the growth seasons ahead. But there is also a reason why winter doesn’t last forever. With too much water, roots will eventually mold. With too much cold, branches will eventually break. And, quite frankly, my roots are getting slimy and my branches are getting brittle.
So what’s a girl to do?
She could indulge in a little denial. Turn on every lamp in the house and burn every candle and turn up the heat. But that lasts only until morning when the necessity of making a living forces her outside.
She could whine. But, as I used to tell my little girl softball players, whining is neither attractive nor productive. And it would garner absolutely no sympathy from the friends who live in Maryland and Virginia, Illinois and Indiana, the ones who are laughing and asking, "Cold? Wet? You think you know cold and wet?"
Or she could just put on her heaviest coat, a pair of gloves and a little Chap Stick and ride it out.
Her choice. That is, my choice.
Choice is a funny thing. We demand it, then are too lazy to exercise it. We use it poorly, then deny we used it at all. We would rather, it seems, be marionettes with thin little wires connected to each of our joints, including the crooks and curves of our brains, responsive only to the deliberate but awkward jerking of unseen hands with only our strangely autonomous mouths refusing to yield.
A couple of summers ago I was at the beach and bought a painted sign made from a piece of reclaimed tin. It read, "Life Is Good." A piece of rusty wire was twisted into two holes at the top and, when I got home, I hung it on the one of the deck railings.
I walked outside last Saturday morning. The rain had stopped temporarily the night before and a fierce wind had come in on its heels. Trash cans were turned over and, up at the big curve, a tree had fallen across the road. And the rusty wire on the "Life Is Good" sign had broken leaving it dangling, banging on the deck railings, twisting in the wind.
I took it down and laid it to the side. Eventually I’ll find another piece of wire and I’ll hang it up again because, despite the cold and the wet, I choose to believe that life IS good and winter won’t last forever.
Copyright 2010
About this time every year I get my fill of the season, but this year the sensation is less wistfulness and more ache. I’m not just tired of the cold and wet; I’m exhausted by it. I’m not just shivering when I walk outside; I’m scowling. I find myself growling at other cars, which are always going either too fast or too slow, and rolling my eyes, figuratively if not literally, at the minor dramas of everyday life (the woman in the express lane who can’t find her debit card in a purse the size of a small suitcase, the puncture wound in the Styrofoam cup that leaves a puddle of Diet Coke in my cup holder, the annoying phone call from the telemarketer) that usually make me laugh at our commonality and fragility.
I think I reached my limit the other day. I was walking across the yard at Mama and Daddy’s and felt my feet sink into the saturated soil, heard a discernible squish as I lifted one shoe, then the other to slowly make my way to the front door. It was as though there was something under the ground that might suck me under at any moment. It reminded me of the scene from "The Return of the King" where Frodo, Samwise and Gollum are making their way across that interminable swamp.
There is a reason the earth needs winter. To rest, to slow down, to re-energize for the growth seasons ahead. But there is also a reason why winter doesn’t last forever. With too much water, roots will eventually mold. With too much cold, branches will eventually break. And, quite frankly, my roots are getting slimy and my branches are getting brittle.
So what’s a girl to do?
She could indulge in a little denial. Turn on every lamp in the house and burn every candle and turn up the heat. But that lasts only until morning when the necessity of making a living forces her outside.
She could whine. But, as I used to tell my little girl softball players, whining is neither attractive nor productive. And it would garner absolutely no sympathy from the friends who live in Maryland and Virginia, Illinois and Indiana, the ones who are laughing and asking, "Cold? Wet? You think you know cold and wet?"
Or she could just put on her heaviest coat, a pair of gloves and a little Chap Stick and ride it out.
Her choice. That is, my choice.
Choice is a funny thing. We demand it, then are too lazy to exercise it. We use it poorly, then deny we used it at all. We would rather, it seems, be marionettes with thin little wires connected to each of our joints, including the crooks and curves of our brains, responsive only to the deliberate but awkward jerking of unseen hands with only our strangely autonomous mouths refusing to yield.
A couple of summers ago I was at the beach and bought a painted sign made from a piece of reclaimed tin. It read, "Life Is Good." A piece of rusty wire was twisted into two holes at the top and, when I got home, I hung it on the one of the deck railings.
I walked outside last Saturday morning. The rain had stopped temporarily the night before and a fierce wind had come in on its heels. Trash cans were turned over and, up at the big curve, a tree had fallen across the road. And the rusty wire on the "Life Is Good" sign had broken leaving it dangling, banging on the deck railings, twisting in the wind.
I took it down and laid it to the side. Eventually I’ll find another piece of wire and I’ll hang it up again because, despite the cold and the wet, I choose to believe that life IS good and winter won’t last forever.
Copyright 2010
Tuesday, February 02, 2010
Someone Like Lucy
My friend Lucy is eight years old. She’s about as big as a minute and has huge round eyes that are green as a gourd. And she has a head full of tight curls that, without anything else, would have endeared her to me. Lucy loves her dog Frannie, "High School Musical" and beating the grown-ups playing Wii. It is one of the great joys of my life that I got to stand with her and her parents as a judge signed the papers that confirmed what we’d known from the beginning – Lucy belongs to us.
Lucy’s mother is a high school basketball coach. One of the girls playing for her this year is my namesake Graham and her parents, who I introduced to each other our first week in law school, are dear friends, so I had lots of reasons for going to the game last week.
I normally sit directly behind the bench. I’m closer to the game there and the inevitable berating of the referees by spectators who know less about basketball than I do about brain surgery is easier to ignore. One this night, however, I took a seat far up in the bleachers with Graham’s mother, brother and grandparents.
Lucy was wandering around the gym like she owned the place and, about halfway through the first quarter, she climbed up to where I was and asked, "Can I have a dollar?"
I opened my wallet and counted out the coins. "There you go."
"Thanks," and she went skipping down the bleachers like a goat over rocks.
A moment or two later Graham’s grandmother tapped me on the shoulder. "Is there some reason," she asked tentatively, "that that little girl picked you out to ask for money?"
I, along with Graham’s mother, who knows Lucy and my connection to her, burst out laughing at the same time. It took only a minute to explain, but a week later I’m still pondering the whole thing.
First of all, there’s the question of whether I really am the kind of person of whom a child, any child, would ask for help. If Lucy hadn’t known me, if she hadn’t known anybody in that gym, is there anything about me – the way I looked or walked or talked to other people – that would make her think that I could be trusted to help?
But Lucy did know me and, because of that, she did not think twice about finding me and asking for money. She did not hesitate, once she’d made up her mind that a pack of gum was what she wanted, to go straight to someone who could help her get it. And, best of all, she didn’t feel the need to wheedle or manipulate or even convince me that her request was a legitimate one. "Can I have a dollar?" Direct and candid.
Which raises the next question: Why is that so hard for us adults? Why do we so often feel that, even with those with whom we are most intimate, we have to preface our requests with evidence of, first, our general worthiness and, second, our specific need? Why can’t we just ask, secure in knowing that where the ability to fulfill the request exists it will be granted?
The last few years have presented me with plenty of opportunities to revisit and reexamine my personal theology, the concept of a God who is big enough and powerful enough and attentive enough to be concerned with the welfare of each individual human being. There have been moments when the flannelgraph image of a smiling Jesus in blue and white robes seated on a rock and surrounded by a passel of smiling children has seemed anything but believable and that business about becoming like a little child has seemed more saccharine than sacred, more condescending than convincing, more witless than workable.
And those moments, coming one after another, can leave a person with the idea that it is better to go lacking than to ask and be refused.
Until someone like Lucy comes along. Something who doesn’t know any better. Someone who isn’t afraid to ask and, consequently, is always ready to receive.
Copyright 2010
Lucy’s mother is a high school basketball coach. One of the girls playing for her this year is my namesake Graham and her parents, who I introduced to each other our first week in law school, are dear friends, so I had lots of reasons for going to the game last week.
I normally sit directly behind the bench. I’m closer to the game there and the inevitable berating of the referees by spectators who know less about basketball than I do about brain surgery is easier to ignore. One this night, however, I took a seat far up in the bleachers with Graham’s mother, brother and grandparents.
Lucy was wandering around the gym like she owned the place and, about halfway through the first quarter, she climbed up to where I was and asked, "Can I have a dollar?"
I opened my wallet and counted out the coins. "There you go."
"Thanks," and she went skipping down the bleachers like a goat over rocks.
A moment or two later Graham’s grandmother tapped me on the shoulder. "Is there some reason," she asked tentatively, "that that little girl picked you out to ask for money?"
I, along with Graham’s mother, who knows Lucy and my connection to her, burst out laughing at the same time. It took only a minute to explain, but a week later I’m still pondering the whole thing.
First of all, there’s the question of whether I really am the kind of person of whom a child, any child, would ask for help. If Lucy hadn’t known me, if she hadn’t known anybody in that gym, is there anything about me – the way I looked or walked or talked to other people – that would make her think that I could be trusted to help?
But Lucy did know me and, because of that, she did not think twice about finding me and asking for money. She did not hesitate, once she’d made up her mind that a pack of gum was what she wanted, to go straight to someone who could help her get it. And, best of all, she didn’t feel the need to wheedle or manipulate or even convince me that her request was a legitimate one. "Can I have a dollar?" Direct and candid.
Which raises the next question: Why is that so hard for us adults? Why do we so often feel that, even with those with whom we are most intimate, we have to preface our requests with evidence of, first, our general worthiness and, second, our specific need? Why can’t we just ask, secure in knowing that where the ability to fulfill the request exists it will be granted?
The last few years have presented me with plenty of opportunities to revisit and reexamine my personal theology, the concept of a God who is big enough and powerful enough and attentive enough to be concerned with the welfare of each individual human being. There have been moments when the flannelgraph image of a smiling Jesus in blue and white robes seated on a rock and surrounded by a passel of smiling children has seemed anything but believable and that business about becoming like a little child has seemed more saccharine than sacred, more condescending than convincing, more witless than workable.
And those moments, coming one after another, can leave a person with the idea that it is better to go lacking than to ask and be refused.
Until someone like Lucy comes along. Something who doesn’t know any better. Someone who isn’t afraid to ask and, consequently, is always ready to receive.
Copyright 2010
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
Some Conversations
Some conversations you never forget.
"You’re fired." "We’re pregnant!" "It’s cancer." The smell of the carpet, the color of the curtains, the sound of a passing train become Pavlov’s bell and, thereafter, never just a smell or color or sound, but the conversation itself.
Earlier this week I had one of those conversations and Huddle House waffles will never taste the same.
It happened like this: It has become a tradition for Aden, the 7-year-old philosopher, and me to have breakfast at the Huddle House when he comes to Georgia to visit. On Monday morning we were sitting across the booth from each other, our waffles puddled with maple syrup, when I noticed him staring at his chocolate milk carton.
"What’s so interesting?" I asked.
"I’m checking the calories and stuff," he said without looking up.
OK. Was I reading milk cartons in first grade?
"What are you liking best about school?"
He stared off into the distance for a moment, his eyes squinted and his chin stuck out. "Math. I like all the math. I like all the stuff I’m learning."
I reached over the table to cut up the big slice of country ham he’d ordered.
"So, what do you think is the most important thing for a kid to learn?" I asked, sensing that I was about to hear something consequential.
"Reading. That’s the most important. But," and he paused, fork stuck in the air like a conductor’s baton, "I don’t like fairy tales."
I didn’t interrupt to ask him why. This is a boy who brandishes light sabers. This is a boy who thinks it’s funny that I am afraid of tiny little mice. This is a boy.
"I don’t like fairy tales because they always have a happy ending. It’s not like that." I felt my shoulders sink and curl forward. I stared into the guileless and unscarred face staring back at me and waiting to see if I would speak truth.
I took a deep breath. "You’re right. It’s not always like that."
He propped one elbow on the table and leaned his head against his hand. "Did you know Grandma?"
Yes. I knew his great-grandmother. "
It was a very sad day when she died."
A simple declarative sentence. A seven-year-old’s version of reality. I couldn’t have said it better myself.
There is a reason we cling to our children. They are our connection to what is real. They love without sorrow or guilt or regret. They remind us of who we wanted to be before we learned better.
My waffles had pecans in them. The sausage patties were too salty. The chocolate milk carton was brown and white. And the sage across the table from me wore a camouflage jacket and slip-on sneakers. I will never forget.
Copyright 2010
"You’re fired." "We’re pregnant!" "It’s cancer." The smell of the carpet, the color of the curtains, the sound of a passing train become Pavlov’s bell and, thereafter, never just a smell or color or sound, but the conversation itself.
Earlier this week I had one of those conversations and Huddle House waffles will never taste the same.
It happened like this: It has become a tradition for Aden, the 7-year-old philosopher, and me to have breakfast at the Huddle House when he comes to Georgia to visit. On Monday morning we were sitting across the booth from each other, our waffles puddled with maple syrup, when I noticed him staring at his chocolate milk carton.
"What’s so interesting?" I asked.
"I’m checking the calories and stuff," he said without looking up.
OK. Was I reading milk cartons in first grade?
"What are you liking best about school?"
He stared off into the distance for a moment, his eyes squinted and his chin stuck out. "Math. I like all the math. I like all the stuff I’m learning."
I reached over the table to cut up the big slice of country ham he’d ordered.
"So, what do you think is the most important thing for a kid to learn?" I asked, sensing that I was about to hear something consequential.
"Reading. That’s the most important. But," and he paused, fork stuck in the air like a conductor’s baton, "I don’t like fairy tales."
I didn’t interrupt to ask him why. This is a boy who brandishes light sabers. This is a boy who thinks it’s funny that I am afraid of tiny little mice. This is a boy.
"I don’t like fairy tales because they always have a happy ending. It’s not like that." I felt my shoulders sink and curl forward. I stared into the guileless and unscarred face staring back at me and waiting to see if I would speak truth.
I took a deep breath. "You’re right. It’s not always like that."
He propped one elbow on the table and leaned his head against his hand. "Did you know Grandma?"
