A Novel Blog

The Early Mourning

2009-11-04T09:24:00.006-06:00

The most important thing my Grandmother White taught me—she never spoke in words.

If a person had put a glass in front of my grandmother and asked her if it was half-full or half-empty, I think she would've been too preoccupied by the fact that the glass was dirty and would have to be washed to answer the question.

To understand what she taught me, it's important to explain who she was and who she wasn't.

She wasn’t the stereotypical grandmother who baked cookies, made you cocoa, smiled sweetly and gave you big hugs. She didn’t wear button down sweaters, or floral print dresses. She wasn’t one to speak about feelings.

To describe my grandmother in one word, I would have to choose: pragmatic. She was a doer, not one to ruminate and spend hours in intellectual study. In her philosophy, you did things for the people you loved—words just got in the way of actions.

People often use the expression “words fail me.” My grandmother tended to “fail words.” She rarely could pick a good one and her blunt honesty could sometimes border on cruel. She never hesitated to tell me or my cousin when we had put on weight.

She assessed my backside one time, telling me, “You’re getting kind of a wide load, kid.”

But, I just think she didn’t know how to express herself. If she loved you, then she would criticize you because she wanted to help you be “better.” She was probably the harshest on the people she cared about the most.

When I finally received my first Master’s degree, I jokingly told my family one Easter that they would have to refer to me as “Master Sarah” from now on. My grandmother, brushing past me in the kitchen, told me that she wasn’t “impressed by titles.” That was the most she really said about my academic accomplishments. And, off she went to set the dinner table and put the meal of ham, mashed potatoes, and green beans on the hot pads she had crocheted.

I found out—though definitely not through her—that she was going around bragging about me, but she would never have let me know this.

One instance that defined my grandmother for me as a child was when she took my older brother Matt and I out to Big Boy for dinner. I don’t remember why she did. Perhaps it was a birthday. Perhaps she thought my parents should have a night to themselves.

In any event, the three of us sat down and ate our chicken strips, burgers, and French fries. My grandmother had ordered soup, and when the waitress brought it, some of the soup spilled over the side and onto the table.

When it came time to pay, we went up to the cashier, who asked us if we had enjoyed our meal. Now, my parents are not assertive. In the past, when dining with my parents, the response was automatic—“Yes, fine.”

Not with my grandmother.

“Well,” she huffed with a jerk of her head. “I don’t appreciate having soup slopped all over me.”
My brother and I stood aghast. We did not realize that you could say things like that.

She was also one of the first people I ever heard swear. She was telling some story about work, and she pursed her lips and cocked her one eyebrow (her signature mannerism for irritation), and remarked, “Wouldn’t he just shit a brick?”

Again, we sat there aghast. Did our grandma just say, “shit”? Could people talk that way?

She was fiercely independent, a trait I supposedly inherited. For many in the family, they claim that I am my grandmother’s granddaughter—at least in terms of spiritedness. We were different personalities, inhabiting different parts of our brain. But, we shared a spirit of independence that is palpable.

The one thing my grandmother taught me—she never put into words. As a younger woman, my grandmother was highly critical, judgmental, and no one would’ve ever accused her of being overly compassionate. She worked in a bank for years, rising through the ranks to Vice President. She used to terrorize the tellers—sort of a female Ebenezer Scrooge at times. There was no sympathy for sick days, personal days, or mistakes.

In her last few years, however, my grandmother mellowed. She worked as a volunteer at the local hospital—one of the “Gray Ladies” who volunteered in the gift shop and took flowers to the patients’ rooms. She spoke more kindly about people who were going through difficult times.

She would shrug things off and sigh, “Such is life, I guess.”

She taught me that the things that seem so important to me now won’t mean a thing when I am older. People are what are important then. When you asked her what she wanted for Christmas, she always said, “For you to come visit more.”

Dorothy Alice White had her faults, and she wore them like old battle scars from her younger years. Life is worth the living, she taught me. Never give up. Change what you can and realize the things that you can’t.

My grandmother suffered a massive stroke last week. She has not fully awakened. The decision was made this last weekend to forgo the feeding tube and simply allow her to drift off into that final peace. As of when I write this, she is still asleep, her mind gone, my grandmother gone, but that strong body of hers still clings so tenaciously to life.

The last time I saw her, probably the last time I will ever see her, she was lying in a hospital bed, a pink and red afghan across her frail body--knitted by a volunteer "Gray Lady."

With one last squeeze to her hand, I leaned over and kissed her on the forehead. Her blue eyes opened and seemed to focus on my face for just a second before she slipped back into sleep.

Then, and even now, I can hear what she would tell me:

Well, such is life.

And she would shrug her shoulders and give me that tilted smile of hers, as if to say that things are going to happen in life that you can never control, and that's okay. Things will work out the way they are meant to.

She never seemed to have the right words, but she always knew just what to do. Perhaps this is why I will always remember that phrase of hers. Finally, in the end, she had the words to express that sometimes "doing" means stepping back and allowing things to happen.

Someday, I hope I can be as eloquent.

The Meaning of Life

2009-09-29T16:19:00.003-05:00

The checkout clerk scowled, slid my bread, apples, and tampons across the scanner. Blip. Blip. A monotone reminder of how much money she probably wasn’t getting paid.

She had dark circles under eyes and did not look up when I stepped forward. There was no cheery, “How are you today? Did you find everything all right?”

I’m not sure how old she was, but she looked like she was in her late forties. Unkempt, penny-red hair, skin pale from working long hours inside, a pair of glasses probably purchased from the eye care center just a few feet from where we stood. Her movements were slow, like she was moving through water.

The rest of the line inched forward, impatient people sighing, arms full of multi-colored boxes, carts burgeoning with junk food, crying toddlers, and various other discounted staples of modern life.

Here we all stood—in all of our motley middle class glory.

Such a thing never ceases to fascinate me. What brought that tired mother to this store at this hour on this day of this year? What prompted that retired man in the Bermuda shorts and socks with sandals to decide he needed that two liter of Sprite so badly that he had to rush out at 2:00 in the afternoon on a Wednesday? Why did that lady in the aqua blue scrubs need that case of beer, rotisserie chicken, and potato chips at the same moment I needed tampons?

I had switched lanes three times before finally settling on this one—the shortest, though, ultimately, not the fastest moving.

I could hear my own thoughts begin to grow louder.

Nice customer service. Don’t we look at customers anymore? C’mon, lady, this ain’t brain surgery, just swipe my stuff across the scanner and let’s go!

I took a deep breath and realized something I already knew.

Right there, in the middle of Wal-mart, I was reminded of the meaning of life.

Is it to live and die and become fertilizer for the next generation of plants, animals, and various other critters? I believe there is much more to it than that.

On May 16, 1974, I was born and given the name Sarah Elizabeth White. Common, pretty enough, the sound and cadence my sign—the utterance of which will turn my head in a crowd or make my heart swell with pride when receiving special recognition. My parents came together eight months before, and that mysterious alchemy, divine miracle, set in motion what I have come to recognize as my “life.”

Now, I, like other living beings, must shoulder the burden of existence. There is no way to un-exist—not in my belief system. When I die, I believe there will be an afterlife where the soul never dies.

And it all started with two horny people in their late twenties. My parents—probably sometime in the humid heat of September—shared a moment of passion, unplanned, spontaneous. In all likelihood, the idea of a child resulting from it had not been entirely thought out.

And so, here I am.

It wasn’t my choice. If I’d had the choice, what would I have said? No, Mom and Dad, I don’t want to have to deal with everything that Existence entails. It wasn’t their choice either, at least not according to the Judeo-Christian world. According to the Bible, I am here for a reason, as part of a larger plan—a soul recognized by its Creator before it was even created.

So, why was it so important that I be here, in this time, in this place, in this “now”?

To cure cancer? I don’t like science. To become President? It’s not ruled out but seems unlikely.

Honestly, most days, I sit in the dim light of my apartment and grade for hours. I don’t really have that much interaction with people beyond what I get with my students and colleagues.
And, yet, here I am. Surely, the world would have and could have kept turning without me.

There are billions of people here. Was it really so necessary that a soul recognized as Sarah White should exist at the turning of the millennium?

I have to admit that on the darkest nights, I feel as though I have wasted a good portion of my life. At 35, I do not have any children yet to carry on my name and family histories, nor a long lasting marriage that has weathered storms and established economic and emotional stability. I don’t have many roots.

I have not written a novel, nor lived up to the “promise” I seemed to exhibit early on in my academic career. I have a few publications and accolades, but nothing of special note per se. Certainly, no more than anyone else.

Most of my friends and family live several states away, and while they have all of my heart, they have little of my time.

At night, when I am taking a break from working, I sit down with my cats and watch movies or exercise or both—some solitary activity that winds down the remains of the day until I go to bed, wake up, and begin again.

On those dark nights, I must confess I do not always see what is so essential about my existence at this moment in time.

But, at Wal-mart, on that day, I was reminded.

In middle of that angry mob hovering around that checkout lane, the weary clerk taking so long to ring up only three items, I suddenly made myself meaningful.

“Crazy day today, huh?” I said to the clerk with a smile.

As if she had just been startled from a nap, she turned and looked me in the eyes. She smiled, laughed a little.

“Yeah,” she said quietly.

She put my stuff in the bag and handed me my receipt.

“Try to have a good afternoon,” I said with an empathetic smile.

“Oh, I will,” she replied.

“You take care,” I said.

I was born for that moment at that time on that day of that year.

And, I was born for many more moments just like it. I was born to connect with others. I was born to view other people as other selves with good days, bad days, and in-between days.

I don’t know what all had happened to that woman. Maybe she had just found out her father had cancer. Maybe she hadn’t slept well because she was worried about how to make ends meet. Maybe she had just buried her brother she lost to suicide.

I don’t know. But, I know that I have been her. I don’t know who all witnessed me treating that worn out check clerk with compassion. I don’t know who else might’ve been affected by seeing a friendly smile that day.

But, I don’t have to.

That day, I did what I was born to do, and when I went to bed that night, my time didn’t feel wasted.

A Genealogy of Blood and Place

2009-08-26T20:19:00.003-05:00

On humid summer nights, after the birds have flown into trees and folded their wings, the true natives of Northwest Ohio infiltrate the darkness.

They creep through the cracks in windows. They use stealth to prey on unprotected victims. They have a claim on this land that predates the Indian tribes whose names mark this place: Wyandot, Seneca, Maumee, Ottawa, Huron.

Theirs is a prehistoric possession, thawed out of the glacier that carved this region into a Great Black Swamp thousands of years ago. We who live here now are their birthright.

Their high-pitched song whines like the wheeze of a slumbering giant. The Great Black Swamp lives in the bloodlines of these delicate, hungry breeders.

When Northwest Ohio was The Great Black Swamp, the mosquitoes kept settlers and Indian tribes at bay. People who dared to enter the shadowy, wild cathedral paid for it with chills, uncontrollable shaking, malaria, condemned to wear wool in summer and inhale the soot of smudge pots at night.

