The Secret Revealed. This one's for you Jenny

This is a photo of my Mother from High School. I cannot really imagine her as this young girl, but I have the unique prospective of knowing how her life turned out. I wish I could show you a picture of her like the one in my mind's eye. Perhaps it is better this way, but somehow I think the real thing would be even more amazing than I remember, but then, I was a child and saw with a child's eyes. This is a story about her so you can see a bit of her like I do, but it is also about me, my daughter, and now her great granddaughter. We share a bond of strength and family and a love of cooking. Of course if you choose to believe it is just a story about a cake, that's okay too.

I cannot fairly describe my mother, but I do know she was a complicated woman. She would deny that of course. The oldest daughter of a rural family, she graduated from high school in 1936 and married the same year. She settled down to be what she thought was her God proscribed role as homemaker, and in a few years, mother. I doubt that anyone was more surprised than she when she discovered 20 years later that she was a brilliant and astute businesswoman. Never confident because of her lack of higher education, she brought her considerable talent to bear on my father's business. Because of their synergy and long hours it was a resounding success. When money began to roll in she was generous to a fault, the fault being the strings often attached to her benevolence. Through all the years of hard work in "the store" she remained an immaculate housekeeper, with cleanliness and godliness running neck and neck in my childhood home. I always disappointed her by my lack of interest in this subject and although she has been gone from me these 15 years, I still have a knee jerk rebellion when it's time to do ironing or wash windows.

She would object strongly if someone called her vain, but she was a child born in genteel rural poverty, who was sent to school wearing long wool underwear hanging out from beneath her dresses. I say she had the right to a bit of vanity. When she could afford them, she bought hundreds of pairs of beautiful shoes, in an impossibly small 7 1/2 triple A. Of course they never fit either of her duck footed daughters. She stood a petite 5'4" and kept her weight under control by rigid dietary discipline, interspersed with epic indulgence on holidays. Not unpredictably, it is the delights of those seasons that I remember the most fondly. Nothing brings this into focus more vividly than Mother's secret Jam Cake recipe. It would not do to just give it to you flat out. A long preserved secret like this deserves a story.

It was around this time of year she always started the baking. It had to be early so many cakes could be shipped around the country and the world. One of the first ones sent was to my Uncle Bill and Aunt Edna Mae, a military family who delighted us with treasures from exotic locations. My favorite gift from them was my Japanese Doll with shinny black hair reposing on a red satin cushion. She also sent wooden platform flip flops, never large enough to fit my feet even when I was 6. For several years my mother cried as she packed one for my brother in the navy, stationed first on Midway Island, and later in Hawaii. With six siblings and their children, aunts and uncles, pastors, church family, business associates, and friends near and far, there was an enormous demand for the marvelous homey cake, chock full of local sorghum, homemade wild blackberry jam, and hickory nuts, plus delightful spices, all topped with a carmel candy icing and chopped nuts.

The first year I could not get home for Christmas not one but two arrived at my apartment door in New York. I had pretended to everyone that I was not homesick, a very thin lie. Pregnant with my first son and in constant fear of my husband's anger over my "immaculate conception", I sat on the floor and sobbed and laughed at the treasure from Mother. Our love/hate relationship was pure love that day so long ago. I pictured her kitchen as I opened the tin and smelled the familiar aroma. I thought of the hours standing on the old white step stool helping cook when I was too short to reach the counter. Mother gave me tasks appropriate to my age, first sifting, and then stirring the nuts and fruit into the flour so they would be distributed uniformly through the cake. I was allowed to grease and flour the many baking pans and put circles of wax paper neatly into them. Later I hulled nuts and picked out the meats with a tiny sharp weapon. As a mostly grown girl I stirred the batches of evaporated milk, brown sugar, and butter, waiting for them to boil and then setting the timer for the five minutes required for it to become the rich candy icing. I recall the rows of wax paper squares loaded with flour and spices, one for each batch, lain out on the long kitchen counter, but I do not remember ever being trusted with the mixing of batter, and certainly not the timing of the delights in the oven. I did learn early how to tell a cake was done just by the smell, a skill that has stuck with me over the years.

The making of Jam Cakes was mass production of the first order, a enterprise worthy of a factory, but carried out by one dynamo of a woman and two incompetent girls that tried their best to keep in step. We were never allowed to put fingers in the batter or the icing for a taste, but when the day's cooking was done we could have the bowl and spoon to harvest the tiny morsels left behind by her efficient spatula. Afterwards it was our job to wash up the bowls and pans for the next day's cooking. Mother was tireless, working long hours at the business and then coming home to cake baking at night. The end results was between 50 and 150 perfect creations, tucked into Christmas tins ready for gifting.

Unlike seasonal fruit cake, the unique flavor and texture of my Mom's jam cake was coveted by almost everyone who tasted. Many people in my home town tried to replicate mother's recipe without success, and then came to her hat in hand for the secret. Being a perfectionist, she did not trust that they would create it to her specifications, so she always said no. She was right of course, but none the less, I am going to spill it. If you take the trouble to make it and it turns out well, tell them that it's Evelyn's original recipe. Otherwise, well, keep trying until you get it right.

Evelyn's Rich Jam Cake

1 C shortening

2 Cups Sugar

3 Cups plain flour

1 Cup Buttermilk

4 eggs

1 teaspoon baking soda

2 teaspoons allspice

1 teaspoon cloves

1/2 teaspoon ginger

1/2 teaspoon nutmeg

1 Tablespoon cinnamon

2 Tablespoons cocoa

1 Cup Raisins

1 Cup chopped nuts

(walnuts if hickory nuts are unavailable)

1 Cup blackberry jam

(best if homemade from berries picked by barefoot children who come to the door with a bucket in hand and berry stains and scratches on their faces)

1/2 C sorghum molasses

(You can only buy this in KY I think. They still use mules to turn the mill and squeeze the cane before they boil it down)

1/3 cup grape juice

(Mom used sweet wine in the early days but stopped that because she got upset about having to go into the liquor store, but that's a story for another day)

Cream shortening and sugar together and add eggs, one at a time and then jam, and sorghum. Sift dry ingredients together. Mix the nuts and raisins with about half cup of the flour. Stir into batter and then add other dry ingredients alternately with milk and grape juice. Bake in 3 greased 9" pans at 370 degrees until done ( about 25 minutes). Do not over cook.

Caramel Icing

The recipe for this made a vast quantity, but I attempted to give you a small version. I believe it will still be too much, but it keeps well in the fridge and can be warmed to spreading temp and used again. You can also add some walnuts, pour the remainder in a pan, chill and serve as you would fudge.

2 pound brown sugar

1 cup plus 2 scant tablespoons of evaporated milk

2 sticks (half pound) of butter

vanilla (no quantity listed but I would estimate 2 teaspoons)

1 seven oz jar marshmallow fluff

Put sugar, milk, and butter in heavy saucepan. Cook stirring constantly over medium heat until it boils. Continue to stir and time mixture for 5 minutes. Remove from heat, cool slightly while stirring and then add fluff and vanilla. Beat by hand until cool and firm enough to spread on cake. This is a fudge like frosting and will get too thick to spread when it gets cold. While still warm sprinkle top of cake with finely chopped nuts.

And the beat goes on...

HAPPY FATHERS DAY ALL

That would be Wrenn's dad holding him on the way to church to be christened.  Beside it is Dad with all the family (Eva, Carl, Cindy in arms, Russ on the left and Wrenn on the right) at Camp Haley a few years further along. Next is my Dad,about to give me away.  To the right is the 5 year old me, Daddy, and my sister, fishing in Florida. Yes, it was hot and pants only pants were not optional. I remember that trip vividly. We camped in a pop up tent that dad pulled behind the car, sleeping on little shelves they called beds over my parent's heads. All night long I fell off my shelf and landed on my sleeping parents. Oh, and my sister got chased out of the Gulf of Mexico by a crab that was almost as big as the mosquitos. I think we had way more fun than my parents.

Next row, Wrenn holding Jason in the hospital with a proud papa beam on his face. Almost as excited is the picture of Ben with the fish his Dad had caught earlier. I love the next one of a sleepy group, Eva, Dad, and Jason, all in their undies on the floor in front of the TV. Moving ahead a few years our trip to Disneyworld for the 15 year anniversary of the park. Then there is Dad in costume picked by his daughter, "giving" her away at the occasion that was forever to be known as "Wedstock" because of the two hurricanes. God spoke but we did not listen.

In the middle of the last row is a typical activity at our house almost 30 years ago, "horsie, daddy, horsie", and Dad was never too tired to play. To the left is our son with his firstborn and the proud papa beam.  On the right, with an older and wiser version of the same look sits the proud Granddad...and the beat goes on...

Learning to fly

This morning I read a post from Wing Seeker that made me cry and I started to write my own story of discovery, but as the words came out I realized I had said this all before, so many times. I remember telling my first son, a fledging walker at 9 months, not to touch the TV controls. He loved Sesame Street but he would go up to the TV and switch the station or volume and then whimper to me about this disappointing event. He would not associate the movement of the dials with the shadows on the screen for many months so we would play the game. He would sit on the floor and reach his hand up slowly and I would say “no” and move him away. He tried a casual approach, just walking by and looking in another direction, place his tiny fingers in the proximity of the dials. I would still say “no” and move him away. Then the sneaky from the side move, not even standing in front of the picture grab, but still, I would say “no”, move him to another location and try to distract him. This went on for many months before my sweet but determined child learned what “no” meant in this particular situation. I don’t know how many months went by before he grasped the universal concept of “no” but I’m sure he was right on schedule.

I thought about him this morning when I started writing, trying to approach the story from yet another angle, hoping it would change the absolute nature of space and time, but no matter what I say, how I try to rewrite it, my past remains the same. My daughter tells me I dwell too much on things gone by, and no doubt she is correct. Her life opens up in brilliant color as she moves into her most productive and exciting years, while mine begins to fade like the photos of me from the 70’s and 80’s. However one of my favorite poet/songwriters, Towns VanZandt said it better than I can:

Time runs in and then runs out, starts again and it’s always been that way

You’re gonna drown tomorrow if you cry too many tears for yesterday

Tomorrow’s half of all you’ve got so treat him good, cause when I’m gone he’ll stay.

If tomorrow is half of all I have, then yesterday would be the other half, but

I think it might be time to stop writing so much about it. I believe I’m mostly healed and that is most likely the reason I have neglected this blog for so long. So many good and bad things lie behind me and I am going to try and forgive myself and everyone else. After all I have survived, and more than survived, flourished, despite the fears of yesterday. Now my tomorrow is upon me and nothing makes that more real than this picture of my grandson. I give credit to my D-I-L Joriel for the picture and for the nurturing environment she has made for her family.

I also want to commend Wing Seeker for her bravery in telling a story that is decidedly more horrendous than anything I can imagine. I do not know yet how her story ends yet, but I can tell what a remarkable woman she has become. My life looks like a trip to Disneyworld compared to the pain she suffered, yet she is sane and whole and a brilliant writer, the kind that makes you think, the kind that changes your life. Because of her words today I am determined not to forget the past, but to stop dwelling on things I cannot change. I shall however wait quietly to hear the bell that tells me Wing Seeker has achieved her goal. 

