The Human Dilemma

In the prideful insecurity and ignorance of my youth, I registered, in my very first semester of college, for an upper-level history course.  An honors upper level history course.  I was not alone in this risky venture, but was accompanied by my friend-since-sixth-grade, Lucy Lee.  For the next four months, the two of us spent our Tuesday and Thursday mornings from 8:15 to 9:30 under the tutelage of Marcile Taylor, whose lectures we wrote down word for word and took turns transcribing so that they might be memorized in hopes of passing the final exam.

Two totally unrelated facts learned from that semester burrowed so far into my brain that 39 years later they float to the surface on a regular basis at unexpected moments and, often, a propos of absolutely nothing.  First:  The single event that drove the settlement of the American West was the invention of barbed wire.  And second: The single question around which the colonization of New England by religious refugees was conceived and carried out was the issue of how to live in the world without being of the world. 

The invention of barbed wire tidbit has rarely been of any practical use, not even in any of the trivia competitions in which I have distinguished myself over the years.  On the other hand, the Puritan dilemma, as it came to be called, remains an unresolved quandary, an ever-present irritant, a never-to-be-lined-through item on the to-do list.  And, to be honest, after all this time it nags at me not with regard to religious affiliation or practice, but rather as a question of how one manages to approach the world with an attitude of appreciation rather than consumption, how to experience intimacy with creation without experiencing the need to own it, how to inhabit a specific set of geographic coordinates at a specific moment in time in such a way as to know both without being changed by either.

Some days I am more barbed wire than thoughtful Puritan.  Some days I show up at the office locked and loaded with a tale about the ineptitude of the food service folks at my drive-through of choice or the cluelessness of other drivers in the line.   Some days I bounce hard across the washed-out places on Settlement Road and wonder why I’m not a priority for the road crew.  Some nights I stand on the deck staring at stars that look like the cheapest of rhinestones and want to throw what is left of my patience and my heart into the darkness that I am quite convinced is a bottomless pit.

But there are other days.  Days on which I find myself mesmerized by the sight of a two-year-old in a seersucker bubble suit patting her fat hands together and bobbing her head so fast that her blonde curls can hardly keep up. Days on which I notice that the dress I am wearing is the exact color of the cornfield reflecting the early morning sun and I wonder if Sherwin-Williams has a shade called June Corn and declare out loud that, if it doesn’t, it most certainly should.  Nights on which I stand at the edge of the ocean, feel the waves carve away the sand beneath my feet, and hear my brain, my pulse, my heartbeat respond to their shush-shush-shush’ing like voices to a tuning fork.

Not long ago I got to watch Jackson as he got his first look at the ocean.  Prepared to cajole and comfort, his mother and I stood on either side as I set his bare feet on the sand.  He opened his mouth in a smile and ran toward the water, arms spread wide.  The waves slapped at his ankles and he skittered away laughing.  As they receded, he ran back out to meet them, to replay the slapping and skittering and laughing over and over again, all the while with his arms held out as far as they would go.

 

The Puritan dilemma was not resolved by the Puritans.  It will not be resolved by the Methodists or the Presbyterians or the Druids or the atheists.  Perhaps it is not even a dilemma.  Perhaps it is the exact opposite.  Perhaps it is a miracle – an amazing, astonishing, unexplainable condition that is still identifiably human, like bipedalism and the capacity for language, a condition that defies all known physical laws by demonstrating that everything that is can be held with arms that are open.

Copyright 2013

Typographical Truth

The room was at the end of the hall.  Its large windows looked out over an empty field where, during fire drills, we stood at bored attention in long lines awaiting the all clear. Its rows of desks were topped with heavy black Royal and Olivetti manual typewriters and worn copies of the Gregg Typing Manual that opened from the bottom rather than the side like ordinary books.  The object, Mrs. Reba Clements explained to us on the first day of seventh grade, was not just speed, but speed along with accuracy.

At the end of the timed tests that eventually became as competitive as the sprints and free throws in P.E., we were required to proofread what we’d typed and count the errors, circle each one so that it stood out like one of the blemishes that had started to appear on our adolescent faces.  Five or more errors and the words-per-minute was simply irrelevant.  

The English language, the placement of the letters of the alphabet on the QWERTY keyboard, and the unpredictability of the human mind inevitably and frequently create situations in which it is not only easy, but probable, that the rapidly twitching muscles in a typist’s fingers will turn was into saw and heart into heard.  Or sacred into scared.

Last year, within the twelve weeks that span my birthday and Christmas, three friends, all unbeknownst to each other, gave me the same gift: an hourglass.  They are each about eight inches tall and contain sand that is the pale aqua color that I prefer over all others.  I tried placing them together at first, but the concentrated reminder of life’s ephemeral nature (“Like sands through the hourglass ...”) was too much for me, so, like misbehaving children, I separated them.  One is now in town at the office as a reminder that what I do there is not who I am.  One is in the study at Sandhill, a functional prod to commit measurable time to the words that keep me alive.  The third is on a chest in my bedroom next to a jar of seashells and a candle, a focal point where, at the end of the day or first thing in the morning, all the rays of thought and sensation and emotion can converge in a place of calm .

Last night, as I walked into the bedroom (Was it to empty my gym bag or put up linens or take out my contacts?), my peripheral vision registered something out of place.  I stopped.  Lamplight left the corners dull, but I could see that no photograph had been knocked over on its table, the door to the deck had not been blown open.  All appeared to be in order.

I turned back to what I’d been doing and that’s when I saw it: the hourglass, about a quarter of its sand still in the upper chamber and not falling.  Time had, literally, stopped.

In the one to two milliseconds it took my brain to register the image and to relay back to my conscious self that, clearly, some object or force, most probably humidity, had acted upon the sand to impede its flow, my unconscious self, the one that is contained within, but not defined by that brain and 5'9" of bone and muscle and flesh, the one that sees things that cannot be imaged and knows things that cannot be articulated, had already experienced the startle and fear of the possibility that time really had stopped and processed that fear into the marvel of expectation of the what-next.  

What if there is only now now?  What if I am no longer moving inevitably away from what I have known and inescapably toward what I cannot know?  What if this – lamplight and the shimmer of new polish on my fingernails and the sounds of a baseball game on the television in the living room – is all there is?   I am, for a moment, allowed a glimpse of what it could be like if I did not live caught between the magnetic poles of yesterday and tomorrow, feeling the equally violent pull of both.  

I reach for the hourglass to dislodge the sand and am stopped.  Leave it there, I am told.  Leave it there and know what is possible.

I was always one of Mrs. Clement’s students who aimed for speed.  I pay more attention to accuracy now.  It takes more than a couple of errant key strokes to turn scared into sacred.

Copyright 2013

Wounds and Water Slides

A couple of Saturdays ago I was at Jackson’s third birthday party.  More unbelievable than the fact that he is already three years old is the fact that I am the great-aunt of a three-year-old.  I had a lot of great-aunts growing up and my memories of them are consistent: they all had gray or white hair and they all wore plain cotton shirtwaist dresses during the week and lace-collared shirtwaist dresses on Sunday and to funerals.  Not one of them would have been found going down an inflatable slide on my third birthday.  Which is what I was doing shortly after Jackson blew out his candles and opened his presents.

Later in the afternoon, after a number of slippery descents punctuated by splashes and squeals and the realization that I really should have taken the time to put on some sunscreen, I noticed a slight burning sensation on my left elbow.  I had, in all the flinging and flailing, managed to get the water slide equivalent of a rug burn, not a big one, just a small scrape.  The next morning, though, I had the beginning of a scab.  And by Monday, it was a genuine, irritatingly noticeable scab.