Ditches were gouged into the sides of roads to drain the swampland and reveal rich, fertile soil. Rains still overflow these ditches that are deep enough to swallow a car and drown the passengers. Farms dot the flat horizon, but the clouds of mosquitoes cannot be tamed.

When I was a girl, on summer nights, the foggers would drive up and down the streets, and we would stop in the middle of our sweaty play and taste the peppery pesticides on our tongues.

And, still, the mosquitoes would come.

We would dab our bites with Witch Hazel, or scratch them into scars.

We are the prey of would-be mothers, so essential to their survival. On summer nights, female mosquitoes gather for their blood meal. These nutrients mean eggs and larva and the preservation of their dominion.

In their red swollen bellies is our second genealogy, the untraced lineage that can only belong to a particular place. We who inhabit The Great Black Swamp are blood brothers and sisters with those who inhabited these lands before us. Strong warriors—Little Turtle, Blue Jacket, Chief Bukongahelas, and the famed Tecumseh—who fought settlers and soldiers to maintain their hold on Ohio and its hunting grounds.

My people came to Ohio well after The Great Black Swamp was drained of its water, its great trees were chopped down, leaving a landscape so flat a person can see into the next county. They came well after there were cities and towns and the semblance of civilization. They came and lived where the bobcat once hunted, where black vipers slithered through muck, and beavers gnawed on sycamore branches. We live in a place the mosquitoes never surrendered.

Our blood comingles with the blood of our birthplace ancestors in the bellies of these determined mothers. A new generation waits to be formed, to grow, and keep ownership of our mutual home—a genealogy of blood and place.

I Know Why The Willow Weeps

2009-08-12T13:39:00.005-05:00

A Weeping Willow’s shade is otherworldly.

Sweeping those famed branches aside feels like peering into a secret world of fairies and sprites. Breezes sway the long, languishing limbs, and reveal a perfect spot for mischief.

I remember the first and only time I stepped beneath the Weeping Willow in my grandparents’ front yard.

I could not have been more than ten-years-old. The tree had always been a curiosity—not symmetrical and firm like the maples that surrounded our house or prickly like the tall pines. This tree stood in perpetual lament.

I don’t remember playing on my grandparents’ property much. Mostly, we sat indoors and watched the colorful static of their television, listened to my mother and grandmother chatter about family gossip. My dad and grandfather flipped through fishing magazines and barely spoke but seemed to be having a conversation just the same. And, there, my brother and I would sit and wait for the opportunity to eat stale cookies with oats and raisins and a couple scoops of Neapolitan ice cream.

It was an autumn day. I remember this. I zipped up my red windbreaker and asked to play outside.

Theirs was a quiet neighborhood, every house filled with people they knew and trusted. My brother might’ve stayed inside or else came with me—I don’t know anymore.

Since his death, I lose him more and more in my memories. Perhaps because he is not alive to assert his presence, share the common history of our family. He lingers in the periphery, and my memory almost convinces me that I have always been an only child.

I breathed in that crisp autumn air and sighed away the stuffiness of my grandparents’ small front room. There was nothing more to do outside than inside. They had a large backyard but no trees or places to explore. The only difference was the stillness. I reveled in the quiet—the lack of voices and words and conversations that had no relevance to me.

I wandered my way to the front of the house, stopping once to examine a small toad hunting near where the downspout from the gutter emptied into the yard. Off it hopped when my childish fingers stroked its bumpy skin too much. I sighed and turned my attention back to the rest of the world. This is when I noticed the willow.

Its branches tickled the tops of the grass blades, and I thought it looked like an ugly tree. No one else had a Weeping Willow in their yard, yet here one stood alone and distinguishable. From my perspective, I could not see into the branches very well. My grandfather had allowed it to become overgrown and unruly.

When I brushed the hanging branches aside, I saw that it was not cool and dark like the shade of most trees. The willow’s shade was light, ethereal. I touched my palm to the trunk and listened to the crackle of the shed leaves beneath my tennis shoes. The fuzzy brown egg sacks of gypsy moths dotted the trunk. I did not know what they were at the time, but I took a stick and scrapped them away because I was a child and I was bored.

I squatted down and leaned my back against its trunk and sat that way until my parents came and told me it was time to go.

In a strange way, it felt like a holy experience—willows known for their curative and mystical properties. As a child, leaning against the slender trunk, I almost believed this tree was a special kind of living thing—one that understood loneliness and grief.

In the shade of that willow tree, I listened to the whisper of its leaves, to its secrets to mourning. This tree, rooted in the middle of a yard in the middle of a city, seemed resigned to its solitary existence.

The tree is not there anymore. The last time I drove by my grandparents’ old house—the tree was gone, as was my great-grandmother’s rose bush that had been grafted and replanted. I don’t know who lives there now, but I know each room of their house well. I remember each creak of the floorboards, the taste of the well water, and the musty smell of the basement where my grandfather worked on upholstery and played Dartball.

But, the willow is gone—probably too damaged from gypsy moths—or too distracting from the house’s “curb appeal.” And, so, is my brother who must have been with me under that tree. Though he was older, we tended to do most things together. But, he is gone, too—probably too damaged from his own years of weeping—a figure not unlike the willow, perpetually sad, heavy-hearted.

Looking back on that autumn afternoon, perhaps now I realize why that experience has stayed with me and why I cannot seem to find my brother there.

I do not know why every willow weeps, but I believe I know why that one did and always will.

A Life Outside

2009-07-31T00:10:00.002-05:00

Oh, to have been a fly buzzing near the ear of Emily Dickinson as she bent over her writing desk, scribbling her thoughts, contemplating the way sunlight shifts across the ground on dreary, winter afternoons.

The reclusive woman in white, who townspeople spoke of as a myth, never left her family's house during the last years of her life. She spoke through a door to visitors, lived in self-imposed exile from the world, sought to translate the power of her emotions into the little, black specks of words.

She felt things deeply, or so her poems seem to say. Thoughts and words were her entire world. She wrote hundreds of letters—the faces of friends reduced to the scrawl and smudges of their particular penmanship.

There is such romance in the story of this shy genius whose thousands of poems were only discovered and published after her death. As an undergraduate Creative Writing student, I wanted to be Emily Dickinson—someone who wrote out of the love and passion for the music of language, who did not chase publication but who wrote out of the simple need to express herself. To turn a soul inside out. To paint on the canvas of another’s imagination. To revel in the angsty torture of a “true” artist.

I loved the idea of such self-sacrifice for the craft of writing. So romantic. So exquisite. So tragic. The image of this delicate woman dressed in white writing in the stillness of her room touched me in a profound way. Something about her life seemed reverent, like a nun dedicating herself to her Holy Father.

Now, as I sit in the quiet of my own living room tonight, I feel especially akin to Dickinson—at least in terms of her solitude. And, lately, I wonder about Dickinson the person, not the myth or the genius poet, but the young woman who slowly retreated from social life.

What types of concerns caused her to pull away? Did she have a disorder that affected her ability to form relationships? Was she overwhelmed by the prospect of living a life among people? A person could argue that she suffered from agoraphobia. Is this what turned her into a living ghost?

But, what if Dickinson had not spent her days writing poem after poem? What if she had found love and married and had children and spent her days in the sunshine and the air? What if she had worn dresses of vibrant color and visited her friends in person rather than through letters?

We would never have her poems.

And, yet, at this point in my life, a part of me feels sorry for this woman who was so paralyzed that she could not leave her house. I begin to see this person hampered by some kind of inability, and I pity the genius whose “letter to the world” we cherish a hundred years later.

I am sure that she was happy in her way. I am sure that she experienced contentment in her way. Her poems show us the scope and depth of what she felt during her lifetime—whether in her actual life or dream life.

Would a healthier life have produced such concise and precise meditations on what it feels like to feel? Would she lead a more normal life if she were alive now? How many Dickinsons are lost to the world outside?

One of my favorite Dickinson poems is “I Heard A Fly Buzz—When I Died.” I am drawn to the simple truth of the poem. The fly buzzes, even after the speaker “could not see to see.” There are so many interpretations of the fly and its buzz. I think it is what it is. Nature will have her say in the end—once we pass on to the afterlife (wherever and whatever we may believe that to be). Our own physicality, decay, is between the “light” and ourselves. What we leave behind besides our keepsakes is our bodies, like a keepsake, an heirloom of bloodlines. Nature reclaims us.

Would I sacrifice the insights in this poem and all of the others if it meant Emily Dickinson, my literary hero, would have spent more time walking along sidewalks, frequenting shops, and laughing with friends?

These days, I almost believe that I would.

Agreeable Friends

2009-07-25T11:45:00.001-05:00

When I was little, I wanted to be a vet. I would perform surgery on my stuffed animals with mechanical pencils and make stitching noises with my mouth. I’ve always felt connected to animals, whether it was the sparrow hopping in the grass, the Golden Retriever barking at butterflies, or fuzzy cygnets trailing through the algae of a pond.

I could probably try to blame Disney. Animals were often protagonists in the cartoons and movies. I strongly identified with Benji, watched all of his movies, even though they made me cry.

The longest I ever lived without a pet was my first semester at Iowa State University, and I could barely stand the absence in my heart. I would visit friends’ apartments and houses just to pet their cats and dogs.

It wasn’t long before I bought Herbie the guinea pig from Earl May, and we spent many nights together grading papers, watching television, and munching on carrots.

Of course, we are tempted to anthropomorphize our furry companions, give them thoughts that might not be their own. I do not know how much my two cats “think” about things. But, I know that we communicate.

My big, white cat is my nursemaid and emotional comforter. When I am sick, she purrs beside me. When I am crying, she comes and licks my tears. She spends every night beside me. Often, we wake up in a similar pose—arms outstretched, my head on the pillow, her head on my arm, breathing in tandem.

My little, brown cat is my constant companion. She is always quick to play and give me a laugh. She nestles beside me or on me when I sit on the couch. In the kitchen, she weaves in and out of my legs and meows loudly and urgently. She “talks” to me when she jumps up beside me, mimics the sound of my own “what?” And, so, we speak each other’s sounds.

They both greet me when I come home. My white cat perches on her cat tower; my brown cat lounges in the blinds of the patio door. They wait for me to return to our little “den” because when I do it means food, water, security, and cuddles.

These are two of my dearest friends.

Yes, I know that they could be equally as happy in another home, purring as loudly for another owner. But, that does not change the ways in which these furry companions and I know each other. We know each other’s routines and personalities. We share an intimate world. They know me better than most. We’ve been through quite a bit over the years.

I know them, too. I know that my white cat likes to sit on shoes, tables, and laptop carrying cases. She loves string and will chew things she shouldn’t. She tries to eat plastic. She enjoys joining me in the bathroom when I take a bath. She paces the edge of the bathtub, licks the water, likes me to pet her with my wet hands.

My brown cat likes to hunt and eat bugs. She doesn’t just play with the insects; she finishes the job. If I go into the bedroom, she will almost always come and flop on the bed. She loves to get in the middle of bed when I am trying to make it. She loves to chase soft little balls. Her favorite room is the kitchen where she asks for cheese and newly emptied tuna cans. One of her back paws is deformed, and she is more sensitive of it than her other paws. Only those she trusts most are allowed to touch it. She likes to bury her head in my chest and make a flutter noise—something between a purr and a deep breath. If I was cat, I would be her.

