Cori Connors

YES, I AM STILL ALIVE (I think)

2011-10-19T14:46:00.003-06:00

My friend Bob emailed the other day and indicated he was tired of looking at that deflated inner tube on my blog. So I got on Blogspot and caught myself up on a few peoples' blogs (yay) and noticed that mine hadn't been updated in 5 months. I guess I overdose on blogging during Lent and sort of fall off the face of the bloggoplanet afterwards. Not unusual for me, historically. I diet, and then very passionately don't. I exercise and then very passionately don't. Clean, then don't. Organize then don't. The don'ts, sadly, weigh heavy in the equation.

A lot has happened since I blogged last. And to be sure it should not be interpreted that the things that have happened mean less because I did not record them. That's one of the worries about recording our histories. People will think that the things recorded were most important and that's not always the case.

Anyway, since I have something like 14 minutes to record the last 5 months in my life I will leave it to pictures to tell the biggest headline of the last 5 months.

THIS girl and THIS boy...

...Made THIS...

..after enduring THIS...

AND this...

(This is an "after" shot)

Calvin Roy Merrill was born July 22, 2011.

He stole our hearts...

...and owns them still!

(Calvin...grab your cool shades and join your Connors family cousins!)

WOTD-TUBE

2011-05-17T01:48:00.000-06:00

Fourteen.

Baby fat melted off; skin like soft creamy caramel cooked under the slow steady heat of a long lazy summer, the kind of summer you don’t get after you are sixteen and old enough to hold down a summer job. Shirt tail tied in a knot at the belly button; training bra outgrown, replaced by one with real-woman hooks in the back; short shorts slung low around her widening hips. Straight blonde hair pulled back off her neck, the soles of her turquoise blue flip flops worn almost through at the balls of her feet and in the curve of the heel. Legs freshly shaved, smoothed over with Coppertone.

Yeah…fourteen.

1972.

They slung the withered truck tire tubes over the handlebars of their bikes, flung one leg over the back and pumped the pedals from a standing position on thick steeled single speed cruisers. When they finally got the bike chains warm and rolling, they planted their bottoms on the soft wide seats as they streamed along the side of the back roads to the gas station out by the canal. There, around back by the water hose, they took turns bending over their wimpy black ringlets, pressing the air pump lip to lip with the metal thingy on the tubes. The boys knew the official names for these things. The girls didn’t. Still don’t.

The lifeless rubber rings breathed in the air, woke to their purpose, stood at attention all firm and round. The kids laid their bikes on the grassy spot by the road and rolled the inflated tubes to the bridge. One by one they slid down the embankment, following the worn path where the grassy outgrowth gave way. One of them stood in the water holding the tube for the other while she balanced on the waters edge, her hands grasping the long grass, letting go when she thought her bottom was situated over the hole in the tube. Then, one hand wrapped in a clump of long green whistle grass, she held the other tube for her friend. The boys did the same from the other side of the water. They floated down the whispering canal, bums nestled in the center of their tubes, dipping in and out of the frigid water…floated under the branches of large farm trees, through the shifting shadows of billowing Idaho clouds sailing through a deep blue Idaho sky, her summer tanned feet dangling in the water. Occasionally she flicked them, casually, splashing light filled droplets onto the golden brown skin stretched across the back of that boy… flirting with her toes, holding her hand in the water to twirl the tube, laying her head back, feeling the sun pulsing on her cheeks, her pony tail swishing behind her in the cool meandering water. That’s how it was done in Idaho.

She never tubed in Pennsylvania. The rivers she crossed were wide and restless, undisciplined, rocky and sooty, the residual flow of coal and slag and chemicals from the steel mills swirled and swished. The water there was too high or too fast, at least the waters she knew. They had no secret spots there in the east, though I’m sure they were there somewhere. There were no cousins in Pennsylvania to lead her to them; not even one.

Fourteen.