Yes. I knew his great-grandmother. "
It was a very sad day when she died."
A simple declarative sentence. A seven-year-old’s version of reality. I couldn’t have said it better myself.
There is a reason we cling to our children. They are our connection to what is real. They love without sorrow or guilt or regret. They remind us of who we wanted to be before we learned better.
My waffles had pecans in them. The sausage patties were too salty. The chocolate milk carton was brown and white. And the sage across the table from me wore a camouflage jacket and slip-on sneakers. I will never forget.
Copyright 2010
Sunday, January 03, 2010
Noticing Naked and Asking What If
A couple of years ago I came home one afternoon to find a sycamore tree, a skinny little, smooth-barked sapling, planted in my back yard. I'm not exactly sure where on the farm Daddy found it, but he and Mama knew in that strange way that parents know their children that I would want it.
It was about four feet tall at the time; it is now probably up to eight orn ine. (Sycamores, like children and credit card balances, grow quickly.) It is mature enough to have had, in the summer, leaves as big as the spread hand of a lumberjack, each one covered in tiny little bristles that made it feel like the velveteen collar on the pink corduroy coat I had as a child.
In November, when the color started draining out of the landscape, the leaves turned tea-brown and dropped languidly to the ground, curled at the edges, the lumberjack closing his hand into a fist -- whether in an attempt to hold on to the summer or to fight off the winter I can't say.
I also can't say when I first noticed that the tree was naked. I see it every time I walk out the back door to get in the car or take out the trash, but, like most people, I see without seeing sometimes. And, to be honest, I probably wouldn't have noticed its nudity on that particular day had not one leaf, just as I walked outside, lost its grip on the branch to which it had been clinging and gone floating down a river of wind across the yard.
There were still three or four tiny leaves left on the topmost branches, but the sycamore was otherwise bare. Its slender branches -- angled, not curved, toward the pale gray sky -- made it look exactly like the trees I had painted in my fourth grade snowscape, the one for which we used dark blue construction paper and white paint (as if we south Georgia children knew anything at all about snowscapes).
My chin rose as my gaze moved higher and higher up the trunk of the tree and, about halfway to the sky, I saw it: a next, a matted bowl-shaped nest, balanced in the cleft of two branches. I was tempted, but only for a moment, to try to get it down. Whatever birds had built it back in the spring or summer were long gone, their babies out on their own. They weren't coming back. It would have been no crime to take the next and put it inside with my other treasures.
But what if they did come back? What if they came looking for their home and it wasn't there? What if they were the last pair of whatever-birds left at Sandhill and without that nest they died?
What if? The curse of the evolved brain.
One of my colleagues asked me yesterday if I was making any New Year's resolutions. The answer was no. I'm hard enough on myself as it is.
What I am doing instead is trying to articulate what I've learned in the year about to end and what I hope to learn in the year to come. I haven't quite managed the former, but the latter came to me -- in that magical way that Truth appears in the guise of poetry -- as I was writing this column, came in the form of an e-mail New Year's wish from someone I know only slightly, in one line of a poem: "I want the labyrinth of what ifs narrowed/to a single, poignant sentence."
Yes. That's it. I want to finally locate, in my wanderings, the way to the center. I want to release, like the sycamore tree did its leaves, anything clinging to me that is no longer alive. I want to focus my attention and affection and appreciation on that which responds to my efforts. I want to be a single, poignant sentence.
And, on December 31, 2010, I want to speak that sentence and know that it has been heard.
Copyright 2010
It was about four feet tall at the time; it is now probably up to eight orn ine. (Sycamores, like children and credit card balances, grow quickly.) It is mature enough to have had, in the summer, leaves as big as the spread hand of a lumberjack, each one covered in tiny little bristles that made it feel like the velveteen collar on the pink corduroy coat I had as a child.
In November, when the color started draining out of the landscape, the leaves turned tea-brown and dropped languidly to the ground, curled at the edges, the lumberjack closing his hand into a fist -- whether in an attempt to hold on to the summer or to fight off the winter I can't say.
I also can't say when I first noticed that the tree was naked. I see it every time I walk out the back door to get in the car or take out the trash, but, like most people, I see without seeing sometimes. And, to be honest, I probably wouldn't have noticed its nudity on that particular day had not one leaf, just as I walked outside, lost its grip on the branch to which it had been clinging and gone floating down a river of wind across the yard.
There were still three or four tiny leaves left on the topmost branches, but the sycamore was otherwise bare. Its slender branches -- angled, not curved, toward the pale gray sky -- made it look exactly like the trees I had painted in my fourth grade snowscape, the one for which we used dark blue construction paper and white paint (as if we south Georgia children knew anything at all about snowscapes).
My chin rose as my gaze moved higher and higher up the trunk of the tree and, about halfway to the sky, I saw it: a next, a matted bowl-shaped nest, balanced in the cleft of two branches. I was tempted, but only for a moment, to try to get it down. Whatever birds had built it back in the spring or summer were long gone, their babies out on their own. They weren't coming back. It would have been no crime to take the next and put it inside with my other treasures.
But what if they did come back? What if they came looking for their home and it wasn't there? What if they were the last pair of whatever-birds left at Sandhill and without that nest they died?
What if? The curse of the evolved brain.
One of my colleagues asked me yesterday if I was making any New Year's resolutions. The answer was no. I'm hard enough on myself as it is.
What I am doing instead is trying to articulate what I've learned in the year about to end and what I hope to learn in the year to come. I haven't quite managed the former, but the latter came to me -- in that magical way that Truth appears in the guise of poetry -- as I was writing this column, came in the form of an e-mail New Year's wish from someone I know only slightly, in one line of a poem: "I want the labyrinth of what ifs narrowed/to a single, poignant sentence."
Yes. That's it. I want to finally locate, in my wanderings, the way to the center. I want to release, like the sycamore tree did its leaves, anything clinging to me that is no longer alive. I want to focus my attention and affection and appreciation on that which responds to my efforts. I want to be a single, poignant sentence.
And, on December 31, 2010, I want to speak that sentence and know that it has been heard.
Copyright 2010
Tuesday, December 22, 2009
Home Is Where
Aden’s mama has become a celebrity. She went to New York City last week to promote her business on the "Elevator Pitch" segment of an MSNBC business show. Folks all over the place had the DVR’s set for 7:30 in the morning on Sunday and a few of us early risers actually saw the piece through bleary eyes as it aired.
She did well. And, if I had $500,000 to invest, Urban Pirates would get it.
But this isn’t about Urban Pirates or venture capital or even the fact that Aden’s mama got to meet Howard Dean and sneaked a peak into the Saturday Night Live studio to see her teenage heartthrob Jon Bon Jovi. It is, like all good stories, about clear vision and absolute truth.
A week or so before the trip to the big city, Aden and his mama were out walking in the snow. It was just the two of them and his mama confided to Aden that she was a little nervous about the whole thing.
"Why?" he asked, those huge brown eyes opened wide like a camera aperture letting in all possible light.
"Because," she told him, "I don’t want to mess up."
And because she is his mama and she knows that, at seven, his heart is still pure and his thoughts are still true, she asked, "What will I do if I mess up?"
Without a moment’s hesitation, he said, "You just come home."
Of course.
We mess up all the time. We make wrong choices. We say things we don’t mean. We get lazy and don’t live up to our potential. We assume, we presume, we pretend.
And when it’s all over, there’s only one thing to do: We go home.
I don’t remember when I first memorized the famous line from Robert Frost’s "The Death of the Hired Man," but I do know that it resonated in me like my own heart beat. "Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in."
Home is the place where, after you’ve messed up, they still let you in the door without a word of explanation. Home is the place where, after you’ve made the wrong choice and taken years to figure it out and haven’t a clue as to how to make it up to the ones you hurt or even how to say you’re sorry, they meet you on the porch with tears of relief in their eyes. Home is the place where, after you’ve said words that were never true, words that were born of hurt and anger and frustration and can never ever ever be taken back, they come out into the yard, onto the road to pull you in for a feast of fatted calf.
We are all prodigals. Our riotous living may be nothing more than failing to pay attention, but at some point every one of us has left home without a backward glance, secure in – but oblivious to – the reality of home. And every one of us has found him or herself standing on a street corner in some far country – empty, wrung out, used up – when, suddenly, in a moment of clear vision and absolute truth the solution appears like a billboard in Times Square: Home.
It’s nearly Christmas, the season in which Christians celebrate the arrival into a less-than-perfect world of One who was himself, in a way, a prodigal. He left his home, emptied himself, used himself up for the good of the other prodigals and, after experiencing the suffering of separation, returned home.
It’s the same story. Over and over again. And Aden already understands it. Not bad for a seven-year-old.
"Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in." Amen and amen.
Copyright 2009
She did well. And, if I had $500,000 to invest, Urban Pirates would get it.
But this isn’t about Urban Pirates or venture capital or even the fact that Aden’s mama got to meet Howard Dean and sneaked a peak into the Saturday Night Live studio to see her teenage heartthrob Jon Bon Jovi. It is, like all good stories, about clear vision and absolute truth.
A week or so before the trip to the big city, Aden and his mama were out walking in the snow. It was just the two of them and his mama confided to Aden that she was a little nervous about the whole thing.
"Why?" he asked, those huge brown eyes opened wide like a camera aperture letting in all possible light.
"Because," she told him, "I don’t want to mess up."
And because she is his mama and she knows that, at seven, his heart is still pure and his thoughts are still true, she asked, "What will I do if I mess up?"
Without a moment’s hesitation, he said, "You just come home."
Of course.
We mess up all the time. We make wrong choices. We say things we don’t mean. We get lazy and don’t live up to our potential. We assume, we presume, we pretend.
And when it’s all over, there’s only one thing to do: We go home.
I don’t remember when I first memorized the famous line from Robert Frost’s "The Death of the Hired Man," but I do know that it resonated in me like my own heart beat. "Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in."
Home is the place where, after you’ve messed up, they still let you in the door without a word of explanation. Home is the place where, after you’ve made the wrong choice and taken years to figure it out and haven’t a clue as to how to make it up to the ones you hurt or even how to say you’re sorry, they meet you on the porch with tears of relief in their eyes. Home is the place where, after you’ve said words that were never true, words that were born of hurt and anger and frustration and can never ever ever be taken back, they come out into the yard, onto the road to pull you in for a feast of fatted calf.
We are all prodigals. Our riotous living may be nothing more than failing to pay attention, but at some point every one of us has left home without a backward glance, secure in – but oblivious to – the reality of home. And every one of us has found him or herself standing on a street corner in some far country – empty, wrung out, used up – when, suddenly, in a moment of clear vision and absolute truth the solution appears like a billboard in Times Square: Home.
It’s nearly Christmas, the season in which Christians celebrate the arrival into a less-than-perfect world of One who was himself, in a way, a prodigal. He left his home, emptied himself, used himself up for the good of the other prodigals and, after experiencing the suffering of separation, returned home.
It’s the same story. Over and over again. And Aden already understands it. Not bad for a seven-year-old.
"Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in." Amen and amen.
Copyright 2009
Monday, December 07, 2009
Weathervane
I was done with court and heading back to the office on a two-lane county road that curves through fields and planted-pine forests, through places that used to be towns and at least one that still is, if only barely. I drove slowly enough to read the signs on the small white churches and nearly slowly enough to count the monster hay bales dotting one side of the road. I felt my shoulders relax and my breath slow.
I passed a pasture, the color of highly-creamed coffee, where a horse stood like a statue staring into the sun. I passed one cotton field foaming with white puffs on skinny brown stalks and then another one, picked over, the stalks looking skinnier in their nakedness. I felt the corners of my mouth ease up into a smile.
Bucolic. Pastoral. Freeze frames of countryside. I’d seen it all before.
But today was different. There was something about the light. Bright, nearly blinding, laser beams from, they tell us, 93 million light years away, it fell at an angle so sharp that the elements in the landscape – wire fences, naked trees, horses – looked like objects in a View-Master, starkly three-dimensional. The blue in the sky was so faded I’d have sworn I could see straight through to the face of God. I was enthralled.
Could this be December? The month whose only redeeming quality was the placement within its days of Christmas? The month that announces cold, wet weather and chills me to the bone with the mere thought of wearing socks to bed, a pointless, but nevertheless irresistible effort at staying warm?
By mid-afternoon it was gone. The luminous, illuminating light was hidden by clouds dense and gray. The view outside my office window was flat like the street facade in the old television westerns and the edges of everything I could see, people and sidewalks and brick corners of buildings, were smudged as though drawn by pencil and unsuccessfully erased.
The rain started within a couple of hours, the clouds wrung out like dirty dish rags, and by the next morning the dirt roads were deep trenches of slick clay. The sky was one endless flannel blanket.
I was, I admit, more than just a bit irritated. I’d been fooled. Made a fool.
That awe-inspiring morning, when the sun spotlighted every tree as though it were the only tree, had been nothing but a tease. That hadn’t been the real December. This – the rain and muck and cold – was the real December.
It’s important to know what is real. To be able to distinguish diamond from cubic zirconium, sincerity from flattery, truth from lies. I know that. And like anyone who came of age in the Watergate era I’ve developed a pretty healthy skepticism when it comes to politicians in particular and authority figures in general.
What I’ve never been able to shake, however, is that hopefulness (Some people would call it naivete.) that always anticipates a 9th-inning rally when the lead-off batter draws a walk, that always expects the lost wallet to be returned with the money and the credit cards still inside, that always assumes people will do what they say. So, of course, I saw the first day of December bright and balmy and got seduced into believing I deserved 31 days just like that one.
When, I asked myself, gripping the steering wheel and feeling the tires slip violently back and forth through the mud, will I ever learn?
Funny thing: A few hours later, about 12 actually, I stood on the front porch and watched the clouds suddenly take off running, chased by something I couldn’t see, and as they ran they left in their wake an unobstructed view of a full moon. Another light. A different kind, but just as enthralling.
When will I ever learn?