George Eliot told us, “Animals are such agreeable friends - they ask no questions, they pass no criticisms."

In the end, I suppose all they do want is a warm place to sleep, food, and water. Anyone can provide them with these.

Maybe these are the best friendships because they can be so simple. Maybe more friendships should be this way. A person makes you smile, listens to you when you need to share something, hugs you when you’re feeling down, offers you a blessing or prayer whether you ask for it or not—the essentials.

Right now, my white cat is sleeping soundly by my feet, no ear flick or twitch.

She feels safe; I feel trusted.

Such a thing makes me smile and contemplate the dreams of cats.

The Questioning

2009-06-15T19:03:00.002-05:00

One of the most often quoted verses in the Bible appears in Psalms 119: “Thy Word is a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path.” The idea here is that God’s Word would be able to illuminate a follower’s choices and directions in life, helping to bring such a person into the “light” of God’s Truth.

This verse assures us that God’s Word won’t steer us wrong, so it becomes vitally important to read, study, memorize, and try to grapple with the complexities found on those crisp, gilded pages.

I have read the Bible straight through at least six times in my life. This does not include all of the many sermons I have listened to over my life, the devotionals of which I have been a part, or the little “Daily Bread” booklets that we used to read each morning at the breakfast table when I was a child. In short, I have spent a lot of time in the company of God’s Word.

This makes me no expert, though, and the more I engage with it lately, the less certain I am of the interpretations with which I was raised.

I was speaking with a minister lately who seemed to admit that the Bible and its interpretations can take many directions sometimes. He told me what he believed certain verses were saying, but it was always couched with the statement, “I believe.” In other words, he could only speak to me out of what he felt the Bible was saying—a subjective, ultimately, perspective.

I was in search of Truth. The minister and I had many email exchanges, which prompted me to say at one point:

You ask: “What do you feel is right? What do you sense God telling you?” This is a catch-22, it seems, as you mentioned, right? Overall, I do feel right in my relationship with God. But, am I only deluding myself? Where is my objective correlative, if that cannot be God’s Living Word?

As I stated in a previous email and as you stated again—how are we ever to be certain that what we feel is God’s direction and not Satan’s temptation? When our prayers seem answered, is it truly God? If, even as born-again Christians, who pray and seek God’s truth, we can still be “deceived” by errant “voices,” then it seems like the deck is stacked against us. We can never truly be certain that what we feel and experience is from God.

The minister offered me no reply on this point. So, it seems, we have to go back to the Bible for proof of what God is trying to say to us.

Okay.

Another minister I spoke with told me about bibliolotry—that means turning the Bible itself into a kind of idol. So, maybe the Bible cannot always have certain answers we seek. After all, there have been hundreds, thousands of translations, various interpretations, historic understandings that have condoned such things as slavery, etc.

The Bible, this minister said, has been used by each culture and era to justify its own belief systems of the day. As such, it can be and has been dreadfully misused.

The first minister, when asked about the social question of marriage equality, told me that God made male and female to come together and form a perfect union, a new creation, two halves who unify to become a “complete” whole.

I found this so very interesting because the Bible also tells of King David whose love for Jonathan (Saul’s son) was so profound and powerful, he is prompted to declare:

“I grieve for you, Jonathan my brother; you were very dear to me. Your love for me was wonderful, more wonderful than that of women.”

Some people say these two men were friends, close friends; others claim they were even lovers. One thing is absolutely clear, David, who was married with many wives and concubines, finds his most “perfect” love with Jonathan. Shouldn’t that not be? If a man and a woman marry and this has been God’s grand design since back in Eden, then shouldn’t that be the most profound form of love a human being can experience?

Let’s also talk about divorce. One thing that is condemned in the Bible, very clearly, is adultery—in fact, it even scores a place in the Ten Commandments. When he is tested by some religious leaders of the day about divorce, Jesus says that people shouldn’t do it unless there has been an instance of adultery. And, if a person marries someone who is divorced, then adultery has been committed.

Adulterers, we are told by Paul, will not gain entry into Heaven:

“Do you not know that the wicked will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor male prostitutes nor homosexual offenders nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God.”

So, why aren’t there cries for a divorce amendment?

One of my friends who studies Judaism says that questioning is an important aspect of understanding a given text. And, this is what we did in my many, many literature classes. Perhaps it is through our questioning that Truth actually emerges.

I believe that God is omnipresent, omniscient, and omnipotent. We have been given a collection of writings by various men written thousands of years ago—an ancient text now. Not impossible to accept from a timeless God. What are a thousand years to Him, though it means, often, quite a bit to us.

The mere fact that we still read the Bible and practice Christianity seems a clear indication of something worthy of notice and understanding.

But, here is what it all feels like in summary: The Bible can be misused and twisted, almost always filtered through our own culturally limited lenses. We can pray but have no guarantee that our answers are truly from God. We clearly cannot trust our own feelings, since we are “of the flesh” and swayed by the temptations of sin.

Where can we find truth?

In the end, I believe we find truth in the questioning. We are thinking creatures, who should use the intellect we have been given, and that means asking hard questions and avoiding the pat, simplistic answers that, oftentimes, cannot be fully supported by logic.

Questioning is necessary. We ask our parents questions, seek guidance and counsel from those around us when it comes to decisions about what car to buy, how to finance a house, what electric company to use—so, why shouldn’t we question our God?

If God is a living God and the Bible is the “Living Word,” then it is with real, day-to-day questions that truth can be found.

A Dedication

2009-05-20T11:01:00.002-05:00

Eyes say more than all the words our tongues could twist free from our minds.

So much is said in her eyes—cornflower blue with gold accents near the pupil. Eyes, they say, are windows to the soul. If this is true, her soul can be as tranquil as a sea on a windless day, or as brooding as clouds congregating in storm. Yet, those wide eyes often belie that firm brow that overhangs them and speaks of a soul that loves, wants for protection, has a yearning to connect.

And, those eyes of hers can sparkle with the mischief of the Irish and harden with German resolve; emotions are never far from those cornflower blue eyes, which are her perfect canvas for the artistry of her thoughts.

She is the realized dream of hundreds of years of men and women from unforgiving climes, who forged lives out of the cold, jagged rock, whose hands bore calluses, whose own eyes stared into steely skies, emerald grasses, and stubbornly greeted each morning with which Life challenged them.

Her forebearers shouldered the burden of survival—all for the sake of a baby girl born one hot July day.

What brought those people together? God, Fate, purpose, love, lust, need? Whatever warmed those many cold nights, when clothes were shed, and skin heated skin—these people joined themselves, tangled bloodlines and genetics. Were their paths always meant to cross? Was this new millennium always meant to own a strong young woman with cornflower blue eyes and an inner fire ignited in one charged moment by ancients in distance lands?

She sings Irish ballads, devotes herself to acknowledging those relatives without whom she would not exist. In her truck, windows rolled down, winds whipping, she speeds down country roads proudly rambling to those Irish brogues lost in song.

She is a caretaker of her ancestors’ memory, scraping moss out of the grooves of their names and dates, raking back the tall grass—much like the people who woke up and sweated to feed their families, whose lives she protects from being forever forgotten, she battles with Nature to preserve the proof of their existence. Future generations owe a debt to this warrior preserver.

She is a caregiver to the ones she loves. She drives hours after a long day of work to comfort fears. She offers her strong hand to be clasped, held, clutched. She is never in doubt of her own sense of responsibility. When she tells you that she loves you, you get a sense of the bedrock truth beneath those words. No words are spoken that do not have deep meaning—those cornflower blue eyes reveal the earnestness and commitment.

What causes two disparate paths to cross? What draws two bloodlines mingled for thousands of years together suddenly? Perhaps it is a Topographer sketching our bloodlines like roads on a map—directing one path to merge into another path.

Our paths have finally crossed. I am thankful to those hundreds of people whose destiny she embodies, for without their desire and will, I would’ve been left to wander without a hand to hold or a heart to touch.

Three Days in the Belly

2009-04-01T15:01:00.003-05:00

The other day I was thinking about the Biblical figure of Jonah.

Many people know the story—Jonah and the whale. Of course, in the Bible, it is a big fish.

This is a point I made in Sunday school once, and it irritated my teacher. I said—quite rightly, I feel—that if the Bible is God’s word and God created the animals, then we can safely assume that God would know the difference between a whale (warm-blood mammal) and a big fish (cold-blooded). My teacher was not impressed, and frankly, neither was I. It was only a matter of time before I lost interest in Sunday school. A small point with big implications.

The story of Jonah, though, is that he was told by God to go to Nineveh and warn them that if they did not change their ways, then God was going to destroy them.

But, Jonah wasn’t particularly bright, it seems, as he decided to “flee from the presence of the LORD” and go to Tarshish. He boarded a ship at Joppa and off they sailed for Tarshish. This resulted in a storm that God brewed up to stop him.

The men on board the ship were afraid that they were all going to die, so they went and found Jonah who was sleeping below deck. They were angry that he could sleep during a storm. Finally, they all cast lots to see who was causing the raging tempest. Of course, the lot fell on Jonah.

He admitted that it was his fault for going to Tarshish instead of Nineveh, and he told them to toss him overboard. They refused. Jonah insisted. Off he was thrown.

To save him, God caused a big fish to swallow him and hold him in its stomach for three days and three nights. In the guts of the fish, Jonah prayed to God, and God spared him. Eventually, the fish “vomited out Jonah upon dry land.”

In Sunday school, often, this is where the story ends. Jonah disobeyed. God punished him but spared him from dying by providing a big fish to swallow him up and protect him from the depths of the sea.

Clearly, this was a fish large enough that he could breathe for three days and three nights. It makes you wonder what such an experience must be like. Very moist, I suppose.

But there is much more to the story.

When Jonah finally recovers from his big fish ordeal, he ventures off to Tarshish—like he was supposed to—and warns them that if they don’t change their ways, then God will destroy them in forty days.

Immediately, the people repent. They turn from their “evil ways,” wear sackcloth, and cry out to God.

Is Jonah happy? Does he share in this miracle? Is he elated to see people turning to his God at such a dire hour?

No, he’s pissed.

He goes and sits down and prays for God to take his life.

God allows a plant to grow up and shade Jonah from the sun. Then, God allows a worm to kill the plant. Then, he creates a hot, sunny day and scorching wind to beat down on Jonah’s uncovered head.

What does Jonah want? To die again.

God says, “Are you mad about the plant dying?”

Jonah replies, “I am greatly angry, even unto death.”

So, God says, “'Thou hast had pity on the gourd, for which thou hast not laboured, neither madest it grow, which came up in a night, and perished in a night; and should not I have pity on Nineveh, that great city, wherein are more than sixscore thousand persons that cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand, and also much cattle?”

This is where the book of Jonah ends, on God putting Jonah in his place.