The summer of the first real crush, the heartbreak of driving away and knowing he would be thousands of miles out of sight and she would be two thousand miles out of mind. The air felt different in Idaho, the dry hot evenings crisped with the chill of an Idaho wind on an Idaho night, the wet mist of the massive sprinklers out on Tuckers farm floating all the way over to the Rowberry’s trampoline. Goosebumps rising in the spray, then falling nearly as fast with the warm night air. Crickets and toads along the ditch bank, huddled in the rows of irrigation water, hissing in crescendo through the dark starry night, their music ebbing and flowing, rising and falling, like young love pulsing through the blood of a fourteen year old.

Fourteen.

Right there on the soft round edge of the steps, the ones that came down from heaven. She took them slowly at first, when she was little. But lately she was speeding up, interested in what was down there at the bottom. Now she stood there, on step fourteen, her toes hanging over, the weight of her body rocking back and forth between child and woman.

Fourteen.

Heartsick and homesick as the old station wagon pulled into the driveway of her house on the hill; far…far…far from Idaho…there where the crabapple bloomed so massively pink in the spring, where the leaves of autumn laid thick and wet under her feet as she walked to school; where the summer-night air was heavy and mulchy and sweet; where flickering fireflies still left her charmed.

WHEW

2011-04-25T19:29:00.003-06:00

Well, after a blessedly peaceful, beautiful, love filled (if not a little hectic) Easter I find myself back to the grind of daily living. We are creating a study in another room of the house - a place I can keep as messy as I want and nobody has to see it from our front door! (My idea). Dave can use the front study. So I'm taking the old TV/Play room, which Anna calls the "Drawing Room" because that's where the round coffee table and little kid chairs are...along with the crayons and paper and coloring books. I've been going through mountains of papers trying to make the best of the new space and clean out the old. New beginnings are exciting and taxing.
I'm grateful and a little sad to be done with my Lenten writing experience. Excited to have a couple more hours a day to do things like sort through mountains of papers. Sad, I guess, that I will let things like sorting through papers (sorry to overuse that phrase...it's just the truth of the moment) take precedence.
In an attempt to review what I may have gained spiritually from this exercise, I have come up with a few ideas. Rounding them out to 10, here they are:
What I've Learned this Year from my Creative Writing Exercise During Lent:

1. I can make myself do things I don't feel like doing. This should transfer to other areas of my life, don't you think?

2. Everything...seriously, just about everything...can be twisted according to perspective. The way we view things, experiences, people, emotions, values, religion, philosophy; is altered and is alterable by our perspective. Mood, timing, past experience and even hunger change the way we view things. I considered at one point doing 40 days writing on one word. One can find a myriad of ways to drive thoughts around one single word. What I learned from this, in the spiritual sense, is that I must be part of a living religion, allowing myself to be altered by the spirit in meaningful ways, while at the same time being cautious that my own faulty reasoning doesn't take me off track. Stepping back, shifting to the right or left, slowing down, even stopping - these are all useful tools in changing perspective. Sometimes a change in perspective puts us behind a column in the theatre of life and blocks our view. Other times it opens things right up. I've learned to always ask for the Spirit of the Lord to be with me when I risk changing perspective.

3. There is such a thing as too much information. I think I over wrote this year. Too many words. I too easily followed my train of thought, which sort of goes along with my messy study. I let myself drift a little bit too easily. I need to be aware of my tendencies and correct my course for the sake of the final outcome.(in the study AND my writing. :)

4. Honesty matters. Not everything is sweet. Nor should
it be. On the other hand, some things are especially sweet and should be celebrated as such. It seems like we've sacrificed too much these days, worrying about being cheesy. What is - is. And that should speak for itself. When you expose yourself publicly in the vulnerable hours of the day (when I tend to write) what you get, from me at least, is candor. That has to be ok.

5. We must be still. But we must not be lazy. In order to get to the deeper places I learned to be still physically, and extra active mentally, allowing myself to push past easy and into strenuous but uncontrived. It's a delicate balance and we don't get good at it until we try.

6. Some things take a long time. Their worth is not always in the final product. Not every thing is worth keeping, or sharing, but that does not mean it's time wasted.