Wordsonwater

     When I was a child we had a small vacation get away spot in Western Tennessee. It was a modest trailer parked in a fishing village on the banks of Lake Reelfoot. My sibs and I spent many summer days there trying to find something to do while Dad fished. On one of his forays into town for food he spied a used book store. My father had a life long belief in the power of books, and as a child of the great depression, he knew a bargain when he saw one. He picked up ten books for a dollar and brought them back to our tiny motor home by the lake. They were unlike the usual run of Reader's Digest Condensed books and Bible reference that normally sat in our house. The two I picked as my own were “The Best Loved Poems of the American People” and “The Great Chicago Theater Fire”. The book on the fire was grizzly and inappropriate reading for a young child but I held it close and marveled at the horror. The poetry book was my real love, although the American people have taste in poetry that is at best, eclectic. I carefully sorted the wheat from the chaff and wrote notes in the margins. Sitting by a cypress knob by that stagnate lake was the first time I really read poetry. I still have the book sitting on my shelf , dog-eared and missing pages from the index, but the best of it was committed to memory over the years, including this verse that helped form my attitude toward material possessions.

         If of thy mortal goods thou are bereft

               And from thy slender store two loaves alone to thee are left,

Sell one, and with thy dole

Buy hyacinths, to feed thy soul. 

     In eight grade I was made to memorize a poem for punishment because I was talking during class. I recall how puzzled I was at this particular penalty. I still know the words to The Flower Fed Buffalo by Vachel Lindsey, Mr. Martin's choice of verses for me to recite to him the next day. I stood in his office and spoke it so willingly, and with such drama, I think he realized he should just called my parents and let them deal with me. I learned early that the majority of my peers did not share my feeling about verse. Neither could the majority of them distinguish a shade of difference between the rhymes on greeting cards and  the sonnets of Shakespeare, except they liked Hallmark better.

I wrote from the time I was 11 or so, some of it dreadful, but some not so bad. I aspired to be Edna St Vincent Millay who wrote Renascence when she was seventeen. 

All I could see from where I stood

Was three long mountains and a wood

I turned and looked the other way

And saw three islands in a bay.

So with my eyes I traced the line

Of the horizon, thin and fine,

Straight around till I was come

Back to where I started from;

And all I could see from where I stood

Was three long mountains and a wood.

The words pounded in my head as I looked around me, knowing I saw even less than she, no mountains, no islands, only green rolling farm land for hundreds of miles. My inner life was also more starved for intellectual stimulation and I longed to mirror her figurative rise from the deep recesses of the earth. 

My freshman year of high school the English teacher, who was also the basketball coach, gave us an assignment to write a poem about spring. The best one was to be published in the local paper. He was dreamy cute and all the girls sat in the front row and hung on his every word while the boys sat surly and unnoticed by us in the back of the class. I was delighted, for now he would see my obvious intellectual superiority and single me out for knowing glances. I worked long and hard and produced what I knew was the best thing I had ever written. It was free verse, dark with hidden meaning. Mr. G handed it back to me during class with a note saying, “good effort, B-”. The poem that got published in the paper spoke about birds and frogs, flowers and sunshine, with a singsong rhyme that would fit perfectly on that Hallmark card. That was when I realized that my handsome, tall, dark haired, blue eyed teacher was a bit of a dullard. I never flirted with him again, but he didn't seem to notice.

I kept my own council and read everything I could find, especially poetry.  Although we did not study the civil war in Kentucky the way children do in Virginia, I got my education on it via poetry. Stephen Crane, so well known for The Red Badge of Courage wrote, 

Do not weep maiden, war is kind

Because your lover threw wild hands toward the sky

While his affrighted steed ran on alone

Do not weep

War is kind.

Mother whose heart hung humble as a button

On the bright splendid shroud of your son,

Do not weep

War is kind.

No amount of propaganda on the merits of the struggle ever came close to overturning the image he painted about the reality of the war of brother's blood. While the men went off to fight, the southern bells like  Mary Lou Wingate sat at home and “hated the north with the hate of Jale, who with hot dry hands went seeking the nail”. Before reading Wingate Hall my attention had never been drawn that gruesome passage in the bible about the young woman who enticed her husband's enemy and then, while he slept, drove a spike through his temple with a hammer.   Stephen Benet described Mary Lou “as slightly made, and as hard to break as a rapier blade”, but somehow I could imagine her having the courage to murder a man in his sleep, as long as he was a Yankee. 

     My junior year of high school I had a first year teacher that recognized and encouraged my writing. I gave her sheets of verse on notepaper with my scribbled hand and poor spelling, full of all the passion of a 16 year old tortured soul. Regardless of how bad it was she praised me for making the effort and gave me little tips on improvement. I was in college when I had my first poem published. It was not my best effort but my boy friend  was impressed with my skill and snuck my little book of verse to his English teacher. The two of them picked the ones they thought were best for the student publication. I was horrified. 

     As years passed I scribble little verses on scraps of paper, occasionally making an effort to collect them in on spot but always losing them as I moved about first with my husband, and then, after the divorce,  traveling from one cheap apartment to another. I began to envision myself as an Emily Dickinson whose brilliance would only be recognized after her death. I went back to early verse and revised in anticipation of an early demise. Unfortunately I could not bring myself to part with the original version, penned in the artist's own hand. Looking back I realize I should have tossed most of it but now I keep them in case I need another lesson in humility. 

    Computers became an affordable reality of life about the time my last child was born, but try as I might the hard drives that promised they would hold onto my words forever crashed and died randomly. Much that I wrote was lost, but after a time I learned that rather than dwell on the loss I just needed to accept that my words were never intended to be written on stone, but like my blog, on water.  It is the writing rather than the product that has meaning to me. If you catch them as they go by remember they are only temporal, like the wake of a boat or the splash of a fish as he leaps into the air. Soon the surface returns to normal and all traces of their passage is gone.

  

MERRY CHRISTMAS

I did not make any cookies this year and the world does appear to be shrugging off this news with grace. My oldest son, a cookie monster of the first degree, is staying in Seattle with his wife and baby son, a foot of snow, and all my cookie recipes.  I know his wife has probably made some of them and some of her own to comfort him on his first Christmas ever away from home in all his 39 years. The four of us that will be here sat down Tuesday night and came up with a comprise plan for food over the holidays.  We will not be having my Mama's Christmas dinner boys and girls. My husband is disappointed but the people voted and his menu did not win. 

In my mind's eye I can see the look on his face the first time I took him to my parent's house for the holidays. We came in through the frigid garage where Mother had kept three long tables situated between the two cars. Mother had spent weeks mass producing jam cakes to give as gifts and for us to eat but she did not stop there. Neither could she make just one of anything. Pound cake as well as coconut, chocolate, banana and orange slice were standards, but she also made some new ones every year. My husband loved the pecan pies best, but if he got tired of that he could have pumpkin, mince, chess, chocolate, lemon, coconut, mincemeat, butterscotch, or the children's favorite, peanut butter. She made enough to put every member of the house into a diabetic coma of epic proportions. In the refrigerator she had my weakness, boiled custard, rich and soothing and loaded with fat, it was the perfect side for the shortbread and ginger snaps and coconut crinkles. With a dessert menu like that I will just leave the overabundance of the main meal to your already taxed imaginations. 

My parents believed alcohol was a sin and classified all who drank as morally bankrupt, a short step away from the gutter. It took me many years to realize that gluttony was on the same level as alcohol abuse and that drinking, like eating, could be done sensibly and with moderation.  Still when we sit to talk about Christmas treats the old days tug at my husband so strongly and myself to a lesser degree. My daughter and son say they want no sweets at all. I know my husband will be at the store buying a pecan pie if I do not make one, so I stand firm for him on that point. It's a good dessert to make because neither my daughter or I are tempted by treacle or fat, the main components. What did we come up with? I thought you'd never ask. 

Free Range Organic Turkey with defatted Pan Juices

 Apple Celery Gluten Free Stuffing

(The Ham that my husband thinks he has cleverly hidden in the downstairs fridge)

Fresh Organic Cranberry Sauce with Port Wine

Garlic and Olive Oil Winter Vegetable Roast with Yams, Red Potatoes, Onions, Rutabagas, Butternut Squash and (yuck) Beets.

Brussel Sprouts with Roasted Chestnuts and Orange Peel

Corn and Limas

Green Beans with Almonds and lemon

(Homemade rolls that no one knows I'm making)

Pecan Pie 

 (A lower fat version of my Mother's Boiled custard that no one knows I'm making)

(English Trifle with Port and fresh Raspberries that no one knows I'm making)

(What ever else the rest of them are hiding, hopefully made of dark chocolate)

Some Lovely Pinot Noir that the wine steward at Whole Foods suggested and a Petit Sirah that I picked out myself.

For all my friends, and any out there who think themselves my foes, my wish for you this Christmas is that picking a menu is the least of your worries and that the next year puts more of all the good things in life on everyone's plate. 

...and I can still fit in my skinny jeans

      I pulled a tissue out of the box I keep tucked into the console of my car and started lifting it toward my face. It felt like my arm was tied to my side with an large strong rubber band. That's when I realized what an unusual Thanksgiving I was having and also how much my world view has changed in the last few years. For the first time in my adult life a holiday has come and it is not my job to cook, serve, or even clean up after. It is amazing to me that the world seems to be spinning peacefully on its axis even though this  year I have reservations instead of a turkey thawing in my sink. I did not rise at the crack of dawn to and cook until late afternoon. My daughter and I rose at a leisurely pace  this morning and headed to the gym. That's where Crystal put us through the body pump class that earned me the dull ache, slow arm movement, and righteous attitude.

     Now, elegantly dressed, I am ready to head out to a first class restaurant and have wonderful food that I did not cook. My husband can have ham and beef and pecan pie to his... well, heart's delight doesn't seem to quite fit, but he can eat only the things he wants. My girl and I can enjoy the lighter side of the menu and perhaps indulge just a bit, since the calories have already been burned. Then the best news of all? There will be no lingering pie and stuffing and gravy calling to us from the over loaded refrigerator. Five years ago I could not imagine myself in this situation, but today it feels as natural as picking up that loaded bar and checking in the mirror to make sure my butt is sticking out like Crystal tells me it should. 

   Over on a shelf in the corner of the kitchen is a cookbook I created. In it are more than thirty years of Thanksgiving and Christmas menus that I prepared with love. I think I'll print out the menu from the restaurant today and add it to the stack. I have no regrets for spending the endless hours in the kitchen previously, but today instead of falling asleep exhausted before dark, I will have time to contemplate how truly blessed I am. For you and yours, those who celebrate Thanksgiving, and my friends in other countries who are puzzled over a holiday devoted to food and football, I hope you have a lovely day, rich with the joys of the season. 

Open Love Song for Fellow Scorpios

I realize your birthday must have come and gone just like mine, but while I know we share a sun sign I have no idea of your day. I wonder if like myself you enjoy the crisp clear autumn days more than any other season. It must be the melancholy in my soul, the restless brooding part of me that seems most at home when summer starts winding down. The bright warm days, as lovely as they may be, never seem trustworthy, like the long stemmed red rose that every woman but myself finds romantic. For me they seem insincere, almost artificial, and they fade so quickly. I am most happy with a child's bouquet, field flowers gathered from the meadows, the delightful ones that most people call weeds and try to root out of their formal beds. They grow for their own reasons, not for any gardener's pleasure, and no matter how he tries to eliminate them, next year they are back, tough and resilient and almost accidently beautiful. 

It's the time of year my husband starts complaining about the leaves, the ones he loved so much when they pushed tiny heads of fuzzy green into the world a few months back, as adorable as kittens. Now they are predictably demanding, but he grumbles about, attempting to engage me in conversations about the lawn mower, the constantly full gutters, even the neighbor's leaves that have the audacity to blow over before all the ones on our yard are vanquished. It's a thankless task, especially with the puzzling oak species in our yard. Stately and green in summer, the brown leaves seem to cling for dear life on into deep winter, yet somehow the ground remains covered with their russet pattens until finally snow eliminates the problem. 