Copyright 2009
I passed a pasture, the color of highly-creamed coffee, where a horse stood like a statue staring into the sun. I passed one cotton field foaming with white puffs on skinny brown stalks and then another one, picked over, the stalks looking skinnier in their nakedness. I felt the corners of my mouth ease up into a smile.
Bucolic. Pastoral. Freeze frames of countryside. I’d seen it all before.
But today was different. There was something about the light. Bright, nearly blinding, laser beams from, they tell us, 93 million light years away, it fell at an angle so sharp that the elements in the landscape – wire fences, naked trees, horses – looked like objects in a View-Master, starkly three-dimensional. The blue in the sky was so faded I’d have sworn I could see straight through to the face of God. I was enthralled.
Could this be December? The month whose only redeeming quality was the placement within its days of Christmas? The month that announces cold, wet weather and chills me to the bone with the mere thought of wearing socks to bed, a pointless, but nevertheless irresistible effort at staying warm?
By mid-afternoon it was gone. The luminous, illuminating light was hidden by clouds dense and gray. The view outside my office window was flat like the street facade in the old television westerns and the edges of everything I could see, people and sidewalks and brick corners of buildings, were smudged as though drawn by pencil and unsuccessfully erased.
The rain started within a couple of hours, the clouds wrung out like dirty dish rags, and by the next morning the dirt roads were deep trenches of slick clay. The sky was one endless flannel blanket.
I was, I admit, more than just a bit irritated. I’d been fooled. Made a fool.
That awe-inspiring morning, when the sun spotlighted every tree as though it were the only tree, had been nothing but a tease. That hadn’t been the real December. This – the rain and muck and cold – was the real December.
It’s important to know what is real. To be able to distinguish diamond from cubic zirconium, sincerity from flattery, truth from lies. I know that. And like anyone who came of age in the Watergate era I’ve developed a pretty healthy skepticism when it comes to politicians in particular and authority figures in general.
What I’ve never been able to shake, however, is that hopefulness (Some people would call it naivete.) that always anticipates a 9th-inning rally when the lead-off batter draws a walk, that always expects the lost wallet to be returned with the money and the credit cards still inside, that always assumes people will do what they say. So, of course, I saw the first day of December bright and balmy and got seduced into believing I deserved 31 days just like that one.
When, I asked myself, gripping the steering wheel and feeling the tires slip violently back and forth through the mud, will I ever learn?
Funny thing: A few hours later, about 12 actually, I stood on the front porch and watched the clouds suddenly take off running, chased by something I couldn’t see, and as they ran they left in their wake an unobstructed view of a full moon. Another light. A different kind, but just as enthralling.
When will I ever learn?
Copyright 2009
Sunday, November 22, 2009
Astronomy and the Rolling Stones
I pushed back the covers and put my bare feet on the floor. I pushed my bare arms through the loose sleeves of the bathrobe and, in the familiar darkness of my own house, headed toward the front door. I walked out onto the porch and then onto the brick steps whose coolness pricked the bottoms of my feet.
It was 4 o’clock in the morning. I had awakened without an alarm, something about the excitement notifying my sleeping brain that it was time.
Time for the Leonids meteor shower. Time to watch the light of millions of particles flying off the tail of Comet 55 spray across the sky like paint out of an aerosol can.
I’d gone out earlier to get my bearings according to the sky-map I’d printed out from the BBC webpage. Look east; locate the Big Dipper; look to the right and, there, in the center of the constellation Leo I would see the celestial fireworks. Except that I didn’t.
I didn’t because a froth of fog covered the entire span of sky. I stood there for a moment while it sunk in. It had been 11 years since the comet had been this close to Earth and my chance to bend my neck into an unnatural configuration and be little-kid-amazed was lost. Sigh.
Somewhere people were gasping in wonder and smiling involuntarily at the spectacle. Somewhere people were pointing and grabbing elbows. Somewhere people were watching the night explode. But not here.
The air’s cool dampness wrapped around me like the strips of an old sheet we might have used to turn ourselves into mummies on Halloween. I was paralyzed with the frustration of not getting what I wanted. I felt the dew wetting my feet, but I couldn’t move. I was the petulant child who crosses her arms and stomps her feet and sticks out her lip in the distorted belief that what she wants actually matters.
But no amount of stomping or pouting was going to move the fog and, eventually, I turned around and went back inside.
Disappointment. It is such a palpable emotion.
Near the beginning of the movie "The Big Chill," a group of college friends gathers for the funeral of one of their circle. They walk into the church together while one of them goes to the organ to play. She spreads her fingers to reach the notes of the beginning chords and, while the congregation and the audience anticipates which of the standard funeral hymns she will offer, they hear, instead, the opening measures of The Rolling Stones’s "You Can’t Always Get What You Want."
It is an unexpected moment of comic relief and, simultaneously, a heart-breaking declaration of truth. We are taught early to have desires, to express those desires, to expect the fulfillment of those desires. From a kindergartener’s letter to Santa Claus to the high school senior’s college admissions application to the mission statement of the entrepreneur applying for a loan, we learn that it is important to say what we want and to assume that we will get it.
But Mick and the boys are right: We can’t always get what we want. The video game, the scholarship, the promotion, the house. Sometimes other people get those things instead, leaving us standing in the front yard like mummies trying to understand.
It is good to dream, to desire. It is good to long for and yearn. It is good to reach for that which exceeds one’s grasp and then figure out what movement is required to get close enough to clasp it. What is not good, what will serve only to create frustration and heartache is wasting a single moment staring into the darkness and trying to figure out why the fog rolled in.
The fog hid the meteor shower; it didn’t destroy it. I didn’t get to see it, but I still know it’s there. And tonight, that has to be enough.
Copyright 2009
It was 4 o’clock in the morning. I had awakened without an alarm, something about the excitement notifying my sleeping brain that it was time.
Time for the Leonids meteor shower. Time to watch the light of millions of particles flying off the tail of Comet 55 spray across the sky like paint out of an aerosol can.
I’d gone out earlier to get my bearings according to the sky-map I’d printed out from the BBC webpage. Look east; locate the Big Dipper; look to the right and, there, in the center of the constellation Leo I would see the celestial fireworks. Except that I didn’t.
I didn’t because a froth of fog covered the entire span of sky. I stood there for a moment while it sunk in. It had been 11 years since the comet had been this close to Earth and my chance to bend my neck into an unnatural configuration and be little-kid-amazed was lost. Sigh.
Somewhere people were gasping in wonder and smiling involuntarily at the spectacle. Somewhere people were pointing and grabbing elbows. Somewhere people were watching the night explode. But not here.
The air’s cool dampness wrapped around me like the strips of an old sheet we might have used to turn ourselves into mummies on Halloween. I was paralyzed with the frustration of not getting what I wanted. I felt the dew wetting my feet, but I couldn’t move. I was the petulant child who crosses her arms and stomps her feet and sticks out her lip in the distorted belief that what she wants actually matters.
But no amount of stomping or pouting was going to move the fog and, eventually, I turned around and went back inside.
Disappointment. It is such a palpable emotion.
Near the beginning of the movie "The Big Chill," a group of college friends gathers for the funeral of one of their circle. They walk into the church together while one of them goes to the organ to play. She spreads her fingers to reach the notes of the beginning chords and, while the congregation and the audience anticipates which of the standard funeral hymns she will offer, they hear, instead, the opening measures of The Rolling Stones’s "You Can’t Always Get What You Want."
It is an unexpected moment of comic relief and, simultaneously, a heart-breaking declaration of truth. We are taught early to have desires, to express those desires, to expect the fulfillment of those desires. From a kindergartener’s letter to Santa Claus to the high school senior’s college admissions application to the mission statement of the entrepreneur applying for a loan, we learn that it is important to say what we want and to assume that we will get it.
But Mick and the boys are right: We can’t always get what we want. The video game, the scholarship, the promotion, the house. Sometimes other people get those things instead, leaving us standing in the front yard like mummies trying to understand.
It is good to dream, to desire. It is good to long for and yearn. It is good to reach for that which exceeds one’s grasp and then figure out what movement is required to get close enough to clasp it. What is not good, what will serve only to create frustration and heartache is wasting a single moment staring into the darkness and trying to figure out why the fog rolled in.
The fog hid the meteor shower; it didn’t destroy it. I didn’t get to see it, but I still know it’s there. And tonight, that has to be enough.
Copyright 2009
Monday, November 09, 2009
Counting Down
There is a finite number of full moons in a person’s life.
Fairly obvious and, at the same time, startling, the thought came to me Monday night as the light from the cream-colored poker chip in the sky spilled over my shoulder and into my lap and the miles between me and Sandhill grew fewer.
I caught my breath. Held it for a moment high in my chest. Felt my hands loosen their grip on the steering wheel just slightly as I heard the night whisper, "Pay attention." So I did.
What I noticed first was the color of the light itself. Not white or yellow like the beam of a light bulb, but luminous blue-green, like pool water at night. And not clear and piercing, but diffused as though coming through a scrim. There were no edges to the light, no defined stream; the entire landscape was covered and seemed to shiver under its unmeasurable weight.
It was dark – The sun had been down for an hour at least. – but the outlines of the houses, the barns, the fences, the billboards were all still clean and straight, like portraiture silhouettes.
Turning onto the dirt road, the angle of the light shifted and now came through the back windshield making me feel, more than ever, as though I were being stalked. Erratic breaks in the tree canopy turned the moonlight into a strobe, flashing up and down, side to side, the color now reminding me of the black-light posters Keith used to have on his bedroom walls.
As I pulled into the carport, the moon was straight ahead, no longer stalking, but beckoning. Its light had turned the deck into a castle keep, the stark white deck posts into silver ramparts, the pots of rosemary into miniature turrets.
There were none of the usual nighttime sounds coming from the branch. The chill in the air had silenced the crickets, the frogs, the birds. The light had stilled the deer who would wait until later to forage the now-empty fields for some last vestige of corn hidden in the trampled-over rows. I was as alone as one ever is.
I like to think that I always pay attention. I like to think that my eyes and my mind are always open. I like to think that I always notice things of beauty and matters of import. But none of those things are always true. Sometimes I’m just plain lazy.
Not lazy in the sense of neglecting work or responsibility, but lazy in letting work and responsibility overwhelm the reality that nobody lives forever, beauty is fleeting, relationships need tending.
Sometimes I read three pages of a book and realize I don’t know what I’ve read or catch myself singing along with something on the radio and realize I’ve just said/sung something I don’t believe to be true. Sometimes I put a stamp on a birthday card without remembering the face of the person to whom it is being sent and breathing a prayer of gratitude for that life. Sometimes I look out the window and realize that the season has changed and I didn’t notice. That is no way to live.
There is a finite number of full moons in a person’s life. A finite number of sunsets, of low tides, of tomato sandwiches, of chances to love without condition. I don’t want to miss a single one.
Copyright 2009
Fairly obvious and, at the same time, startling, the thought came to me Monday night as the light from the cream-colored poker chip in the sky spilled over my shoulder and into my lap and the miles between me and Sandhill grew fewer.
I caught my breath. Held it for a moment high in my chest. Felt my hands loosen their grip on the steering wheel just slightly as I heard the night whisper, "Pay attention." So I did.
What I noticed first was the color of the light itself. Not white or yellow like the beam of a light bulb, but luminous blue-green, like pool water at night. And not clear and piercing, but diffused as though coming through a scrim. There were no edges to the light, no defined stream; the entire landscape was covered and seemed to shiver under its unmeasurable weight.
It was dark – The sun had been down for an hour at least. – but the outlines of the houses, the barns, the fences, the billboards were all still clean and straight, like portraiture silhouettes.
Turning onto the dirt road, the angle of the light shifted and now came through the back windshield making me feel, more than ever, as though I were being stalked. Erratic breaks in the tree canopy turned the moonlight into a strobe, flashing up and down, side to side, the color now reminding me of the black-light posters Keith used to have on his bedroom walls.
As I pulled into the carport, the moon was straight ahead, no longer stalking, but beckoning. Its light had turned the deck into a castle keep, the stark white deck posts into silver ramparts, the pots of rosemary into miniature turrets.
There were none of the usual nighttime sounds coming from the branch. The chill in the air had silenced the crickets, the frogs, the birds. The light had stilled the deer who would wait until later to forage the now-empty fields for some last vestige of corn hidden in the trampled-over rows. I was as alone as one ever is.
I like to think that I always pay attention. I like to think that my eyes and my mind are always open. I like to think that I always notice things of beauty and matters of import. But none of those things are always true. Sometimes I’m just plain lazy.
Not lazy in the sense of neglecting work or responsibility, but lazy in letting work and responsibility overwhelm the reality that nobody lives forever, beauty is fleeting, relationships need tending.
Sometimes I read three pages of a book and realize I don’t know what I’ve read or catch myself singing along with something on the radio and realize I’ve just said/sung something I don’t believe to be true. Sometimes I put a stamp on a birthday card without remembering the face of the person to whom it is being sent and breathing a prayer of gratitude for that life. Sometimes I look out the window and realize that the season has changed and I didn’t notice. That is no way to live.
There is a finite number of full moons in a person’s life. A finite number of sunsets, of low tides, of tomato sandwiches, of chances to love without condition. I don’t want to miss a single one.
Copyright 2009
Monday, October 26, 2009
Uncommon Wisdom
After two days of cold – days that belonged in some other month, some other state – October came home and teased me outside with the still crispness that doesn’t require a jacket, but makes you want to wear one anyway.
There was no wind to carry my scent or the sound of my feet shuffling in the sand, so the dogs didn’t come running from the backyard where they were overseeing Mama picking up pecans until they saw me, just past the mailbox, and walking away from the sunset. Lily simply fell in beside me; Tamar had to lick my hand before trotting ahead. They, like all of us, are creatures of habit.
We didn’t walk very far. The dogs demanded no explanation. They simply turned when I turned.
The sun was still over the treetops, but low enough to make me squint. I looked down at the sudden glint of metal in the middle of the road. Bending over to pick it up, I expected to find only one of those aluminum disks that contractors put under nail heads. It was, however, a quarter. Heads up. George Washington’s profile with the straight nose and wig flipped up on the ends like a 1960's cover girl.
