Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better. –Albert Einstein
The Sun Rose Again Today
The sun rose again today. In its light I watch as birds arrive and share our feeder. Three sparrows and a blue jay. Later, a cardinal settles on the right. He takes a bite then brings his color to other streets and zones. There is enough seed and light for all.
A goldfinch, his spring color hidden in February, appears. More birds land as the week continues. They join the blended beauty of my integrated neighborhood.
The sun rose again today. May the earth it touches warm hearts and open sleepy eyes to see the ways of the earth. May there be light, color, and seed for all nature’s humans as well.
“Children learn more from what you are, than what you teach.” –W.E.B. Du Bois
The Night of Delirium
A high fever told me I needed to rearrange the drawers in my dresser because the outside colors were wrong. My dresser was ordinary beige. Then, I needed to bring the dresser to school. The fever also decided I had to take the number one million and make it tangible before second-period math the next day. My darkened room gave me no answers; I went downstairs to ask my dad what to do.
I churned my arms as I spoke. One, two, three. Seventy six, seventy seven…lost my place, start over…My mother’s footsteps magnified the rhythm of my count.
“The aspirin. It should be in this cabinet,” she said. “No, this closet. Found it.”
“What is it?” I asked. Enough times to prove planet Earth and I had little in common.
“Aspirin. You are burning up. Listen to me for once.”
“I have to take the numbers one to a million and bring them to school tomorrow,” I repeated. My behavior set Mom into a panic.
Dad saved the moment and spoke to my delirium. “I’m good at math and at fixing things. Tell you what. I will take care of your dresser and put that million together for you. All you need to do is take the aspirin.”
I descended from planet-dangerously-high-temperature madness long enough to swallow the tablets. Then my father carried me to bed. Strangely, I remembered the insanity of the night the next morning. My fever had gone down enough for me to enter the real world again. Even if school wasn’t a possibility until after a round of antibiotics.
The year was 1963. I was a junior in high school. I could never thank my dad enough for that moment. I still do.
Meet your child where they are. That’s what I learned. It may take some guts and imagination.
Thanks again, Dad. I’m waving upstairs. Beyond the ceiling and roof. “If you didn’t make it to the top of the clouds, no one else has a chance.”
When we are children we welcome thinking of the future. This innocence leaves us free to enjoy ourselves as few adults can. The day we fret about the future is the day we leave our childhood behind. Patrick Rothfuss
Nope, No Wedding Yet
The rocky ground at the bottom of the street of my grade school home became my mini-mountain, perfect for climbing. It was hidden behind enough trees to be its own paradise, a place for a kid to climb and become king of the world. When I was nine years old I saw nothing peculiar about a strawberry-blond girl king.
The great play arena eventually disappeared as developers plowed through. But in the mid 1950’s Joe and I claimed the world. He was my self-proclaimed boyfriend. In fourth grade I hadn’t graduated from paper dolls and mud pies, so the notion of a white veil followed by a life in the kitchen sounded as appealing as living with a perpetual mop. I was allergic to homework, much less life responsibilities. Imagination was more appealing.
Joe wasn’t like the other guys in my class. We played as equals. I knew his family wasn’t tidy. I didn’t care. Joe didn’t need the meaner boys around him to be okay. He wasn’t the tallest and certainly not the most popular kid. Mom had never met him. That alone was good enough for me. Outside, Joe and I could always be free. From homework or chores. From real life. We challenged an open space where the air moved freely around our imaginations. And the blue sky was on our side.
“Hey,” he said one day. I saw a kind of shy smile in his brown eyes that didn’t match the same dirty blue jeans he wore all the time, and he planted a kiss right smack on my lips.
I thought, oh yuck, but didn’t want to hurt his feelings. Joe wore a kindness that transcended grime. You had to face foreign lands on a fun rock to see past the classroom to understand Joe. We never talked about school stuff. Only the next jaunt into places we created.
“I’ve got a special surprise for you since your birthday is coming up,” he said. “Come to my house.”
We cut through two yards and landed on his street in something like three eyeblinks.