This year we went straight from shirtsleeves to winter coats overnight, a common version of fall in Virginia. I am holding out little hope for a lovely indian summer with those cool bright charmed moments that come and go between the heartbeats of the seasons. Instead I pull out my winter coats, don that houndstooth scarf I love, and make one last search for my leather gloves. As organized as I am about other items, gloves get tucked into odd places and often don't reappear until I have purchased a new pair, or sometimes not at all. 

But fall is a time of resignation, for coming to terms with temporal joys, things lost and things barely remembered. In my heart of hearts I never expect anything good to last, but no one who knows me would consider me a pessimist. I take in life with all the gusto and passion in my soul, racing against the time when these sensual pleasure will be only a memory. Having spent my youth worrying about looking foolish, I am free in my middle years to be place foolishness in it's proper prospective. Winter comes inevitably, but now, for today, when the music plays I will dance. I will toss my arms in the air and sing along while they play. I will see you standing there watching and I will beg you to join me. Even though I know it is the last song of the evening I will still mean it when I cry, “More, more, more.” 

Only Somethings Are Good Upside Down

It's November, my favorite month, despite the fact that I have a birthday this week. The hurry of fall makes me hasten my already fast pace to a frantic whirl, like a squirrel dashing about for acorns, and often just as haphazard. I look about at all the things that need to be done  and the things I want to do, but instead of cleaning the garage, taking a trip to anywhere but here, or doing the million mundane chores that should be done to keep the house running, I sit down and write. My life seems to grow sweeter with each passing day and even when someone tells me I am reaping the good harvest from what I have sown, I shake my head in amazement. Most every good thing that I have has come almost by accident, often by misadventure. My daughter who has had the most horrific and wonderful things come to her in turn says with a shrug, “Well, that's what happens when you put yourself out there.” Not much time for crying over spilt milk in this household, just full throttle on to tomorrow. 

I don't believe in fate or predestination, despite how much life tries to force me into it's own opinions in that regard. I do believe in seizing the opportunities that lie clearly in my path, for better or worse, and using them to learn. My upbringing prepared me to expect the worst from life so every good thing is a surprise and delight. Among the surprises of the week our new president elect has to top the list. I texted my son late Tuesday with a simple “Halleluljah the good guys won.” The next day I woke up in what looked like the same world but a paradigm shift had occurred. A glimmer of hope replaced the despair that once hovered over the world like a toxic cloud. Everyone seemed to breath a collective sigh of relief. If there were staunch Republicans out last Wednesday I assumed they were wearing their invisibility cloaks. 

At the gym on Thursday I scanned across the dozen TV screens in front of me and saw something that made me realized the rock ribbed were just in temporary shock. One of our local residents has decided his protest to the Democratic victory would be to fly his American flag upside down. I later found that this was not an isolated phenomenon across the US on Wednesday. Now I have no problem with protest of the government, and have even been involved in some civil disobedience from time to time, but goodness, I'm an old hippie and people have come to expect that sort of behavior from my kind. In the car on Sunday my girl said to me, “Now I don't have to be afraid to fly in an airplane. I am not ashamed to tell people from other countries that I am an American. I have hope for our country. That has never happened in my lifetime.”  Then she added, “but everyone will be expecting so much of him.” 

I think back to the day she was born, March 31, 1981, listening to the news as we drove to the hospital in the wee hours of the morning. “Firing at close range, a lone gunman shot and wounded President Reagan.”  I was not a Reagan fan, but my first thought was, “Oh please let him be all right.” I was too young to vote the last time we had a man with the charisma and courage of Obama in office. I was still too young to vote when the shots rang out in Dallas, taking a flawed but remarkable man from the world stage.  This time I not only voted, I worked for Obama, as did my children and many others. It was enough to turn Virginia's complexion from an embarrassed red to a rich vibrant blue. Now comes the waiting and hoping that the seeds of this new beginning fall on fertile soil, take root, and mature in the fullness of time. For our flag reversers I would just say that you had your chance to make a better world and even Republicans will have to admit we're in a bit of a mess. Now it's our turn at bat, so just suck it up and play nice. Remember, the world is watching.

OMG! It was never about being black, but...

The Flesh of my Flesh has come to Freedom

Alex Haley

ON ANNIVERSARIES and ALTRUISM

Since my first post on Nov 4 2004 I am astounded at the changes in my life. I started this blog at my firstborn's urging, something he now admits he thought I would not maintain. I found a voice here and friends that have encouraged me. That angst that I was trying to get rid of, well thanks for shouldering part of that for me. I assume you have as it seems to be rare now days that I have the deep depressive moments I once did. Four years ago I spent a lot of time feeling sorry for myself, a most unproductive activity. I can't say I have completely left the past behind but I now look at it more realistically. Dwelling on the past is an occupational hazard for a writer, but hopefully I view it with more realism and less self recrimination. 

This week I got an email from an associate (pictured above with OMER) that made me take another look at myself and the focus of my life. Up until a few years ago (pre blog) I was focused on others to the detriment of my own personal growth. I volunteered for everything and spent most of my time and energy working for others. I dropped most of those outside activities in the past four years except for one, Odyssey of the Mind. I continued in it for what may be selfish reasons, hanging out with a great group of people that not only have a lot of fun, but who truly make a difference in the world. OM is a problem solving competition that fosters creativity in children around the world, something that is often missing in our approach to education. My associate, a class room teacher in North Carolina, took a bolder step this past year. The letter below is what I found in my inbox. If any of you are so moved, please join me in supporting my friend Glenn in his mission to put books in the hands and hearts of children. 

 Dear friends,

 

    During Thanksgiving week, I will be making the trip to Cabo Corrientes to deliver the classroom libraries you have helped with. Right now, I'm getting ready to make my book order. When the books come, some of the classes in my school will help put checkout envelopes inside, attach stickers and sort them for individual libraries.

 

    We have created a terrific project for students to use to help out their Mexican counterparts. The students here ask for pledges tied to their own reading. The pledges are on a per book basis, so for every book the students read here in a month, a child in Mexico will get books to read. I love the link between our kids reading books in order to enable kids in Mexico to read books. The kids are itching to get started reading. A win-win, I think.

 

Our website will be up and running soon. We have created brochures and a logo and have had a chance to talk to a lot of local service organizations. Our sales tax exemption has been approved by North Carolina, but the federal tax-exempt status is still pending.

 

Support for this work has been wonderful, but I'm still about $1200 short of what I need for this trip to be completely successful. Some of you have mentioned your intentions to help out, so now is the time I could use your help. Even without current tax-exempt status, you can donate now with the assumption it will be approved. When approval comes, I will notify everyone and all previous donations will be considered tax-exempt by the IRS.

 

If it works for you, send a check to:

Libros for Learning

7614 Sims Rd.

Waxhaw, NC 28173

Josie and I

 

Overlooking all but the Obvious

At eighteen, alone and armed only with the innocence and audacity of youth, I took the train from Louisville Kentucky to a place through the looking glass, Washington DC. My mother had driven me from Beaver Dam to Louisville with dire warnings and instructions that I completely ignored. In my pocket book I had the hundred dollars she had given me, along with an envelope that had a boy's address and an invitation from his mother to visit. Since I had met him in September we had bandied about terms like forever and love and marriage like we knew what they meant. Now this cold January day I looked out the train window into the back yards and industrial wasteland of America, believing only a tiny portion of the things I told myself and my family about him. The steel rail rocked me finally to a fitful sleep as it carried me safely to my doom.

I was wide awake long before the conductor announce Union Station around 10 the next morning. I pulled my round blue American Tourister suitcase down from the overhead rack and clutched it firmly by the loop handle and stepped off the train into the cold bright January day. I walked briskly along with the stream of people who obviously knew where they were going and pretended I did too. I was giddy with excitement because I knew that the boy who wanted to marry me would be eagerly awaiting as soon as I went through the iron gate into the station.

I did not see him immediately, so I slowed down and scanned my surroundings with an anticipatory smile frozen on my face. Seconds turn into minutes as I milled about the station staring at the rushing press of strangers, hands wrapped tightly about my oh so chic hatbox suitcase, my navy blue suit now rumpled, my new leather pumps feeling a bit tight . Nothing in my previous life had prepared me for being stranded alone in a large city. I grew up in a town of 2000 people all of whom would have taken me in if I had knocked on their door and told them my plight. I had been in a Baptist college for one semester in a town of 7000. The only two people I knew that lived in DC were my boyfriend John and the president , and I didn't know how to get in touch with either of them. The prototype edition of a cellular phone was still 15 years in the future, so I looked about for a phone booth. I was stunned when I saw there were five phone books, each of them the size of the giant bible my mother kept on the coffee table in our formal living room. I picked one at random and turned to the F's. My heart sank where a cursory scan revealed there were more than a dozen pages of John Freeman listings.

At this point it might have occurred to any sensible girl to use her return ticket immediately, but I was a month and a week past 17, not an age especially given to sensibility. I stepped through the tall outside doors into the frigid air with a ghost of hope that he was waiting in his father's car. Instead I found rows of yellow cabs lined up at the curb. I had never ridden in one before in my life, but it looked like I was going to have to chance it. I told the driver the address from the envelope without giving him the quadrant, and fought back tears as he became impatient with me for not knowing. He softened a bit when I told him my problem in an accent that made my lack of local connections obvious. By the time he got me safely to what was then the Italian middle class neighborhood of Anacostia, he told me he was going to wait until I was sure I wanted to stay before he left.

We pulled up in front of the row house around noon and while I puzzled over the tip and the fee for my rescuer the front door opened and the face of my consort appeared in the glass screen door. His neck was wrapped in a plaid muffler and he had an ernest and contrite expression, but he did not open the door until I walked up the steps. Greeting me with a quick kiss on the cheek he apologized for not meeting me. I was waiting for an explanation of the catastrophe that must have occurred to keep this boy from me, the one who told me I was more important to him than oxygen. That's when I met Josie, his mother.

“Well see,” she said, “She made it here safe and sound. Glad to meet you. John wanted to come get you but I couldn't let him come out in the cold when he had a sore throat.” She launched into a long and detailed medical history of her only child which should have sent me screaming back to the taxi, but at this point I was so relieved to be safe I just smiled, waved the driver on, and embraced my future mother in law.

By the end of the day I was in deep cultural shock. My mother's home was immaculate and orderly but this house was so clean it set my teeth on edge. The living room sofa had custom made clear plastic slip covers. I could see my reflection in the kitchen floor. Nothing, even a visit from the first girl their son ever brought home, disrupted the family schedule. Saturday morning they cleaned an already spotless house. Saturday afternoon they shopped for the exact same groceries they purchased the week before so they can make the exact same meals they ate the week before, and pay the cook the exact same compliments. The cook is Josie's mother who came to live with them right after John was born. She does not go anywhere with them except church, not even the grocery, and she retires to her room each evening after she does the dishes. Even on this brief visit I realize that life in the Freeman household is scripted. My mission, if I choose to accept it, is to bring chaos into their otherwise orderly existence. I start my job on the very first night by asking why John has a plate of lettuce when the rest of us are eating a tossed salad.