7. There are sometimes big stories and important messages in little things. Finding them is worth repeated effort.

8. I shouldn't judge myself by others' comments - for good or for bad. I wanted people to like what I had to say. More than I should. It took quite a while and a bit of sorry self-centered conversation with the people closest to me to finally let go and allow people to not necessarily like, or even care about, what I had to say. For some reason I had very few comments this time around. It played games with my head and heart. It probably took thirty days of Lent sacrifice for me to let go of caring about that. I was glad Lent was longer than 30 days so I could come to that conclusion.

9. I have a bottomless pile of memories. And you probably do too, if you'd allow yourself to fall into them through the rabbit hole in the back of your head. One silly word is a good way to start.

10. God plays a big role in my life. This exercise was not intended to be anything but a writing exercise. I had no other intent. I could not have been so candidly honest otherwise. But in looking back I see that my faith in a higher power, whom I call God, and whose son is named Jesus Christ and Jehovah, has a central place in my thoughts and history. By writing every day on words that were not religious by nature, I notice that faith is a part of my center whether I shout it to the crowds or whisper it to myself. If you are a believer, it will show without you trying to make it show. Trust me on this one.

OK, so now I've looked back and breathe a sigh from all the way down in my diaphragm.

If you have read this far, you may have read some of my other over-written pieces this year and perhaps for the last three years. They are all here in this blog. Can I ask you a favor? (I realize I am probably at this point talking to Libby and maybe a couple of my kids...oh, and my friend Kristen) If I were to collect a few of the best pieces from my Lent Writing, what would a few of them be for you? I'm thinking of making a small collection for my bookshelf and decided that printing them all takes too much paper. If you remember any off the top of your head please leave them in the comment section or email them to me (cori@coriconnors.com). Don't go re-reading. You can also scrawl through titles and see if any of them struck you as meaningful. Even if you recall just the subject matter, that would help, then I'll find the post.
(So there-what you think DOES matter to me)
Thanks.
Again.
Cori

WOTD 44- CATALOG

2011-04-24T02:01:00.004-06:00

Agony is essential. Get to a certain age, and there is no getting around it. There must be somewhere some degree of agony. It’s a relative term, but like they told me when I wondered how I would know if I was in labor: “You’ll know it when you need to know it.”

Our friend and neighbor, Cindy Simpson, died two weeks ago. She knew agony. She battled cancer for seventeen years. In the end she was not herself. I thought it a strange blessing that she suffered visibly in the end, because I surmised it would make it easier for Floyd to let her go, knowing she would be free of her pain. I don’t know if it’s true. I do know they suffered together.

Lib and I stepped softly over the threshold of their house in the last weeks of her life, and in the days after she was gone. We hugged their kids, spoke lovingly to Floyd, tried to walk the razor thin balance beam of emotion at such a time as this; holding our arms out and balancing between the deep sullenness of compassion, respect and reverence and the refreshing lightness of good humor.

"We’re praying for you,” we always said. And we meant it. We say that a lot, I’ve noticed; we Christians.

Years ago, when I became intimate with agony for a spell; when I was very ill, bedridden and unsure of my future, I slept quite a lot. My nerves, exposed because the myelin sheaths insulating them had been stripped, screamed against each other so loudly that sleep was a mode of relief from the shouting. I felt my body fighting for energy, and rest was a sort of refueling for the fight. After the worst of it was over and I was able to sit in a recliner while my nerves slowly re-grew, I spent weeks drifting in and out of sleep. Friends and family visited, bringing so many beautiful emotions with them, and such love and tenderness. They too repeated those words to me, “We are praying for you.”

One afternoon I awoke from a restful sleep and had a vivid recollection of a dream. Short, and peaceful, it was unlike my regular dreams. There was a stillness to it, which I thought must have been what made me feel so rested when I awoke. I can’t recall all the details of the dream, except this:

I was standing in a room facing a wall. The wall was filled, floor to ceiling, with small drawers. The drawers looked very much like the card catalog file in the Pleasant Hills Library. A man stood beside me, calm and gentle natured, helping me find the drawer with my name on it. His finger traced the letters of the alphabet as he scanned the massive collection of boxes until he got to a certain one. He then curled his finger into the hooked drawer pull and out slid the narrow box, long and heavy. He looked at me, implying I should look with him. There, on the front of the drawer was my name, and in the drawer were hundreds, maybe thousands of thick paper files attached to a small iron rod at the bottom of the drawer. I don’t remember him speaking any words, but I do remember his eyes talking. Where he looked, I looked. He stood beside me, one hand holding the heavy weight of the drawer, while I flipped through the cards stacked in the drawer. One by one I read them.