“Hey, Mom!” he called. “Where’s the engagement ring I found? I am going to give it to Mary Therese.”
Mary Therese! My at-school name. I groaned. Oh no. Formal talk. Sounded like a nun. Not me. I’d never hit anyone with a ruler in my life. And I would be off balance with a rosary that big at my waist. A wedding would spoil that lifestyle but neither wife nor sisterhood sounded appealing. And call me Terry, my at-home name.
How could I say something about how I thought girls had to at least have boobs before marriage without sounding personal? Joe’s mom wasn’t mine. The question would need to wait.
“Oh Joe, I’m sorry,” his mother said, not sounding sorry at all. “That ring got accidentally flushed down the toilet.”
Joe groaned. Now that I didn’t need to worry about a commitment, gratitude filled every cell of my tiny being. Who needs a ten-year engagement? Or worse, a lost recess for a wedding ceremony? Yet somehow Joe quickly recovered.
Our relationship ended long before puberty. As time passed, I hoped Joe found someone. Later. Much later. Long after the septic system absorbed my first engagement ring. I always wondered whether it had been born in a box of Cracker Jacks or found on a west-side sidewalk.
At least now if someone asks if I ever broke someone’s heart I can say, “No. The ordinary toilet took care of that for me.”
Anne Frank’s words: “I don’t think of all the misery, but of all the beauty that still remains.” Her voice was forever silenced. Yet, her heart rings true in this oh-so-similar era.
Hope. Insight. Peace. They grow inside seeds that don’t recognize their worth when planted. Small, invisible in a world where power and greed rule. May buds of integrity bloom, then refuse to die.
ICED WINDOWS, FROSTED VISION, revisited To appreciate the beauty of a snowflake, it is necessary to stand out in the cold. Aristotle White sky and ground blend into a seamless horizon of gray where snow-encased branches rise as part of both threat and beauty. Darkness and slick roads threaten travelers. Glistening ponds and crystal trees tempt artists and treat the spirit.
I kick off my boots, let them dry inside a warm house, and allow my toes to find feeling again. Then I embrace bitter and sweet for as long as each experience lasts, in order to live inside the fullness of each moment.
“There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.” ― Albert Einstein
Kim’s Secret
“Aren’t you tired of ho-ho-ho songs by now?” Dana said, nodding toward the radio on the back counter.
Kim shrugged. Sure “Frosty the Snowman” earned freezer burn by December 23, but Phil’s “Silent Night” could calm a hurricane. She wanted to picture him playing guitar before his first round of chemo. She saw him in his red plaid flannel shirt and khaki pants that didn’t match, his leg muscles strong from jogging, and his dark hair three weeks late for a trim. When Phil plucked a string it answered with a celestial ring, even on his nephew’s student guitar. Phil’s upbeat attitude never fell out of rhythm, no matter how he felt.
What a family he has, Kim thought. And they accepted her the first time she met them, with all her quirks, something Kim never understood. Her mother died when she was two. And the only memory she had of her father came with a belt buckle flung across her back. However, she never saw the belt or her father again after the ambulance came and got her. Just the inside of three foster homes, the last an okay shelter, a good place only because Phil lived two doors away.
Tess, Phil’s mother, always said, “Look for the miracle, Kim.” Even through the worst of Phil’s illnesses.”
“How can you still believe in such things?” Kim would ask.
“You’re here, aren’t you?” Tess answered.
The IV room printer made demands that slowed Dana’s whining and took the edge off Kim’s worry about Phil’s cancer surgery, scheduled at ten, after five years of remission. She sighed. The doctor said the tumor was larger than the first or the second recurrences. She had told no one. In fact, she told no one about anything in her private life, even insignificant details. Fortunately, Phil was in another hospital. She regretted insisting that no one call her at work. Ever. She wondered if even hermits needed to take a breath out of their caves now and then. Her heart beat over time.
“Hey, who was that hunk I saw you with in the cafeteria last week?” Dana asked.
Kim gasped. Hunk? Phil weighed less than she did after all his chemo. His baseball cap fit as if he were a child wearing his father’s hat.