Josie laughs along with John's grandmother and they explain that little John, just turned 21, is a bit of a picky eater. I wisely kept my theories on picky eaters to myself, but made a mental note that this is one thing I will have to fix after we're married. The gods must still be laughing about that ambition because when we split up 7 years later he still picked through canned Campbell's soup discarding the vegetables he refused to eat. By that time I had also found out that his eating habits were the least of my problems.

The rest of the story is so deeply personal I am loath to share it. Let me just say we were predictably bad for each other and for most everyone around us. It took us so much longer than our family and friends to realize it was over. The day I finally had to go I turned one last time to hold him, something we had not done for months. Even then I was still foolish enough to believe he would be less selfish in divorce than he had been in marriage, just because he told me so. Turning from him, I left my childhood behind in that embrace and walked out the door with my son.

My Summer Vacation

My husband says nothing but stares at me with one of his variations on “a fool and his money are soon parted” looks. I've seen all of those looks over the years and I've deserved most of them, I admit. We have that nonverbal communication thing down pat, but I have a need to explain this one. “Yes dear I know she's lying, but she's so good at it for someone so young. I admire a good salesman. I mean, last year she could have been wearing a little badge sash and selling me thin mints.” He's got nothing to say as I zip up my almost empty wallet, the one that had $20.00 in it this morning. I can't tell you where it all went but I just gave the girl three dollars and I'm about to give the street performer my last two. I pointed to the group of pierced and tattered street kids sleeping on the plaza beside us and gave her a tiny lecture, the price of my gift. “Just don't sleep out here tonight, okay?” She swears her dad is waiting for her to come home and I know she's lying and she knows I know.

The next morning is Sunday and I go alone to a tiny coffee shop across the street while my husband sleeps. It is the best cup of coffee I've ever had, dark roast with a little chocolate on the side to melt into the hot brew. With my wallet down to coins. I drink by virtue of plastic. No wait, plastic and virtue don't belong in the same sentence, but you get my drift. The Cafee D'Arte is on the corner of 2nd and Stewart, only a few blocks from Pike Place market and the harbor. For me this menage of strangers is my perfect isolation, the best way to be alone and think, a place where nobody knows my name. Seattle charms me more on this visit than the last. It reveals itself to me, shining towers and dark underbelly alike, and I take a more contemplative look at the place where my grandson will grow up.

I am suddenly startled when a man goes by the window wearing a yellow and white shirt with a matching parrot on his arm. As I puzzle over this, another passes with a jaunty hat and a large cardboard suitcase plastered with “Free Ballard” stickers, and one dignified gray bearded man wearing what appears to be an old tuxedo stoops to pick up a discarded cigarette from the ground. It is the morning parade of Buskers and homeless heading for the plaza to make their living. My husband and I discussed the proliferation of panhandlers yesterday and we both agree that cities draw the brilliant and deranged in equal measure, and perhaps this city more than most. But I only need to turn my head slightly to see Elliot Bay that leads into the dark cold waters of Puget sound, filled with ships of every size from the giant cargo containers to tiny kayaks.

Although not without it's seamy side , Seattle is a city of amazing beauty, but tuned to a cadence I find difficult to step to. My husband does not want to step at all after the first day, but he goes with me, knowing I will go alone if he stays behind. I am like a puppy running off from him and back again trying to see everything. I do not slow down enough in the Aquarium, but we compromise between spending the entire day there and my need to race through it all in an a half hour. A visit to Fremont, advertised as the Left Bank of Seattle, is less than stellar as the shops do not open until noon and we are there at 10. We walk to the top of the hill and see the troll under the Aurora Bridge and down to the statue of Lenin, posed leaning forward in a rush to get on with the revolution. After lunch at a whole foods market, we brave the bus back downtown. At night we tour the restaurants and pubs, finding mostly tourists like ourselves, and in the daytime ,when we do not tour the city ,we visit the wee babe, the reason for our trip.

We meet my children's friends for tea on Sunday morning, the baby's first trip to the outside world. They are a diverse and talented group and I instantly like them all. My oldest son says later that he wishes he could have come to Seattle years ago when he was young and single. I know what he means. It's no place for the old, for despite the beautiful sunny days we enjoyed, fall, winter, and spring are sullen and damp. The weather this week makes people giddy with cheerfulness and causes every person we meet comments on how lucky we are to have blue skies. Despite how rare these days are, every restaurant seems to have a sidewalk cafe and screenless windows that are so big and open they startle me as I walk along the street inches away from someone else's dinner plate.

The last night comes before we are ready, but such is my unknowing timing. We are there for Salon of Shame, a singularly rare treat of embarrassing moments from total strangers. They read excerpts from their journals going back to awkward childhood, gangly adolescence, and those intense college years. The readings by the original authors are delivered with high drama and they tell the audience things that make us laugh because we all identify with the painful immaturity that produced them. I am unsure how many people were turned away from the small venue, but two hours before the show there is a line going around the corner. Tickets are not sold and no seats are reserved, well none except for special guests like visiting family. We were inches from the mike as my son read excerpts from his Dungeons and Dragons phase, one I'm not sure he is completely over.

I asked him before I left if 5:30 was too early for him to take us to the airport. He stares at me with the glazed look of perpetual lack of sleep, one that I expect him to keep for many months or years to come. “Mom,” he says “There is no early, no late anymore.” We glide through Pioneer Square, old original Seattle as we head for Sea-Tac. After some confusion about tickets we check in and eat breakfast. Despite all the meals we have purchased on vacation, my husband is constitutionally against paying for food in the airport. He eats a granola bar from his bag while I have eggs. He finished off the fried potatoes I refuse to eat, not objecting to eating airport food, only buying it. I get a bottle of water and a diet coke for him which he grudgingly accepts. On board the plane he goes instantly to sleep after takeoff and I chat with my charming seat mate, a retired professional cyclist with a taste for literature similar to mine. We quote poetry, share stories, exchange email addresses so I can send him a link to a poetry website I like. The time goes quickly and we are changing planes in Philadelphia, then storming down the east coast naming rivers as they flow into the Chesapeake Bay. When I finally lie down to sleep exhausted, I dream of flying in a clear blue sky, clouds below me like a child's drawing, with cotton balls glued on generously.

This is not a grandmother blog, I swear

But just this once, well twice, or actually, maybe sometime in the future, but not everyday, you're gonna see the boy. 

Bye Bye Belly, Hello Baby

Sagen Foltz Haley proves that the Son shines in Seattle for the Haley clan. Welcome darlin' Granny and Grandaddy will be out to see you next Thursday. Kiss Kiss

Here are Mom and Dad right after they came out of the birthing pool, stopping only long enough to put clothes on the baby. As you can see he is perfect, a healthy 7 pounds 8 oz. Mom says the labor went quickly but she needs to sleep. I told her she can kiss that sleep thing goodbye.

Good grief! I'm a grandma!

Rev. Carl Wrenn Haley 11/27/1912 to 9/30/2008

This morning I turn through the pages of the two books my father in law presented to us for Christmas 1997, his labor of love for his children and grandchildren. They are bound, but printed on one side only, stuffed with afterthoughts of memorabilia and pictures of varying qualities, some blurs of what must be people, others brilliant and vivid. The endearing, frustrating, overriding impression of the book is the mish mash of truth and fiction, history written from an egocentric and narrow point of view. It is however the unwavering vision of a man of God, one whose faith sustained him through many dark times. As far as I know, none of his flesh and blood have given more than a cursory look at the volumes, but my curiosity drove me directly to read non stop for many days.

I try to reconcile the man who lives on these pages with the frail shell I saw when we entered his room yesterday at the Methodist home in Roanoke. His appearance is shocking, mouth agape and gasping for air, eyes open, unblinking, but seeing nothing as far as I could tell. Margaret, his wife of 45 years, snores in the chair beside him. I step out to the nurse’s station through the line up of wheelchairs. I speak my hellos to the occupants but they all stare west to end of the hall like they are awaiting the second coming. I introduce myself to a cheerful woman and ask her if Mr. Haley is awake. She walks back with us, perhaps thinking him already dead, and seems relieved to assure me that all is well. Every instinct tells me that the man has fled but is hovering nearby; waiting for us to come so he can move on. I arrange chairs close to his bedside and encourage my reluctant husband to sit. Margaret is having trouble with her hearing aide, so we screech a conversation across the room as loud and as accurate as cannon ball shots, rarely connecting with a target, and often wounding innocent bystanders.

Realizing my husband’s discomfort I suggest he go to the car and get the memory chip he has brought to fix Margaret’s computer. He comes back shortly smelling of cigarette smoke and takes her down the hall to her room. I turn to the faded remembrance of a man and start to talk to him. I try to hold his hand but he is posturing, lifting his arms suddenly into the air and dropping them, looking for all intents like he is emphasizing a point in a sermon. I start to sing his favorite hymn. “Tis a gift to be simple, tis a gift to be free, tis a gift to come down where you ought to be, and when we find ourselves in the place just right, it will be in the valley of love and delight.” I stumble over the words of the refrain but get the part where “turn, turn, will be our delight, til by turning, turning, we come out right.” It’s a sweet tune, one of the few where I like the music more than the words. Finished, I start on one we both know, Amazing Grace.

It is an easy song for every voice, the octave range narrow. It sounds sweet in the room and his breathing calms a little. I adjust his pillow and find he is damp with sweat. Lifting his head eases his breathing, but he pushes back against my hand as if he were uncomfortable. I go back to singing. “Will the circle be unbroken”, “I’ll fly away”, “A child of the king”, “Just as I am”; I dig deep back into my Baptist roots for all the words. “I come to the garden alone”, “the Old Rugged Cross”, “My eternal home”; I sing for over an hour and between times I talk to him. I tell him I love him. I kiss the baldhead, the stubbly cheek. I tell him it’s okay to go now, that his struggle is over, that we will watch over Margaret. Facing death I become a believer, or rather I suspend my disbelief and I ask him to say hello to my mother, my father. I remind him of the glorious reunion he will have soon with his beloved Eva, the mother of his children, and with Russell, the son who died in 1967, his father and mother, the three brothers and one sister that went before him. I want it to be true.

His minister comes by and finds me dry eyed and singing. He speaks a few words and tears start trailing down my cheek. I tell him about the letter Pop wrote me when my mother died and how it touched my heart. It was not written by the minister but by the real human being that lived inside my father in law. With that letter I realized for the first time I loved him and that he loved me. The kind pastor leaves me and I go back to singing, digging around in my brain I come up with “Circuit Rider”, the song about a minister at the turn of the century riding his horse through the night, bringing the church to the people in the hills, just as Pop’s own father did in the early days of his ministry. Old gospel hymns long forgotten spring to my lips, “I am weary, let me rest”, “Carry me off on your snow white wings”, “Life is like a Mountain Railroad”, "Far side banks of Jordon", I don’t know all the titles, just the words learned in revival meetings in my childhood.

My husband and Margaret come back into the room and he smiles and kisses me and tells me he heard me singing when he was coming down the hall. Margaret’s dinner is here and she sits and eats. Neither Wrenn nor I have had anything substantial since breakfast so I decide to go pick up something. The phone call comes while I’m in line at Kroger. “He’s left.” No drama, just one breath he was here and then he stopped. My husband says Margaret talked through it and he had to yell the news across the room. When I come back my eyes go first to the body , skin as yellow as a spring jonquil, mouth still open, but no struggle, only stillness. Margaret is still eating dinner. I hug my husband and kiss Pop a last goodbye. We chat for a while and I go over to sit on the bed beside Margaret. Her face is flushed and she cries as she eats the chocolate cookie from her tray. I put my arm around her and tell her she is not alone. I tell her I love her. In that moment I’m not lying. She is as frail as mortals come, argumentative and always contentious, but I am mortal too and have no stones left to throw.