Names.

Maybe dates. Maybe more. I don’t recall. But there were for sure names; and I knew most of them.

And I loved them, too. There, in letters pressed into cards of paper, were the names of people I loved, repeating in random order.

Afton H.: Mother.

David C.: Husband.

Sharon…Susan…John…George…Ann Marie…Elizabeth – all my brothers and sisters and their families.

John M.: Son
Sarah… Katherine... Ann...: Daughters.
Extended family, friends, acquaintances, neighbors, and some names I did not know. Even the name of my estranged father.

My eyes turned from the card catalog file and looked into the eyes of the stranger.

Again, I don’t recall him using words, but there was an exchange of understanding, and there was a point as I gazed into those luminous brown eyes and then back at the drawer when I suddenly knew what this drawer held. I understood in an instant that this drawer full of names held a record of people who had prayed for me. Supplications to the heavens for …for… me. It overwhelms me still.

I remember feeling, as I awoke, a profound fullness, a pulsing thickness in my neck and shoulders, a shiver down my arms and a quiver in my bones. I close my eyes and feel it again. It stirs me still.

Looking forward at looking back, I saw before me the love of people in my life who trusted the power of God, even if they did not understand it. There was no indication in those card catalog files what form the prayers took; whether they were spoken softly at the side of a bed, or in the silence of the temple, or publicly from a pulpit; if my name was given to heaven’s charge silently from behind the wheel of a car or in the last waking moments when the head is cradled in the softness of a pillow. It must not have mattered where or how, but it did matter that they were addressed correctly, sent to the proper source. Some guardian of prayers must have been assigned to keep record: My personal divine record. This has changed the way I pray.

A few weeks ago I went to the Farmington Library to get some books on disc for our drive to Mexico. In the back were four small computers holding stacks of information that would surely exceed the capacity of a card catalog file. I suppose that kind of paper information storage is obsolete these days. Perhaps the angels in charge of our dreams take us back to our childhood so we can understand what is being told to us in our unconscious life experience.

All I know is that for some unknown length of time I was standing before a wooden set of drawers with brass fronts; my name typed in bold print on a slip of paper inserted in the slot. And standing beside me, helping me find what I needed, was not our ancient rose-water scented Pleasant Hills Librarian, Mrs. Hubbs, whose well spent bosoms hung gently over the thin belt imbedded in her waist. It was instead a strong, healthy, gentle looking man with tenderness in his eyes, the corners of whose lips raised almost imperceptibly as he pulled the drawer forward and showed to me the first name ever printed on the first card in my drawer of prayers.

On this blessed day, Easter Sunday, let the final words of my Lenten sacrifice be the first who spoke my name; whispered in supplication before my spirit took flesh. He who knew what would come of me, who knew what would come of all of us, offered his own prayer for my soul as He did for yours; there in the shadows of a garden, His hands clenched in supplication, His knees pressed to the ground, His blood oozing from His holy flesh. He pressed His name into every card in that wall of drawers, first in every box; calling to the Heavens for our sakes. No other name comes before it.

He is the first.

And the last.

Jesus Christ: Savior.

WOTD 43- CROWD

2011-04-22T19:47:00.005-06:00

The air was dense with sweat and spices and heat, dust rising like incense smoke. As his leathered feet throbbed against the old skin of the earth it swirled around his ankles and was shaken away, swept clean in the walking by the blue-fringed hem of his robe. Blue fringe, dancing its holy dance; a token of covenant and reminder of his birthright and his blessed appointment with fate. He had come home, across the water to the place where they knew his name. They had heard of the drowning swine, of the cleansing. Jairus, who had left the synagogue and wept at his daughter’s deathbed, had found him and fallen at his feet, imploring him to come.

News of his coming drew a crowd. Jairus brought him credibility. Soon the narrow passages of the town were steaming with the curious, the faithful, and the infirmed. They pressed against him as he walked, layered themselves like mud along the shores of the sea. He moved with haste, pulled along by the grieving father and his family, but the crowd pressed harder and thicker around him.