“A friend.” My fiancé someday, maybe. Tess may believe in divine intervention, but … She drilled an unblinking stare into Dana’s eyes. “Is there some reason you need to know?’
“Well, I …”
“Well, we’re running low on 5ml syringes. Should I get anything else before I scrub again?”
“No, but you don’t need to get so testy. I only asked.”
Kim kept her head down as she pushed a cart through the pharmacy’s IV supply aisle.
Dana said little the rest of the day, but the sweet Christmas songs lost their flavor.
Kim had known Phil for ten years, since seventh grade when they played basketball in his driveway. She beat him. Before his growth spurt. Tess gave her a basketball for Christmas. Phil wrapped it with leftover Christmas wrap in haphazard, clumsy patches. Then he presented it with a mock flourish as if it were a work of art. Even Phil’s dad, usually serious, couldn’t stifle a laugh.
Kim knew she had found a home, even if it wasn’t official.
As she got into her car at the end of her shift, she called Tess to get Phil’s room number.
“Oh, Kim, I wish you had let me call you at work.” Tess cried. “I almost did anyway.”
But the connection was so poor in the employee parking garage that Kim couldn’t catch her tone.
“What room is he in? I can barely hear you,” Kim shouted until she discovered at least that much. “Tell me the rest when I get there.”
When she arrived, Kim walked behind two men headed for the elevator.
“I know I’m only on first-year rotation, but I was in the OR. I saw everything,” one man said.
“But I saw the tumor on the scan, less than a week ago, not the first one he’s had either. Things don’t happen this way. You checked his labs?”
“Double-checked.”
“And they just closed him back up again?”
“Yes.”
Kim paled. No, it couldn’t be. But the second man said something about the first tumor appearing when the patient turned thirteen. This could not be some peculiar coincidence. They were talking about Phil.
When she got to his closed door, Tess opened it the instant Kim knocked.
“I should have called you anyway, whether you wanted me to or not.”
Kim hurried to Phil’s bed. He opened his eyes for a moment, then closed them again. “Sorry, sweetie, too many drugs, but the miracle lady’s got news for you,” he whispered.
Tess made a mock swing toward Phil, then laughed. “I understand the confusion in the OR was unprecedented. When they cut Phil open, the tumor wasn’t there. As in disappeared. Gone. Ended up sewing him back up again. He may be released tomorrow.”
“But, how?” Kim asked.
“Doesn’t matter,” Phil said, his voice weak, but clear.
“I’m confused.”
“What matters is that neither one of us gives up. What do you think? Big bash or small chapel wedding?”
Kim hesitated. Carolers began singing at the other end of the hallway. As they passed Phil’s door their harmony reached a crescendo, then settled into a gentle sweetness that faded into the opposite wing.
“Simple ceremony and celebration, lots of family,” she answered. “All I ask is that you be there.”
She caught Tess’s smile and grinned back. What more could she want than Christmas in a family made of miracles?
“Hey! This-thing-that-tells-us-who-called, went blank,” I call to my husband. “I unplugged it and plugged it back in and it didn’t work.”
“Your dad put that up for us years ago. I’m surprised it lasted this long.”
“Then I guess it’s lived a good life.”
And I realize I’ve been thinking about my father a lot lately. When I was in high school I had a high fever and he carried me to bed. As an adult, I wrote a song for him and he avoided listening to it. And I never understood why. I remember him in the nursing home. I watched him say goodbye to this world and hello to my mother. She was his world. How could someone so primary to my existence be such an enigma?
The entry below I published in 2011. It fits again today in a peculiar way.
Peace to all–as you are now and as you are in your memories.
Friday, December 16, 2011
Whenever you think or you believe or you know, you’re a lot of other people: but the moment you feel, you’re nobody-but-yourself. ( E.E. Cummings)
Last year, during this season, the unheated hall upstairs was filled with painted glass and I was afraid it would freeze and crack. It didn’t. But some of the lovely, easy permanent paint-on-glass pens I bought were not so permanent. My paint didn’t make it through washing. I suspect that love isn’t that fragile; it doesn’t dissolve in the dishwasher.