Jonah reminds me of some Christian people these days. They sit around in insular lives—homeschooled children (or children in private Christian schools), church two to three times a week, completely shut down from people who do not agree with them. They look at people who are “sinners” living their untouched lives, and they can’t wait to “go home.” They say the world is “screwy” and “nothing is as it should be.”

And there they sit, like Jonah, in their living rooms each night, arms crossed, pronouncing judgment, complaining, essentially just waiting to die, only associating with other Christians, criticizing everything, angry that God has not “punished” the world yet.

I have received emails telling me I am an abomination and that I am distracted by smoke from the “pit of hell” because of the way I live my life. I am judged by people who lament the world and cannot wait to “die” and be in Heaven.

These people are like Jonah.

We never find out if Jonah learns how to be happy and not desire the suffering of other people—even those who have “sinned” and turned from God.

A few nights in the belly of a big fish didn’t change him. Having God speak directly to him didn’t change him.

It makes you wonder what people need to go through in order to learn compassion and to actually listen to what God is saying.

Just An Average Girl

2009-03-30T12:23:00.003-05:00

In Creative Writing classes, I was always taught that you should never write stories that began with: “Bob was just a typical guy,” or “It was an ordinary day.” We claim that such beginnings “bore” the reader from the very first line. If the day is “ordinary,” then why tell the tale? If Bob is “typical,” then why do we want to read about him? And, yet, my own personal story would begin no differently:

Sarah White is a typical Midwestern girl. She stands 5’6” tall with brown hair and brown eyes, right-handed, a size 10 (on most days), 8 ½ foot size, makes a middle-class wage, speaks with a Northwest Ohio “accent”—which is considered to be “no accent”—the one that broadcasters are taught to use in school. She tries not to lie, steal, cheat, kill (a hard one when driving around Chicago). She shows compassion when appropriate, leading a “laid back” life, not bothering to “fret” about most things. Life has a way of sorting things out, if a person is patient and slow to anger. A Protestant raised with a Puritan work ethic (hard work, limited spending), she possesses a last name that is as bland and ordinary as her complexion.

Sarah White is profoundly average. She is “the girl next door.” Her parents are still married. They live on the same street where she grew up, in the same house where her father carried her mother over the threshold. Her parents had two children: a boy and a girl. Growing up, Sarah owned hamsters, fish, a poodle named P.J. and then a cat named George. On Saturday nights, her parents made them watch the Lawrence Welk show. They would pop popcorn and watch The Waltons, MASH, Little House on the Prairie—she still recalls the cartoon Puff the Magic Dragon with a smile. Sarah owns Star Wars figures, grew up with a mad crush on all of the heroes—Luke, Leia, and Han. She played with Barbies, skinned her knees while roller skating on the uneven sidewalks, learned to ride her bicycle on humid summer nights after supper.

Sarah White is extraordinarily ordinary. She grew up knowing both sets of her grandparents, who all lived in her same small town. She even knew her great-grandmothers—two feisty women who did not “go gentle into that good night.” Her Grandmother White’s mother traveled the country until the very end of her life. Her Grandfather White’s mother, who had been divorced from her husband for decades and had not remarried, was a firm and fiercely independent New England woman.

With her ethnicity from England, Scotland, and Ireland, Sarah descends from a stock of people who forged the New World, fought in the Revolutionary War, and settled down to the expected lives of work and longing.

In the end, Sarah White is like anyone else. She doesn’t believe that people are like snowflakes—each unique. She cries and smiles and dreams and bleeds like every other human being on the planet, just as strong and just as fragile. She can become lost in a crowd and many people have told her that she “reminds them of someone else.” Strangers already feel like they know her. Perhaps they do.

Maybe that’s the difference between life and a story—in stories, we try to create quirky people to make them seem “real,” but truth be told, our lives are mirrors of other lives that have come before us and that will echo after us. Maybe we should celebrate the comfort inherent in that instead of trying to make ourselves and our stories into something more than they truly are. I am you and you are me and we all share these pronouns in some form or another.

Even in our stories, we seem to be thirsting for “sameness.” As the movie Shadowlands says, “We read to know we’re not alone.” Even in the exotic, we search for the familiar and that is what makes the connection electric. You are not me but like me and sometimes you are me—when trying to express your individuality in words but you cannot without me.

Sarah White is just an average girl with plenty of stories to tell but none as powerful as the "ordinary" one she is living.

At the Midterm

2009-03-17T23:40:00.002-05:00

The other day someone said the phrase I keep hearing repeated more and more—“you’re middle-aged.”

At 34, I suppose a case could be argued. The grey hairs glint in the light. Extra weight clings tenaciously to my tummy. I see lines and wrinkles where the skin was once soft and smooth. My body shows the effects of aging—a process millions of people throughout thousands of years have tried to tame. In the end, we always come to our end: wrinkled and worn.

In academia, at the halfway point, we give grades, midterms, sometimes evaluations to see how the students are progressing. I am having my students answer questions about if they feel their writing has improved, what changes would they like to make, what do they feel they have learned that they didn’t know before.

And, this made me start to think about being middle-aged.

What have I learned so far? What changes would I make? How have I improved?

Strangely, I don’t know that I have improved. Changed, definitely. I wonder if our progression through life can be quantified in terms of reaching some “better” level. Maybe we just get older. We accumulate more experiences, knowledge, etc, but am I “better” than I was when I was younger?

As I get older, I am becoming much more fascinated by Time. Probably because half of my life has been lived. Or, should I say that I have lived half of the average lifespan of a human being? I don’t know what my lifespan will be. Maybe only a day more, maybe 70 years more.

One of my professors told us once that he believed in the existence of souls because there always seems to be a fundamental part of us that does not change. He said that in his being was an essential core that did not feel much different than he did at seventeen. He was probably in his 50s. I remember sitting in my desk mulling over this notion. I already believed in a soul, but I considered his argument.

I suppose that I am still me. I don’t know if I am Sarah per se. Sarah is a name that my parents selected. I could just as easily be Mary, or Jane, or…Jack? I recognize a certain element of myself that seems unchanging, perhaps spurned on by memory and consciousness. But, is the soul really so steadfast?

Time, aging seem to make you even more aware of the various layers involved with being human—memories from twenty years ago that feel like just yesterday, aches seem more nagging on long walks—the body weakens, the mind remembers, our “souls” retain ourselves? Perhaps.

Just last night, it occurred to me that it had been fifteen years since my brother died. I was nineteen at the time. Something about that profound passage of Time struck me. I have lived almost as much life as I had on St. Patrick’s Day 1994. I admit, these last fifteen years have gone much more quickly than those first nineteen. As you age, Time seems to be on a mad dash towards that final finish line.

So, the question remains: what have I learned at the Midterm? I have learned that I am less certain about some things in my life than I was. I am also much less flexible. I will have a confrontation with someone if I feel that I am not being heard or respected. I have learned that these might not necessarily be changes for the “better.”

I always say that “life is the journey, not the destination.” Aging has taught me, though, that while I still enjoy a good amble, the time is coming to walk with a bit more purpose.

Specters

2009-02-04T14:19:00.008-06:00

I do not believe in ghosts. The dead are dead.

Death does not make a soul suddenly omnipresent. None of those who have passed on are looking at me as I go about my daily life.

How would they see me anyway? Is there a giant screen television in Heaven (or Hell) tuned to the 24 hour Alive Network? If there was, I doubt enough of the billions of dead would all agree to watch the Sarah Channel for more than a minute while flipping through to something much more entertaining.

The truth of it is: I am here; they are not. Where they are, I will not venture to say. I know what I believe, but no one has sent me any postcards from the Great Beyond, so I will humbly stay silent on the subject.

But, I do know that when the clock gongs midnight in the blackest hour of the night, no tortured souls are treading my floorboards or lurking in my closet, or roaming and moaning with the torment of eternal restlessness. If we cannot see our own souls while we’re alive, why would they become visible once we’re dead?

Ghost stories are romantic, though. Enough of my family heritage hails from New England, where specters are part of the lore and fabric, that I still enjoy the chills of believing the undead walk. In New England, where everything quivers with such rich history, it is hard not to hear the whispers of our predecessors in the rustling of the tall evergreens.

I have seen the church box where George Washington once sat, stared into a bust made from Benjamin Franklin’s death mask, touched my fingertips to the splintered boards of a covered bridge just a few miles down the road from Norman Rockwell’s house.

Ironically, it’s the “thingy-ness” of artifacts that make us almost believe in ghosts. We touch what someone else years before touched. We see the threadbare flag that a nameless woman spent nights hunched over, her nimble fingers sewing the fabric together for the sake of her new country.

I see her stitching; I feel her fingertips.

These objects make these people step out of our imaginations.

One historic figure who marched out of the stiff pages of history to stare at me was Abraham Lincoln.

The first time I read a biography of Abraham Lincoln I was in elementary school. I’m not sure which grade, but I remember that it was a picture book with black and white sketches of the president from gawky boyhood to his time as a lawyer to his time as president. I was fascinated by this story of a self-made man—reading borrowed books by the hearth, chilling in the cold of a log cabin, developing his famed reputation for honesty. I read this book in early 80’s, so there was much emphasis on Lincoln’s virtues of lifelong learning, integrity, and hard work. While the book attempted to humanize him, true to the era in which it was written, he was also lionized and mythologized.

I felt Lincoln’s ghost twice.

The first time I was standing in Henry Ford Museum. Memories are never accurate records of what “happened,” but they almost always capture the way certain moments felt. Perhaps, that is why they tend to skew the actual events. How else do you capture the complexity of emotion?

It felt like I was standing in the middle of an open hall with nothing but this glass display case. Inside the case was a rocking chair. The red velvet fabric, frayed and stained, chilled me. This was the chair where Lincoln laughed at Our American Cousin before Booth’s bullet lodged into his brain, and the icon slumped—only a man after all.

I was told that the crimson stain on the back of the chair was Lincoln’s blood. Other sources now say that it was likely hair oil. Either way, the stain was human residue, the mark that a flesh and blood person had used it. Staring into that glass case, at that stain—which at the time, I believed was his blood—I could feel Lincoln in the most tangible way.

The second time I shivered at his ghost was years later while touring Hildene in Manchester, Vermont. This is where Abraham Lincoln's only living son resided. I have family in New England, near Robert Todd Lincoln’s mansion. It is a palace with an impressive Observatory on the edge of a mountain and sprawling gardens and meadows.

In one of the bedrooms—I think—was a dressing mirror. In my memory, it was oval. I am not sure how long. The object itself eludes me. But, I remember the tour guides words.

He said, “This is a mirror that hung in the White House cloak room. Abraham Lincoln might’ve looked in it to check his top hat before making his way to Ford’s Theatre that fateful night.”

I saw him. I saw him in ghastly black and white, overhanging brow, bushy beard, a face all crags and lines. His reflection still seemed to haunt that polished glass. In that mirror, Abraham Lincoln last saw himself alive. The thought of it sent shivers down my spine--the chilly brush of a ghost's passing?--and, yet, the Emancipation Proclamation giant seemed never more real and human.