After an hour the nurse arrives to pronounce him, kisses us all, and tells him to rest in peace. Then the funeral home comes with a red velour covered gurney and the kind man in a suit puts a pillow under Pop’s head after he moves him, a sweet touch my husband appreciates. Then, there in the empty room surrounded by the stench of death, Margaret tests my resolve to be kind by deciding everything must be moved out this evening to prevent people from stealing. I puzzle over who would want his underwear and socks, his old man sweaters, his jaunty hats, the last of a tube of toothpaste, the stacks of adult diapers sorted in plastic bags and labeled with a jagged cursive “size medium”, “extra absorbent”, “too small”, but I pack them uncomplaining. She tells me I walk too fast as we go down the hall at a snails pace. I slow down to accommodate her walker.

At 8:30 when we stop at Sheets for food and gas Pop has been dead two hours and forty minutes. All the relatives have been called by myself or my husband, the obit written 20 years ago by Pop has been located on the computer, and Margaret sits alone in a 12 by 12 room surrounded by boxes and bags and a lifetime of memories. It is midnight when we arrive home, and worn from the day I have the blessed relief of sleep. I hear the insomniacs, my husband and my daughter, talking loudly and laughing in the kitchen around 4 am. It is their time like the morning is mine, and tomorrow will be here soon enough, so peacefully, I go back to sleep.

Whose will shoe his pretty little feet?

I am skating slow circles around the idea of becoming a grandmother, dancing in and out of the throngs of people already on the ice. The grandmother I treasured died more than three decades ago, right after my oldest child was born. I memorized the moment I took him to meet her, the talcum powder smell of new life blending with the old lady smell of her room at the home, his smooth pink baby face contrasting to the darker waves of her softly creased cheeks. He nuzzled for milk and she laughed, delightfully amused. “That’s been dry for a long time baby,” she spoke as if incredulous that the years had passed so swiftly. Painfully I realized that she had no idea who I was. I looked imploringly into her eyes, straining for her to see me as the pigtailed girl with skinned knees who once sat happily in her lap. Believing I could skip a rock over the years and pull her back to me I began to tell her stories like she once told me.

Remember Pearl Bryan, Mamaw? Remember how we used to sing it together while you played the organ in the living room? Remember how you showed me the newspaper clipping of her death? The murdered girl ballad from long ago came easily to my mouth:

Down in the Valley
Where the flowers fade and bloom
There lies my sweet Pearl Bryan
In her cold and silent tomb
She died not broken hearted
Nor lingering sickness fell
But in an instant parted
From friends she loved so well.

She’s remembers the words and sings along with me, music being the last thing that leaves our soul before we depart. Like her, I always sang to my children, but the only one who ever liked it was the baby she held so briefly. Grown, he still remembered, and we danced to “You are my Sunshine” at his wedding, the song I sang to quiet him so many times when he was a little boy. I think about singing it to his little boy, and the wonder of the flickering passage of years overwhelms me again.

I am back in my grandmother’s tiny house, the pot bellied stove pouring off heat into her parlor, the craftsman rocking chairs padded with homemade quilted pillows, all the side tables heavy with starched dollies. She is patiently teaching me skills she believes I will need, like how to crochet, and make braided rugs; how to create quilts from scraps of fabric and sun hats from chicken feed sacks. She came from a time that everything needed for life was made by hand, and seeing my mother was not encouraging me in those womanly skills, she tried to fill the gaps in my education.

On sunny days we walked together to the grocery in our small town, down stop and go sidewalks and past black wrought iron fences. I held her hand and balanced precariously on top of every concrete wall along the way, pretending to be a tightrope walker. I don’t remember ever questioning why we didn’t drive, the delights of going with her and helping her carry home packages was paced perfectly for a child’s adventure. After, she gave me pennies from her change, probably money she could not afford, and we put them into a mason jar for me to save. She taught me not to spend them, but to wait until there were 100 painstakingly counted copper circles, whereupon I got to trade them for one greenback dollar. It was a month’s allowance for me, a fortune in a time when candy bars were a nickel, comic books a dime, and a “real” emerald ring from the 5 and 10 cent store cost a quarter.

If it rained, her kitchen was a cozy retreat where I made miniature versions of her cakes and pies in jar lids, baked them in her kerosene stove, and ate them immediately, hot from the oven. If it did not rain I helped her carry water to the garden for the vegetables she grew and canned for winter. When the green rows of corn, beans, tomatoes and okra were harvested, the bright mason jars multiplied on her shelves, giving promise of sustenance through dark winter days. Every visitor was ritually invited to come see the fruit of her labors and to make approving noises about her foresight.

I had no love for her shed of nervous sharp beaked chickens, and I dreaded the glare of their suspicious eyes as I reached under their silky warm bellies to steal their eggs. One noisy explosion of clucking set them all off, wings beating uselessly, the air filled with the hot smell of dust and feathers. I loved the gentle rabbits that sat in high cages at my eye level, their noses twitching as the leafy greens I fed through the wire disappeared into the conveyer belt of their toothy little mouths.

The boundless detail of rich anachronistic skills I learned from her fill my head with promises as sweet as the homemade jam lined up on shelves in her kitchen. I wonder what useless things will I teach my grandchildren, what brilliant stupid things will they love about me? Then, in a flash, I remember the some 2500 miles that lie between him and me and feel a warm tear fall unbidden down my cheek.

My children have made a web site to share the life they have in Seattle. It is filled with pictures of their beautiful friends, and there, in the middle, is the surprisingly large belly of my daughter in love. She looks so happy, and the picture of the life they have made in the Emerald City so brilliant, it takes my breath. I tell myself that it is enough that warm and loving friends surround them. I’m quite sure that grandparents in residence are not essential, since I reared my own children far from the crazy people who raised me. I know it’s going to be best for them, probably best for the baby. I’m sure I will get over feeling sorry for myself any minute now.

Not quite ready for that rocking chair

Some years ago my oldest son, exasperated with my search to find a pair of glasses when I needed to read fine print, bought me one of those chains with the little elastic loops to hang a pair around my neck. Even though I know I’m not suppose to look a gift horse in the mouth, I was less than gracious when I realized that he actually intended for me to go around accessorized in granny mode. He was thinking practically, in that way that men do. I was thinking, what’s next, some of those old lady lace up wedge heels, a hot pink polyester pants suit with the baggy ass and a little flowered over blouse, or maybe one of those white visor hats with blue hair peaking through the open top. What he doesn’t understand besides the fact that his mom is not ready for the nursing home is the looking for glasses thing can happen at any age, and it’s not such a bad thing.

Consider this morning when I put on a pot of coffee and sat down in front of the computer only to discover that the pair I normally use was missing. Now, I can see the screen without them you know, but I’m worried about those little crow’s feet I’m making around my eyes, so I tried to think where I had last had them. Oh yes, downstairs night before last when I was cutting tile for our remodeling project. I headed down and chatted with my daughter who was trying to get ready for a busy day. After she left I mopped the floor, started the laundry, and picked up all the cans and bottles for recycling. With a basket of laundry in hand I headed back upstairs. On my second trip down to find my glasses I hung up damp shirts from the dryer, fed the cats, finished the mopping, got on my daughter’s Wii fit and found out I had lost 5 pounds on my diet this week. Yeah! I literally raced back up the steps. A short time later I realized I still didn’t have my glasses.

You can see where this is headed, and I guess you wonder how I ever get any computer time. Well fortunately on my third trip to find my glasses, I noticed them lying on the table when I stopped to dust the living room. Humm, I thought. The coffee is done and I need a cup. Maybe I’ll write for a while. Now I know I post infrequently and you’re looking for something profound when I show up, but today you are out of luck on that count. I think the message is that after all the sorrow of my recent days, I’m just happy to be here. For everything I wanted, deserved, and didn’t get there are an equal number that I am blessed with that I didn’t earn and didn’t even know I wanted. I have enough glasses that I can always find a pair, but I promise my son that if I ever get to the point that I don’t know where any of them are I will…no, wait, I still won’t wear them on a chain around my neck. Seeing that he’ll be 40 in April of 09 I might just pass the one he gave me on to him. Maybe I’ll also get him one of those jaunty hats that the old men who drive sports cars wear. Then I will stand back thank God for having at least one of my children when I was, uh, would you believe 10? Nope, I didn’t think you would.

My Mother in Law, The Musical

We needed a bit of comic relief around here, so when I got the call from my mother in law I was glad that my husband was out of the house, forcing her to talk to me. As always, her message for him was urgent and required immediate action. It’s a bit obscure as to exactly how we were supposed to help, but I listened attentively. I noticed right away that she had a new favorite word, excruciating. She was in excruciating pain from her "groins to her toe". Although the doctors tell her otherwise, she knows it must be gout because of the excruciating pain. Sometimes the pain jumps from over to her other foot and it is, excruciating. I know that jumping gout is the very worse sort and I felt that if I was a good daughter in law I should offer to supply her with a few more adjectives. How about agonizing, intolerable, unbearable, unendurable, insufferable, or unspeakable? Well, I guess unspeakable might not work for her after all.

Between the news of her imminent death she related that she has a new “wheelbarrow”, which is hopefully nursing home slang for a walker with wheels. Even so, she has not been able to use it for a week because the nurses at the home have told her that she is not to "set her foot on the floor". “Now how,” she asks me rhetorically, “am I going to go to the toilet if I can't put my foot on the floor?” Well, I allowed as to how that would be difficult and asked if they could bring her a bedpan. "Bedpan!" she shrikes, "Bedpans have gone out of style!" While I sat gobsmacked by this revelation she continues, "Anyway, they put one under me and the pain was (wait for it) excruciating!" She continues to talk in explanation points about the woes of her life, and indeed, the burdens of Job do not compare to all she must deal with.

Margaret is the sort of person who, upon hearing that your arm had been bitten off by a shark, would look at you in disgust and say, "Well at least your arm is gone. Mine is causing me such excruciating pain I can't even use a fork. I don't know why you don't come up here and help me eat. You don't even care if I starve to death, do you?" It wouldn't end there either. She would go on for a bit, trying to lay down as much guilt as possible while I sat there with my bloody nub. In other words, empathy is not her strong suit.

She muttered a few words about her husband, perhaps the source of her ire, as he has pretty much checked out mentally leaving her with all the responsibility for everything in the universe, which of course, contains only Margaret. It seems like he has been relegated to the “special” dining room because he is unable to eat without turning over glasses of juice and milk and dropping food. It has fallen on her shoulders to tell him the terrible news since no one else, his son for example, has any concern about him, by which she means concern for her. I told her I would be thinking about her and she ranted for a bit about the fact that I did not write and tell her so, and then she told me she had to go now and call Cousin Keith to let him know all this critical information too.

I got off the phone and started telling my daughter the story of the call. She was a bit depressed about her life when we started, but by the time I got to the wheelbarrow she was roaring with laughter. My husband came in and we continued to discuss the latest gospel according to Margaret and I made up a little song about bedpans. Everyone chimed in with additional verses and we realized we had a hit on our hands. I mean, the boomers are aging and they grew up on musicals, so a light opera set in an old folk’s home should be just the ticket. I think the title should be obvious:

BEDPANS HAVE GONE OUT OF STYLE

I’ll get back to you on casting calls.