I am a careful person, some might say cautious.  A few might even say overly cautious.  The last time I had a scab was probably 14 years ago when Ginny, unaccustomed to the leash I had to put on her to walk her into the vet’s office, jerked hard and sent me tumbling over a wheel stop at the end of a parking space.  For a couple of weeks my knee looked like I’d made a hard slide into home.  I was particularly conscious of that scab, like the new, much smaller one on my elbow, because it was located on a joint and every time I moved it I was reminded of the pain.

About a week after the birthday party, when the edges of the scab had started to peel up a little and get caught on the bath sponge in the shower, I started thinking about the other kind of scab, the kind that forms on the wounds that nobody sees.  Those hurts, the emotional ones, are so much worse and the amount of flesh torn off so much greater.  The “wound healing reconstruction process” requires more than just time and the replication of cells when what is damaged is a heart and the painful reminder comes with every beat.

Yet, so often we are encouraged to treat the disappointment, the disillusionment, the loss of the dream, as just another rug burn.  “Give it time,” we are told.  “You’ll get over it,” we are assured.  “It’ll scab over,” we hear and are meant to understand that the scab, hard and brittle, will miraculously numb the pain.  Anyone who has ever felt the emptiness of disappointment or the loneliness of disillusionment, anyone who has ever watched a dream evaporate like a shallow puddle on a hot day knows that platitudes are worse than useless.  They are infuriating.  

They are also ignorant.  Because platitudes ignore the last step: When the scab is gone, what is left is the scar.

Interesting thing about scars: They are made of the same protein as normal skin, but the composition is different.  Instead of collagen fibers woven together in a random basket-weave formation, the fibers in scar tissue show an articulated alignment in a single direction.  Scar tissue doesn’t forget.

Which some of those platitude-people might see as a negative thing.  The reason it’s not is this: Scar tissue, that which doesn’t forget, tells stories.  The scar that runs up the back of my leg tells the story of the afternoon I led my brother and my cousins on a tromp through the woods and fell on the barbed wire fence.  The tiny scar on my knee tells the story of the four-year-old Kathy that daringly (and uncharacteristically) jumped off the front porch imitating some cartoon character.  And the scars on my heart tell me the story every single day that I am braver and stronger for having survived the disappointments and disillusionments and dream-deaths.  

The scars are prima facie evidence that what I am is alive.  And waiting for the next chance to go down the water slide.

Copyright 2013

After The Rain Has Fallen

The morning after a rain, no matter how sparse, is always startling.   It isn’t just that every sprout and blade and leaf of green is greener.    It isn’t just that the vista has been swiped by a giant squeegee and everything is in clearer focus.  And it’s not even that the birdsong is deeper, as though the entire genus has overnight become a choir of contraltos.  It’s that some of the pall of dust that the rain has washed away wasn’t that clinging to the landscape, but to you.

               
I’d gone to bed with my head spinning.  Not like Linda Blair’s, but it might as well have been.  And the spinning had no center.  Like a lump of clay misplaced on a potter’s wheel, snatches of conversation flew off in small clumps and landed on the floor.  Unexpected memories sprang up and splattered my face.    Futile attempts to separate lies from truth left my hands covered in slick mud.   And my foot just kept pumping and pumping and pumping the pedal of the wheel.
              
As exhausted people do, I eventually fell asleep, though the spinning continued in my dreams.  When the radio alarm went off at 6 a.m. with NPR alerting me to the fact that the NSA is collecting Verizon phone records of private citizens, it seemed obvious that neither my subconscious nor my unconscious nor any fairy sprinkling magic dust had intervened overnight to bring about anything like détente between the warring factions of my overloaded brain.
              
I showered, dressed in lawyer clothes, gathered up briefcase and purse, and headed out.  Halfway down the back steps I stopped.  Startled into stillness.
              
Every spring I am a little anxious as I wait to see if the hostas show back up, a little excited when they do.  I watch their knife-blade buds slice up out of the ground, all tight and hard, and over the following days unfold into varied patterns of green and yellow and white banded leaves.  I stop and look at them every morning to remind myself that resurrection is always a possibility.
              
What stunned me so this time was one hosta in particular, one of the smaller ones.  I could see that in its thick spade-shaped leaves it was still holding some of the night’s raindrops, big and bulbous.  They glittered in the morning light, looked like diamonds, polished and ready to be set into rings.  In their smallness they reflected the light of the entire universe.
              
I could feel the spinning in my brain beginning to slow.  I could feel the center beginning to take hold.
              
Last week the sweet and talented woman who wrangles my hair had a little extra time between appointments and suggested that we (meaning she wielding the flat iron and I doing my best to sit patiently for an extra 40 minutes) straighten my mane.  For the next few days I got a lot of attention for not looking like myself.   No one said anything negative, but only Kate, like the child in “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” was brave enough to state the truth:  “You don't look like Kap...not okay.”

The most frequently asked question by those who recognized me was, “How long will it last?”  And the answer was, “Until it gets wet.” 

That’s what I thought of as I looked at the hosta, its leaves trembling just slightly under the weight of their precious stones.  How long does dullness hide brilliance?  How long can selfishness masquerade as need?  How long does deception prevail over truth? 
               

The ground stays parched and barren until it gets wet.    Clay is hard and useless until it gets wet.  People can pretend to be something they aren’t until they get wet.    It is only after the rain has fallen, only after the tears have been shed, only after the tide has washed the shore that the sun has something in which to reflect its light.

Copyright 2013

Make Way For Ducklings and Fawns

Adabelle Road was a little like Beacon Street this morning, only without Fenway Park and Boston Common. It was a pair of Canada geese, not Mallard ducks, trying to cross the road with their offspring and, of course, there was no Michael the policeman stopping traffic. Still, the scene felt familiar as I was forced to a complete stop as an inter-gender discussion of which way to go took place on the white line running down the middle of the pavement.

After much flapping of the wings and shimmying of the hindquarters and moving onto opposite sides of the tight rope, the youngster whose safety was the original focus of all the discussion before it disintegrated into what was clearly a domestic power struggle fluffed up his own downy wings in a rapid flutter and startled his parents into making a decision and waddling out of harm’s way.

One afternoon a couple of weeks ago I drove through the dirt crossroads, less than a mile from home, and saw a young deer standing in the middle of the road about a hundred yards away, tire tracks banding her delicate feet planted in the sandy earth. Something small, probably a squirrel based upon size and speed, ran into the road and stopped directly in front of the deer. It seemed odd that a squirrel, or any other animal, unless it was rabid, would have done such a thing. And deer are skittish. They do not pause in the middle of the road to investigate other animals. They are not curious about those with whom they share the neighborhood. It was odd.

I drove on toward the deer expecting her to dart quickly into the forest. She didn’t move. I got closer, within 50 yards. Still she didn’t move. I was no more than 25 yards away when she finally trotted unusually slowly into the woods.

What I’d thought was a squirrel didn’t move. I decided it must be a box turtle and that the movement I’d associated with it had just been a flash of sunlight through the canopy of pine trees. But when I got about half a car length away, I realized that the mound was a tiny tiny tiny fawn curled in on itself like a crescent moon. It was clearly newly born.

I stopped the car, opened the door, and started making shooing sounds. The little face stared up at me and the huge ears twitched just the slightest bit, but he didn’t move. “Please, little deer,” I urged him, “get up! Get up!” He finally scrambled uncertainly to his legs. He was no more than two feet tall. After a wobbly start he ran ahead of me for about 30 yards, finally veering off to the edge of the road so I could get past and allow his mother, who’d done her best to divert my attention, to return.