Ghosts are not souls wandering among us, tormented, seeking some sort of eternal sleep; ghosts are when our minds recognize the humanness of the past—the human residue of the footprints and top hats, mirrors and rocking chairs of those who have tread this earth before us.

If I sit where George Washington sat, then, if only for a moment, I can see what he might’ve seen, hear what he might’ve heard, feel what he might’ve felt. History and the past can sleep then, for we have seen them and heard them—appropriately haunted by them.

I touch my fingertips to this keyboard. Maybe years from now, a woman will touch her fingertips to this keyboard and know what it meant to be a woman in her mid-30s at the turn of the millennium.

The ghost of my touch will touch her, and together, we will merge in our understanding of what it means to be alive.

On The Coldest Night of the Year

2009-01-15T18:44:00.003-06:00

Outside my window, tonight, heaps of crumbly snow stand like arctic Easter Island statues: stout, sturdy, with mysteriously stoic expressions in the hollows and shadows of hardened snowflakes.

They are buffers against the usual night noises—cars rushing down side streets, sirens, horns, the whirling of people hurrying their lives away. These snow creatures pout in the icy winds that sway the cars in the parking lot.

The snow drifted against my patio doors reminds me of January of 1978. There was one of the worst blizzards in Northwest Ohio that year. Our electricity did not work at our house. We put blankets over a car table, used flashlights to illuminate our faces, and huddled together against the bitter cold house. I was three years old; my brother must’ve been eight. My parents were younger than I am now.

I remember that our neighbors let us stay over one night. It must’ve been much too cold for us to snuggle together in bed. I cannot imagine my father agreeing to such a generous proposal unless my mother shamed him into it, or it was just too darn cold to be proud.

During the day, we built snow forts with several different interior rooms. I crawled and giggled my way throughout one “snow house,” visiting each room as my snowpants swished and mittens dampened. The enjoyment was short-lived. My mother banned us from playing in it too much lest it should collapse on one of us. Still, as I sit here, the corners of my lips curl into a smile. The size of that snow fort still tickles me.

One of my other favorite memories is about as simple as they come. It probably explains why on days like yesterday and today—heavy snowfall, knee-deep snow, stinging cold air—all I want to do is go out into it. Not in a car per se but definitely by foot. It is one of my favorite times to go for a walk.

I’m almost positive the memory I am about to describe happened during the aftermath of the Blizzard of ’78. I think what prompted the occasion was the need for some sort of supplies—something my father must not have had at the hardware store where he worked.

My father, for whatever reason, said he was going to walk to the K-mart store. As an adult thinking back, I suppose the distance isn’t more than two miles or so, but it seemed like the other side of town when I was little. Being a daddy’s girl, I’m sure I begged to go. We both bundled ourselves with scarves, hats, gloves, coats, and snowpants (at least for me), and off we set.

I always say that “my people” were pilgrims. I come from “pioneer stock.” My family claims Peregrine White—the first pilgrim child born in the New World.

My people were restless. My people were not afraid to pick up and start over in a new land. My people craved adventure, rejected the stagnation of a “comfortable life.” They had a thirst for fortune. They were hearty with an emotional and mental toughness that I cannot fathom. It must’ve felt like packing up and moving to the moon.

And, so, in the spirit of “our people,” my father and I set off on our journey to K-mart in the snow.

I don’t remember being at K-mart, but I remember that journey…

After a while, probably on the way back, my father carried me part of the way.

When we returned home, I felt like I had accomplished something so momentous. I had gone with my father to K-mart on foot.

I love to walk. Sometimes, I will start walking without any clear destination in mind. I’ll stroll down side streets just to see where I will end up and what I might find.

Tonight, I feel the restless call of this night. When I think of my life until this point, I feel the stirring of “my people” woven into the genetic tapestry I recognize in the mirror. I have moved eight times in the last eight years: nomadic, transient, at times so exhausting.

It is the coldest night of year tonight. Only my heater crackling and floorboards snapping can be heard.

The night’s darkness brings a sting, and I sit here, lost in the revelry of childhood memories and the future daydream of a time when I can rest calmly on a snowy day.

The Other Side of Pain

2009-01-01T23:30:00.004-06:00

The movie The Curious Case of Benjamin Button could’ve been better, but the one thing that sticks with me is the notion of time and how it can affect us. I don’t remember which class I was in when we discussed time in specific detail. It is never really discussed enough, is it? In this class, we mentioned Thomas Aquinas and the idea of human beings existing in Time and God existing outside of Time.

We are stuck in this web. I tend to picture the movie What Dreams May Come. There is a giant spider web and we are trapped inside of its sticky comfort.

It might be silly, but I do tend to revisit my past. I ask myself what things I would change if I had the opportunity to do things differently. There are a great many things. More things than I would like to admit.

I wish I was more assertive. I wish that I was less afraid of other people’s feelings and more mindful of my own. The movie I watched this afternoon truly offered the idea of “carpe diem.” We should seize this day. We do not truly know when we will have another. Oh, we assume. Human beings are great at assuming, but quite frankly, we cannot boast of anything more than this second we are living right now. It could all change in a heartbeat.

Human beings are so very, very fragile. We are as strong as we are weak. An infected paper cut could kill us. We could also survive being shot, poisoned, drowned, and God knows what else. Human beings possess the most fragile strength of which anyone could conceive.

We are covered by a thin membrane. Anything could pierce it. Yet, there are babies abandoned in the dead of winter in dumpsters who survive through cold, cold winters. Human beings are a fascinating lot. This year, I hope to understand this body a bit more. It is the only “true” thing I have been given.

Where the Walking Begins

2008-12-19T12:28:00.002-06:00

People grieve the way they wished to be grieved.

At least in my experience. We hold on to the pain for as long as we can because we think that letting go of the pain means letting go of the person—we’re afraid that it means the worst part of grief and one of many people’s greatest fears: to be forgotten.

If we stop crying and dwelling on past memories, we are afraid that it will mean that we don’t love the person anymore. Our pain keeps us close to the person.

It is the same for death as for a break-up. The longer we think we maintain a connection with the person (regardless of how it twists our insides), the more we feel we have never lost that other person. We believe that life can coast along that like. But, it’s false a connection. We cling to the pain because we would want someone else to do that for us. We grieve the way we wish to be grieved.

Like I told someone the other night, what we often don’t realize is that the world is not colder without that other person in it; it just feels different. It’s about getting familiarized with a new perspective. The world is the same as it always was and will be.

With the death of someone close, it isn’t about forgetting the person or somehow negating the past and what that person meant. With a break-up, it probably is best to forget the person and negate the past. Most of what we remember in such cases as break-ups is what I tend to call “emotional residue.” We romanticize the “good times.” But, at least for me, I sometimes forgot my daily unhappiness. In my mind, I turned the experience into something it simply wasn’t—because I wanted the other person to miss me. I grieved the way I wished to be grieved. I didn’t want to be forgotten by someone who had been so important to me.

But, grief isn’t necessarily rational, and it’s all about adjusting and getting reacquainted with yourself. Grief has a way of reintroducing you to yourself, perhaps because you are, in a sense, mourning yourself whenever you mourn someone else. I don’t want to oversimplify it, though. I do miss my brother. I miss my grandparents. I miss the friends who I have lost. I just think there is an element of the self in, at least, the internal feelings that we recognize as grief.

The famous saying tells us that “time heals all wounds.” I believe it can. We hate that idea, but the truth of it can’t be denied. In time, the wound will heal. That doesn’t mean that you won’t still have a scar. It’s like I told someone else. The pain of a car accident does not always stay as sharp and severe as that initial impact. Eventually, the pain fades as our body begins to heal. We may walk with a limp from that day forward (as we often do after the loss of someone important), but we still keep walking. We probably don’t think about the accident everyday that we limp. It’s simply part of us. It is the same with psychological and emotional wounds. The thing to remember is that it’s okay to limp and it’s okay to get up out of bed and start walking.

Moving on can have a negative connotation, but that’s not always earned. Moving on means accepting yourself and letting yourself off the hook. It means acknowledging that you are individual. It means understanding that letting pain heal is not about loving the person you’ve lost any less or somehow making the past something it wasn’t. The cliché tells us that life is short. In my experience, it surely is. Of course, I want to think that I am important to other people. I want to mourn everyone the way I feel someone significant ought to be mourned. The truth is, though, that pain and tears aren’t the only ways to keep someone who has died close to you.

When my brother died, it jarred my entire sense of the world. We were not close at the time of his death. I never regretted that per se. I know that if he was alive today, we might not be any closer necessarily. But, when he died, something clicked.

I suddenly signed up for college. I suddenly had a stronger sense of purpose. I wanted to accomplish things with my life and my opportunities. I never would’ve thought I would one day teach college. Never. When I sat in that chilly back office in the car parts store where I worked for seven years sorting invoices and counting money, I never would’ve thought I had the strength to quit and let myself go where this journey called life would take me. If my brother was alive, I don’t know that I would’ve gone to college. It’s interesting to contemplate alternate realities.

In the end, grief can strengthen you in ways you never would’ve realized or thought possible. That, too, is how we honor our past and the experiences that make us who we are.

We become empowered and start walking; we move on.

When the World Turns Silent

2008-12-03T22:35:00.003-06:00

Something happens when it snows.

Large fluffy flakes drift from the darkened sky, and suddenly, the world becomes muted. Cars creep down side streets. Streetlights dim into shadowy beams. The blinds glow with the reflection of fake illumination. Cars huddle under coats of white. The night is quiet, and save for artificial light sparkling on snowflakes, a person would not know there was a world outside at all.

The world slows and quiets.

Today has been a silent day, a day for thoughts.

I love the muffled music of a snowy night...

Do You See What I See?

2008-11-19T23:54:00.005-06:00

I was sitting, chilling in an overly air conditioned classroom at Bowling Green State University about twelve years ago when I first read C.S. Lewis’ “Meditation in a Toolshed.” In the essay, he discusses the need to look both at and along a particular issue in life: love, religion, life, whatever. We should recognize that experience and education are equally as valuable when trying to understand the mysteries of this thing we call human existence.

We read the essay in class in preparation to discuss the debate surrounding Science and Religion. Are they mutually exclusive? Can they both present valid perspectives? The answer, I believe, is obvious. Of course, they can.

I have been thinking about Lewis’ essay for the past few days. I had not read it since that summer in 1996. Perhaps I am drawn to this text because recently I have revisited several passages in the Bible.

I was raised Fundamental Baptist. We attended church three times a week; there were a lot of “no’s” growing up. No smoking, no drinking, no dancing, no movies, no sex, no wearing pants to church (a memorable fight involving lots of tears changed that), no, no, no, no, no. Many of the people I grew up with, of course, ended up doing many of these things, and, as far as I know, some still do.