This year I painted only a few items. One project may or may not get completed, late. It looked like I struggled through the job. My design went down the kitchen drain–too much on my mind this year. It showed. I would love to be the kind of person who can remain distant from the hurts of the people who are important in my life. I don’t succeed at that ploy. Perhaps if I did, I would become someone else.
I watched my father struggle.
“You don’t have to visit if you have a lot to do,” he said a day or so before he went to the hospital, and I was glad that I told him that I would always find time to see him. First things need to come first.
Now, buying becomes secondary, a lost opportunity. No credit cards. I am allergic to carrying a lot of cash. Gift-giving will be light this year. Maybe that baking I hoped to do really will happen. If not, it is all okay. Somehow. Perhaps, in this last week the final opportunities will appear. If not, Christmas lights don’t have to be strung in neat primary colors or brilliant white. They can appear when the right word or person appears at the right time. Right now, I attend to my father.
Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it. (Mark Twain)
Joy to the World” rose dulcimer sweet and holiday warm from my car radio as I pulled into the church parking lot last December 23. The song’s bright spirit irritated me. It reminded me of the heat in my ‘85 Buick—hell-fire hot on high or dead cold on any other setting. Turning off the ignition eliminated the carol, but it didn’t solve my problem.
So why was I going to a Christmas program, advertised as experiential, in a grumpy mood? A place where joyous carols were inevitable? I could convince myself that I was here because some random sign recommended the evening: Be in St. Patrick’s lot at seven. A bus will take you to the program from there. Location will not be announced. This is a definite don’t-miss! But my reason was less noble. I had refused to go with Jack and Tara to the airport to pick up my mother. My mother’s plane arrived at seven—I wanted to be almost anywhere else. This sign was the first thing I saw on my escape route.
Tara had brought a white poinsettia for Grandma Paisley. With her own money. I don’t know where my fifth-grade daughter found such fondness for the old witch. It’s not like Grandma gave her any more than an obligatory birthday gift now and then, usually the wrong color and the wrong size—from the double-mark-down, non-returnable rack.
Tara hadn’t even seen her grandma in two years. Mother moved to Florida in November on a whim. She didn’t even say goodbye. She just packed a suitcase and moved into an old friend’s apartment in case she decided to move back. She stayed for six months but didn’t pay rent—the friend evicted her. So much for Mother’s friends. I’m not certain where she went after that.
I couldn’t understand Jack’s enthusiasm for Mother’s visit either. He had been so supportive of me when I went into counseling, so depressed I grew dehydrated by crying. Not literally, but it felt that way.
The counselor was only minimally helpful, too confrontational. She had the audacity to suggest that I intentionally put on weight to hide my obvious resemblance to my mother. Yes, we both have eyes the color of weak coffee, slender noses, and square chins.
However, I’ve never been drunk in my life. And you can be certain Tara didn’t learn profanity from me. Any resemblance is skin-deep. That monotone-professional-doc-distance that the therapist used made me even more angry.
“Anna,” Jack said sighing. “Paisley has been sober for five weeks now.”
“So, you say. She also told you she’s vegetarian,” I said, shuddering because Jack said my name with disdain, yet referred to his mother-in-law by her first name. “She’ll take one look at our Christmas turkey and call us a bunch of carnivores. Then she’ll spread wheat germ into my cookie dough as if she were disinfecting it.”
“But nothing like that has happened yet.”
“Right. The key word is yet. Have you ever heard Mother say one kind word to me? And has she asked to say one word to me?”
“Compliments aren’t her way,” he answered.
***
I locked my old Buick and zipped the keys in my purse, I felt betrayed. Tara was barely ten years old. She didn’t know any better. But where had Jack’s support gone? I knew—to the airport to bring home a woman destined to destroy the happiest season of the year.
I was the last person in line to get on the bus.
“Not much of a turn-out for a production that’s supposed to be so incredible,” I mumbled.