It was a magical moment and the images have flickered around the edges of my consciousness ever since I drove away. Encountering the bickering Mallard ducks this morning brought the images back into focus and caused me to see what I had not before.

Making a crossing is fraught with danger. That which connects two parts of something is often where one is most vulnerable. A seam. An intersection. A joint. That is why there are reinforced stitches. That is why there are flashing lights and warning signs. That is why there are instruction manuals and trained technicians.

And, as in the cases of the fawn and the gosling, that is why there are those who have crossed before: because they know the way. More importantly, though, is that they know the risk. They know the risk and they go anyway, on guard not just for themselves but for the ones entrusted to their care.

Copyright 2013

Run In The Forest, Run

I was walking in the woods, a hundred yards or so past the broken down, rusted out barbed wire fence that may or may not mark the property line between our land and our neighbors’. I had two friends with me, people accustomed to the outdoors, one of whom I call The Scientist. Their brand of nature, however, is generally more marine.

The one who grew up in Maine was amazed at the height of the pine trees and the size of the cones as we stood with hands on our hips leaning as far back as possible, chins stuck into the air trying to find the tops. The one who grew up farther down Highway 301 in the near-swamp was surprised to so see so many prickly pear cacti peeking through the underbrush. They were both amazed at the elaborate armature of the deer stands that seemed to appear out of nowhere.

We were following old logging roads, still wide and open if well-carpeted with years’and years’ worth of pine straw. We had found the head of the creek that runs around the southwestern corner of the farm and identified a lone stand of wild indigo, its butter yellow petals folded like hands in prayer. And we were talking. Chattering really, as friends who haven’t seen each other in a while will do.

Then mid-someone’s-sentence, someone else called out, “Look! Deer!” We turned abruptly in the direction of the pointed finger. Not 25 yards away three deer were bounding through the woods, their pace unimpeded by the vines and logs and low-hanging branches that had made our progress slow and necessarily methodical. They looked like ballet dancers leaping across a stage.

And in seconds they were gone.

These woods are not unfamiliar to me. I have been here many times over the years, nearly always alone. The few times I’ve had company it’s been just one other person and there have been few words passed between us. I have never before rustled up a deer.

My friends were delighted. I was rather pleased myself. It was as though the local fauna had decided to show off a little for the visitors.

Equivalent to my pleasure, though, was my curiosity. Was it just the noise that startled the timid creatures and caused them to run? Were they really so afraid of something that was no threat? Or were they utilizing some sort of diversionary tactic to draw our attention away from where they had been? Was it possible that somewhere in the soft brown mattress of last winter’s fallen leaves there was a newborn fawn or an old buck, sick and dying?

We tend to see people who run as deserving of contempt. We label them as men with no courage, women with no heart. We call them cowards and pray that we will never be so weak. The deer in the woods have made me wonder how many of those men and women run not for their own good, but for that of another. The deer in the woods have made me question whether running away might not, sometimes, be the best way of protecting something or someone that you love.

The last glimpse we got of the deer was a flash of tall white tail disappearing into the brush. We stood in the sudden silence for a brief moment and then turned for home, the questions rattling around in our pockets like pebbles and coins.

Copyright 2013

Staying Home

Things wear out.

Over the past four months this very simple axiom has been demonstrated to me in the following ways: My office computer began the familiar slow-down that leads to the inevitable flashing blue screen and had to be replaced. The extendable handle on my office briefcase stopped extending and the briefcase had to be replaced. The glue on the crown on my front tooth that had stuck admirably for 30 years gave way and had to be replaced by a very expensive implant. My washer and dryer, 27½ years old and never a minute’s trouble, both stopped working within 15 minutes of each other and had to be replaced.

And, then, of course, my dog died. On a fine spring morning when the morning mist had not yet lifted from the fields, Lily just didn’t come out of her house. Went to sleep and didn’t wake up.

Nothing lasts forever.

But we want it to. We want something to last. The human heart is made of Velcro.

Earlier this week I went to a memorial service for someone I’ve known most of my life. At the visitation the day before, as I stood in a long and serpentine line to speak to his family, to offer condolences that I knew couldn’t sound like much more than just another measure of a single song of sorrow, I watched as photographs memorializing this good man’s life were projected onto a flat white screen. White-water rafting with his older brother and their sons. Gazing into the face of his newborn grandson. Sharing Christmas with his mother.

And then the photograph that brought me to tears. Five men, their arms around each others’ shoulders, half-smiling at the camera held by one of their wives. Lifelong buddies. I know them, all of them. I knew them as boys. I watched them play baseball on Jaycee Field and football on Womack Field. I watched them grow into good men, good fathers, good husbands. I still watch them.

At the memorial service I sat near the back of the church. At the last amen, I watched the faces of those men as they walked down that long, long aisle and back out into the world, a world without the smile, the laughter, the company of their friend.

I forget sometimes, when I go to the grocery store and don’t see a soul I know or walk a few blocks down the street and nobody blows his horn and waves at me or meet someone for the first time and don’t know a single person to whom she is related, that I still live among my people. I lose sight on occasion, when I’m watching too closely the construction of too many new apartment buildings, of the landmarks that are invisible to the natural eye, but still show me the way. I get lost every now and then in the maze of newer, faster, better, only to get so tired that all I can do is sit down and wait for a familiar face to show up and remind me where I am.
          
There are a lot of reasons to leave the place that reared you. There are also a lot of reasons to stay. One of the best is that when we do, we get to remain a part of each other’s stories, right to the end.

Nothing lasts forever. Except love. And friendship. And the memories of a shared lifetime.

Copyright 2013

Acts of Enchantment

Beware those things by which, those people by whom you are enchanted.  As all readers of fairy tales know, enchantments are temporary.

I have been enchanted by moons – full moons, crescent moons, harvest moons, eclipsed moons – for years.  I have religiously, as in, with awe and in reverence, stood outside in cold that charged my toes like electrical current, in wind that deafened me to my own thoughts, in leftover heat that pasted my shirt to my chest, to look at moons the size of dimes and silver dollars, the color of ice and tangerines.  I have laughed at, cried over, wondered at, marveled over the magic of gravity and seasons and the tides.  

Over the last few months, though, the moon has disappointed me.  Almost without fail the full ones have been draped in heavy mist or completely obscured by clouds.   The shiny crescent ones that always before have invited me to reach up, grab hold, and swing like a first-grader on a jungle gym have been dull and dangerously brittle, clearly not strong enough to hold the weight of my imagination.  Even the one that was supposed to point me to the comet PANSTARRS last month failed.  I stood in the side yard and stared and stared and stared without ever getting sight of what it seemed that everyone else was so easily observing.

So last week, on the night when the full moon was hovering over Sandhill, I deliberately stayed indoors.  Took a stand.  Made a statement.  Protected myself against what I was certain would be another disappointing effort at channeling some of the magic of the sky into me.

I have tried this before.  Not ignoring the moon, but protecting myself from disappointment.  For years I proudly proclaimed that I was a vicarious learner, that I could watch other people and learn from their mistakes without the necessity of making them myself.  I avoided risk at all cost, mistakenly thinking that the cost was insulation when, in fact, it was numbness.    I took stands and made statements that did nothing but deprive me of the opportunity for joy.

                

I heard the other day that a better translation of the New Testament scriptures generally called the Beatitudes would read, rather than “Blessed are …”, “You are in the right place when …” .  You are in the right place when you are meek and merciful, when you seek righteousness and make peace.   When you are in a place of engagement.  A place, I suspect, where it doesn’t matter whether you can actually see the moon, but only that you are looking at where it is supposed to be.