There are two schools of thought about found coins. One is a poem that Katherine taught me at Wesleyan: "Find a penny pick it up, all the day you’ll have good luck. Find a penny let it lie, before the day you’ll surely die." The other is less lyrical and less morbid: Picking up a penny that is lying heads up brings good luck; picking up a penny that is lying heads down brings bad luck.
The contradiction between these two points of common wisdom is intriguing. According to the first, picking up a penny that you finding lying heads down will result in good fortune for a day. According to the second, picking up that same penny will kill you. How can both be true? They can’t. Unless the finder is one who is eager to throw off the garment of flesh and exchange it for whatever form awaits in the next life.
Which points out the problem with common wisdom – that, while it may very well be common in a "generally known" sense, it is rarely common in a "shared by all" sense. And, of course, superstition isn’t wisdom at all. Or is it?
I slowed my pace and rubbed the quarter with my thumb, ran it through my fingers like a magician, thought about flipping into the nearly-dusk sky and changed my mind immediately at the panic of trying to find it again if I dropped it. Without a pocket, I had to close my fingers around it if I wanted to keep it.
And I did want to keep it, didn’t I? I’d found it. It was mine now, wasn’t it? I could drop it in the milk bottle where I put all my quarters. And when I had 560 I could buy that turntable at Best Buy. And then I could start over again and when I got 720 more I could buy the new tuner that matched. Back at the house, I dropped the quarter on the kitchen counter and started supper.
Now it’s on my desk and in the lamplight I can see it better. I can see the ribbon at the end of George’s ponytail and I can read "liberty" in all capital letters in the rainbow curve over his head. Suddenly, I have an idea. Excuse me for a minute.
...
Okay. I’m back. This is what I did: I walked outside and tramped out into the edge of the branch as far as I dared go in the dark and I threw the quarter into that dark. I heard it fall, hit leaves that had themselves fallen. Common wisdom says that a penny or, in this case, a quarter saved is a quarter earned.
Sometimes. But not tonight.
Copyright 2009
There was no wind to carry my scent or the sound of my feet shuffling in the sand, so the dogs didn’t come running from the backyard where they were overseeing Mama picking up pecans until they saw me, just past the mailbox, and walking away from the sunset. Lily simply fell in beside me; Tamar had to lick my hand before trotting ahead. They, like all of us, are creatures of habit.
We didn’t walk very far. The dogs demanded no explanation. They simply turned when I turned.
The sun was still over the treetops, but low enough to make me squint. I looked down at the sudden glint of metal in the middle of the road. Bending over to pick it up, I expected to find only one of those aluminum disks that contractors put under nail heads. It was, however, a quarter. Heads up. George Washington’s profile with the straight nose and wig flipped up on the ends like a 1960's cover girl.
There are two schools of thought about found coins. One is a poem that Katherine taught me at Wesleyan: "Find a penny pick it up, all the day you’ll have good luck. Find a penny let it lie, before the day you’ll surely die." The other is less lyrical and less morbid: Picking up a penny that is lying heads up brings good luck; picking up a penny that is lying heads down brings bad luck.
The contradiction between these two points of common wisdom is intriguing. According to the first, picking up a penny that you finding lying heads down will result in good fortune for a day. According to the second, picking up that same penny will kill you. How can both be true? They can’t. Unless the finder is one who is eager to throw off the garment of flesh and exchange it for whatever form awaits in the next life.
Which points out the problem with common wisdom – that, while it may very well be common in a "generally known" sense, it is rarely common in a "shared by all" sense. And, of course, superstition isn’t wisdom at all. Or is it?
I slowed my pace and rubbed the quarter with my thumb, ran it through my fingers like a magician, thought about flipping into the nearly-dusk sky and changed my mind immediately at the panic of trying to find it again if I dropped it. Without a pocket, I had to close my fingers around it if I wanted to keep it.
And I did want to keep it, didn’t I? I’d found it. It was mine now, wasn’t it? I could drop it in the milk bottle where I put all my quarters. And when I had 560 I could buy that turntable at Best Buy. And then I could start over again and when I got 720 more I could buy the new tuner that matched. Back at the house, I dropped the quarter on the kitchen counter and started supper.
Now it’s on my desk and in the lamplight I can see it better. I can see the ribbon at the end of George’s ponytail and I can read "liberty" in all capital letters in the rainbow curve over his head. Suddenly, I have an idea. Excuse me for a minute.
...
Okay. I’m back. This is what I did: I walked outside and tramped out into the edge of the branch as far as I dared go in the dark and I threw the quarter into that dark. I heard it fall, hit leaves that had themselves fallen. Common wisdom says that a penny or, in this case, a quarter saved is a quarter earned.
Sometimes. But not tonight.
Copyright 2009
Sunday, October 11, 2009
One True Color Liberally Applied
I saw autumn once. Real autumn. Cloudless sky the color of delphiniums. Trees that moved in the breeze like flamenco dancers, skirts flounced in leaves the red of the ripest plums, the gold of a long-worn wedding band, the orange of new rust. Creek water already so cold it raised the hair on my arms as I dragged my fingers through its ripples.
It was in New England, the first week in October, and I wore turtlenecks and a jacket that was supposed to look like an old Indian blanket. I picked up leaves and pressed them between the pages of the notebook I carried.
I found myself thinking in cliches – describing the air as "brisk," as though it had legs and could move them quickly – and taking far too many photographs of the same colorful trees over and over. I decided I liked apple cider.
And when I got home, walked off the plane taking off my jacket so I could breathe, I was feeling a little – yes, I admit it – a little ashamed of this place where most of the trees stay green and nobody taps maple trees for sugar and my turtlenecks wouldn’t be needed for at least another couple of months.
Pure silliness.
Autumn, of course, comes to south Georgia as surely as it comes to New England; it just looks different. Instead of flushing the landscape with the entire spectrum, it carries a single paintbrush laden with one color, the bright yellow of French’s mustard -- goldenrod at every crossroad, at the base of every light pole, on the line of every fence row. Happy-faced asters and soft-edge primroses, foxglove and buttercups. They do not dance; they just sway to the music of the still-warm breeze through the pine trees like the homely girl in the corner at the Homecoming dance.
And it doesn’t make a whole lot of fuss either. It casually saunters in while everybody’s attention is on getting the corn out of the fields and planning for the first tailgate. One morning you walk outside, feel a little shiver in your shoulders and suddenly have a craving for turnips.
Then it’s time for the fair and cane syrup and while you’re there somebody invites you to a peanut boiling and, before you know it, the newspaper is running that unscramble-the-names-and-win-a-turkey promotion and it’s Thanksgiving.
No, it’s not the autumn of elementary school bulletin boards or Charles Kuralt’s video essays, but it is autumn nonetheless. Our autumn.
Last week, when the moon was nearly full, I lit some citronella candles out on the deck (something no New Englander would ever have to do in October) and stood in the dark staring up at the big white circle. The fields on either side of Sandhill had given up their corn and the empty stalks had been felled by a rotary cutter in preparation for dove season. The frog chorus that had been a loud accompaniment to any kind of outdoor activity all summer was faint and arrhythmic. I realized it had been several days since I’d filled the hummingbird feeders.
The season had, once again without fanfare, stolen in and settled herself.
There is a lot to be said for the absence of fanfare, for subtlety and grace, for one true color liberally applied.
Copyright 2009
Sunday, September 27, 2009
The Road More Traveled
It is hard not to think of it as my road or, at the very least, our road, my and my family’s road. No one else was living on that five-mile stretch of sticky clay and powdery dirt when we took up residence there and, to this day, long after other residents have acquired an address on the road Daddy named, I still look up at the sound of a passing vehicle, assuming that it is somehow connected to us.
I have walked hundreds of miles between the ditches that the county drags sometimes, crossing tracks made by deer and turtles and snakes and birds of Lord-knows-how-many species. I have pulled a young Adam and even younger Kate in a little red wagon over the undulating bumps created by farm machinery. I have foolishly punished myself by riding a bicycle through sand that provided no traction.
Sandhill sits about halfway between the two paved roads that are the bookends for our dirt one. When I get into the car and head out I don’t have to pay a whole lot of attention. I’ve driven that two-mile stretch in every kind of weather and I know exactly when to slow down, speed up, move over. My hands and feet respond to memory without any specific direction from my brain which is, then, free to wander. I can go through the day’s to-do list or lose myself in an NPR piece. I can notice the morning sunlight coming through the pine trees like a laser and smile at my good fortune.
And in about four minutes, I can find myself at the stop sign, scanning the county road for pick-up trucks going the back way to the poultry plant before pulling out onto the hardtop. Except that several times lately I’ve been jerked from my revery by something totally unexpected.
Our neighbors up on the highway farm a couple of the fields on either side of our dirt road. And they irrigate those fields regularly. At least five or six times this summer I have come smoothly around the bad curve on dry and dusty road only to find my tires suddenly slipping and sliding into muddy clay. I’ve not ended up in a ditch yet, but it’s been close a time or two and less than charitable words have slipped out of my mouth as I’ve maneuvered the car away from a vertical drop of three feet or more.
The last time it happened I felt the tightening of my muscles and the flood of adrenalin and, then, equally as unexpected as the slipping and sliding, came the flash of insight. It is, as I thought, my road. But it is subject to the conditions all around it. And those conditions aren’t always created by rain or wind or other acts of God. Sometimes they are created by other people.
It is a metaphor so often-used as to become predictable and trite, but it is used so often because it so applicable: Life is a road. We can plan the trip, unfold the old gas station map or print out something from Google to plot the course. We can fill the tank, check the oil and the tire pressure, clean the windshield of squashed bugs. We can get a good night’s rest and pack some snacks. With the help of the Weather Channel, we can even accelerate or postpone the journey to take advantage of optimum atmospheric conditions.
What we cannot do is predict the behavior of other people. Drivers, passengers, pedestrians. DOT engineers waving flags, farmers irrigating fields. The homeless woman pushing the grocery cart, the biker in the funny-looking helmet and Spandex shorts. They slow us down, create road hazards, force us onto detours and – Let’s face it. – very seldom know or care that their actions effect our journeys.
So it’s up to me and me alone to make sure I don’t go crashing through a barricade or running over a two-by-four. It’s up to me to pay close enough attention to the changes around me that I don’t end up in the ditch. It’s my road, but there are other people on it. And, if I want to get home, I have to share.
Copyright 2009
I have walked hundreds of miles between the ditches that the county drags sometimes, crossing tracks made by deer and turtles and snakes and birds of Lord-knows-how-many species. I have pulled a young Adam and even younger Kate in a little red wagon over the undulating bumps created by farm machinery. I have foolishly punished myself by riding a bicycle through sand that provided no traction.
Sandhill sits about halfway between the two paved roads that are the bookends for our dirt one. When I get into the car and head out I don’t have to pay a whole lot of attention. I’ve driven that two-mile stretch in every kind of weather and I know exactly when to slow down, speed up, move over. My hands and feet respond to memory without any specific direction from my brain which is, then, free to wander. I can go through the day’s to-do list or lose myself in an NPR piece. I can notice the morning sunlight coming through the pine trees like a laser and smile at my good fortune.
And in about four minutes, I can find myself at the stop sign, scanning the county road for pick-up trucks going the back way to the poultry plant before pulling out onto the hardtop. Except that several times lately I’ve been jerked from my revery by something totally unexpected.
Our neighbors up on the highway farm a couple of the fields on either side of our dirt road. And they irrigate those fields regularly. At least five or six times this summer I have come smoothly around the bad curve on dry and dusty road only to find my tires suddenly slipping and sliding into muddy clay. I’ve not ended up in a ditch yet, but it’s been close a time or two and less than charitable words have slipped out of my mouth as I’ve maneuvered the car away from a vertical drop of three feet or more.
The last time it happened I felt the tightening of my muscles and the flood of adrenalin and, then, equally as unexpected as the slipping and sliding, came the flash of insight. It is, as I thought, my road. But it is subject to the conditions all around it. And those conditions aren’t always created by rain or wind or other acts of God. Sometimes they are created by other people.
It is a metaphor so often-used as to become predictable and trite, but it is used so often because it so applicable: Life is a road. We can plan the trip, unfold the old gas station map or print out something from Google to plot the course. We can fill the tank, check the oil and the tire pressure, clean the windshield of squashed bugs. We can get a good night’s rest and pack some snacks. With the help of the Weather Channel, we can even accelerate or postpone the journey to take advantage of optimum atmospheric conditions.
What we cannot do is predict the behavior of other people. Drivers, passengers, pedestrians. DOT engineers waving flags, farmers irrigating fields. The homeless woman pushing the grocery cart, the biker in the funny-looking helmet and Spandex shorts. They slow us down, create road hazards, force us onto detours and – Let’s face it. – very seldom know or care that their actions effect our journeys.
So it’s up to me and me alone to make sure I don’t go crashing through a barricade or running over a two-by-four. It’s up to me to pay close enough attention to the changes around me that I don’t end up in the ditch. It’s my road, but there are other people on it. And, if I want to get home, I have to share.
Copyright 2009
Saturday, September 12, 2009
Choice and Chance and What Is Meant To Be
It still surprises me that people who have known me for, let’s say, less than 30 years, all seem to assume that I grew up on the farm, that my ability to identify coffee weed appeared along with my baby teeth, that the first motorized vehicle I drove was a tractor and that I know how to birth baby pigs. The truth is that I was a reluctant transplant to Adabelle, 17 years old and counting down the days before I left for college.
In those eight months and in the holidays over the next seven years, however, I managed to obtain an accelerated education. I learned to chase runaway cows and move pigs from one pen to another. I learned what a soybean was and made a reasonable effort to understand something called soybean futures. I climbed grain bins, rode tractors, experienced something akin to quicksand by playing in a trailer of just-combined corn. I watched the skies and prayed for rain.
None of those things are remarkable anymore. They are a part of the rhythm of my days.