When reading the Bible, I am also reminded of Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave.” Like many people, it is one of my favorite pieces of literature. In it, Plato describes a scene where human beings have been kept shackled in a cave. They can only stare at the wall—nowhere else. There is a fire and a wall. Puppets cast shadows on the wall, and the human beings, having grown up in the cave, recognize this shadow world as “real.” The movie The Matrix offers a stylized version of the same notion. Plato says that if we unlocked one of these persons, dragged him up out of the cave, and introduced him to sunlight, flowers, trees, grass, sky—the “real” world—he would be unable to return to the world of shadows, for he had experienced something more and finally understood that all he knew before was false, someone else’s interpretation of the truth.

When I sit down and read my Bible, I want to see past the shadows. I want to see the text anew. I want to look at it and along it—simultaneously. There are many passages that I have never heard preached on, or at least, they were not preached on in the ways that I understood them. The women of the Bible were rarely spoken of, unless they were Ruth or Esther. Much of what I have read in the text was ignored. Slowly, I begin to recognize that I grew up watching shadows.

I want to believe that I have the mental capacity to read the Bible for myself without the filter of a “learned” intermediary, or “scholar.” If these words are truly from my Creator and Deity, then I should be able to have access to them as freely as anyone else.

C.S. Lewis wonders about subjectivity. If we can only experience things from our own limited perception, then how can we ever have any “true” objectivity? Is that really a table? Does my friend experience the table as I do? What are the implications of our disparate understandings of table?

I read stories of love in the Bible. I have read plenty of sections about types of love that are condemned. If I read the text one way, I am an abomination who does not deserve access to God. This is how my parents read it. Sometimes, I think it is a test of their faith everyday that I survive and am not "judged." They believe that I will die early--perhaps they think my salvation is lost these days, I'm not sure. They didn't used to think that. Even so, everyday, their words cross my mind. Will I slip and fall in the bathtub? Will a stray car swerve into my lane? Why does my head hurt and throb? I feel like my parents are sitting back and waiting. My seemingly "unpunished" life tests their beliefs. I can see both along this issue and at it. I understand how they think and why. Are they right? Am I right? The shackles of my Baptist upbringing bite my wrists.

People say that the sin of Sodom and Gomorrah was homosexuality. Fine. I will read the text that way. But, what about the fact that after Sodom and Gomorrah was burned into nothingness, Lot’s daughters got their father drunk and both slept with him—having children by him? I always found that passage so hard to read. Thankfully, our mores have changed thousands of years later. A person could compose a list pages and pages long of things that we are supposed to read one way (without our modern knowledge and understanding) and things that are not supposed to be read the same way (having children by our drunken fathers).

In the end, I have tried to look at and along the beam whenever I approach the Bible. I pray and have prayed, cried, lost weight, tossed and turned and stayed awake night after night. My brother prayed hard, too. He prayed that he could be “cured” of the pain he felt most of his life. He took his own life fourteen years ago. I felt the same way five years ago when I cried out to God for different reasons. I received an answer. Was it a deception? A test? Perhaps.

I suppose what I would really wish to see is fewer people judging others. Why can’t we try to look at and along the beam before we condemn someone? Perhaps my answer could be found if I spent an afternoon in the shadows of a toolshed.

All I know is that some days the sun, that bright shining warm sun, feels just beyond the reach of these manacled arms...

Still Grieving

2008-11-04T16:06:00.001-06:00

I am about to confess one of my deepest regrets in life: I did not attend my Grandma Moor’s funeral. The most natural question is: “why not?” The answer is very simple: it was easier not to go. It was easier on me. Yes, I lived ten hours away in Iowa. I was teaching and taking summer classes. I would’ve had to miss several classes to make the drive, or else chug plenty of black coffee and prepare myself for the long drive on back-to-back days. But, I could’ve done it. And, from where I sit now at 34 years-old, I should’ve done it.

Grief is a tricky thing. Sometimes, I almost think people don’t talk about it enough. Oh, we do the “words aren’t enough” jive, but we don’t always discuss the real nitty gritty of grief. When my brother died, I had diarrhea for days. Everything I ate went straight through me. It didn’t matter what I ate. I’ve heard other people tell of being constipated. If these are embarrassing details, then I guess I will embarrass myself. Grief is not always immediately felt in the heart, but you will more than likely feel it in the bowels.

Grief is also the gift that keeps on giving, as I like to say. Once you think you are “over it,” it will rear its head at the most unexpected moments. You will feel the absence of a person at the strangest junctures in life. Maybe you will have finally outlived your older brother, watched a certain team win the World Series, or suddenly realized that you and the person you lost performed a yearly ritual you always took for granted.

I should’ve gone to my grandmother’s funeral. My mother was grieving the loss of her mother and she ached for her only living child to be beside her—her only daughter no less—to be there as support. I did not go. I couldn’t ask for permission to leave school without having broken down into uncontrollable sobs. I hate grieving in public. I hate crying in front of people. When my brother died, my father had us troop over to a friend’s house. A bunch of people sat around in the deacon’s living room. My father talked. I cried. The people watched. I despised every tick of the clock. I did not feel supported. I know my father did, and I’m sure my mother did, too, and all of those people were there to lend comfort and love, but I felt suffocated.

For some reason, my Grandmother Moor has been on my mind lately. Hard to say exactly why and how those things happen. Perhaps it is a symptom of aging: an understanding of the moments you should’ve savored as a youth. It’s too bad that memories cannot be stored on disks and rewatched and memorized. They become so fuzzy over time.

My grandmother’s father called her Hank. The name suited her—at least the person we could see in those coal black eyes of hers. My Grandma Moor was spunky, even I could tell that and I did not meet her until she was already into her 60s. Henrietta was a fine enough name, but it was a bit old-fashioned. Grandma did have a love of cat-eye frames and floral print dresses. Every time I visited my grandparents’ house, she was in a dress. Her ways were traditional. And, yet, Hank seemed to capture the spirit of a woman who age and dementia could not dim.

Henrietta Elizabeth Sterling was the name her parents gave her at birth. Her black hair, black eyes, pale skin, and tenacity for her ideals embodied the Irish blood that now courses in my veins as well. People said we looked alike. Perhaps so. When I see past my mother in my face, I can see a resemblance to Hank.

She loved animals. She used to keep parakeets. Before that, years before, on their farm, Hank had cats. My mother claims that she could win over any cat, even the most wild. Maybe those felines recognized a kindred.

Towards the end of her life, my grandmother’s mind was lost, but she had a constant refrain. She wanted to “go home.” It is hard to say exactly where that was in her mind, though she often hinted that it was her childhood home she craved.

Sometimes, I understand this feeling. There are times I would like to “go home,” too, but it is more a feeling than any particular place. I should’ve gone to my grandmother’s funeral. It is one of the many regrets I have, and age has taught me that it will not be last.

Looking through Windows

2008-10-13T16:27:00.003-05:00

Scythes, saws, hoes, old harnesses—the barn wall was cluttered with dusty farm implements from the past. As we strolled by, sipping the cold apple cider, we could almost feel the sweat on our own brow, feel the damp cotton and denim clothes cling to our backs. The past suddenly seemed to breathe in our imaginations and through us, becoming us, reminding us of how alien we are to that past.

If someone from years ago visited our new millennium, that person would see everyone with handheld phones, listening to commercials on the radio about how women can freeze their eggs, no longer using our hands to open doors at stores, walking miles a day for exercise, and, of course, there are so many other things. We are living the futuristic movies they made in the 50s and 60s.

When I think of the past, I think of faded daguerreotypes—those haunting, colorless eyes of our ancestors, our forbearers, the brick layers of this reality we are born into and grow up accepting as “life.” Those eyes seem steely, fixed with stares that are windows to souls now wandering the afterlife. These people have always known what we cannot.

We romanticize the dust of the things they left behind. We hang rusted tools on barn wall with handwritten tags and we try to imagine the life these people led. They inhabited an everyday world with no electricity, indoor plumbing, owned a worldview no wider than the edges of their property, existed in a quieter world. Today, we hear lawnmowers, cars, radios, televisions, engines of all kinds. We think these people must have been more patient; to them, though, it was simply the tempo of life.

I love visiting museums, historic sites, touching things that belong to a time that is forever lost. Perhaps that is part of the fascination. We share an earth with those before us. We literally walk where they walked. We look the same (except for the arbitrary fashions of the day), function the same; we are still human beings. And, yet, their “other” world, captured only in photographs, books, letters will never be the same as ours.

In the county where I grew up, there is old asylum that is now used as a museum. There are lunatic rooms, morgue rooms (that possessive a definitive chill), large sewing rooms. When you walk through, you can almost feel the energy of the past still humming on each antique carefully displayed throughout the old brick building.

I used to romanticize this past. I used to want to understand these people. I used to want to know—if only for a minute—what it felt like to be alive “back then.” These days, some of the romance has worn. Now, I see the dust for what it is. I see clutter. I imagine people who were probably much like anyone else, just waking up trying to get through another day. You begin to understand that the things on our own walls could just as easily be in a museum some day.

A hundred years from now, people might find a picture of you or an old pair of your jeans and try to imagine the life you led. Would it be romantic? Do our things really represent our daily lives? We are the past people will one day try to fathom, and we are the future people years ago could have never believed.

Season of Flowers

2008-09-10T18:38:00.007-05:00

My students are writing personal narratives, which prompted me, on this late afternoon, to delve into my files and read a few of my own. I am posting some excerpts from one I wrote a few years ago:

We knew, my older brother Matt and I, that my father had enlisted in the Air Force in 1963. He told us that he had wanted to get away from home, out from under his father, and so, instead of waiting to be drafted, he simply marched downtown and enlisted. My grandfather had served in the Air Force twenty years before, during World War II, stationed in India. I don’t know what he did there—the mystique lingers now after his death and maybe I don’t ask because I want to leave a little romance for my own imagination to discover years from now.

Matt and I knew that my father was stationed at Da Nang, injured in the explosion at the airbase in Bien Hoa, and eventually sent home after several months of rehabilitation at Clark Airbase in the Philippines. We’d seen the white, squiggly scar on his knee, touched it even.

We didn’t know this because he talked about it very much; we knew this from watching his slides. Every couple of years or so, the slides of his time spent in Viet Nam got pulled out of his underwear drawer where they were boxed inside a crumpled A & P grocery bag, and the rickety slide projector that overheated was battled from the back of his closest, along with the mini-movie screen.

There was always a thrill to this event, especially when I was a child. The lights around the house would be clicked off, and we would sit together in the living room, in the dark, and listen to my father tell us the same stories. I remember the nightmares my father would have sometimes when I was young and slept in the room at the top of the stairs. He would yell in the middle of the night. My mother would tell stories of how he once grabbed her thigh and squeezed it, urging her to “watch out.” The closest things we had to knowing what he might be dreaming about were in these slides—or somewhere around the edges of the frames.

We saw the red tipped silver bombs full of napalm. We heard tales of Hanoi Hannah and the V.C. and could almost recite back the types of bombs and planes flashed before us. We read the words “Mua Doa hoa,” on the side of a B-57 Canberra attack plane and knew the words meant: “season of flowers.”

I can remember the slides more than the occasions which prompted the effort of getting them out. Mostly, I remember the darkness, the family sitting together in the living room without the television on, the hum of the projector, and the way the scenes flashed before us like the fragments of a memory within a memory.