                

The next morning I walked outside and was startled to see the moon, absolutely full, a huge white polka dot pasted over the western horizon.  It was floating in a band of pale pink sky over a field of planted pines and a fence row of scrub oaks.  I stopped to stare.  And in the stare was my apology. 

She responded by remaining very still, hovering over her spinning earth, and covering me once again with enchantment.

Copyright 2013

Into The Woods

On Sunday I went to the woods. To get there I had to walk along the edge of a just-plowed field, soft and uneven. At the back of the pond the field slopes sharply toward a creek that runs just beyond the property line and my shoes began sinking into not-quite-mud. I ran to keep from being sucked in up to my ankles, gauging the size of the deer who had come before me by how far their hooves had sunk into the muck. The ground got solid again at the fencerow, barbed wire and rusted. I held it down with one foot and stepped across.

 

I went to the woods because it is close and quiet. I went to the woods because no one would know where I was. I went to the woods because I knew that my heart could breathe there. And my heart needed to catch its breath.

 

On Saturday I’d driven across the state to, as we say in the South, bury a friend, though he wasn’t actually buried, but cremated. Brian was tall and strong. He had an Irishman’s red hair and blue eyes that danced with the impishness of a leprechaun. He wooed and won my friend Melissa with bike rides and camping trips and songs played on a guitar and, though I didn’t meet him until the day of their wedding, I knew right away that it was good. Very good.

 

They had three beautiful children they allowed me and a lot of other people to love. They made a life that was wide and inclusive. And then Brian got sick. Sick with the kind of illness for which people don’t set up Caring Bridge websites or organize blood drives. The kind of illness that you can’t see, but that is no less real for its invisibility. And despite good professional help and lots of love – oh, so much love – Brian’s life unraveled.

 

Sometimes people get better. Sometimes they don’t. Brian didn’t.

 

On Sunday there were a lot of fallen trees in the woods. A lot of wind, a lot of rain over the winter had been hard on the old ones, the diseased ones. Most of them looked as though they had just sighed and laid themselves down. I walked down their lengths, holding my arms out to balance myself, bouncing just a little to feel the degree of rottenness in each.

 

There was one, though, that had splintered off about four feet from the ground. I walked over to peer inside the trunk. At first it looked just like the others – the layers of what I think Mrs. Foy called xylem all soft and dry, flaky like a Kit Kit – , but then I noticed that in the center there remained a small circle of heartwood. A modest ring of golden sap, glinting in the late afternoon sun that poked its way through the canopy. I leaned over to sniff the sweet tar scent. I stuck my finger into the cavity to feel the glassy hardness.

 

I couldn’t help smiling. The pine tree had given in to the wind and the rain, but there remained, deep within it, a true heart.

 

At the memorial service a friend of the family played the guitar and sang “The House at Pooh Corner,” a song that Brian had played and sung over and over as a lullaby for his two girls when they were little. In the quiet of the chapel, the sweet notes lifted up into the high ceiling and settled back over the heads of those gathered: “But I've wandered much further today than I should

and I can't seem to find my way back to the wood.”

 

Sometimes people find their way back. Sometimes they don’t. But standing there – in my woods, on Sunday, remembering my friend – I realized this: Wandering away, getting lost, forgetting the way home is never the end when the beginning was a true heart.

 

Copyright 2013

 

Color Charts and Playbills

I’ve been paying attention, the last few mornings, to the sunrise. I’ve broken the waking-up routine that normally follows my abrupt coming to the surface of reality by getting out of bed and, before doing anything else, opening the blinds on one window. For three mornings in a row I’ve stood there in my nightgown, bare arms breaking out in a rash of chill bumps, and squinted at the first beams of daylight like a newborn pup.

 

I couldn’t tell you why. Honestly. I have no idea why it has suddenly become the thing to do, this bearing witness to the breaking of day.

 

What I can tell you is that the first couple of mornings I was just quietly awe-struck, but the third morning, well, the third morning was different. Because the third morning the sky, instead of being streaked with its usual blood-orange and gold, was layered with hues of lavender. Closest to the horizon was a band of color very close to that of spring’s first irises. Above that was a swath of wisteria-hued mist, above that something akin to the shade of hydrangea that grew outside Aunt Tooster’s house when I was a little girl. And above that, stretching up and out and over everything that is was the very palest silvery gray.

 

A few days earlier I had heard someone on the radio talking about a current off-Broadway play that examines the idea of living in the present, appreciating the immediate moment, something like a 21st-century riff on “Our Town.” The title of the play, as I heard it, was “Now Hear This!” and, in the nanosecond it took me to absorb and process the words, I thought it an appropriate title – a directive, a command, an order one dare not disobey.

 

The voice on the radio explained, however, that the title of the play is actually, “Now. Here. This.”

 

Now. This moment. Here. This place. This. This work to which I have put my hands, this face to which I have directed my gaze, this love to which I have devoted my heart.

 

This one. Not another one. This one. Not the one that used to be or might be one day. This one.

 

Perhaps that contemplation was still lingering as I stood at the window watching the sky lighten. Perhaps that is why I did not, as I am wont to do in such moments, reach for the camera in what would be a futile attempt to capture the colors. Perhaps that, not the chill, is what moved me to wrap my arms around myself and hold tight. Now. Here. This.

 

Between blinks of my near-sighted eyes the colors began fading. The semi-circle sun pushed its way into the day and I did, too. Dressed and drove across the newly-deepened river to court. Manila folders and children in trouble and the language of the law became the now, the here, the this.

 

There is a temptation to linger in the lavender moments, to make them more than they are, to turn them into totems. One must be on guard, always, against the natural tendency toward tarrying until conscious living becomes unconscious languishing, against the propensity to seize the moment the moment but never release it.

 

It is an unavoidable truth that now will become then, here will become there, this will become that.

 

The sun rose again today, its colors garnered from another part of the spectrum. They did not stretch out in layers, but spread in puddles over the trees, the fields, the grain bins. Another opportunity to stand at the window and stare. Another morning. This morning. This day. Now. Here. This.

 

Copyright 2013

Triple-A Adventure

As adventures go, it wasn’t a particularly exciting, frightening, or life-changing one. In fact, most people wouldn’t call it an adventure at all. I do because I define adventure as anything that requires me to do something risky or that interrupts my plans or even that I will at some point in the future have the opportunity to recount to some unsuspecting soul by uttering the words, “Oh, that reminds me of the day I ...”

 

It happened like this: I’m leaving town for a couple of days, headed to Tallahassee to speak about and read from the book I wrote. I’ve gotten as far as Reidsville and stopped for gas. Tank full and iPod buds back in my ears, I turn the key. The Escape (a/k/a the Bradley Fighting Vehicle) doesn’t start. I try again. Nothing. Again. Still nothing.

 

I look around to make sure that no one is waiting for my pump. Deep breath. One more try. Failure.

 

That’s okay. No need to panic. I have Triple-A. I walk around to take a look at the rear windshield where my Triple-A decal is barely visible underneath the road dust. I read off the 800 number and repeat it to myself as I walk back to get my phone. Triple-A answers on the first ring and a young woman who was obviously hired because her voice is as soothing as a mother’s hand on a fevered brow says, “First of all, are you in a safe location?”

 

Within two minutes a wrecker has been dispatched to a location whose address I do not know and which I can describe only by saying, “It’s a Clyde’s Market across the street from the courthouse.” I notice that I am not nervous. My palms are not sweating. I am not imagining the horrible inconvenience it is going to be if I don’t make it to the speaking engagement tomorrow. I am surprised at this.