The other day I was in the backyard making a new flower bed, pulling out long white fingers of grass roots from the dry gray dirt, and looked up toward the road at an unusually loud truck rattle. Daddy was pulling the corn auger from the shed up to the grain bin.The auger is tall and skinny and looks like a praying mantis made of sheet metal. One end goes into the grain bin and another into the truck holding shelled corn. In one of those amazing feats of mechanical engineering that I don’t understand, the auger twirls ‘round and ‘round and draws the corn up its narrow neck and into the bin. Sure beats shoveling.
I stopped my digging long enough to watch the slow procession – Daddy with his elbow hanging out the open truck window getting him closer to the rear-view mirror to make sure that the auger did not veer off into the adjacent fields – and remembered hearing for the first time, during that first overwhelming summer, somebody mention an auger.
My thoughts – the thoughts of the bookish literary-minded girl I was – had gone immediately to "Julius Caesar" and the warning of the priests whose auguring ( "Plucking the entrails of an offering forth, They could not find a heart within the beast.") convinced them that Caesar should avoid the Senate on that day. Different word, different spelling, but my only frame of reference.
Thirty-five years later, my own hands plunged deep into dirt, not animal entrails, I found myself laughing at possible confusion between the two words, the idea that an auger could foretell the future, that the waterfall of bright gold kernels splashing into a grain bin could divine tomorrow, that the cloud of corn pollen that rises and falls in a fine layer on grass and sleeves and eyelashes is some sort of pixie dust.
But, of course, it can. Of course, it is. Just as an auger curls its way up into the sky, so Daddy’s choice to bring us all here, to the dirt road and the scrub oaks and the wide open sky, curled its way into our thinking, bore into our definition of what is good and right, twirled itself so tightly into our vision of how things should be that it – after a while – seemed no longer a choice, but destiny.
We like choice. We like to think that we have control. We like moving down the line at the sandwich shop and telling the disinterested young man in the corporate-logo’ed shirt that we’d like lettuce, tomato, no onions, just a few cucumbers and light mayo on one of 50-something possible combinations of meat and bread.
And that is a comfort. But it is also a comfort to sit in the sun on a clear September day and hear the wind chimes sing in the breeze through the chinaberry tree and be glad, be oh so very glad, that some things are just meant to be.
Copyright 2009
In those eight months and in the holidays over the next seven years, however, I managed to obtain an accelerated education. I learned to chase runaway cows and move pigs from one pen to another. I learned what a soybean was and made a reasonable effort to understand something called soybean futures. I climbed grain bins, rode tractors, experienced something akin to quicksand by playing in a trailer of just-combined corn. I watched the skies and prayed for rain.
None of those things are remarkable anymore. They are a part of the rhythm of my days.
The other day I was in the backyard making a new flower bed, pulling out long white fingers of grass roots from the dry gray dirt, and looked up toward the road at an unusually loud truck rattle. Daddy was pulling the corn auger from the shed up to the grain bin.The auger is tall and skinny and looks like a praying mantis made of sheet metal. One end goes into the grain bin and another into the truck holding shelled corn. In one of those amazing feats of mechanical engineering that I don’t understand, the auger twirls ‘round and ‘round and draws the corn up its narrow neck and into the bin. Sure beats shoveling.
I stopped my digging long enough to watch the slow procession – Daddy with his elbow hanging out the open truck window getting him closer to the rear-view mirror to make sure that the auger did not veer off into the adjacent fields – and remembered hearing for the first time, during that first overwhelming summer, somebody mention an auger.
My thoughts – the thoughts of the bookish literary-minded girl I was – had gone immediately to "Julius Caesar" and the warning of the priests whose auguring ( "Plucking the entrails of an offering forth, They could not find a heart within the beast.") convinced them that Caesar should avoid the Senate on that day. Different word, different spelling, but my only frame of reference.
Thirty-five years later, my own hands plunged deep into dirt, not animal entrails, I found myself laughing at possible confusion between the two words, the idea that an auger could foretell the future, that the waterfall of bright gold kernels splashing into a grain bin could divine tomorrow, that the cloud of corn pollen that rises and falls in a fine layer on grass and sleeves and eyelashes is some sort of pixie dust.
But, of course, it can. Of course, it is. Just as an auger curls its way up into the sky, so Daddy’s choice to bring us all here, to the dirt road and the scrub oaks and the wide open sky, curled its way into our thinking, bore into our definition of what is good and right, twirled itself so tightly into our vision of how things should be that it – after a while – seemed no longer a choice, but destiny.
We like choice. We like to think that we have control. We like moving down the line at the sandwich shop and telling the disinterested young man in the corporate-logo’ed shirt that we’d like lettuce, tomato, no onions, just a few cucumbers and light mayo on one of 50-something possible combinations of meat and bread.
And that is a comfort. But it is also a comfort to sit in the sun on a clear September day and hear the wind chimes sing in the breeze through the chinaberry tree and be glad, be oh so very glad, that some things are just meant to be.
Copyright 2009
Monday, August 31, 2009
Laughing Into The Wind
I was standing in chest-high water, the waves slapping at my back like love-licks. Behind me was the wide wide ocean; in front of me was a water-colored beach – white sand, red lifeguard chair, scattered people in various shades of pink and brown stretched out under the sun that came down in wavy yellow beams.
My friend had left me to become one of those toasting people and so I was alone at the moment, a tiny island just off-shore.
It had been a busy weekend – another wedding! –and I was hungry for space. The sand slid and shifted under my toes which I had curled tightly in an effort to keep my balance. Hands on my hips, chin tilted toward the sky, I took a deep breath.
At just that moment, a pair of pelicans entered the frame of my vision, flying so low I could make out the line where their dark cartilaginous beaks meshed with their jiggly white pouches. I had never been that close to pelicans, never seen them flying so near people. I was startled, but not frightened. They were neither. And with a couple of flaps of long brown wings they were gone.
There are some things that evoke praise, some things that draw forth an eruption of amazement, some things that – rather than take your breath – give you an explosion of breath that pours out in a rolling swell of words. There are some moments when silence is blasphemy.
This was one of those moments.
And so it was that I stood there in the shallows of the endless sea and heard a voice that was clearly mine making exclamations of how very glad I was to be alive, how very grateful I was for the serendipity of pelicans flying low, how very much I wanted to make sure that I squeezed out of that day and every day all that was meant to be mine.
It is, I think, pretty much irrelevant to whom I was speaking – to myself or to the pelicans or to God. What matters is that the words came of their own accord, without hesitation and without editing. What matters is that those small puffs of wind were expelled into and absorbed by the larger wind that makes the waves that make the tides that make the sand into which my toes kept uselessly digging.
I opened my eyes, which I had closed momentarily, to see a boy, 11 or 12 years old, standing about 25 feet away, between me and the beach. He was looking at me. He was looking at me quizzically. He was looking at me as though he wasn’t sure whether to pretend he didn’t see me or to turn and run as fast as he could.
I realized, too late, of course, that the wind – the one that makes the waves and tides – was blowing in. In toward the beach. In toward where he was standing. And, yes, the poor child had heard my spontaneous invocation. I can only imagine what he was thinking.
I gave up the bad habit of allowing myself to be embarrassed a long time ago. There is absolutely no value to it and it takes far too much time and energy. I didn’t, then, feel my face turn red nor did I have an urge to look around as though I, too, had heard something strange and did not know from whence it came. I just looked at him, made as much eye contact as one can from that distance and watched him, in his pre-adolescent suspicion, scope out his mother a little farther down the beach and begin moving in her direction.
It was funny. Really. I am laughing still. Laughing at how silly I must have looked (I think I probably raised my hands at some point.) and sounded. Laughing at how astonished the boy was, his eyes and mouth frozen into three big circles. Laughing at how foolish we are to think that we odd creatures are ever anything but funny.
I waited a few minutes and then slogged my way through the water up onto the beach where I shook out a towel, stretched out and joined the rest of the pink and brown people, all of us different, all of us funny, all of us laughing in short sweet breaths of wind.
Copyright 2009
My friend had left me to become one of those toasting people and so I was alone at the moment, a tiny island just off-shore.
It had been a busy weekend – another wedding! –and I was hungry for space. The sand slid and shifted under my toes which I had curled tightly in an effort to keep my balance. Hands on my hips, chin tilted toward the sky, I took a deep breath.
At just that moment, a pair of pelicans entered the frame of my vision, flying so low I could make out the line where their dark cartilaginous beaks meshed with their jiggly white pouches. I had never been that close to pelicans, never seen them flying so near people. I was startled, but not frightened. They were neither. And with a couple of flaps of long brown wings they were gone.
There are some things that evoke praise, some things that draw forth an eruption of amazement, some things that – rather than take your breath – give you an explosion of breath that pours out in a rolling swell of words. There are some moments when silence is blasphemy.
This was one of those moments.
And so it was that I stood there in the shallows of the endless sea and heard a voice that was clearly mine making exclamations of how very glad I was to be alive, how very grateful I was for the serendipity of pelicans flying low, how very much I wanted to make sure that I squeezed out of that day and every day all that was meant to be mine.
It is, I think, pretty much irrelevant to whom I was speaking – to myself or to the pelicans or to God. What matters is that the words came of their own accord, without hesitation and without editing. What matters is that those small puffs of wind were expelled into and absorbed by the larger wind that makes the waves that make the tides that make the sand into which my toes kept uselessly digging.
I opened my eyes, which I had closed momentarily, to see a boy, 11 or 12 years old, standing about 25 feet away, between me and the beach. He was looking at me. He was looking at me quizzically. He was looking at me as though he wasn’t sure whether to pretend he didn’t see me or to turn and run as fast as he could.
I realized, too late, of course, that the wind – the one that makes the waves and tides – was blowing in. In toward the beach. In toward where he was standing. And, yes, the poor child had heard my spontaneous invocation. I can only imagine what he was thinking.
I gave up the bad habit of allowing myself to be embarrassed a long time ago. There is absolutely no value to it and it takes far too much time and energy. I didn’t, then, feel my face turn red nor did I have an urge to look around as though I, too, had heard something strange and did not know from whence it came. I just looked at him, made as much eye contact as one can from that distance and watched him, in his pre-adolescent suspicion, scope out his mother a little farther down the beach and begin moving in her direction.
It was funny. Really. I am laughing still. Laughing at how silly I must have looked (I think I probably raised my hands at some point.) and sounded. Laughing at how astonished the boy was, his eyes and mouth frozen into three big circles. Laughing at how foolish we are to think that we odd creatures are ever anything but funny.
I waited a few minutes and then slogged my way through the water up onto the beach where I shook out a towel, stretched out and joined the rest of the pink and brown people, all of us different, all of us funny, all of us laughing in short sweet breaths of wind.
Copyright 2009
Monday, August 17, 2009
AKC Registered -- Or Not
Lily is a good dog. She loves to go with me when I walk or run down the long dusty roads at Sandhill. She growls alertly at anything or anyone she deems suspicious and she generally comes when she is called.
She lets you know that she wants to be petted by lifting her left front paw and patting whatever part of your body is within reach. She likes to have her belly scratched, but is willing to settle for a quick pass with the bottom of my shoe. She has the square jaw of at least one boxer relative somewhere in her genetic past and when she smiles the lower cuspid on one side of her mouth sticks out over her upper lip making her looking a little like Popeye.
Lily is a good dog. And I love her.
But I have not forgotten Ginny. And sometimes, when I see the long face and sunshine-colored hair of someone else’s golden retriever, my heart clutches just slightly and for a moment I am sitting on the laundry room floor, holding Ginny in my lap, crying over some heartbreak and wiping my eyes with her silky ears.You never get over your first dog.
Which is why, this morning, already running a little bit late, I had no choice but to pick him up. I’d come to the stop sign at 301 and, looking to the left for oncoming traffic, saw this glorious golden retriever loping along the side of the too-busy highway. He walked straight up to the car (Goldens are like that. They trust everyone and believe with all their hearts that everyone loves them.) as though he’d been expecting me.
I got out and reached for his collar, one of those flourescent orange ones with the brass nameplates, the kind that hunters use. This was seen as an invitation to frolic and he began licking my hands and dancing around my legs, wiping me with the dirt and dew that his fur had collected in his wanderings.
Realizing that I’d never be able to read a name or telephone number off his collar unless he was confined, I opened the back door of the car and he jumped right in. I called the number, left a message and turned around to take him back to the farm where he could safely await his master. It took less than 10 minutes and, while I drove, I thought about Ginny.
This dog was lighter in color, bigger in size, a male. Not really much in common with Ginny, except the breed. And that was enough. Enough to let me know that I didn’t need to be afraid of him and that he would gladly accept my kindness.
It occurs to me people are like dogs in that way: We each have our breed. Some of us are chihuahuas, in constant motion, nipping at the heels of anything that moves, yapping constantly. Some of us are poodles, delicate and high-strung. Some of us are boxers with imposing physical presences and Forrest Gump personalities. And, just like dogs, while we’ll travel in a pack of pretty much any combination, but we’d really rather be with some of our own.
Just as I was getting my new friend into the dog pen, his master returned my call, got directions and started our way. I backed the car up and started for the office for the second time this morning.
I didn’t realize until later that I’d not noticed his name. It was on the collar, along with his master’s name and telephone number, but I hadn’t noticed it. It didn’t matter. I knew his breed and that was enough.
Copyright 2009
She lets you know that she wants to be petted by lifting her left front paw and patting whatever part of your body is within reach. She likes to have her belly scratched, but is willing to settle for a quick pass with the bottom of my shoe. She has the square jaw of at least one boxer relative somewhere in her genetic past and when she smiles the lower cuspid on one side of her mouth sticks out over her upper lip making her looking a little like Popeye.
Lily is a good dog. And I love her.
But I have not forgotten Ginny. And sometimes, when I see the long face and sunshine-colored hair of someone else’s golden retriever, my heart clutches just slightly and for a moment I am sitting on the laundry room floor, holding Ginny in my lap, crying over some heartbreak and wiping my eyes with her silky ears.You never get over your first dog.