She heard he would come. She had washed herself and dressed, wiped the blood and anointed herself with oil. She rose from her kneeling, covered her head, and opened the door to the crowded street. Skimming along the edges of the buildings, working her way toward the hub of the crowd, she followed the chanting and the aura that rose above it. Weak with loss and with shame, she could not keep up. Renewed by some spirit, some force from her center, she pressed on nonetheless. Every eye was focused, even hers. Pushed by the throng she fell to the earth, pressing her eyelids tight against the dust. When she opened them, helpless and hopeless, she saw that he had turned. She felt him turn toward her, and yet she could not rise. Reaching, stretching, bleeding, she found the fringe laughing at the foot of his robe. Touched it. And the fountain within her ceased.

He knew he had been touched, that some part of him had been removed that he could not compel, that must only be taken. He felt it go, and she felt it come. She rose and fell again, this time at his still feet; weeping, chanting, clutching her waist and rocking like a childless mother.

“Daughter, thy faith hath made thee whole. Go in peace.”

14^th century Byzantine Mosaic, Istanbul, Turkey

Note: The above painting by Del Parson was altered by someone to include the tzitIzit. In the Old Testament God commands the Jews to weave tassels or fringes (tzitzit) on the corners (kanaf) of their garments. By looking at these tassels, they would be reminded to obey all God’s commands (Num. 15:38-40). These reminders both visual and tactile, were sewn into the hems of shawls or robes of Rabbis and other faithful Jews.

The Bible makes note of these fringed shawls in a number of places. Even today there are many Jews who wear a prayer shawl to obey this command.

This woman, unclean for 12 years, was forbidden to touch other people. (a bleeding person was considered unclean). The fact that she touched the fringe of Jesus' rabbitical robes (a symbol of priesthood power) indicates to me her obedience as well as her faith.
I love this story.

CLICK HERE for and explanation of the symbolism in the fringe (tzitzit) which was commanded to be placed on the four corners of a robe. (Not an endoresment of anything, just FYI)

WOTD 43- LABORATORY

2011-04-22T00:12:00.004-06:00

I had the unfortunate distinction of following my siblings George and Ann Marie in the classrooms of TJ High. Not to mention being the older and less brilliant sister of Libby. Goodness, talk about pressure! The thing that made things troublesome was that Mom had us so close together. We were the second batch of kids. I was so inattentive it did not even occur to me that some of my siblings had different last names than I, which would mean we were technically half-siblings. The first batch, Sherry, Sue and John, were the children of Cy Davis, Mom’s first husband; the one she married at seventeen. He went off to war for four years. Mom said when he came back they were both different people. I can’t imagine having a big horrendous war hovering over a marriage for four years and not ending up being different people. After their divorce Mom either fell for Dad or made him fall for her and she had four more children in five years: George, Ann Marie, me and then Libby.

I got this all the time: “Oh, you’re the sister of George or Ann Marie Hansen? I expect an A from you!” Their voices would rise in that smug teasing sort of way, like they thought they were giving me a compliment for belonging to a genius family. If Mom had given herself a half dozen years to rest before she had me, the teachers might have forgotten my brilliant brother and sister.

Alas.

George gets a big kick out of repeating a story about a faculty room conversation where the Chemistry teacher reportedly commented that he had the smartest student he’d ever had and the not-smartest student he’d ever had from the same family. Don’t you think that’s kind of a rude story to be repeating? Seriously.

Anyway, I have learned to live with it. I don’t hate myself. I know I hear different drums. I am not wholly uncomfortable being around brilliant people. I married one after all.

My genius brother, who I might add has his own flaws which I will not mention here, is one of those rare breeds who can understand complicated things on paper, but can also translate them into every day layman’s terms. He is as much right brained as he is left. Good logic; and strong creativity. He was artistic and ingenious as a kid. His favorite toys: the erector set, the chemistry set, plaster of paris and gauze, wax, and a set of paints and brushes. He plays mandolin and guitar very sweetly and has a lovely baritone voice. Well, let me recant that last phrase…he occasionally has a lovely baritone voice. Sometimes it is booming and over enthusiastic, usually followed by a rolling belly laugh and a witty little phrase or disclaimer like a curly Q at the end.