 

The wrecker is going to tow the Escape back to Sandhill and I need to locate other transportation, so I pull out the telephone book I keep in the sliding drawer beneath the passenger seat and open the Yellow Pages to Automobile Rental. I call four places. No one has a car.

 

I take a deep breath. And before I am consciously aware of what I am doing, I turn the key. It cranks! The Escape is running! And before it has time to change its mind I buckle my seatbelt, throw the phone book to the side, and pull out into the highway. I’m headed to Tallahassee. I won’t stop along the way and if the thing doesn’t start in the morning I can call a cab!

 

I re-dial Triple-A. Another young lady with the same kind of voice answers. I explain that I no longer need a tow, that I appreciate very much their help, and that I hope she has a nice day. She returns the favor.

 

It is 196 miles to Tallahassee. That’s a lot of driving time, a lot of time to think about what happened in the Clyde’s parking lot. A lot of time to figure out exactly what it was that made a situation (“car trouble”) that is usually so aggravating, exasperating, and frustrating such a non-event. I consider the possibility that perhaps I have finally reached an optimum level of maturity, enlightenment, or detachment. I discard that possibility when I get behind an RV going 45 miles per hour.

 

I discard a few other possibilities before I light on the theory that feels exactly right: I managed the situation rather than allowing it to manage me because of one thing, that first question the Triple-A operator asked: “Are you in a safe location?”

 

When the answer to that question is yes, whether the safe location is a well-lit parking lot, a contented state of mind, or a trustworthy relationship, you are free to give your best efforts to solving the problem, formulating the new idea, creating something that has never existed before. There is no waste of energy looking over your shoulder or erecting barriers. There is no reason to hold things or people at arms’ length and every reason to embrace them without hesitation. When the answer is yes, everything is an adventure.

 

Copyright 2013 

Theology In Twenty Items Or Fewer

The sign over my head identified it as the Express Lane. The crowd pressing around me suggested that the designation might be a bit optimistic. I wondered for not the first time what exactly had made me think that I could not live one more day without banana bread yogurt and that, because I’d just left the gym, I was aptly armed to brave the Saturday afternoon mob of shoppers. There were, though, only two people ahead of me, so it was entirely possible that my good humor might actually survive the expedition.

 

The first of those two people ahead of me was an older woman, probably 75, her short white hair sculpted into layers of wide apostrophes at a weekly beauty shop appointment. Pale pink powder had collected in the wrinkles on her cheeks. She was paying with cash. There was probably a checkbook somewhere in her pocketbook, but there would never be a debit card.

 

Behind her was a young woman, probably 20, her shiny black hair smoothed flat against her skull, her profile making me think immediately of those Egyptian coins with the images of Nefertiti. Her cheeks were smooth, the color of rich chocolate. She was purchasing one item, a box of Lemonheads.

 

The clerk handed the older woman her change, some bills and quite a few coins. Her hand, deeply-veined and wrinkled, shook with the involuntariness of age as she reached out to take it. With her other hand, equally contrary, she attempted to open her billfold. She struggled. “I’m sorry,” she said to no one in particular and anyone who might be inconvenienced by her difficulty. She was embarrassed and anxious and angry at her inability to make her hands obey.

 

“Here,” I heard the Lemonheads girl say, “let me help you.” She gently reached forward to catch the money that was about to spill on the floor, to hold open the billfold so that it could be dropped safely inside.

 

“Oh, thank you. Thank you,” the woman sighed as she accepted the help.

 

She put the billfold back into the pocketbook, grasped the handle of the buggy with both trembling hands, and turned to look at the girl again, “Thank you, sweetheart.”

 

“You’re welcome, ma’am.”

 

Before I’d gone into the store, I’d been listening to a radio broadcast about the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, the racially motivated attack that killed four little girls. I was not quite seven in September, 1963. I don’t remember the bombing, but I do remember, if only vaguely, a world of separate water fountains, separate entrances to the county health department, separate schools. And I remember the first black child to ride my school bus, how the older boys tried to bully him, how it made my nine-year-old blood boil, and how I invited him, a shy and quiet little first-grader, to sit up front with me.

 

Maybe it was the radio broadcast. Maybe it was the memories it conjured. Probably it was both that caused me to be so aware of what I’d witnessed in the Express Lane – the old white hands and the young black ones working together.

 

It has been nearly 50 years since Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson and Denise McNair went to church one Sunday morning and never went home. It has been nearly 50 years since this country and each of her citizens were forced to reexamine the meanings of equality and justice. It has been nearly 50 years and work remains to be done, but no one can deny that 200 million Americans don’t remember “separate,” not even vaguely, because they were not even born.

 

The sermon that was to have been given at the 16th Street Baptist Church on the morning of September 15, 1963, was titled “The Love That Forgives.” I don’t know if Rev. John Cross ever got a chance to deliver that sermon from a pulpit, but I have seen it preached over and over, most recently in the Express Lane.

 

Copyright 2013

Necessary Tension

For the first time in days the landscape is still and silent. The wind chimes outside my bedroom, like icicles, hang hard and motionless. The empty fields, rolled out like bolts of unpressed linen, the edges fringed with caramel-colored broom sedge, are empty. No flocks of blackbirds to be flushed by the sound of a door being opened, a car being started. No dead leaves rattling. Just stillness. Just silence.

 

 I pause. I wait. I linger for just a moment in the moment.

 

 This place, this land animates me.

 

Four days ago I stood on the beach. It was neither still nor silent. The water rolled onto the sand in low frothy waves, slapping at it like a kitten at a ball – teasing, playful. A brisk wind was swirling from the north end of the island, picking up the sand and tossing it in tiny eddies around my ankles. Its whistle, combined with the ocean’s interminable shoosh-shoosh, accosted my uncovered ears, so that even my thoughts – thankfully my thoughts – were drowned out.

 

I paused. I waited. I lingered for just a moment in the moment.

 

This place, this ocean, it, too, animates me.

 

Can that be right? How can both the silence and the sound, the stillness and the stir, the earth and the water kindle that which lies within? There is contradiction and friction and tension between the two, but it is a necessary tension, the kind that allows an object on a string to swing in a perfect circle.

 

Mama’s old Singer, the one on which she stitched all my Easter dresses and school clothes, every curtain that ever hung in our house, and enough dresses and skirts and blouses and coats for the women in town to fill a department store, had on its face a small protruding knob right over the needle. The tension knob, she called it, and explained that this knob regulated the length and tightness of the stitches which are made by the looping together of two threads, one from the spool and one from the bobbin. The spool is the one that sits on top of the machine, the one that spins as the sewer presses the foot pedal. The bobbin is the invisible one, the one that lies hidden beneath the throat plate.

 

She also taught me that you never ever touched that knob.

 

I didn’t question the instruction, just followed it. But over time I learned that never ever didn’t really mean never ever. Sometimes the tension knob needs to be adjusted. Making a buttonhole requires an adjustment in the tension. Using a decorative stitch or machine embroidery requires an adjustment in the tension. Pretty much anything other than simply attaching two pieces of fabric to each other necessitates a turn, sometimes an extremely subtle turn, of the tension knob. So what never ever really meant was “This is my machine and I adjust the tension, not you.”

 

I think I am beginning to understand. I am stitching together experiences and thoughts and emotions to make my life. The spool thread is the land, the constantly visible strand that whirls and twirls so fast that I don’t always notice it until it is suddenly still. The bobbin thread is the sea, less visible, but absolutely essential to the closure of each stitch. And the tension knob is my heart.