Which is why, this morning, already running a little bit late, I had no choice but to pick him up. I’d come to the stop sign at 301 and, looking to the left for oncoming traffic, saw this glorious golden retriever loping along the side of the too-busy highway. He walked straight up to the car (Goldens are like that. They trust everyone and believe with all their hearts that everyone loves them.) as though he’d been expecting me.
I got out and reached for his collar, one of those flourescent orange ones with the brass nameplates, the kind that hunters use. This was seen as an invitation to frolic and he began licking my hands and dancing around my legs, wiping me with the dirt and dew that his fur had collected in his wanderings.
Realizing that I’d never be able to read a name or telephone number off his collar unless he was confined, I opened the back door of the car and he jumped right in. I called the number, left a message and turned around to take him back to the farm where he could safely await his master. It took less than 10 minutes and, while I drove, I thought about Ginny.
This dog was lighter in color, bigger in size, a male. Not really much in common with Ginny, except the breed. And that was enough. Enough to let me know that I didn’t need to be afraid of him and that he would gladly accept my kindness.
It occurs to me people are like dogs in that way: We each have our breed. Some of us are chihuahuas, in constant motion, nipping at the heels of anything that moves, yapping constantly. Some of us are poodles, delicate and high-strung. Some of us are boxers with imposing physical presences and Forrest Gump personalities. And, just like dogs, while we’ll travel in a pack of pretty much any combination, but we’d really rather be with some of our own.
Just as I was getting my new friend into the dog pen, his master returned my call, got directions and started our way. I backed the car up and started for the office for the second time this morning.
I didn’t realize until later that I’d not noticed his name. It was on the collar, along with his master’s name and telephone number, but I hadn’t noticed it. It didn’t matter. I knew his breed and that was enough.
Copyright 2009
Sunday, August 02, 2009
Wind and Sand and Sky
Late afternoon. Sun low in the sky, kissing the tops of buildings in the distance. Tide going out in choppy waves.
Daphne and I are sitting on the beach, arms and shoulders and legs exposed to the still-warm air, eyes shielded by dark glasses. We have been inside all day listening to serious and dedicated people talk about the hard things our job forces us to see and hear and try to understand. We have been inundated with images of pain and evil. We have been reminded of the existence of worlds we will never know.
But now, outside, absorbing the sunlight, we are simply admiring each other’s swimsuits, making plans for dinner and talking about life. Talking about it as though we can actually make sense of it, as though we can actually anticipate the future with enough accuracy to be prepared for it, as though we can actually shield ourselves from the possibilities of pain and evil.
To one side of us is a young couple taking down a beach tent, obviously well-practiced as they position themselves at opposite corners and release the latches in unison. On the hard-packed sand near the edge of the water are a handful of young boys, long-legged and skinny, trying to tame the wind and fly kites. Behind us is an elaborate sand castle molded, not from small hands, but turret-shaped plastic buckets.
I absorb it all without being distracted from the conversation, keep my attention on the story Daphne is telling me, offer sensitive and cogent interjections at just the right moments. And, then, I realize that I have turned my head toward the water, that I am watching something other than my friend’s expressive face.
Just off the beach is a windsurfer struggling with his sail. A little farther downwind is another having no better luck. Neither one is particularly skilled. Both are managing to remain upright, but there is no fluidity in their movements, no grace in their maneuvers. They are so close to the shore than I cannot imagine that they are experiencing much in the way of transcendence. I feel sorry for them.
I don’t windsurf. But I have spent hours watching it. I can recognize the pure pleasure that comes from skimming the waves, leaning into the wind and letting it carry board and body and sail through air that smells of sun and salt. These two, the strugglers, are not experiencing that pleasure.
The next night I am talking to my friend the windsurfer, the one from whom I learned what I know, and I tell him about it. "Why," I ask him, "would they be staying so close to shore? That can’t be much fun."
"What was the direction of the wind?" he asks.
I try to remember, tell him where I’d been sitting, figure out that the wind was blowing in.
"That’s it," he says. "To get farther out they would have had to fight the wind. Not everyone wants to work that hard."
Instant gratification. Quick fix. It is what, unfortunately, most of us prefer.
"You put in the effort first," he goes on. "Tack, then sail."
Of course. That is the secret. Put all your energy – ALL your energy – into the climb, then trust gravity to bring you safely down. Put all your effort into the living, then trust life to bring you what you want. Tack, then sail.
The late summer light fades while we talk and I sit in near-darkness. I can close my eyes and I still see the two figures, tense and stiff, knees and elbows locked. I can almost hear the release of tightly-held breaths as their boards strike sand.
And I think about sitting on the beach with Daphne, working on our tans and our lives. I know what I will tell her when I see her again, the next time we find ourselves asking questions and wondering what is ahead.
"It’s all pretty simple," I will say. "Tack, then sail."
Copyright 2009
Daphne and I are sitting on the beach, arms and shoulders and legs exposed to the still-warm air, eyes shielded by dark glasses. We have been inside all day listening to serious and dedicated people talk about the hard things our job forces us to see and hear and try to understand. We have been inundated with images of pain and evil. We have been reminded of the existence of worlds we will never know.
But now, outside, absorbing the sunlight, we are simply admiring each other’s swimsuits, making plans for dinner and talking about life. Talking about it as though we can actually make sense of it, as though we can actually anticipate the future with enough accuracy to be prepared for it, as though we can actually shield ourselves from the possibilities of pain and evil.
To one side of us is a young couple taking down a beach tent, obviously well-practiced as they position themselves at opposite corners and release the latches in unison. On the hard-packed sand near the edge of the water are a handful of young boys, long-legged and skinny, trying to tame the wind and fly kites. Behind us is an elaborate sand castle molded, not from small hands, but turret-shaped plastic buckets.
I absorb it all without being distracted from the conversation, keep my attention on the story Daphne is telling me, offer sensitive and cogent interjections at just the right moments. And, then, I realize that I have turned my head toward the water, that I am watching something other than my friend’s expressive face.
Just off the beach is a windsurfer struggling with his sail. A little farther downwind is another having no better luck. Neither one is particularly skilled. Both are managing to remain upright, but there is no fluidity in their movements, no grace in their maneuvers. They are so close to the shore than I cannot imagine that they are experiencing much in the way of transcendence. I feel sorry for them.
I don’t windsurf. But I have spent hours watching it. I can recognize the pure pleasure that comes from skimming the waves, leaning into the wind and letting it carry board and body and sail through air that smells of sun and salt. These two, the strugglers, are not experiencing that pleasure.
The next night I am talking to my friend the windsurfer, the one from whom I learned what I know, and I tell him about it. "Why," I ask him, "would they be staying so close to shore? That can’t be much fun."
"What was the direction of the wind?" he asks.
I try to remember, tell him where I’d been sitting, figure out that the wind was blowing in.
"That’s it," he says. "To get farther out they would have had to fight the wind. Not everyone wants to work that hard."
Instant gratification. Quick fix. It is what, unfortunately, most of us prefer.
"You put in the effort first," he goes on. "Tack, then sail."
Of course. That is the secret. Put all your energy – ALL your energy – into the climb, then trust gravity to bring you safely down. Put all your effort into the living, then trust life to bring you what you want. Tack, then sail.
The late summer light fades while we talk and I sit in near-darkness. I can close my eyes and I still see the two figures, tense and stiff, knees and elbows locked. I can almost hear the release of tightly-held breaths as their boards strike sand.
And I think about sitting on the beach with Daphne, working on our tans and our lives. I know what I will tell her when I see her again, the next time we find ourselves asking questions and wondering what is ahead.
"It’s all pretty simple," I will say. "Tack, then sail."
Copyright 2009
Sunday, July 19, 2009
Not In The Whirlwind
The early evening breeze, making its way through the cornfield whose stalks are now fading from bright green to dull gold, sounds like an advancing rain shower and I have to look up from my book to figure out which it is. No water, just wind.
Soft and easy it comes across the yard, so gently that the wind chimes hanging from the eaves over my head do not move, so gently that the thin leaves on the chinaberry tree vibrate no more than a blinking eyelash, so gently that the single hummingbird can float before the feeder, hesitate a moment as though she’s never seen such a thing before and then tilt her head slightly to plunge her beak into the fake flower like a needle into silk.
It has been a busy summer. A summer of weddings and parties and warm times with people I love. All good things. But there have been few moments of inactivity, few moments to sit on the deck and watch the hummingbirds. The feeders emptied last week without my noticing and I refilled them this morning with more than a dash of guilt and a whispered prayer for absolution. The birds, at least this one, seem to have forgiven me.
The larger question is whether I’ve forgiven myself.
Nothing has been neglected really. Nothing except the hummingbirds and the hanging baskets of petunias that, let’s face it, never really stood a chance in the constant heat. I’ve managed to make the telephone calls to keep the grass cut. I’ve sent all the birthday and anniversary cards for June and July. I picked enough blackberries to make a few pints of jam.
And, yet, in this moment, with my legs stretched out on the lawn chair, my hand curved around a glass of tea, and my breath easier than it’s been in weeks, I understand that what I’ve snubbed with my busyness, what I’ve slighted in my constant movement, what I’ve disregarded in my attention to the details of my to-do lists, is myself.
A couple of weeks ago I was having a conversation with someone who knows me well. We were speaking of esoteric things, peculiar ideas and polarizing opinions, unanswerable questions and undoubtable truths. I think – no, I’m sure – I was being deliberately obtuse. I wanted to talk, but my brain was too tired. I wanted to engage, but I was physically and mentally incapable of doing so. At some point, frustrated like an infant needing a nap, I replied to a particular question with a harsh, "I don’t know!"
I expected a reprimand. Or something along the lines of, "Sure you do." Or something that would allow me to rev up the tension, complain about the busyness of my life and elicit some sympathy.
What I got instead was, "Be still and know. You have to be still to know."
Ouch.
So now it’s Saturday. The perennials I spent the morning planting smile at me from the flower bed at the bottom of the deck steps. The sycamore tree whose bottom limbs, puddling on the grass, I’d trimmed away with Mama’s hacksaw sighs deeply with the extra breathing room. The hummingbird hums, sucking at the Kool-Aid in the hourglass-shaped feeder.
And I am being still.
Still and noticing that the sun is setting in a slightly different place than the last time I watched. Noticing that the kudzu on the trees in the branch between the house and the pond has completely obscured the view of the water. Noticing that my skin is browner, that there are no mosquitoes, that the humidity isn’t so bad.
I am being still and I can feel myself contracting and expanding, contracting to expel the waste of used-up energy, expanding to take in the pulse-beat of everything around me. Breathing out the hurry, breathing in the calm.
I am being still and, in the stillness, I know everything I need to know.
Copyright 2009
Soft and easy it comes across the yard, so gently that the wind chimes hanging from the eaves over my head do not move, so gently that the thin leaves on the chinaberry tree vibrate no more than a blinking eyelash, so gently that the single hummingbird can float before the feeder, hesitate a moment as though she’s never seen such a thing before and then tilt her head slightly to plunge her beak into the fake flower like a needle into silk.
It has been a busy summer. A summer of weddings and parties and warm times with people I love. All good things. But there have been few moments of inactivity, few moments to sit on the deck and watch the hummingbirds. The feeders emptied last week without my noticing and I refilled them this morning with more than a dash of guilt and a whispered prayer for absolution. The birds, at least this one, seem to have forgiven me.
The larger question is whether I’ve forgiven myself.
Nothing has been neglected really. Nothing except the hummingbirds and the hanging baskets of petunias that, let’s face it, never really stood a chance in the constant heat. I’ve managed to make the telephone calls to keep the grass cut. I’ve sent all the birthday and anniversary cards for June and July. I picked enough blackberries to make a few pints of jam.
And, yet, in this moment, with my legs stretched out on the lawn chair, my hand curved around a glass of tea, and my breath easier than it’s been in weeks, I understand that what I’ve snubbed with my busyness, what I’ve slighted in my constant movement, what I’ve disregarded in my attention to the details of my to-do lists, is myself.
A couple of weeks ago I was having a conversation with someone who knows me well. We were speaking of esoteric things, peculiar ideas and polarizing opinions, unanswerable questions and undoubtable truths. I think – no, I’m sure – I was being deliberately obtuse. I wanted to talk, but my brain was too tired. I wanted to engage, but I was physically and mentally incapable of doing so. At some point, frustrated like an infant needing a nap, I replied to a particular question with a harsh, "I don’t know!"
I expected a reprimand. Or something along the lines of, "Sure you do." Or something that would allow me to rev up the tension, complain about the busyness of my life and elicit some sympathy.
What I got instead was, "Be still and know. You have to be still to know."
Ouch.
So now it’s Saturday. The perennials I spent the morning planting smile at me from the flower bed at the bottom of the deck steps. The sycamore tree whose bottom limbs, puddling on the grass, I’d trimmed away with Mama’s hacksaw sighs deeply with the extra breathing room. The hummingbird hums, sucking at the Kool-Aid in the hourglass-shaped feeder.
And I am being still.
Still and noticing that the sun is setting in a slightly different place than the last time I watched. Noticing that the kudzu on the trees in the branch between the house and the pond has completely obscured the view of the water. Noticing that my skin is browner, that there are no mosquitoes, that the humidity isn’t so bad.
I am being still and I can feel myself contracting and expanding, contracting to expel the waste of used-up energy, expanding to take in the pulse-beat of everything around me. Breathing out the hurry, breathing in the calm.
I am being still and, in the stillness, I know everything I need to know.
Copyright 2009
Sunday, July 05, 2009
From This Day Forward
In June, even the lowest tide is still high, making the beach a narrow ribbon of eggshell-colored sand. And so it was that there was just enough room, on this dazzlingly brilliant Saturday afternoon, for a few rows of white folding chairs, a line of serious men in black tuxedos, a loop of pretty girls in diaphanous pink dresses and, of course, the bride.
The walk down to the beach from the hotel, in high-heeled mules that click-clacked on the asphalt like miniature jack-hammers, had not taken long. There had been no breeze on the street and moving through the two o’clock, 105-degree heat had been like pushing through an endless succession of heavy curtains. But here at the edge of the water, where the waves spread out in thin pancakes, and the rocks over to the side caught the sound of rushing water and rolled it back out in a sustained whisper, it was almost possible – almost – to forget the trickle of sweat that rolled down my sternum.