There were times after the slide show, after we helped my father put away the projector and screen, that he would open the little side door on his dresser and pull out his cigar box. The box had a Spanish lady in an oval on the front. She wore a red scarf around her head and a Mona Lisa smile on her lips. Inside were a few snapshots, yellowed newspaper articles, dog tags, colorful paper money, and Filipino coins. We would flip through the small green and yellow English to Vietnamese dictionaries and try to pronounce the language.

I remember holding the dog tags and reading the name impressed in the metal. White, Howard B. That wasn’t my father. He never went by Howard, mainly because it was my grandfather’s first name. He’s always gone by Blain. One of the photos had White, Howard B. leaning against a jeep, shirtless, his grey-blue eyes framed by thick, black glasses. In the background the sky is grey, leaden with storm clouds. Everything in the box smells like dust.

The dog tags list his blood type, O neg, and at the bottom, it says: Episcopal, but my father is a Baptist these days. The yellowed newspaper clippings talk about the V.C. (Viet Cong in parentheses) ambushing people, or bombing airbases. Canberra attack planes bombed right back. One of the newspapers has my father’s picture, lying in a hospital bed being tended by a nurse whose face is obscured. I own this cigar box now and all of its artifacts. My father gave it to me a few years back. Every time I look at that picture of him, it’s hard to think that I am older than he is, almost twice the age of that young man in the picture.

Now that I am older, I go back to that picture of my father—18, bare-chested, drab-green pants—I don't know who took it. Does he even remember? The ominous storm clouds in the background oppress the sky; so heavy, so laden with deep blue, you expect to smell the scent of rain in the ink. I look at this picture and wonder if he could see outside of that frame, and know that five years later, he would be set up with the red-haired bookkeeper for an A & P Christmas party, marry her six months later, father a son in the fall of the following year—a son who would grow just as strong in body, but weaker in mind and heart, a son who would commit suicide at 24 years old, the exact same age my father was when Matt was born.

Would my father have made different choices, if he'd known? Would any of us? My father and brother worked together, near the end of Matt's life, at the same hardware store. When the family would get together, they would make inside jokes, talk about screws, bolts, and hardware stuff. They laughed. In 1994, after Matt learned from his mistakes and slumped in his white Dodge Shadow, my father said he knelt beside his son, brushed the hair from his forehead and kissed him.

The Only Love Story I Know

2008-09-09T23:36:00.013-05:00

Here is another excerpt from a story I wrote a couple of years ago in my nonfiction class. It pretty much sums up the feelings I have at this moment in time:

I have three Biblical figures that I enjoy reading about. One of my favorites is Ruth. Hers is a short book. It opens with the story of Ruth and Orpha traveling with their mother-in-law Naomi. Both of the women's husbands have died. Orpha leaves at the crossroads and returns to her home and family, but Ruth goes with Naomi, claims her as her mother. Ruth tells her: Where you go, I will go.

It is a story of devotion, a story of love. In the end, Ruth marries one of Naomi's relatives, Boaz—he is the kinsman redeemer, the one who will preserve the family lineage. Other than being a beautiful love story (of many forms of love), it tells the account of King David's ancestors. Ruth is obedient and follows her heart. She loves Naomi.

This is probably why King Solomon has always appealed to me—David's son who eventually inherits the throne, even though he was born from Bathsheba. Most people know that story:

David and Bathsheba, of her taking a bath on a rooftop and her beautiful body snaring the wandering eye of the king who should've been at war along side the rest of his troops. Bathsheba became pregnant, and to cover his sin, David had her husband sent home, but her husband Uriah would not sleep with her, would not dishonor his fellow soldiers by enjoying his wife while they risked their lives and bled on the battlefield. David's lust for Bathsheba led him to kill Uriah by sending him back to war, close to the fighting.

I have always admired Uriah—he carried the papers that prescribed his death without knowing it. God could've spared him. Just because he was close to the worst part of the fighting didn't necessarily mean that an arrow would pierce him, but it did. David married Bathsheba after their child died; years later, she would give birth to Solomon, who would become king.

A crooked path. God could've chosen another of David's many sons to succeed him, one not born from a woman with such a history, but he didn't. Solomon would become known as the "wisest man who ever to lived."

The third person who captures my imagination every time I read about her is Queen Vashti. She's a very minor character in the Bible, but her actions would result in allowing a young Jewish woman to ascend the throne as Queen of Persia. Vashti only has a couple of verses devoted to her; her husband, King Ahasuerus, was having a feast with all of the powerful men in his kingdom, while Vashti was having a banquet for the women.

After about three days of drinking, King Ahasuerus called for Vashti to come and appear before the men, so they could look at her. But, she refused. There is no hint at her reasons, but I've always imagined that she didn't wish for her beauty, her body, to be exploited for the enjoyment of drunken men. She lost her position as queen. King Ahasuerus searched his kingdom for a replacement—Esther, who concealed her Jewish identity until it became important to save her people from the machinations of a man named Haman who hated them and wanted them killed.

The book of Esther centers around the establishment of the Jewish holiday of Purim, and a person has to admire Esther's courage when she decides to appear before the king without being summoned, an action that was supposed to result in the person's death. Before she goes in to the King, to plead for the life of her people, she says: "If I perish, I perish."

I could never identify with Esther, whose reputed beauty gave her the opportunity to be queen.

I admired Vashti—the woman who refused to be defined by her body.

These stories are love stories I've grown up memorizing and studying. These are the stories I read in my Bible when the minister was rambling at the podium. Sometimes, I wonder how my mother reads these stories: if she admires Vashti, too, or if she identifies more with Naomi instead of Ruth?

If I wanted to sum up my feelings for my mother in a single moment, this is it: when I was little, my mother stayed at home. She would cook in the kitchen, clean, read to me; sometimes, in the afternoon, we would curl up on the couch together and we would nap. My mother was also an avid sewer. She made all of my clothes for the first several years of my life until I got made fun of at school for having a zipper in the back of my pants.

"Girls' pants are supposed to zip in the back or on the side," she'd said, but after that, we went to the store to buy me things.

But, when I close my eyes, I still have this image in my mind, and sometimes, when I close them tight enough, my stomach tingles as though I'm there again, still fresh, still clean, still without the baggage of years lived and choices made.

My mother had a quilting rack she put up in the living room. The frame was as big as a small sofa, and the fabric created a beige canopy for me to play under. I would sit under the quilting rack, small enough for the quilt above me to serve as a tent, the sunlight coming in through the living room windows.

The soft prick of the needle and the hush of the thread: the elegant designs above me of leaves and blossoms, the rhythm of another quiet afternoon at home with my mother.

She is a presence in my memory, not even the same person that she is now, but an abstraction for security and comfort, a body to be close to. Wherever you go, I will go.

The older I get, the more I look like my mother. We already sound alike; how many times did people call the house and say to me, "Marsha?" Even my father would confuse us on the phone; I could even hold a conversation with some people several sentences long before they realized who I was. Her mannerisms come out more and more—or am I just more conscious of them?

Maybe they are my mannerisms that spilled out when I was inside of her, a little of my genetic design washing into the shared fluids. Some days, looking in the mirror, it is hard to ignore the resemblance: the darkness around the eyes, the same rounded cheeks, the shape of my neck, nervous babbling when a room is too quiet, laughing to ease tensions, the way the jaw tightens in anger. One day (if I live long enough) will I suddenly have the craving for a husband with calloused hands?

My mother took fertility drugs in order to have me. This could be why I was a breech baby, three weeks too early.

I've always heard the story about what an "easy" baby I was, quiet, not hard to get to sleep—a child who never argued, just did what I was told. My brother was the difficult one.

For a while after his death, I strived to fill the void he left. I wanted to give my parents the church wedding, the grandchild, the "normal" family life they probably dreamed about and talked about while they were dating and giving each other goose bumps with coy smiles. I wanted to be the child they should've had; I felt the pressure of "lost" years. I would be the child who succeeded, who made a life on her own, who could live several states away and be self-sufficient.

But, that's not what happened. The story I'm not going to tell you changed all of that. The nights I stayed awake, the tears that I cried, the anguish I felt at finding myself uncertain of my own body—I knew, after ten years of trying to constantly please everyone, it was time to be "reborn." I needed to breathe.

The story I won't tell you, the one with Beth and me, the one I could tell you if "proper" English allowed for double negatives and could be bent and shaped, but I have only these words. That story is about negative capability. Perhaps my love of God belongs in that space, too.

For all of my dislike of what it felt like to sit in church, in those itchy uncomfortable nylons and heels, dressed in my "Sunday best," listening to a minister tell me that I wasn't good enough, no matter how hard I tried, I still remember the taste of that baptismal water. I still find myself on my knees. There are moments when I picture myself as Ruth; would I have stayed with Naomi?

The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want.

Standing in the hot desert sun, I see a woman in her late twenties at the crossroads. Her old life has died, and she must make a decision, go forward into an uncertain life, follow her heart and her love for this woman. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures. Does God know that I try? Do my prayers at night do more to comfort me than they do to actually reach a celestial Creator who looks down and sees only an abomination? The young woman reaches out and touches Naomi's shoulder, or is it Beth's? He leadeth me beside the still waters. It might not be either, but it is the body of a woman who feels strangely like home.

There was a moment when my brother tried to kill himself, the first time in 1987, when he says that he cried out to God. He restoreth my soul. He says he unconsciously turned off the car and began to walk out of the boarded up garage—he was listening to Christian music on the car tape; ironically, these were songs, one of them especially, that talked directly about suicide and never feeling alone. The last thing he remembers was calling out, "Lord," then he hit the cement floor.

But why hadn't God interceded sooner? When my brother was feeling sick and alone and in the pain he so often tried to describe? Why did God allow Uriah, Bathsheba's husband to die in battle? Why did her son with the King who killed him eventually inherit the throne of Israel?

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death.

My mother tells the story of how in 1994, she was sitting at her desk, and suddenly felt the need to pray for my brother. In the quiet of her office, she clasped her hands and bowed her head. She prayed that he would find the peace he was desperately seeking. It was mid-morning. I will fear no evil: for thou art with me. It was three hours after my brother, slumped in his white Dodge Shadow, was already dead.

But I still pray. Thy rod and thy staff they comfort me. I know there are Christian people who look at my life, at how I perform in my body, and call me a sinner, something ugly, something unworthy to feel God's love. Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies. I know there are people who understand my heart, who share my desires, who see my love of God as hypocrisy, as just an "opiate for a deluded mind," who probably look at me and say: "well, she was raised that way." But I still pray. Not because my church tells me to, or to please my parents, or because I was raised that way—it would be easier not to.

People will tell you that loving someone of the same sex is not a choice—"who would chose that kind of anguish, to willingly put themselves through the harassment and fear"—but they still follow their heart; it's a matter of love. I still pray. I pray to a God who might not hear me.

My cup runneth over.