 

I haven’t touched my sewing machine in years. It is in somewhere in the attic, back in the corner with my scrapbooks from college and a set of old deck chairs. I suspect that the belt has dry-rotted and it might take me a few minutes to locate a bobbin, but I am quite certain that muscle memory would guide my hand and wrist from the spool pin to the thread guide, down around the tension knob, up and over the thread take-up lever, down and back through the thread guide to the needle without a single deliberate thought.

 

Once you’ve learned how, you never forget how to sew. Once you’ve learned how, you never forget how to live.

 

Copyright 2013

What Remains

 My friend died.

 

And I am hurting in a way that death has not hurt me before, a way that has nothing to do with my own mortality or lost opportunity or regret. Hurting in a new place, a place where the loss of adored grandparents did not reach, a place where neither the sudden, tragic death of a classmate or the slow and brutal taking of a cousin dragged me. There is a gnawing in my gut, a gnawing to understand, to put to words the sudden numbness that seized me when I got the news and that faded at unexpected intervals over the next few days to leave me weeping.

 

On Sunday afternoon I found my way to the pew where we, the women who, as a group, go by any number of appellations, but on that day were simply mourners, would sit together. We’d all worn red, Margaret’s Wesleyan class color, in some form – scarves and jackets, dresses and jewelry –, our mourning clothes splashed with the color of Valentines. We sat as closely as we could, shoulder to shoulder, trying and not succeeding to hide the fact that we were actually leaning on each other.

 

The congregational hymn was “Jesus Loves Me” and, having seen photographs of Margaret as a child, I could imagine her learning the words at Sunday School in Druid Hills. Learning them not just by memory, but by heart, learning them in such a way as to carry that certainty with her right to the end of her 84 years. After the first verse the words in the hymnal blurred into marbles rolling around the page and I left the singing to more stalwart souls.

 

The ministers who conducted the service knew Margaret well. We laughed when the senior pastor told the story of how Margaret had asked him why he did some particular thing and, after hearing his answer, replied, “Well, that’s a dumb reason.” After reflection, he’d decided that, in fact, it was a dumb reason and adopted Margaret’s suggestion for doing it another way.

 

We nodded when he explained that, upon joining the church, Margaret had insisted upon being given something to do. “I didn’t join this church just to sit here.”

 

Near the end of the service, as the minister’s words and the organ’s notes and the bell’s chimes mingled like some rare incense over our heads in the church’s vaulted ceiling, I had a startling moment of clarity: With Margaret’s death, there was one less person in the world who loved me. One less person who loved me. One less person who loved me. I suppressed the gasp that rose in my throat. I raised my fists to my eyes now incapable of containing the tears.

 

Outside the church is a prayer chapel. Margaret took me there shortly after its dedication. I wrote about that visit, how after she had told me all about the architectural details, she had left me to be alone. Leaving the funeral I walked up the narrow path to that chapel, noting the plaque at the doorway that indicated the date of dedication – five years ago to the day.

 

Inside it was exactly as I remembered. Candles flickered. Late winter afternoon light came through the high windows. The stone altar remained fixed, unmoved, unchanged.

 

I knelt, covered my face with my hands, and realized I had nothing to say. No prayer worth praying. No petition worth offering.

 

Then I heard it. The voice in my heart. Call her the Holy Spirit. Call her my true self. Call her Margaret. Call her whatever you want. This is what she said: “Love is all that matters. Love is all that matters. Love is all that matters.”

 

And in that moment I understood. There will be no more endless amounts of food pulled from a seemingly bottomless freezer and no more endless rounds of Mexican Train Dominoes around a table in a mountain cabin. There will be no more picnics in Oakland Cemetery, no more nearly-indecipherable notes, no more unsolicited advice. But her love is still here. Reminding, encouraging, provoking. Soothing, healing, holding.

 

And love is all that matters.

 

Copyright 2013

A Change in the Landscape

It is eight o’clock on the morning after Christmas. One shelf of the refrigerator holds nothing but blue-lidded plastic tubs crammed with leftovers. The trash can by the back door is stuffed with paper and ribbon, cardboard and plastic, tin cans and Styrofoam. The closet where I keep the wrapping paper is gorged with empty boxes that I will eventually make the time to break down and store until the next broad round of gift-giving.

 

Everything is full. Even the clouds. So full that they are saturated and dripping in heavy wind-swept drops over Sandhill. The road is slippery, but not very. Rutted, but not too. Muddy, but not markedly. The rain is hard, but the warnings of possible hail seem a bit dramatic. The weather is annoying and not much more.

 

It is now about 9:30. I look up from my computer and realize that the sun is out. The sky is a translucent baby blue, the clouds are high and white, and the puddles in the street look like mirrors. It occurs to me – not for the first time, of course – that it doesn’t take long for the landscape to change completely.

 

The fraction of a second it takes to make a choice in anger that would never have been made in calm. To speak simple words that complicate everything – "It’s cancer." "I’m going to have a baby." To pull a trigger.

 

I was driving home from Kate’s graduation when I heard the news about the Newtown shootings. Just the night before I’d been sitting high up in the stands at Kennesaw State watching her confidently stride across the stage to receive her master’s degree. There was a little plus sign by her name in the program – honor graduate, 4.0 GPA. My heart swelled and my eyes watered and I couldn’t stop smiling. It was one of those moments when the future was the largest thing in the universe.

 

In a few hours, though, that future – for 20 first-graders and six women who tried to protect them – would not exist. It doesn’t take long for the landscape to change.
 

The light outside my window grows brighter and I think that, in a matter of days, a single stroke of the clock will turn one year to the next. Advertisements and fluff news pieces and conversations are littered with the phrases "new leaf" and "clean page" and "fresh start." We live as though change is voluntary, that it waits to be initiated by our desire, that we are never its victim, its passive object. In doing so, we live in deep denial of the fact that we are, far too often, powerless against the winds that drive the clouds that empty the rain of adversity and pain and heartbreak onto our flimsy umbrellas.
 

Are those the only alternatives then? To convince myself that I can exercise and organize and meditate myself into perfect stasis or give in to the reality that at any moment the foundations of my existence could crumble?
 

On Christmas Eve I watched intently as the presents were distributed. As each recipient accepted a package, Adam’s Jackson, two-and-a-half and an uncanny recreation of his father, hurried over to assist with the unwrapping. He reached up to touch the bright, curly ribbon first. “Ooooh!” he whispered.
 

His tiny fist curled to grab at the taped seam on the box and pulled to hear the satisfying rip. “Ooooh!” he whispered again. And as the paper began to fall away and the contents came into view, there was always one final, elongated, “Oooooooh!” before moving on to assist with the next treasure.
 

That, I’ve decided, is the third alternative. I don’t have to pretend I am in control or despair in the knowledge that I never will be. I can approach each moment, this present moment as the gift it is. I can resolve to be amazed over and over again, acknowledging every change in the landscape with an appreciative, “Ooooh!”

 

Copyright 2012

This Year's Christmas Play

 It is the season of wonder, after all. And, so, I have been wondering. Wondering how long it takes to decorate that huge tree at Rockefeller Center. Wondering how a person is supposed to learn all four verses of any particular Christmas carol now that school music programs are “holiday” performances. Wondering how our little planet looks from the satellite that takes the photos for Google Earth when all the houses in all the cities and towns across America have their Christmas lights turned on.

 

But mostly I’ve been wondering who I am in this year’s Christmas play.

 

One year I got to be an angel, but that was only because there were only two blonde girls in our Sunday School class and the script called for three. I don’t remember ever getting to be Mary, gazing beatifically at the baby doll wrapped in a flannel blanket and lying in a what somebody thought looked like a manger filled with a variety of hay that would never have existed in Bethlehem. (Directors, even when they are elementary school teachers, tend to type-cast and meek and mild has never been my strength.) Usually, I was the narrator, the one with the words.