I waited, there on the second row with the grandmother, for the guitar music to start and people I love so much it makes me ache to walk down the narrow aisle of sand. I tried to concentrate on the present moment, not the nearly 27 years of moments that had brought my Adam to his wedding day.
The old, old ritual moved through its steps. The words were repeated. The hands were joined. The flower girls dropped petals from their chubby hands and watched the sea breeze waft them away. At one point the minister stepped forward as the ocean slid under his shoes and, following his lead, the black tuxedos and pink dresses did the same. And then it was over.
Jenn and Adam, sporting new jewelry and smiles that came from somewhere deep inside, walked out together, hand-in-hand. What followed – the posing for photographs, the hugging of the same people over and over again, the repetitive but completely sincere declarations of how beautiful the bride, how handsome the groom, how hot the weather – left us tired and sated with happiness.
A week later, the photographer (a good friend of mine) sent me a few sneak peeks of the photos while the newlyweds were still in the Bahamas. I teared up over the one of Daddy helping Adam with his cuff links. I lost my breath over the one of me and beautiful, grown-up Kate. I giggled at the one of Adam skipping down the street, dragging Jenn along, bubbles floating in the air around them.
But there was one – a black and white – that told the story, that preached the sermon, that spoke all the unspeakable words. Adam and Jenn, hands clasped, are looking not at each other but over the shoulder of the minister at the advancing tide. Their faces show no worry, no discomfort, no concern that the rented tux or the ethereal white dress might get stained or damaged. There is no question about whether they should move to avoid the watery licks at their feet. There is no panic, just interest.
Anyone who has ever watched a beloved child grow up and choose a partner has done it with a catch in the throat, a breath held just slightly, wondering if what that child has learned about life and love and commitment will be enough to carry him or her through the days to come. Anyone who has ever made the promises knows how hard they are to keep. Anyone who has ever prayed prays on that day that the inevitable difficulties will be just hard enough to build strength, not so hard as to scar.
This is what I am thinking as I stare at the photograph – the one of my Adam and, now, my Jenn – over and over again. And in the staring I see them not just standing on the beach, but standing on the threshold of their life together – without fear, holding on to each other and looking in the same direction. It is, I think, a very good way to start.
Copyright 2009
The walk down to the beach from the hotel, in high-heeled mules that click-clacked on the asphalt like miniature jack-hammers, had not taken long. There had been no breeze on the street and moving through the two o’clock, 105-degree heat had been like pushing through an endless succession of heavy curtains. But here at the edge of the water, where the waves spread out in thin pancakes, and the rocks over to the side caught the sound of rushing water and rolled it back out in a sustained whisper, it was almost possible – almost – to forget the trickle of sweat that rolled down my sternum.
I waited, there on the second row with the grandmother, for the guitar music to start and people I love so much it makes me ache to walk down the narrow aisle of sand. I tried to concentrate on the present moment, not the nearly 27 years of moments that had brought my Adam to his wedding day.
The old, old ritual moved through its steps. The words were repeated. The hands were joined. The flower girls dropped petals from their chubby hands and watched the sea breeze waft them away. At one point the minister stepped forward as the ocean slid under his shoes and, following his lead, the black tuxedos and pink dresses did the same. And then it was over.
Jenn and Adam, sporting new jewelry and smiles that came from somewhere deep inside, walked out together, hand-in-hand. What followed – the posing for photographs, the hugging of the same people over and over again, the repetitive but completely sincere declarations of how beautiful the bride, how handsome the groom, how hot the weather – left us tired and sated with happiness.
A week later, the photographer (a good friend of mine) sent me a few sneak peeks of the photos while the newlyweds were still in the Bahamas. I teared up over the one of Daddy helping Adam with his cuff links. I lost my breath over the one of me and beautiful, grown-up Kate. I giggled at the one of Adam skipping down the street, dragging Jenn along, bubbles floating in the air around them.
But there was one – a black and white – that told the story, that preached the sermon, that spoke all the unspeakable words. Adam and Jenn, hands clasped, are looking not at each other but over the shoulder of the minister at the advancing tide. Their faces show no worry, no discomfort, no concern that the rented tux or the ethereal white dress might get stained or damaged. There is no question about whether they should move to avoid the watery licks at their feet. There is no panic, just interest.
Anyone who has ever watched a beloved child grow up and choose a partner has done it with a catch in the throat, a breath held just slightly, wondering if what that child has learned about life and love and commitment will be enough to carry him or her through the days to come. Anyone who has ever made the promises knows how hard they are to keep. Anyone who has ever prayed prays on that day that the inevitable difficulties will be just hard enough to build strength, not so hard as to scar.
This is what I am thinking as I stare at the photograph – the one of my Adam and, now, my Jenn – over and over again. And in the staring I see them not just standing on the beach, but standing on the threshold of their life together – without fear, holding on to each other and looking in the same direction. It is, I think, a very good way to start.
Copyright 2009
Sunday, June 21, 2009
Eve and the Serpent: One More Time
I opened the car door and turned to get out. My breath hit the still, hot air like an egg hits simmering water and hovered there – poached oxygen. My arms were instantly damp and sticky and my clothes, light and comfortable that morning when I put them on, suddenly collapsed onto my skin like Saran Wrap. I forced my bare feet onto the concrete of the carport and felt a brief moment of relief.
June in south Georgia. Ah, yes.
I gathered up the mail and my briefcase and my gym bag and the shoes I’d kicked off the moment I’d left the office. Arms full, brain distracted, I started toward the back steps.
Something moved. Just a little something, but enough. I stopped. Squinted my eyes. A snake. Stretched out his full length along one of the steps, his pointy little head raised up toward the clapboards, reconnoitering a possible breach whereby he might invade my sanctuary.
My heart clutched just a second. I quietly set down my burdens, forgetting for a moment that the audacious reptile couldn’t hear, and backed away toward the only weapon anywhere close.
I pulled the hose pipe from its wheel, turned on the faucet and began an aqueous assault that would have made any seaman proud. Water firing toward his head in a violent stream, the snake turned slowly away from the wall and inched bit by bit down the steps. It took at least five minutes to herd him off the carport, through the hostas and under the deck.
Only then, less than three feet from the deck, did I see the two additional snakes, twined together around the deck post just outside the bedroom door, a live caduceus. I turned the spray toward them. This time it took longer.
When the immediate crisis was past and they were dangling from the other side of the deck, twisting and turning like exotic dancers, I did what I always do: I went for Daddy.
Within 10 minutes, the two deck snakes had been sent to their reward by deadly-accurate shotgun blasts. (The first, I truly believe, was prayed away by my friend Mandy who had called in the midst of the initial assault.)
The friend I call Mr. Green Jeans has reprimanded me for my malevolent reaction, reminded me that those snakes feed on the mice that I hate even more and accused me of disturbing the delicate ecosystem around Sandhill.
Sorry. It’s just that, well, I don’t like interlopers. I don’t like my security being breached. I don’t like being reminded of my vulnerability.
None of us do. We pretend to embrace our humanness with its inherent fragility. We pose as sensitive creatures who are moved to tears by sunsets and big-eyed puppies and giggling toddlers, but it’s all a sham. And it lasts only until the snake crawls out of the branch and stretches out across the path blocking the way. At that moment, whether the snake is a reptile or another human being posing as one, what every one of us wants to be is bullet-proof and Teflon-coated, an unshakeable monolith inspiring the awe and respect of weaker souls.
Good luck.
Because what we all have to ultimately admit is that there are no bullet-proof, Teflon-coated people. And there are no impenetrable walls. The best for which any of us can hope is to have within reaching distance another soul with a shotgun or, better yet, an available prayer.
Copyright 2009
June in south Georgia. Ah, yes.
I gathered up the mail and my briefcase and my gym bag and the shoes I’d kicked off the moment I’d left the office. Arms full, brain distracted, I started toward the back steps.
Something moved. Just a little something, but enough. I stopped. Squinted my eyes. A snake. Stretched out his full length along one of the steps, his pointy little head raised up toward the clapboards, reconnoitering a possible breach whereby he might invade my sanctuary.
My heart clutched just a second. I quietly set down my burdens, forgetting for a moment that the audacious reptile couldn’t hear, and backed away toward the only weapon anywhere close.
I pulled the hose pipe from its wheel, turned on the faucet and began an aqueous assault that would have made any seaman proud. Water firing toward his head in a violent stream, the snake turned slowly away from the wall and inched bit by bit down the steps. It took at least five minutes to herd him off the carport, through the hostas and under the deck.
Only then, less than three feet from the deck, did I see the two additional snakes, twined together around the deck post just outside the bedroom door, a live caduceus. I turned the spray toward them. This time it took longer.
When the immediate crisis was past and they were dangling from the other side of the deck, twisting and turning like exotic dancers, I did what I always do: I went for Daddy.
Within 10 minutes, the two deck snakes had been sent to their reward by deadly-accurate shotgun blasts. (The first, I truly believe, was prayed away by my friend Mandy who had called in the midst of the initial assault.)
The friend I call Mr. Green Jeans has reprimanded me for my malevolent reaction, reminded me that those snakes feed on the mice that I hate even more and accused me of disturbing the delicate ecosystem around Sandhill.
Sorry. It’s just that, well, I don’t like interlopers. I don’t like my security being breached. I don’t like being reminded of my vulnerability.
None of us do. We pretend to embrace our humanness with its inherent fragility. We pose as sensitive creatures who are moved to tears by sunsets and big-eyed puppies and giggling toddlers, but it’s all a sham. And it lasts only until the snake crawls out of the branch and stretches out across the path blocking the way. At that moment, whether the snake is a reptile or another human being posing as one, what every one of us wants to be is bullet-proof and Teflon-coated, an unshakeable monolith inspiring the awe and respect of weaker souls.
Good luck.
Because what we all have to ultimately admit is that there are no bullet-proof, Teflon-coated people. And there are no impenetrable walls. The best for which any of us can hope is to have within reaching distance another soul with a shotgun or, better yet, an available prayer.
Copyright 2009
Sunday, June 07, 2009
Stitching and the Art of Love
The dressing rooms on the second floor of Minkovitz Department Store were poorly lit and small, just big enough for a narrow stool and the floor space for one person to dress and undress. To get a full view of whatever it was that one was trying on, one had to leave the dressing room and walk out onto the sales floor where God and the sales ladies and, worst of all, possibly somebody popular who was also shopping could see how tight the skirt was through the hips or how inadequately the bodice was filled.
I was subjected to this torture only a few times as, for all the hours I spent in a Minkovitz dressing room, we – Mama and I – never had any serious intention of actually buying anything.I take that back: Mama never had any intention; I was always hopeful.
From the day Mama and Daddy brought me home from the old red brick hospital on Grady Street, whatever I wore was homemade, floating forth from under the presser foot of Mama’s Singer sewing machine in a froth of soft cotton batiste, crisp gingham and velvety corduroy. The Peter Pan collars on my church dresses were finished in double-stitched scallops and the tiniest of pin tucks framed rows of shiny pearl buttons down the fronts.
Somewhere around second grade I figured out that not everyone dressed the way that I did. Some of them had skirts that looked exactly alike. They had small satin tags sewn into their necklines and, occasionally, some writing or an animal on the outside. And, because the need to be "like" and "liked" arises early in girls, it was somewhere around second grade that I began to resent the fact that none of my clothes came from Minkovitz or Belk or – Be still, my heart. – The Children’s Shop.
By the time I got to junior high, Mama, who just couldn’t justify spending money on clothes that were not as well-made as the ones she sewed, and I had reached a compromise: We went shopping, just like all my friends, dragging an armload of skirts and blouses and dresses into the dressing room, plastic hangers clicking and getting tangled together. I tried each outfit on and stood very still while Mama, pulling out her little Blue Horse top-bound spiral notebook, drew detailed pictures of what I was wearing.
She made notes like "grosgrain ribbon trim" and drew arrows to the place on the dress where said trim would be placed. She rubbed the fabric between her knowledgeable hands and then wrote, "polyester and cotton" or "100% wool." She drew every detail – square pockets and notched collars and 2" cuffs.
After closing the notebook, dropping it back down into her patent leather purse that closed with a loud click and gathering up all the clearly not-up-to-snuff garments, Mama would walk out to meet the sales ladies while I dressed. Through the heavy fabric curtain at the dressing room door I could hear her say, "No, we didn’t find anything today."
An hour later we would be leaving the fabric store weighted down with a Simplicity or Butterick pattern, a couple of yards of fabric folded into a nice square with a paper tag pinned to the top, thread, zipper, buttons, sometimes elastic, all of which would go into the magician’s hat that was Mama’s creativity and be transformed into an infinitely better version of what I had been craving since the moment I saw it on the rack at the department store.
I was not so wise at 13 to recognize the gift of a mother who could work this magic. I did not always have the most pleasant attitude as I sat on the stool at the counter flipping through the pages of the pattern books to find the one that most closely resembled what I’d just tried on.
I did not, as I recall, one single time ever tell Mama that I appreciated what she did. I didn’t because I didn’t. I didn’t tell her because I didn’t appreciate it. I had not the capacity yet to understand love in its tangible forms. I have it now. Because she taught me.
So, in case I haven’t said it in a while, thank you, Mama.
Copyright 2009
I was subjected to this torture only a few times as, for all the hours I spent in a Minkovitz dressing room, we – Mama and I – never had any serious intention of actually buying anything.I take that back: Mama never had any intention; I was always hopeful.
From the day Mama and Daddy brought me home from the old red brick hospital on Grady Street, whatever I wore was homemade, floating forth from under the presser foot of Mama’s Singer sewing machine in a froth of soft cotton batiste, crisp gingham and velvety corduroy. The Peter Pan collars on my church dresses were finished in double-stitched scallops and the tiniest of pin tucks framed rows of shiny pearl buttons down the fronts.