Bridgett Doody June 7 1946 - June 7 2008

This is a picture of Bid from our last visit in the spring. We escaped for a brief moment from the delightful gaggle of children and grandchildren that always seemed to swarm around the house and took a quiet walk in a nearby garden. Later we visited an elegant tearoom and had lunch served by ladies wearing black dresses and starched white aprons. We talked about her son Nick, my daughter Eva, and the marriage that had started and ended in a storm.

Saturday evening Nick phoned us with the news that his mother had passed away about an hour before, her breath coming quickly for a few minutes, then slowing, then stopping forever. If I were a mystic I would say she choose the day to go, her birthday, to let all friends and family know they should celebrate her life, not mourn her death. I do know she was a gracious, intelligent, witty, and charming woman, one that I was most fortunate to know and love.

Rainy Days

This time of year never suits my temperament. I am too skeptical to trust the long soft days, the warm sun, the boring endless beauty of it all. Gerry, my daughter’s British father in law paid me his highest compliment on our children’s wedding day as I stood laughing under the dripping white tent in my backyard, barefooted and ankle deep in water. “You were born to be British,” he exclaimed and gave me a hug. I hugged him back and loved him from that moment on. Yes, I thought, I do pride myself on being a rock during disaster, but sometimes I wish I could relax and enjoy it when everything is going well. I’ve often tried to analyze this character trait; to decide if it’s good or bad. I have determined it makes no difference because it is too deeply ingrained to pry loose.

Even an innate expectation of disaster did not completely prepare any of us for the marriage not working out, but by the time she arrived home, my arm was steady for her to lean on until she found her feet again. She and Nick have managed to salvage a wonderful friendship from the ruins, as close as the one she has with her brothers. They talk on the phone every week and they still share each other’s joys and sorrows. She embraced his family as her own and he did the same with ours. Except for the ocean separating us we would find nothing awkward about including them all in family gatherings along with his girlfriend and her boyfriend. I’m certain his staunchly Catholic family would have more difficulty adjusting to that sort of unconventionality, but all in all, things turned out wonderfully well.

She went to Detroit with her boyfriend this weekend, all sunshine and smiles on the outside, looking forward to the electronic music festival. She took my car of course. She called me Friday night from somewhere in Ohio with that sound in her voice that sets off mama radar. “Bid is in hospital,” she said, in the British phrasing appropriate for the mother in law she still loves. “Nick’s in Shipley. He just called me. It’s a brain tumor Mom. She can’t speak or move her left side.” My mind flashes back through the relationship I too have shared with this lovely woman, the first time we met in Shipley, the bonding we all did together as a family in August of 2005, during what came to be known as “Wedstock”, the bittersweet visit to say goodbye to those family ties a year ago this month. I allow myself only a microsecond of personal grief as I think about the faces of Bid’s children and grandchildren, but most of all, my own girl’s heartache.

“Are you okay,” I ask, knowing she will somehow feel to blame for this. She had a dream on Mother’s Day that Bid died. I know she’s thinking she should have insisted Bid go for testing at that time, perhaps before the tumor spread so far into the speech centers, perhaps when it could have been operable. It’s one of those foolish human things we all do, believing we have some control over a random universe. All weekend I have googled “brain tumor” and followed the threads past the grim prognosis for Ted Kennedy to a few places that give me hope for recovery. The odds depend on location and aggressiveness, neither of which we know at this point.

Tonight a part of my heart is in England in a comfortable modest home in Shipley. The piano in the dining room is silent, the brothers and sisters, the children and grandchildren who have come home from London, Scotland, Italy, and New Zealand sleep fitfully, if at all. It is dark there now, but when the morning sun rises it will fall first on the flowers in the back garden, the ones she tends so lovingly. They will all try to step around the empty place where she should be, but one by one they will trip and fall into it. There will be tears, but there will also be laughter, and hope, because she, the very definition of home for them all, has taught them well. For the few seconds after waking, before remembrance of the reality of the day, Gerry will think of the kettle, the trek to the kitchen and back to the bedroom with tea, the sweet moments together at the break of day, the ritual he has performed every day of their married life. Anguish will come back afresh when he rolls over into the empty space where she should be. I have no bargaining power with God and even if I did, I would have no idea what to ask. I only know life is capricious and even though the rain supposedly falls on the just and the unjust, this particular storm feels personal.

When I was a child, when I was a Baptist, when my mother was alive, we would be pinning on our corsages about this time on a Sunday morning. They would all be red carnations to honor our living mothers, and later I would look around the church sadly and uncomfortably at all the white ones that designated the departed mothers. My grandparents didn’t come to our church, but my mother’s mom attended the tiny chapel in Echols, Kentucky, where the only sign of civilization other than churches and houses was my grandfather’s general store. My dad’s mom didn’t go to church at all as she never learned to drive a car, had been reared as a Methodist, and was not especially religious, one of the things I liked about her. After what seemed an eternity of fidgeting on hard wooden pews in our itchy starched clothes, my parents would take my brother, sister and I out to eat in one of the two acceptable restaurants in our booming metropolis of Beaver Dam. It was a rare treat in those simpler times, a change from my mother’s roast beef waiting at home in the oven for the potatoes and carrots to be added and other vegetables to be cooked while we changed out of our Sunday best and helped Mother get dinner on the table.

This formulaic happy childhood exists for me now just out of the corner of my eye, disappearing if I look directly. Occasionally a smell assaults my nose and takes me back there in a quick flash, the wooden floors and ice cream smell of my grandfather’s store, the musty coal oil and biscuit odor of my grandmother’s house, the sweet funereal scent of a corsage, all transport me to those days of innocence. I can’t help but think about them all on this day, the tactless and self absorbed mother of my mother, the fierce and outspoken mother of my father, and the brilliant but insecure mother that reared me with a love that was deep enough to drown us all. Now they are all gone, dust to dust, and I am left to write the history the way I remember it.

Today my Mother’s day is not about flowers or church or dinner. In fact, we celebrated it yesterday, hiking the Rose River and Dark Hollow falls loop in the Shenandoah, my son and daughter in front of me most of the way, occasionally letting me lead. Dinner was an accidental discovery in Charlottesville in a restaurant that looked like a Big Boy Diner complete with a chrome counter, cozy booths, and black and white tile on the floor. It turned out to be an authentic Greek restaurant where we ate amazing stuffed grape leaves with Tzatziki, a delightful and authentic Greek salad with tons of feta, and grilled lamb and chicken on homemade pita. When I woke this morning I thought about what all of my foremothers might think about my unconventional taste, and I wondered what history will write for me in the hearts of my children and my grandchildren. I know it will be a story of love, hopefully one that knew when to let go, one where it did not take death to release a grip of control.

My girl and I sat in the back seat on the way from Charlottesville yesterday and I told her a story about the grandmother I loved most dearly, the one born on the day after her birthday, the one who may have bequeathed her a bit of stubbornness, a bit of delight. She was feeling patient and she listened to the tales of cooking stoves and flat irons. We moved on to summer evenings in Kentucky where we sat around the pool with her grandparents on the last night of our annual visit, the only time everyone finally relaxed. I questioned her about what the world could possibly hold for her and for me as we move swiftly into the future. I hold this precious minute in my hand, examine it, wish for it to last forever, and then it’s gone on the wind like dandelion fluff, to settle and grow in some unexpected place.

My children are restless today, one in Seattle with his wife, the future of our family in her body, one in Fredricksburg with a boy who wants to love her forever, one sleeping still in the basement, but soon to be gone, with only a spider’s silk string to find his way home. How I love them I cannot tell. Made of words alone, there is not a book big enough to hold the emotion. I want to thank them all today for making me a Mom, expanding my horizons, challenging me to do things I never believed possible when I was a child, when I was a Baptist, when my mother was alive.

Great Expectations

I waited Friday night for my son and his wife to call with the news about the gender of my grandchild. My son's birthday was Saturday April 19 and Friday was the 14th anniversary of my Mother's death. I guess you could call it a day of mixed messages, but I choose to let the dead lie buried and focus on the new life, the bright dot on my family tree that blends all the DNA from my generations with that of the child of my heart, my daughter in love and law. I called my son yesterday and felt the tears in his voice as we talked later about distances. My firstborn is in a state of agitation as the responsibility of what he has set in motion overtakes him. He went to Seattle for good reason, his instincts correct that he needed to learn to make his own family, his own life. Now he second-guesses himself because the love of the unborn child flavors every second with uncertainty about his decision. He reaches for the touchstone of family, especially the Mom who was both parents for him for many years.

My husband and I went out to dinner and arrived at the unexpected early hour of 9. We both sat on the sofa channel surfing, anticipating the call. If we lived nearby we would have been outside the room waiting with a hug, but the news that came by phone was no less spectacular than if two mountain ranges, countless rivers, and thousands of miles of plains and prairies, didn’t separate us.

“It’s a boy.” “A boy!”

Now he hears the tears in my voice as I gush like every other delighted expectant grandmother from the beginning of time. There is more. The son of my son, from his muffled safe world, has moved against his mother’s belly against his father’s hand. The baby is no longer “Thumper” for the sound of the heartbeat they heard last month. He is he, the boy that will have their smile, their eyes, their unconditional love for as long as they live.

He repeats his wife’s concern “Joriel says we have to think of a boy’s name now.” His father and I give him the advice he has already heard before; don’t name a child you haven’t met. But I know she is a planner and will want to have this all sorted out beforehand, just as I know she and my son will wonderful parents.

They had more calls to make so I do not tell my son the things I need to say, but here goes. I am so proud of you, so happy with the choices you have made. They have not all been good choices, but you have turned the bad ones to gold and steel, enriching and strengthening yourself and those around you. But most of all I want him to know that I have stood in the place you find yourself, younger and dumber, with no money and an angry and unwelcoming spouse, and still, things came out all right. You don’t have to be a perfect parent, but you will have to be more flexible than you can now comprehend. As I have told you so many times, you learn more from a child than you teach. Just relax and enjoy him as much as you can, and I promise I will do the same.

Meeting David Wilson

My ancestors were not especially affluent, mostly hard working farmers, blacksmiths, boat builders, millers and such. I have researched most of the ones who settled in Kentucky in the eighteen hundreds and have found that a few of them did own slaves. I wonder how I would react if one of the descendants of those slaves came to me today looking for answers that I don’t have. David Wilson, a North Carolina restaurant owner, got a call from his black namesake, David Wilson, and the dialog that ensued is one of both optimism and pain. I hope a lot of you got the opportunity to watch the documentary this young black filmmaker made while on a journey of discovery to find his ancestors and himself. It was on MSNBC on Friday night and I assume they will rerun it at some point.

After the film, there was a “conversation” that included some amazingly articulate and insightful people, others who seemed a bit dismayed to have been selected to discuss the uncomfortable issue of race in the US today. A lot of short film clips were also run, and I was particularly impressed by “the doll test”, a repeat of a study done in 1954, where black children in a day care center were shown two baby dolls, identical except one was black, one white. They were asked which was the nice doll, the pretty doll, the bad doll, the ugly doll. It seems our efforts to boost the self esteem of black children in the last 50 years has done little to make them feel comfortable in their own skin. The majority of the children picked the black doll as the bad and ugly one, the white one as the pretty and nice doll. I was flabbergasted that at such an early age these beautiful children perceive themselves to be inferior because of their skin tone. I don’t know the answer here. I thought on some level we were raising the first almost color blind generation, but I guess no matter how far we have come, we still have a long way to go. On a personal note I also thought about our still male dominated society and wondered what would happen if little girls were shown a boy and girl doll and asked the same question.