 

Which makes it interesting that this year the character I’m feeling an awful lot like is Zechariah. Pious and proper, wise and mature, he’s the one who couldn’t bring himself to believe in a miracle and got struck speechless as a result.

 

Maybe it’s just because I’m tired. Lots of time on the road, away from home, and the negotiation of more traffic and social conventions that I’d like is a slow but steady drain. Maybe it’s because, in the last few weeks, a lot of people whose mortality I’d managed to ignore have become seriously ill or died. Nothing like a thinning of the generational cushion between oneself and ultimate vulnerability to give one pause. Or, maybe, like Zechariah, it’s because I’ve been paying too much attention to the acting and not enough to the experiencing.

 

Put on the priestly robes. Check. Walk respectfully into the sanctuary. Check. Light the incense. Check. Get out of there and go home.

 

Mail the Christmas letter. Check. Hang the wreath on the front door. Check. Get the gifts bought and wrapped and delivered and the parties attended and the hostesses thanked and ...

 

Poor Zechariah. Doing exactly what he is supposed to do. Following all the rules. And he gets interrupted by an angel who offers him a miracle. But, because it doesn’t fit into what he knows, what he expects, what everybody waiting in the temple courtyard knows and expects, he doubts and, because he doubts, his ability to tell the story is taken away.

 

Poor me. Doing exactly what I am supposed to do. Following all the rules. Have I been interrupted by the offer of a miracle and doubted? Is that why I’m feeling speechless in this holiest of seasons?

 

Like most miracle tales, Zechariah’s doesn’t end in silence, but in cries of joy and shouts of laughter. The angel’s promise materializes. An impossible thing is made real. And, finally, Zechariah gets to tell his story.

 

A story made better by the building tension of imposed silence. A story made more compelling by the passage of time. A story made timeless by the knitting of skeptical and miraculous, human and divine, earth and sky.

 

This year I am Zechariah. I am lighting the incense and listening for the whisper of an angel. And I will be silent until the time for telling the story comes.

 

Copyright 2012

Human Hearts and Veterinary Science

Once a month Lily takes heartworm medicine. It is a chewy, brown rectangle that, now that I think of it, bears a passing resemblance to the chewy brown rectangle of calcium that I take every morning. A long time ago Saint Buddy showed me a 3-D model of a canine heart infested with heartworms intending to make an impression. He did. So for 23 years – through Ginny’s life and now through Lily’s – I’ve dutifully administered what I’ve hoped would protect my dogs’ hearts from becoming the living representations of that model.

I operate under no delusion, however, that either of them remained completely heartworm free. Ginny lived, Lily lives in the country. Running wild through fields, chasing down and scavenging wild animals on occasion, spending their lives outdoors means that one can reduce the odds, but not completely eliminate the chance of getting the one bite from the one mosquito that will infest a healthy beating heart.

 

And, yet, I try.

 

A few days ago I dropped by Saint Buddy’s to pick up a refill. Whatever the number of cats and dogs that may be present, I am always struck by the clean chlorine-y smell of the place – like a swimming pool or a freshly laundered white towel. It is the scent of competence, a perfume made from a mixture of science and compassion. It makes me feel safe.

 

Among the many angelic beings who spend their working days at Saint Buddy’s is delicate and ethereal Amy, a near-doppelganger for a young Emmylou Harris. You can tell from the light in her eyes that she speaks the language of children and animals and I am always glad when she is the one to take Lily’s leash from my hand and lead her toward the treatment rooms.

 

As I explained to her the reason for my visit – to pick up heartworm medicine – she looked up from the computer where she was looking up the prescription and asked, “For Miss Lily?”

 

“Yes,” I said and then laughed. “Though I could probably use some myself.”

 

Amy laughed, too, and said something like, “Couldn’t we all?”

 

Our eyes met. And held. And in that second, that two, three seconds, something important happened. A social exchange became a real conversation. A commonplace chat became a significant dialogue. An ordinary encounter became a memorable moment.

 

My laughter faded to a breathy chuckle. “Some days,” I offered, “I’m convinced that my heart is absolutely full of worms.”

 

Still smiling, but now less photographically, Amy nodded and said, “And if somebody offered me a pill for it, I wouldn’t even have to have it wrapped up in cheese. I’d swallow it whole.”

 

I’ve known Amy for a long time. We’ve spent lots of moments together. But this moment, this particular moment, I will never forget.

 

There was another woman at the counter. She must have overheard our strange back-and-forth, but she didn’t acknowledge it. Just stood very straight, very still. I suspect that she was staring into a corner somewhere, pretending to be invisible.

 

I don’t blame her. I’ve been her. I’ve been the woman without the time, the patience, the courage to engage in the bigger, deeper questions. I’ve been the woman who just wanted to get it done, whatever “it” was. Couldn’t bear to think any more than absolutely necessary because I knew where thinking would take me.

 

Funny thing is, that never works for long. At least, not for me. I am convinced that we, all of us, are connected and it is in having the conversations, sharing the moments, telling the stories that we find the connections.

 

And, now that I think of it, it just may be that those connections are exactly the heartworm medicine that we humans can’t live without.

 

Copyright 2012

Tales From Uncle Remus

When I was a little girl, our vacations always sent us north toward Rock City and Ruby Falls, Stone Mountain and Grant Park, Cherokee and the Great Smokies.   And, in the absence in those days of an interstate highway system, our trek always took us through Eatonton, home of Joel Chandler Harris, creator of Uncle Remus. 
 

Fast food dispensaries were, like the interstate, a fixture of the future and the thought (not to mention the expense) of eating in a restaurant was anathema to my parents, thus we used up most of the car trunk space to, in the words of my mother, “pack a picnic lunch.”  The picnic area at the Joel Chandler Harris Museum became our regular stopping point and when I remember those summer road trips the memories always include the physical sensations of the cool concrete bench under my bare legs, the softness of Sunbeam bread collapsing in my mouth, the feel of thick green grass under my bare feet.  And the laughter.

Oh, the laughter.  Mama and Daddy with their best friends and traveling companions, Mr. John and Miss Frances.  Me and Keith with their children.  Everything was funny.  Even the mishaps.  It was summer and we were on a road trip and the trunk had been too full of sandwich meat and potato chips and powdered doughnuts to leave any room for seriousness.

Last Saturday I was back in Eatonton for the first time in probably thirty years.  I’d been invited to speak to a women’s conference.  I arrived early, greeted my hosts, and got my bearings. I turned down an offer of coffee, explained that I take my caffeine cold and carbonated, and asked for directions to the nearest place open at that hour that could provide the same.

I’m certain that the directions were good, but the IGA to which I’d been pointed didn’t come into view when I thought it should, so I kept driving.  Though it had been a while, but I’d figured out that Eatonton hadn’t grown so much that I was going to get lost looking for a Diet Coke.

I was admiring the quaint shops in downtown, the well-kept yards in the Victorian houses on the side streets when I came to a stop sign and, trying to decide which way to go, realized that I driven right up to the Uncle Remus Museum.  Thoughts of caffeine momentarily left me and I pulled into the parking lot.  It all looked exactly the same – picnic table, log cabin, statue of Brer Rabbit, and the placard of Brer Rabbit with the big arrow tucked under his arm pointing the way to the museum.  

I felt my face stretch into a smile.  I felt my chest begin to vibrate with laughter.  Under my long sleeves I could almost feel the summer breeze, could almost taste the Kool-Aid and the Pecan Twirls.