The Future Daydream

2008-09-04T20:17:00.003-05:00

When I was a little girl, at recess, I would go to the rusty swings and kick myself back and forth. Not the “high” swinging joy of the other children. Just a couple of kicks to keep me swaying. The swings made a distinctive whiny screech, melodic, haunting. From my childhood home, you could hear those old chains scream loudly, almost echo throughout the nearby neighborhoods.

At recess, I used to keep to the edges of the playground. I was a solitary child at school. I watched the other children with a kind of fascination and awe. I felt apart from them. My participation in my school girl years was voyeuristic. I did not flip upside down on the bars. I did not climb to the top of the monkey bars and gossip with the other girls. I did not play Dodgeball. Some days, I did. Most days, I kept to myself, or else had conversations with the teacher. Children my age seemed concerned with things I did not care about. And, so, I would sit in the grass, or on the swings, and entertain thoughts with more depth than I probably ever have since.

On those swings, I used to project myself into the future. I imagined myself ten years older hearing the screechy whine and imagined myself remembering myself as a child. The future adult would look back on the child with a sense of sadness and nostalgia. It was my present self in communication with the future self. I knew that after ten years past, and if I heard those swings, I would remember that very moment again. A strange coded communication between me and who I would become.

I am much older now than ten years. In fact, I am now, at least, twenty years older than the school girl who dangled her legs from those swings. In my imagined future life, I was pretty with long brown hair, a slender body, perpetually youthful, the kind of woman people wanted to know and talk with and be around—that kind of simple, easy beauty some women have. I smiled a lot. I think I was married with a couple of children, but I don’t know if my fantasy provided as much detail as that. I am remembering an imagined memory from over twenty years ago.

I wonder what the child would think of this adult. I teach, now, for a living. I spend most of my days talking in front of people. I can breeze into a room of strangers, and generally, leave with just as many friends. I am comfortable stepping over the careful perimeter I used to keep as a child. I still watch. I am still an observer, but I have learned how to navigate in that “other” world. In my heart of hearts, I still believe that I am a listener, someone as willing to listen as speak. There are few things I enjoy more than delving into someone else’s thoughts, hearing all of the person's stories.

Even though I do the very thing I used to dread as a child (speak in front of people everyday), I will always be that painfully shy child who kept watch from the shadows.

When I go back to my parents’ house, I sometimes hear those swings, and in a flash, I am eight years old again, feeling the weight of years yet to live, wanting to move forward in time to be the woman I imagined myself capable of. Perhaps who I am now would disappoint that child. Maybe I am closer to that child now than I was ten years ago. We will never sit down and have a conversation, compare notes.

But, sometimes, in the quiet, when you close your eyes and listen to the rush of tires through rain, you can hear the echo of who you used to be, through the clutter of adulthood and all of its white noise.

These days, at 34, I have stopped rushing myself through time. It is enough now to listen to the cry of swing sets and appreciate this specific moment I have been given.

So Few Words

2008-08-05T19:15:00.001-05:00

Everyone called him “Red,” even though he had been bald since his early twenties. The nickname was from when he was a young man with flaming red hair, and it would be with him until the day he died in the nursing home, alone, in a bed with a stiff mattress and the thinnest sheets.

I had not visited my grandfather in the nursing home for months before he died. The last time I saw him was when I went with my mother on a Sunday afternoon and stood quietly in the shadows, trying to choke down the tears I know he saw. He was 90. I was 26.

What a horrible feeling that must have been for him--to see a grandchild grieving him while he was still alive. Worse yet, my mother always said that I was his favorite, as much as a grandfather of fourteen can have favorites.

When I was a child, and he was more vital, he rarely spoke to me. Oh, there were the silly teasings and jokes. Maybe even a few tickles and smiles. But, I never had a conversation with my grandfather. I don’t ever recall being in the same room with him alone. How could I have been his favorite?

I have Scottish blood on both my mother’s and father’s side. Through my grandfather came the Scottish blood. My mother’s mother provided the Irish, only a couple of generations away from the boat.

Oral “Red” Moor had been a bit of a dandy when he was young. He liked nice clothes, always wore the finest hats. And, yet, he had been a sharecropper most of his life—probably spending most of his days in the dust of fields and cool of his own sweat.

He was a man of few words. But, he loved card games, and I grew up hearing about his prowess as though legend. The moments when he would make risky bids without looking at his cards. The way he could seemingly always win any game he played. Euchre and chess were his fortes.

I only played chess with him once. I forget how old I was, well into my teens, but I know that he had already begun to stiffen with age and the early stages of Parkinson’s. I wanted to beat him. My entire life I had heard how he was unbeatable, formidable.

It was not a fair match. I watched him feebly move the pieces. I knew that my victory would be hollow. It is even more heart-breaking in retrospect. I bragged at the time. What a shallow thing to do, really. He only sat there with a small smile on his face, staring at the board, not saying a word. He spoke so few. But, those eyes of his said so much. I wish I could’ve played him when we were both at our strongest. I will never be able to.

When I was little, I was fascinated by sticks. I always tried to find the coolest switches from our bushes. I used crooked twigs from the tall maples as swords and lightsabers. He must have quietly taken note.

I could not have been more than five when he gave me my cherished stick, something he spent nights working on in the shop in his basement. He glued two different pieces of wood together and sanded them down until they were smooth enough for a young girl’s hands. It was thick at one end and tapered down into a blunted tip.

At the time, I had found it a disappointment. A stick? My present was a stick? Of course, with time, the stick and I became as inseparable as my baseball cap and thick black leather belt. I loved that stick until years and years later when it finally broke off at the tip and splintered.

I don’t think I ever really thanked him for it. A self-centered child. A wasted opportunity that this adult wishes she had not squandered.

What would I give now for one small chance to sit down across from this quiet man and ask him questions about his life. How much of him is a part of me? What would he tell me now that I am in my mid-30s?

Red was a man of so few words. I wish I would’ve listened more to the ones I had the privilege to have heard.

Never Saying Never

2008-07-21T04:26:00.003-05:00

When the U-haul pulled out of my driveway in Nevada, Iowa eight years ago, I swore that I would never go to graduate school again or live in Iowa again. I had completed my first Master of Arts degree at Iowa State University, and as the gravel popped and crackled under our tires, I could not even muster a tear.

It wasn’t that I disliked Iowa. I definitely loved the people. But, my two year stay in Nevada had felt a little isolated and lonely. I had lived alone with my little guinea pig Herbie, and living in Iowa had felt a bit like wearing a tight, itchy wool sweater that was a size too small.

Never again.

I have always been pretty free with the use of “never.” I like to tempt Fate. I am not superstitious. I like to cross under ladders, open umbrellas in the house, and bend down to pet those menacing black cats that wander across my path—even if they do scratch sometimes.

Now, I find myself writing this with another Master’s degree and living in Iowa again. I moved here with a friend because I was in love—as good of a reason as any, but you know in your gut when things aren’t “right.” After a year of living here on my own again, though, I cannot still say that moving here was a “mistake.” I have met some of the most amazing people of my life here in Iowa. I would not trade one second of the time I’ve spent with each person I’ve met while living here, even if it would mean forgoing the hardships and restless, sleepless nights.

Dare I say, now faced with the reality of leaving, I almost never want to leave? Looking around my apartment, things are already beginning to look empty, barren. Bookshelves have been cleared. Boxes are beginning to stack. I never thought I would find myself so sad to leave.

I will carry my experiences in my heart when I move, pack away the memories, and come back for frequent visits. Something about Iowa seems to get into a person’s bloodstream. Maybe it’s the easy smiles that strangers offer. Maybe it’s the inherent goodness and integrity so many Iowans exude in their handshakes and warm words. It’s a little hard not to feel “at home” here.

My moving is motivated by many reasons—one of the biggest is location. As the only surviving child, I feel the burden of the distance from my family. I will be much closer in Indiana. Close enough to drive there in a weekend; far enough to know they will never visit on their own. Ideal.

I never thought leaving Iowa would be this hard. More than just a few tears have already been shed, but then, I’ve always been a crier. Just ask those who know me best.

It is the time to go, though, or else the job opportunity would not have come so easily.

In the end, I guess I’ve learned my lesson. I always do learn best from my mistakes. I have learned to never say never again and to look forward to the next time I find myself living in Iowa.

In No Apparent Distress

2008-07-12T15:25:00.003-05:00

You hustle through the grocery store. People around you are inspecting apples, eyeing which tomato will be the best buy. You hear the conversations of two older farmers who have clearly known each other for years. They stand side by side, arms folded, toothpicks wet and splintery.

A young man and a young woman flirt with each other behind the meat counter—each wearing a white uniform, apron, and paper hat. They do their best to care which steak an elderly woman is pointing to. When the girl bends over to get into the case, the boy walks past and his smile widens. You cannot see what happened, but the twinkle in the girl’s eye and small blush speak volumes.

You scurry down the soup aisle, unsure what you are hungry for, trying to sort through your craving to know what will fulfill you best. A young woman pushes a cart full of two sticky-faced children while another little girl straggles behind. They are all snacking on graham crackers that the woman has not paid for yet, and given the weary look in her eyes, she will likely forget. You offer her a small smile, but returning the smile proves to be too much effort.

You wander down the cereal aisle—Cheerios, Corn Pops, oatmeal—nothing entices you. Your quick walk slows to a stroll.

An elderly couple stop and study the labels on the various bran cereals.

“Five dollars for cereal?” the man says, scratches his forehead.

“I’ll just make some Johnny Cake. We can eat that,” the woman replies.

She puts the cereal box back on the shelf and takes the man’s hand. They continue puttering down the aisle in silence.

You begin to think you can live with being hungry. After a while, you get used to the feeling. You have eaten food you weren’t craving before, and while it fills you up, it doesn’t quite have that mouth-watering taste that satisfies.

You pass a teenage boy on your way to the cookie aisle. He grabs a bag of chocolate chip.

You stand in front of the Double Stuff Oreos. Have you found what you were looking for? You don’t normally eat Double Stuff Oreos. In fact, you had told yourself you would probably never eat them again—preferring the taste of Ginger Snaps.

You don’t want to pick up that blue and pink bag too fast. You picture yourself back in your apartment, slowly peeling open the wrapper, hearing the cookies shuffle against the plastic container. You don’t want to rush the experience. Each cookie has to be fully tasted and savored.

Should you buy them? Once you buy them, you will want to eat them all in one setting, but you know you shouldn’t, that you can’t.

Your fingers hover above the bag. They itch. Desire pulses through each tip.

Will you walk on? In your mind, you have already eaten each cookie, the gooey, gritty filling.

A young woman with long blonde hair, a stunning caramel tan, the body every woman would love to have rushes by you. You are still standing in the cloud of her sweet lilac perfume before you realize she grabbed a bag of Double Stuff Oreos. They must not be for her. She wears tight jeans and a halter top—no room for the luxury of cookies. She makes you feel frumpy, too pale, not fashionable enough—who are you to be buying these Oreos?

You recoil your hand. Sigh. You decide to go home, still hungry.

And, when you get home, you do a hundred sit-ups, ride your exercise bike. After a good sweat and long bath, you sit on the couch and smile.

You will buy those Oreos tomorrow.