As a child and young adult I studied the Bible extensively, as it was one of the few sources of complex literature available to me. Many things puzzled me, but one that always stood out was the admonition that “the sins of the fathers would be visited upon the children, even to the third and forth generation”. It is a recurrent theme in the Old Testament and the innate unfairness of it always made me angry. It conjured up the image of a vengeful jealous God punishing innocence. Not until I was older did I understand that we all come with a script already written for us by all that came before. I now realize that the sins of the fathers, and the mothers too, are visited upon us to the end of time. I am thankful that some among us have rebelled against the script as written. The David Wilson story speaks to both black and white and all the shades between who are doing their part to make needed changes in our society. For the most part we have changed the laws that supported racism, but our society is far from equal. The only way we can make it so is to ask the hard questions and not retreat into platitudes when we get the hard answers.

Along with the sins of my fathers I inherited the blessings of my parents, their work ethic, their stubbornness and determination, and a lesson not many of my peers were taught, tolerance of racial and cultural differences. My father often told the story of my brother returning from Navy boot camp in 1956 with three friends in tow, one black, one Jewish, and one Catholic. I’m not at all sure what those men thought when they met our oh so white and oh so Southern Baptist family, but my Dad was proud of his son that day. It was only with a bit of discomfort that all of us sat down around the table and shared a meal. I was very young, but the incident stands out distinctively in my mind, the men in fresh starched white uniforms, the strange Yankee accents, the awkwardness of strangers in a strange land.

My grandmother and I sat in the porch swing a decade later while I told her about my experiences at college. With her third grade education and a lifetime of hardscrabble existence, she could not imagine the world in which I was privileged to live. Her first comment to me as I gushed on about books and friends and professors was “I sure hope you don’t have to sit next to any niggers at that school.” I was seventeen and self-righteous as only the very young can be. I jumped at her in anger and informed her that one of the biggest darkest black men I had ever met sat right beside me in English class. Horrified, she asked me if he smelled bad. I don’t remember what I said to that as I was “gob smacked” to use the British expression learned from the young Nigerian boy who actually did sit beside me. When I calmed down I finally realized that if my father could grow up with those attitudes and yet teach me tolerance, there was hope for the world. I still believe it is true and I taught it to my children. Now I repeat it to anyone who “has an ear to hear”. Happy Sunday all.

Never Forget

For those of you who were not yet born and yet had your lives touched for all time by this singular man, pause for a minute today to think what the world would have been like if MLK had not lived, had not died. Not wishing to dwell on his death, but on his life, I still cannot help but think of that day and the pain felt by myself and so many others around me. Forty years ago today I was impossibly young, sitting waiting for my college instructor husband at Virginia Union University, a majority black school in Richmond. The sights and sounds of that day still haunt me.

Robert F. Kennedy, delivering an extemporaneous eulogy to Martin Luther King, Jr., the evening of April 4, 1968, in Indianapolis, Indiana, said,

“Aeschylus wrote: In our sleep, pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.

These words, lacking “own,” have been used as one of the inscriptions at the Robert F. Kennedy gravesite in Arlington National Cemetery.

After hearing his words I went to the library and found the passage in Aeschylus and memorized it, like the young Kennedy had done at University. It has comforted me over the years through much tribulation, both personal and private. I hope it does so for you too in whatever sorrow you have in your life.

Do you smell something?

Nothing in my exciting life has inspired me to write a lengthy post recently, not my new job, my first grandchild, or my many adventures in Denver over the past months, but in that perverse way of humans, the smell under the basement steps suddenly sends me running to my keyboard. My son first mentioned the slight odor of sewage at the bottom of the stairs when I got home from Colorado Friday a week ago. I was racing through the house at warp speed trying to get clothes washed and the house back in some reasonable order after two week away, so I just agreed with him and filed the information away in “Things I gotta do someday-clean garage”. Now our garage is an integral part of the house, with a door opening into the basement and a dark hole of a closet under the steps that divides the laundry room from the garage. The house, built in the seventies, has a dearth of electrical outlets, and poorly organized storage space, but the under the steps closet is a nightmare. It contains three bed frames, several tires for cars we no longer have, an air conditioner that my husband stubbornly refused to relinquish even after we put in a new heating/cooling system two years ago, a guitar he once used as a canoe paddle, lots of containers, both empty and full (don’t know, ask my husband), and a lot of other even more questionable stuff, all surrounded by pink fiberglass insulation that we ineffectively tacked up in one of our periodic efforts at energy efficiency.

Monday evening when I returned from the gym at 11 pm my son greeted me on arrival. “That smell is getting worse Mom”, he tells me with exasperation. I am too tired to do anything other than agree with him, but when you’re right, you’re right. All week we had fleeting conversations about the smell, but by Thursday I knew that it was not sewage. “Son,” I announced to him while making my lunch to take to work, “It’s something dead, something pretty big, like a rat or a cat.” Since there are six cats living in our house, we take a quick head count to make sure none are missing. We discuss this over the next few days and the whole house is skeptical of my analysis, my husband because he has lost his sense of smell almost entirely, my daughter because she spends most of her time at the gym or at work, and my son, because, well, he has no experience to prepare him for the stench of putrefication. Being at home during the day however, and stuck there with the smell, he goes on a halfhearted search for the source, poking about in the front of the closet and in the laundry room. He is looking for a rat hole or a nest of orphaned mice, their mother victim to our small serious gray cat that lives in the garage. He finds nothing and I can’t really blame him. Searching for the dead thing under the stairs is not a job even the bravest do alone.

Saturday morning with the stench not subsiding, I can avoid the issue no longer. Armed with flashlights and gloves, son and I start the search in earnest. The laundry room has a tiny hole in the baseboard, but it has long ago been covered with a board solidly held in place with a giant cooler purchased for Wedstock in 2003 and used once again for Equinox in 05. It is unlikely that we will find anything there, but pulling back the board increases our nausea, so I decide to call for reinforcements. “Go get your father,” I say, and he is more than willing to comply in order to get away form the smell, if only briefly. Everyone watches as I poke at the hole with the jigsaw I pulled from the toolbox. It is half hearted at best, and only a delaying tactic to avoid the black hole of Calcutta where we all know we are headed. Finally, all other avenues exhausted, I lead the charge. Jason gets the well-named trouble light, Dad opens the garage door for ventilation, and I squeeze through the narrow opening, already knowing what I will find.

Our sweet, but litter box challenged gray cat has lived for years in the garage, a window open slightly for her egress. Unfortunately she is not the only creature that uses that porthole in the dead of night. I have been surprised by raccoons, possums, and a host of other neighborhood cats, all of them living happily on the magical endless supply of cat chow in her bowl. I can usually tell when she is not alone by her level of agitation, except for one frequently visitor, a scrawny one-eyed black cat she tolerates better than the other wildlife. The cat is unapproachable, running like spitfire when we open the door. I often see him making the neighborhood rounds, but I doubt that he has a real home except for our garage. I haven’t seen him lately, gray cat has been avoiding the garage this week, and I think I know why.

I hand the boards and cans out the door, and assembly line style, they pile up in the already cluttered garage. The air conditioner requires someone with more muscle than I have, so son wrestles it out through the narrow opening. I fold up the table it rested on, a toddler height refuge from my husband’s childhood, and shine the light to the farthest reaches of the pit. There, behind a spare tire belonging to some unknown and long discarded vehicle, surrounded by pink insulation, is a mass of black; possibly furry, possibly animal like, possibly the source of the odor. Jason and I agree on tactics at this point, the man with a nose that is blind and deaf to smells is summoned. He arrives with a single plastic bag. I go immediately to get a larger one I know he will need. He comes back out shortly asking for plastic gloves. Son and I stand in the cluttered garage waiting for him to emerge. “It’s a cat”, comes the already know verdict from the closet. He emerges after a bit holding a heavy-laden white bag at shoulder height, well away from his body. Even when the bag is far from the house, the smell is still enormous. I send him back to clean up insulation, the itchy nest of the late one-eyed cat. Son sprays everything with Lysol, but still the odor lingers.

We spend the rest of the day in speculation as to the when, how, and why of the cat’s demise. I wonder if it was the fiberglass insulation, or worms, or some incurable disease like leukemia. I hope it didn’t give my cat the virus, although it might be a bit late to think about that. My husband swears he can smell the horrible aroma, but he’s very empathic. I think he is just remembering the way dead things smell in sympathy for the family. After I return from the gym the smell is slightly better. We spend the bulk of the afternoon outside, hacking away at a dead tree that has fallen in the front yard, grinding it noisily to mulch. It seems a day for dead things, but all around the time of renewal is upon us. The pink camellia blooms with wild abandon by the garage door, the jonquils have almost faded, the iris that I cannot kill are sending up budding shoots in the woods where I tossed them out of the flower bed. Later, showered and dressed for dinner and dancing, my husband and I chat in the car.

“What do you think it died from,” he quizzes once again.

“I don’t know, could have been so many things. I guess we were his family even though we didn’t realize it. I will say one thing though, I am glad it had a warm safe place to lie down when the time came. I’m glad we could give him that, at least.” We are both quiet for a while but I read his mind, both of us thinking about the animals that have come and gone in our lives, and our own lives, as we have surely passed our middle age marker.

“Yes,” he says, “Me too.”

All the Planets in Perfect Harmony

Here are pictures of my son Ben around age 4 and his lovely Joriel, slightly younger.

When my husband and I had our first child he was over the moon with excitement. He was in the hospital lobby and saw someone he knew and felt compelled to share his good news. In a daze he walked up to them and said, “Congratulation, I just had a son” and handed them a cigar. His friend just laughed, realizing his exhausted and emotional state. I know just how he felt, so here goes.

Congratulations, I’m going to be a grandmother!!!
And if that were not enough…
Congratulations, I just got a promotion!!!

I’m not sure what constellation my lucky planet is in right now, but these last few days have been incredible. The baby will be due around my father’s birthday in September and my promotion goes into effect at the end of the month. Whoo, whoo!!! How lucky am I?

On my own, the River Unheeding

I write away this stolen hour in the early light of dawn because I must. I polish and refine the words that came forcefully into my mind last Wednesday as I returned from Denver, exhausted and emotional. Poetry steals your soul and empties the dark and light places in your heart, so giving it up is like handing a piece of yourself to friends and strangers alike.

Somewhere far below, through the deep of sky,
The wisp of clouds,
The skim of earth,
All that was my father lies.

I trace the broad curve of the Mississippi to the Ohio,
The Ohio to the Green,
And for a flash of this swiftly running time he rests beneath me,
Alongside his lady wife,
Her beauty slumped beneath the black earth,
The passion that drove them both
Muffled by the weight of sky.

This roaring metal box is not my tomb,
But death waits ever patient beyond the double windows.
Where the trace of atmosphere is made of frozen glass
Ready to cut the breath from my lungs
As swift as an arrow’s flight

I look cautiously for angels in the sky
The ones that mama said would bear us all to heaven
Where life would continue like it did below
Only no dirty dishes or checkbooks to balance

The search is fruitless, and my heart draws my eyes again
To the dear and dreadful landscape
To the place where I learned to crawl, to stand, to walk
They did not teach me how to fly

Jan 30, 08

No toes were lost in the making of these pictures

It is wonderful to have adult children who help out in the kitchen. Never a dull moment in the Haley house.