It has been a long time since I felt like a child.  Actually felt in my body that lightness, that expansiveness, that wholeness that exists when you don’t yet understand the concept of boundaries.  When you have not yet experienced limitation or loss.  When being certain is all you know.

And it has been a long time since I felt so scolded.  Scolded because –  it should be clear, I suppose – that if the mere sight of this place where the innocence and security of childhood was epitomized can send me straight back to those moments, that posture, I should be able to get there at will.  I should be able to remove myself, when need be, from the things and people that would steal my joy, kill my optimism, destroy my faith.  All I have to do is remember.

It is almost Thanksgiving.  The leaves that are left on the sycamore are limp and the color of cured tobacco.  The ones that litter the ground at my feet are brittle and leather-brown, their edges curling like a hand making a fist.  The marshals who enforce the laws of nature are finally, after weeks of effort, wresting those hands loose from their grip on summer.  

I close my eyes and fold my arms across my chest against the chill wind, but under the jacket and the sweater, my arms are bare and I feel the warmth of June sunshine.

Copyright 2012

By The Waters Of Babylon

Our ninth grade literature textbook included the post-apocalyptic short story, “By The Waters Of Babylon” by Stephen Vincent Benet. The story follows a young boy, the son of a priest in a primitive society, as he journeys far beyond the borders his people have long honored. His long and dangerous quest takes him to the city of the gods where he stumbles across the ruins of the great towers that once filled the city. Two of the rocks have words written on them, words he doesn’t understand: UBTREAS and ASHING.

 

I remember this part of the story particularly well, probably because Marcia Lanier quizzed and prodded and cajoled us so thoroughly on what we thought those two words might mean. Probably because the entire story turned on those two strange words. Probably because when we finally put it all together and figured out that the words were really only parts of words, it became clear that the stones were fragments of landmarks in New York City, the United States Subtreasury building and a statute of George Washington, and that the story took place not in the distant primitive past, but in a very possible not-so-distant future.

 

Just the other day I found myself remembering “By The Waters Of Babylon” and wondering what a young priest or priestess who came tip-toeing through the wreckage of one of our cities might find. She might stub her toe on a large piece of signage on which was written “ART” and be led to think that the tower over which such a designation had hung had once been dedicated to truth and beauty. Or that he might trip over an equally large section on which was written “ALM” and think perhaps that the place had been an temple where care was provided for the poor and ill. Both of them would, of course, be wrong.

 

Because, of course, both ART and ALM would be broken off pieces of a Walmart sign.

 

That’s right, Walmart, the store into which I walked two weeks before Halloween to find Christmas decorations already available for sale and realized two things. First, the date upon which I have to stop going into Walmart until after Christmas (the actual December 25th Christmas) in order to avoid crowd-induced anxiety attacks and general ill-temperedness has reached a record early date on the calendar. And, second, when the apocalypse does come most of the bodies will be found inside Walmart Supercenters under mounds of flat-screen televisions, cartons of 500-count LED Christmas lights, and Dora the Explorer pajamas.

 

Okay. Maybe mine is an extreme reaction. Maybe there are those who don’t mind, who actually enjoy navigating a maze of aisles lined with plastic holly wreaths and Lady Stetson gift sets in search of candy corn. Perhaps there are people who are not disturbed by the odd juxtaposition of a jack-o-lantern with the Baby Jesus on the end-cap of the express lane. There is even the possibility that, living here among my own people, there are folks in whom there is not created a sense that can only be described as the heebie-jeebies when one is accosted by the voice of Bing Crosby crooning away about a white Christmas from behind a rack of Darth Vader masks.

 

Extreme reaction or not, I couldn’t help wondering, when our end comes, if it is in the nature of a cataclysm, whether we will be leaving behind anything worth rummaging through, stumbling over. For the ones left behind or coming after, will they think we were dedicated to truth and beauty, that we provided for the poor and the ill? Or will the evidence of our existence leave them thinking, as the young boy in Benet’s story thought, that we had lived in a place of great riches but that we had squandered their magic?

 

I want to believe that somewhere, between the racks of Spiderman costumes and the shelves of scented candles, between the fun-size candy bars and the needle-pointed stockings, behind the scarecrows and hay bales, under the blow-up snowman, those great riches still exist. I think we can find them.

 

Copyright 2012

Dancing With The Seeing Eye Dog

When I was a girl, the only college football games on television on Saturday afternoon involved teams whose nicknames I did not understand (Sooners, Buckeyes) and whose players’ names all seemed to have not enough vowels. I had no connection to Oklahoma or Ohio, Nebraska or Notre Dame and it took me a long time to realize that I watched not for the competition itself, but for the broadcast. I watched so I could hear Keith Jackson.

 

I probably heard him call thousands of plays over the years, but there is one call – probably because it said less about football and more about life – that I will never forget. It was late in the game. The quarterback of the team that was trailing had not had a good game. He’d been intercepted. His completion percentage was negligible. He sat on the sidelines looking like, as Keith would probably have said, a whipped pup.

Conversation in the broadcast booth turned to whether the coach would, when his team got the ball back, put in another quarterback. The starter clearly didn’t have his best stuff. The back-up was pretty good. It would make a lot of sense. And maybe the back-up could surprise the defense. Maybe there was a miracle waiting to happen.

The camera got a close-up of the head coach – dressed in a coat and tie, notes rolled up in his hand, yelling out instructions as the offense took the field. And there was the quarterback, the starter, the struggling starter running out with them.

"Well," said Keith Jackson in that stentorian voice that never lost its Southern accent, "looks like the coach believes that you dance with the one what brung ya’."

I have no recollection of how the game ended, whether the quarterback crafted a storybook ending or walked away the goat. I remember only that with those few words, an expression that, surprisingly, I’d never heard before, Keith Jackson presented me with an axiom that over the years has become something like a koan, a paradox upon which to meditate, a question with more than one answer, a story that in the telling and re-telling I somehow get closer to intuitive truth.

On that day, that autumn Saturday so many years ago, I understood the story to be about loyalty. The coach put the starting quarterback in for the final set of downs because of a previously affirmed allegiance, a declared determination to perform certain acts in support of a common goal. The act may well have been less a demonstration of confidence than a dare to condemn. No matter what happened, no one could fault the man for being loyal.

It is another autumn Saturday and I am outside working in the yard. The car radio is tuned to the UGA pre-game show and the volume is turned up loudly enough for me to hear it as I re-set the concrete edgers around the hosta bed. One of the broadcasters mentions Keith Jackson, long retired to California and endless rounds of golf, and with that mention sends my mind careening back to the unnamed coach and the quarterback with whom he chose to dance. For the first time in a long time the koan appears, its feet (iamb, anapest, molossus) skipping, then tromping, then running breathlessly through my thoughts, looping around and around until I am nearly breathless myself.

I am staring at the clouds. They are high and white, appliques fused to the pale blue baby’s bib of the sky. It has been 40 years since I so assuredly analyzed the coach and the quarterback, their relationship and the dynamics of the moment Keith Jackson memorialized with a quaint colloquialism. I have experienced my share of interceptions; my statistics have been less than stellar in any number of categories. And I understand now, in this moment of re-examining and re-telling, that it was not simply loyalty that put the quarterback back on the field. It was trust.

Loyalty is strong, but it is often blind. Trust is its companion animal. It prevents loyalty from stepping out into traffic and alerts it to unexpected changes in the environment. Trust knows when to abandon calls for reason and disregard demands for explanation. Trust can see in the dark.

And when the game – or something more important – is on the line, it is that ability to see in the dark which will determine who gets to dance.

Copyright 2012