Somewhere around second grade I figured out that not everyone dressed the way that I did. Some of them had skirts that looked exactly alike. They had small satin tags sewn into their necklines and, occasionally, some writing or an animal on the outside. And, because the need to be "like" and "liked" arises early in girls, it was somewhere around second grade that I began to resent the fact that none of my clothes came from Minkovitz or Belk or – Be still, my heart. – The Children’s Shop.
By the time I got to junior high, Mama, who just couldn’t justify spending money on clothes that were not as well-made as the ones she sewed, and I had reached a compromise: We went shopping, just like all my friends, dragging an armload of skirts and blouses and dresses into the dressing room, plastic hangers clicking and getting tangled together. I tried each outfit on and stood very still while Mama, pulling out her little Blue Horse top-bound spiral notebook, drew detailed pictures of what I was wearing.
She made notes like "grosgrain ribbon trim" and drew arrows to the place on the dress where said trim would be placed. She rubbed the fabric between her knowledgeable hands and then wrote, "polyester and cotton" or "100% wool." She drew every detail – square pockets and notched collars and 2" cuffs.
After closing the notebook, dropping it back down into her patent leather purse that closed with a loud click and gathering up all the clearly not-up-to-snuff garments, Mama would walk out to meet the sales ladies while I dressed. Through the heavy fabric curtain at the dressing room door I could hear her say, "No, we didn’t find anything today."
An hour later we would be leaving the fabric store weighted down with a Simplicity or Butterick pattern, a couple of yards of fabric folded into a nice square with a paper tag pinned to the top, thread, zipper, buttons, sometimes elastic, all of which would go into the magician’s hat that was Mama’s creativity and be transformed into an infinitely better version of what I had been craving since the moment I saw it on the rack at the department store.
I was not so wise at 13 to recognize the gift of a mother who could work this magic. I did not always have the most pleasant attitude as I sat on the stool at the counter flipping through the pages of the pattern books to find the one that most closely resembled what I’d just tried on.
I did not, as I recall, one single time ever tell Mama that I appreciated what she did. I didn’t because I didn’t. I didn’t tell her because I didn’t appreciate it. I had not the capacity yet to understand love in its tangible forms. I have it now. Because she taught me.
So, in case I haven’t said it in a while, thank you, Mama.
Copyright 2009
Sunday, May 24, 2009
Squirrels and Board Games
The woods that trimmed the edges of the two-line highway were veiled in the dull light of an overcast sky. The grass and the leaves were still in the heaviness of a threatened rainstorm. Mine was the only car on the road that rolled ahead in easy waves.
While I thought about people and places far away, two squirrels came darting out of the ditch directly in front of the car. How odd, I thought in the split second it took them to cross into my lane, that two would have started across together, one leading, the other following.
The first one scurried (Scurrying being the only mode of perambulation a squirrel has in his repertoire.) straight across the road and disappeared into the high grass on the other side. The second squirrel, the follower, got almost all the way across, stopped, stood up on his back legs and unexplainably, yet not surprisingly, turned to go back the other way.
I couldn’t stop. Had not enough time to slow down or even swerve to miss him. It took less than 3 seconds. I looked in my rear-view mirror and saw only a small dark spot near the white center-line.
Then I heard myself talking to the squirrel. "Why did you do that? Why didn’t you just keep going? You started across; you would have made it! Crazy squirrel!"
And another voice, my same voice, but the one that knows things, said, "It’s all about risk."
The stack of board games in our house growing up included Monopoly and Clue and Scrabble. We had a Parchesi at one point and Checkers, both regular and Chinese. And after three Christmases of asking, I finally got a Barbie - Queen of the Prom game. What we didn’t have, never had was Risk.
In its red box on the shelf at McConnell’s Dime Store, it never became the object of my interest or desire. Even then, at 8 and 10 and 12, I wanted a sure thing. I wanted guarantees, promises, absolute assurances.
For a long time it worked. I played only those games I knew I could win, spent my time on things I knew I could do well, set my sights on goals that were easily within my grasp. But somewhere along the way I realized that something was missing. I realized that I wasn’t growing and I wasn’t having any fun.
What I also realized was that the only way to do either of those things was to stop hoarding my Monopoly money, stop solving make-believe murders and stop dressing for a pretend prom. It was time to take a few chances.
Since then I’ve been each of the squirrels at various times. I’ve been the first squirrel and made it across the highway, heart racing, limbs trembling and grinning from ear to ear. And I’ve been the second squirrel, the one who froze in fear and tried to return to the old place, only to be crushed by something big and loud.
I have been exhilarated and deliriously happy. I have been despondent and desperately disappointed. I have been warmly content and I have been coldly morose. And every moment of every emotion has been infinitely better than the lethargy of being a little metal thimble making its way around a cardboard square over and over and over again.
Each morning we wake up on one side of the highway. Some days it’s good to just roll over and stare up at the flotilla of gauzy white clouds. On other days, though, the breeze and the sunlight and the smell of something pleasant that we can’t quite identify lure us to the edge of the asphalt. And on those days, there is simply nothing left to do except run headlong into the open.
Copyright 2009
While I thought about people and places far away, two squirrels came darting out of the ditch directly in front of the car. How odd, I thought in the split second it took them to cross into my lane, that two would have started across together, one leading, the other following.
The first one scurried (Scurrying being the only mode of perambulation a squirrel has in his repertoire.) straight across the road and disappeared into the high grass on the other side. The second squirrel, the follower, got almost all the way across, stopped, stood up on his back legs and unexplainably, yet not surprisingly, turned to go back the other way.
I couldn’t stop. Had not enough time to slow down or even swerve to miss him. It took less than 3 seconds. I looked in my rear-view mirror and saw only a small dark spot near the white center-line.
Then I heard myself talking to the squirrel. "Why did you do that? Why didn’t you just keep going? You started across; you would have made it! Crazy squirrel!"
And another voice, my same voice, but the one that knows things, said, "It’s all about risk."
The stack of board games in our house growing up included Monopoly and Clue and Scrabble. We had a Parchesi at one point and Checkers, both regular and Chinese. And after three Christmases of asking, I finally got a Barbie - Queen of the Prom game. What we didn’t have, never had was Risk.
In its red box on the shelf at McConnell’s Dime Store, it never became the object of my interest or desire. Even then, at 8 and 10 and 12, I wanted a sure thing. I wanted guarantees, promises, absolute assurances.
For a long time it worked. I played only those games I knew I could win, spent my time on things I knew I could do well, set my sights on goals that were easily within my grasp. But somewhere along the way I realized that something was missing. I realized that I wasn’t growing and I wasn’t having any fun.
What I also realized was that the only way to do either of those things was to stop hoarding my Monopoly money, stop solving make-believe murders and stop dressing for a pretend prom. It was time to take a few chances.
Since then I’ve been each of the squirrels at various times. I’ve been the first squirrel and made it across the highway, heart racing, limbs trembling and grinning from ear to ear. And I’ve been the second squirrel, the one who froze in fear and tried to return to the old place, only to be crushed by something big and loud.
I have been exhilarated and deliriously happy. I have been despondent and desperately disappointed. I have been warmly content and I have been coldly morose. And every moment of every emotion has been infinitely better than the lethargy of being a little metal thimble making its way around a cardboard square over and over and over again.
Each morning we wake up on one side of the highway. Some days it’s good to just roll over and stare up at the flotilla of gauzy white clouds. On other days, though, the breeze and the sunlight and the smell of something pleasant that we can’t quite identify lure us to the edge of the asphalt. And on those days, there is simply nothing left to do except run headlong into the open.
Copyright 2009
Sunday, May 10, 2009
One Big Story
It’s all one big story.
Life, that is.
In rare transcendent moments of immense joy or pain, we know it. But in the ordinary moments – when the babysitter is late or the tire blows out on the interstate or the line at the grocery store is held up because the woman with three children can’t find her debit card in the duffel bag she calls a purse – we tend to lose sight of that truth.
Which is why this story, the one I am about to tell you, needs telling.
In January, I drove to Savannah with Daddy to keep an appointment I’d made with the StoryCorps bus. He wasn’t all that keen on the idea of sitting inside an Airstream trailer for 45 minutes while I asked him questions about his childhood, but I reminded him that his is the last generation who grew up as the children of sharecroppers and that that way of life needed to be remembered and appreciated. It didn’t hurt that I am his only daughter and, except for mouse-trap emptying, I generally don’t ask for much.
Last Thursday each of us got a call from a nice young lady at StoryCorps in New York City. She called to tell us that a portion of the interview as going to be broadcast on NPR’s Morning Edition on Friday morning. I don’t know how Daddy reacted, but when I hung up the phone I went running up and down the halls of the office in my high heels screaming, "My daddy is going to be on NPR!!! Oh, my gosh, my daddy is going to be on NPR!!!"
It is unfortunate, but not necessarily germane to the story, that Georgia Public Broadcasting pre-empted Friday’s StoryCorps segment for a fund-raising plea, a programming faux pas which meant that friends and family who had turned their dials to 91.1 FM (a station that at least some of them, prior to Friday, didn’t know existed) heard only two men engaged in a slightly goofy conversation about pledges and thank-you gifts. However, those in Atlanta, South Carolina and Maryland all heard the segment and were as delighted as I with the result. And all day on Friday I got phone calls and e-mails from people who had managed to find the web link and listen on their computers. It was a glorious day.
Five days later I got an e-mail from my high school friend Francie. We don’t see each other much. Francie is a professor at a university in Virginia and her parents don’t live in Statesboro anymore so her visits here are rare. E-mail is our way of remaining a part of each other’s lives.
It happened that Francie was in New York City on Friday to deliver a lecture and was staying with a friend who has a 30th-floor apartment overlooking the Metropolitan Opera and Lincoln Center. She wrote: As I was blow-drying my hair the bathroom door was cracked so I could hear the radio which had NPR on, and so when I heard the strong southern accent (which I never hear anywhere, but certainly not in New York) I, as always, tried to place from which state the speaker must be. THEN I heard the female interviewer and thought, ‘That sure sounds like Kathy Bradley.’ When they reintroduced the speakers at the end of the piece, I came shooting out of that bathroom screaming at the top of my lungs, ‘Tony, I know those people! They’re from home!’
I cried, of course. Cried because after all this time and in such odd circumstances she recognized our voices. Cried because for Francie this will always be home and because she still understands what it means to be ‘from’ somewhere. Cried because, as I said, it’s all one story.
Once, when I was at Wesleyan, Mama and Daddy came up to hear some speaker and at the end of the program, which must not have impressed him much, Daddy said to me, "I wish somebody would give me that opportunity. If they would let me, I’d stand on the White House steps and speak to the entire nation. And I’d tell them the truth."
Well, Daddy, it wasn’t the White House steps and it took about 30 years, but the entire nation did hear you. Not bad for a country boy.
Copyright 2009
Life, that is.
In rare transcendent moments of immense joy or pain, we know it. But in the ordinary moments – when the babysitter is late or the tire blows out on the interstate or the line at the grocery store is held up because the woman with three children can’t find her debit card in the duffel bag she calls a purse – we tend to lose sight of that truth.
Which is why this story, the one I am about to tell you, needs telling.
In January, I drove to Savannah with Daddy to keep an appointment I’d made with the StoryCorps bus. He wasn’t all that keen on the idea of sitting inside an Airstream trailer for 45 minutes while I asked him questions about his childhood, but I reminded him that his is the last generation who grew up as the children of sharecroppers and that that way of life needed to be remembered and appreciated. It didn’t hurt that I am his only daughter and, except for mouse-trap emptying, I generally don’t ask for much.
Last Thursday each of us got a call from a nice young lady at StoryCorps in New York City. She called to tell us that a portion of the interview as going to be broadcast on NPR’s Morning Edition on Friday morning. I don’t know how Daddy reacted, but when I hung up the phone I went running up and down the halls of the office in my high heels screaming, "My daddy is going to be on NPR!!! Oh, my gosh, my daddy is going to be on NPR!!!"
It is unfortunate, but not necessarily germane to the story, that Georgia Public Broadcasting pre-empted Friday’s StoryCorps segment for a fund-raising plea, a programming faux pas which meant that friends and family who had turned their dials to 91.1 FM (a station that at least some of them, prior to Friday, didn’t know existed) heard only two men engaged in a slightly goofy conversation about pledges and thank-you gifts. However, those in Atlanta, South Carolina and Maryland all heard the segment and were as delighted as I with the result. And all day on Friday I got phone calls and e-mails from people who had managed to find the web link and listen on their computers. It was a glorious day.
Five days later I got an e-mail from my high school friend Francie. We don’t see each other much. Francie is a professor at a university in Virginia and her parents don’t live in Statesboro anymore so her visits here are rare. E-mail is our way of remaining a part of each other’s lives.
It happened that Francie was in New York City on Friday to deliver a lecture and was staying with a friend who has a 30th-floor apartment overlooking the Metropolitan Opera and Lincoln Center. She wrote: As I was blow-drying my hair the bathroom door was cracked so I could hear the radio which had NPR on, and so when I heard the strong southern accent (which I never hear anywhere, but certainly not in New York) I, as always, tried to place from which state the speaker must be. THEN I heard the female interviewer and thought, ‘That sure sounds like Kathy Bradley.’ When they reintroduced the speakers at the end of the piece, I came shooting out of that bathroom screaming at the top of my lungs, ‘Tony, I know those people! They’re from home!’
I cried, of course. Cried because after all this time and in such odd circumstances she recognized our voices. Cried because for Francie this will always be home and because she still understands what it means to be ‘from’ somewhere. Cried because, as I said, it’s all one story.
Once, when I was at Wesleyan, Mama and Daddy came up to hear some speaker and at the end of the program, which must not have impressed him much, Daddy said to me, "I wish somebody would give me that opportunity. If they would let me, I’d stand on the White House steps and speak to the entire nation. And I’d tell them the truth."
Well, Daddy, it wasn’t the White House steps and it took about 30 years, but the entire nation did hear you. Not bad for a country boy.
Copyright 2009
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