“Oh, people are busy and over-committed this time of year,” the young, pregnant girl in front of me said. She had thin, stringy hair, washed, yet hastily combed, so it dried in haphazard clumps. She wore a faded wool coat that was the same shade of sweet potato orange as her hair. Two oversized buttons connected with their buttonholes at her neck and across her chest. Successive buttons and buttonholes grew farther and farther apart, exposing bib overalls over a belly ripe for birth.
I decided she couldn’t possibly be married. “Too bad you couldn’t bring your husband with you tonight,” I said, with only the barest tinge of regret.
“Oh, but he is here,” she said revealing a mouthful of crooked teeth. “He’s driving the bus.”
Two green, bulging trash bags lay on the seat behind the driver. She dropped them next to her husband, in the space between the driver’s seat and the window. He turned around and grinned. I guessed him to be part Mexican, a good ten years older than the girl. He had long, straight, dark hair that looked even straighter jutting out from a tight, brown knit hat. I wasn’t impressed with him either.
The girl motioned for me to get into the seat first.
“My name’s Marilyn. What’s yours?” she asked.
“Anna Barnes,” I answered. I didn’t really want to tell her, but “none of your business” contains three more syllables. I looked out at the pale flurries swirling in the darkness as if I really cared about them.
“We have an Ann in our famil…,” she said.
“That’s nice,” I said as free of affect as I could.
“I’m sorry you need to be so angry,” she said.
“What makes you think I’m angry?” I turned to face her.
“It’s thick around you, dipped-in-concrete thick.”
“If I were angry, could it be any business of yours?”
“Oh, we’ve had to forgive lots of folks who don’t understand the birth of this child. Haven’t we, José?”
José nodded and I felt emotionally naked and stupid in front of these bizarre strangers, despite the fact that my views were probably identical to the views of the forgiven.
“Nice lofty thought,” I said. “But some people deserve to be kept at a distance.”
“Maybe,” she said. “But keeping them off saps my energy. Besides, this baby is due any day now! He’s my first and I have no idea how long my labor is going to be.”
By now we were thirty miles east of the city, cornfield country. José turned down a narrow, unpaved road. The loose rocks made it difficult to drive with any speed. About one-half mile down, he stopped the bus at a farmhouse. One light shone from what was probably the living room. Silently he got out of the bus, walked to the door, and knocked. No one answered, he knocked again. The light in the house went out. José climbed back on the bus.
“We’ll try farther up the road,” he said to Marilyn.
He started the bus again and drove ten more minutes until we came to another house. He got out again and knocked. A man came to the door. Gesturing and pointing, he said something to José we couldn’t hear. José smiled as he re-entered the bus.
“Maybe not what we’re looking for, but this is it,” he said to Marilyn. Then he took the green trash bags to the back of the bus. Most of the people in the bus looked puzzled as the men and women in the last three rows reached into the first bag. Inside were angel costumes, white robes with gossamer wings attached. The angels sang as they pulled the robes over flannel shirts and faded blue jeans, “Silent night, holy night. All is calm. All is bright…”
Their voices blended a Capella—bass, alto, and tenor—with simple, unpretentious strength. A man opened the second bag and brought out shepherd costumes. He passed them out to anyone who would take one, then stood carrying a lantern. Outside the bus he lit the lantern while the angels continued to sing, “Oh, holy night. The stars are brightly shining…”
José took Marilyn’s arm and led her behind the house to a barn.
The people inside the bus followed.
The man with the lantern opened the door of the barn as Marilyn and José went inside. “In those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus,” he began, loud and clear without help from a microphone.
There were no chairs, but I didn’t feel like sitting anyway.
The singers directed us to join them in “The First Noel.” I don’t have much of a voice, but even I couldn’t disobey angels.
Marilyn looked at me and smiled. Somehow, from center stage she didn’t look like an ignorant young girl to me anymore. She was smiling into my soul as if she could see all the concrete-angry ugliness I cherished. Yet she chose to care for me anyway. I wasn’t ready to accept or give that kind of love yet. But I was willing to learn—difficult visitor at my house this Christmas or not.
Merry Christmas
The illustration was made from a public domain image, color paper, and a piece of an old Christmas card.
terrypetersen 