Sugarplums and Firetrucks

He leaned back against my body, his small shoulders shivering with cold and excitement. We could hear the siren turn it’s voice to the left or right occasionally, but always it grew ever closer to the spot we stood bundled against the cold at the end of our suburban driveway. The flashing lights flickered through the trees as the fire truck crept along our street in slow motion emergency fashion. We could see the neighbor children waving but the only sound in the clear night air was the piercing scream normally associated with danger. Finally it was our turn, and as the truck slowed, a man in a red suit and white beard lifted his frozen arm and tossed candy at my boy’s feet. “Santa, Mama, It’s Santa” he gasped, with a voice filled with awe and a bit of trepidation. His Dad and I led him willingly up the driveway as the noise and excitement faded around the curve of the road. It was late for a 6 year old to be up on a school night and he made no protest as I pulled off the parka we had put over his flannel pajamas and tucked him into his bed. “Mama,” he said, contemplatively, “Santa sure is loud, isn’t he.” I smiled and agreed with his astute evaluation, gave him one last hug and kiss, and left him there to ponder how such a noisy and slow fellow could get all around the world, gobble down cookies and milk, leave notes on the fireplace and toys under the tree for children, all without anyone noticing.

It’s the season again and the jolly red suited elf has is out and about the county terrifying and amazing a new generation of innocents. My husband listens for the siren out of long habit, and keeps running to the window all evening hoping to see him, like there were still babies to wrap warm and carry hearts racing, into the dark night. With Christmas only days away, it only reminds me of all I have to do in the little time remaining. Still I know why he does it, why he presses against the pane, remembering the years when the house rang with childish noises, protests at bedtime, and problems easily solved with a hug and a kiss. We both embrace the adult versions of our offspring, but in our hearts is a longing to travel back in time to those days of simplicity, when all things were possible, pirates and wizards and jolly elves, all of whom were modeled after two very human parents, elevated by their enchanted love to heroic status.

When my oldest reached the age of unreasonableness that is so necessary for the break from the safety of home and hearth, he chided me for lying to him about Santa. Foolishly I tried to explain to him that secrets and mysteries are part of the joy of childhood. I defended my years of increasingly contrived stories about how St Nick accomplished his miraculous journey while always my boy’s world and his skepticism grew ever larger. When his brother and sister joined us he was still a believer, a bit long in the tooth even then for the magic to still live in his heart, but with younger siblings we stretched it out for as long as possible. When I finally told him the total truth I tried to soften it the way my parents had, explaining the spirit of love and brotherhood was the true meaning of Christmas and those values were the important things I had wanted him to take with him. “But you lied to me,” my adult son intoned years later with righteous indignation. I had reared a man of honor, a man whose idealism would always run like a flood over the evil of the world. “What else did you lie about,” he asked, cutting to the quick. In the ensuing years he has matured, forgiven me my weakness, but he assures me tales of flying reindeer and golden keys will not hoodwink his children. The man that he is overwhelms me sometimes, the boy I knew still peeking through in places worn bare from the rough edges of the world. He still takes himself too seriously at times, protests against inconsistencies of life as if they were correctable, and lives life with both passion and an occasional despair. Santa notwithstanding, I believe he is a man who keeps Christmas in his heart.

His siblings gave up the myth with more grace, assured that gifts would still come they were content. My middle child was born with an ancient and logical soul, his sister with a heart that could not long despair over things lost. Still, for many years beyond their disbelief, they raced to the door when they heard the fire siren on those sharply frozen December nights. One last Christmas my girl laid aside reason in a last ditch effort to believe and asked that cookies and milk, plus a carrot for Rudolph be left at the base of the woodstove that was fitted tightly into the chimney opening. I do not remember how the boys reacted to her fit of mysticism, but my husband and I ran quickly over her Christmas list, trying to remember if she had asked for a pony. I recall well the year I could not get them to even look out into the window when they heard the fire truck approaching, but just like every other year they eagerly opened the gifts marked “from Santa” that appeared under the tree on Christmas mornings. As the deadline approaches this year I am once again amused to try to find gifts appropriate for the stockings of adults who believe not in elves but in ritual. My girl wants no candy, my oldest only vegan treats, but my middle child has no opinion on stocking stuffers. As I contemplate lottery tickets and perhaps a good bottle of wine to fill the spot that once held plastic and sugarplums, I realize that regardless of the years, my children still hold a place in their hearts for magic. On Christmas morning they will all be here, not for the cookies or the gifts, but for the love and family traditions we created together.

The End of Days

Eva Gantt Haley - 6/1914 to 1/1962

Carl Wrenn Haley -11/1912 to ?????

Did I give you my secret for losing weight? Lean near to the screen and I will impart my wisdom. It’s a simple three-part formula.

1. Eat less
2. Exercise more
3. Don’t take any crap off of anyone.

See, I told you it was easy. So, having followed these rules faithfully for over a year and knowing that my mother in law is the evil nemesis of my life, why did I decide to visit her the day after Thanksgiving? Did I think pigs had perhaps learned to fly? That bears had suddenly found an alternative latrine? My husband would say we were not visiting his wicked stepmother at all, but his father whose body resides in the room with her at the extended care facility. Sadly he seems to have fled into hallucinations interspersed with naps and meals. Margaret tells us he time travels, but instead of picking some happy childhood or adult memory to visit, he lives again the terror of the depression years, eating every crumb off his plate, constantly asking the price of things and being shocked by the squandering of his money. She wastes no time telling us how awful her life is, how she is a slave to this incontinent old man who not only provides her no companionship but fights with her when she tries to dress him. I would have sympathy for her if she left any space in her own tales of martyrdom for me to insert a bit.

When Pop tells us about the police car he sees in the hallway we listen with interest. It is a much superior conversation than the one with Margaret, and certainly better than hearing about his elimination problems. I sent Wrenn outside to get my medication from the car and as soon as he left the room Margaret pounced. “Well, I have no idea what’s going on with you since you swore Wrenn to secrecy” says the troll.

“Margaret, whatever Wrenn told you or did not tell you had nothing to do with my instruction.” I reply. I give her details of my surgery quickly and honestly to show my openness.

“You’re going to have to learn to have some self control” came her rejoinder. We go on for some time with these “when did you stop beating your wife” statements. Pop sits oblivious in the chair, missing in action, watching the fantasy that entertains him. Finally I remember my third rule, the most important one, and I said forcefully.

“Margaret, I really don’t need this. You have no idea who I am or what my life has been like. The fact that my husband is still alive and I’m still with him proves my self-control beyond a shadow of a doubt.”

“Well,” she snips, “I know other people who had had that surgery and they just go back to eating like they did before.”

I rejoined immediately. “The way I lost the weight was by changing my life style. I will never be tempted by that old way of living. I did not have weight loss surgery. (I did not add you are an idiot here you will note.) The doctor just removed the extra skin left over after my loss.” About this time my husband returns and Margaret, carefully not to have a witness to her attact, flees to the other room. She returns shortly and fires a parting shot.

“I’m going down to get your Christmas present from last year since you never picked it up.” As soon as she is out of sight I tell Wrenn we have to go. Pop, who can’t see his hand in front of his face because of vision loss, is still staring at the police car he believes is in the tiny hallway. He raises bleary eyes to his son and asks,

“Did you have a citation on your car?”
Wrenn, humoring him says, “No Dad, they didn’t ticket me.”
Pop continues, “I lived in fear of the police all my life.” I am frankly intrigued by this statement. I’m trying to imagine the mild mannered minister living his life in fear of the police. I get a wild hope that he is ready to confess some previously undetected youthful escapade, perhaps involving underage sorority girls and a Model-T Ford.
“Pop,” I asked, “Did you ever get a ticket?”
“No,” came the reply, “But I was always afraid I might.”
“Pop,” I solicit, as if I were talking to a logical person, “Did you ever speed?”
“Oh, no, not one time,” came the answer. He mumbles something that sounds paranoid about them being out to get him, and then he nods off again.

I turn to my husband, who has waited patiently to find out what happened when he was out of the room, and I give him a brief rundown. When Margaret comes back she is toting one of the annoying pieces of crap that she has been secreting in the basement storage room these 15 years.
“Now I want you to respect these because they are family heirlooms that belonged to the Haley’s” Margaret has on her best scowling schoolmarm attitude. Her, “children never appreciate the things we give them” speech was just getting warmed up when Wrenn rose to leave.
“Elaine’s not feeling well, so we have to go” he states definitively. Margaret is non-pulsed, unsurprised. She taps the bubble wrapped set of picture frames, trying to determine which side is glass so we can use caution. We escape after brief goodbyes, phony hugs and kisses, promises we plan to break.

My husband listens to my rant until we reach the interstate, then I relax briefly. We drive in silence for a time. Finally I ask him. “What band is playing at E*nzo’s tonight?
“Janet Martin” came the reply.
“Let’s go,” I suggest. I know I shouldn’t ask. The day has been trying and he still has three more hours on the road before we reach home. He knows I shouldn’t go out this soon after surgery. He knows I over did it on Thanksgiving and I’m under emotional stress today, but he is a sweetheart and indulges me. It turns out it was just what we needed. We spend a lovely evening eating excellent food, dancing, and visiting with friends.

The impact of the visit on us both is muted until the next day. I wake with unsettled dreams and the realization that I was not talking to my father in law and that my husband was not talking to his Dad. I realized that in all likelihood we never shall again. I think about all the words we have exchanged over the years and also know his father will forever remain a mystery to us all. I recall a few times when he has sincerely touched my heart, like when my mother died and he gave me words that were not from his stash of ministerial flash cards, but personal, sharing the pain of losing his own mother years ago. I remember when my ectopic pregnancy took the first child Wrenn and I conceived. We were his only possibility for grandchildren, but he surprised me by telling me not to try again because my life was too precious to risk. Thank God I ignored him, but still, it was sweet and sincere in contrast to so many conversations that have been conducted at arm’s length. Like many parents of his generation, that distance was deemed the proper place for a man to conduct fatherhood duties. Added to that is the public persona of preacher, for as years went by he lost his ability to slip from the public to the private man. Even his long winded autobiography skips deftly over any picture of the real person, replacing reality with fantasy as required to get to the next chapter. A life fraught with the tragedy of losing a wife he loved dearly and depended on completely, a son who took his own life in the aftermath of his mother’s death and his father’s rush to remarry, and a difficult and rebellious adopted daughter who spent her life blackmailing him, were somehow “oh, by the way” incidents in his own version of history.

I know I was not there and I do not really have the right to judge. But you have only to read the scarred palms of the victims to know the pain they were forced to seal inside themselves. His role model for his family was inward stoicism and outward pretense. His relationship with his second wife floundered in the early years according to my husband’s account. He clung to the contract made in haste and grief, and like a man taken hostage, learned to love what was in his eyes an inescapable trap. He seems to have found a way out finally, the only way acceptable in his philosophy. I pulled up the picture of him in the springtime of his life, the woman he loved all his life holding his hand, and I can imagine talking to the man in the picture. I have a brief urge to step into that frame and warn him, but knowing that none of us in that season of life would ever believe how our days might end. I only know I have been warned to walk cautiously as I negotiate the next 30 or 40 years.

My dear friend C.J. says writing is “ a way to leave something behind that says, I was here, this was me”. I think about my father-in-law’s attempt to mark the place he leaves when he’s gone and about my own effort. The essential difference between us is I want my mark to ring true. I want people to read and feel the pain and delight of living. Even if they are made uncomfortable by my honesty, scandalized by my behavior, shocked by my attitudes, they will walk away knowing the secrets of their own soul are not so different from my own. They will know that I have been here and that I have been foolish and wise, responsible and derelict, merciful and ruthless in turn, just like all humans. They can forgive me or not, but they will know who I am, and ultimately who I was.