George is a chemical engineer. He practiced for this his whole life. Ask my mom. When he grew up he was torn between becoming a Geologist or a Chemical Engineer. Lib tells about being in Brother Bissel's Geology class at BYU. He read the roster the first day of class, last names first. When he got to Hansen, Elizabeth, he looked up from his paper, lowered the glasses to his nose and searched for her raised hand.

“You related to George Hansen?”

Lib nodded her head. He looked her over, took note of her sable colored hair, just like George’s, lifted his glasses back up to the top of his head, made a mark on his paper and said:

“You get an A.”

My brother George created this process by which he coats fabric fibers with nickel. Something like that. It’s a really cool thing, especially if you are into that kind of stuff. He worked for a large corporation in Colorado and then moved to Utah. He and Cyndy built a beautiful home up in Midway, gathered enough volcanic pot rock to cover the whole of their house themselves…one rock at a time. They both know and love the earth. Both are hard workers. Good solid people.

George rented a large warehouse in North Salt Lake and set up his Laboratory so he could produce nickel coated fibers. I drove Mom down I15 one afternoon to see what he was up to. What we saw was straight out of a Jerry Lewis film. Long church banquet tables lined the length of the warehouse, zig zagging like a crossword puzzle in this large high topped structure. George’s booming voice echoed his excitement to see us.

“Come on in!” he said, opening the glass door. He had two or three fellas working for him at the time, one in a lab coat, one in the front office crunching numbers or elements from the Periodic table or something like that. George called out to someone to turn off the gas for a sec while he showed us through. Nickel Carbonyl is highly poisonous. We would later almost lose my brother when there was a leak in that lab and he went back in to turn off the valve so the city would not be contaminated. They had to fly in an antidote from England to save him. He is the only living person on the earth to have survived Nickel Carbonyl poisoning, so I am told. He has a perpetual headache. I think it’s the nickel. But I am not…I repeat NOT… a chemist, remember.

Walking behind him in his place that day felt like someone got the chemistry lab and the Home Ec lab mixed up, like they ran out of stuff to use in Heslop’s AP Chemistry classroom so they borrowed some things from the Home Economics room. Atop the layout of long banquet tables were various crock pots, fry pans, teapots, and Bunson Burners under Mason jars with foil wrapped around the tops, an eternal roller coaster of tubes connecting them. You could see vapor rising; fluids flowing through the snakes of tubing between the various small appliances. Some mechanisms were behind glass shields, others hissed in the open air. We followed the tubes like we were in a game of Chutes and Ladders, ending up at the end, looking at a spool of thin threads the color of graphite.

“All this… for that?” I thought. But that’s not what I said.

“Amazing!” is what I said. And I was right to say that.

A few years later George sold the rights to his process to the world’s largest nickel company (something like that) and he took his family over to Wales for a year to oversee the building of a large factory which would officially manufacture those coated fibers.

Fast forward a bunch of years; a bunch of joyfulness and some piercing agony, and we are suddenly at today. His company, Conductive Composites, is his own. No more warehouse in North Salt Lake. He has his own official lab in Midway. This week I understand they are closing on a large piece of property on the banks of the Green River in Central Utah. They will build a much larger lab there. One with official machines designed just for them. They have in place contracts with entities I am not permitted to mention here. There are defenses and technological advances that are incorporating his genius in their upcoming products; things that will protect and prevent disasters we average people haven't thought about. It all has to do with how electricity travels or doesn’t travel. Like I said…it’s beyond me.

By the end of the year George will be addressed as Dr. Hansen, as will his son Nathan. They will wear those thick heavy royal robes and flick the tassels on their caps and hang gilded diplomas on their office walls. But I can tell you that this did not begin like chemistry teachers like to think genius begins. Nope. It began on the living room floor, with a set of gears and some wooden rods. It was poured down the kitchen sink, after which Mom had to unscrew that thingy and remove the gooseneck, cleaning out all that melted wax plugging things up. It bubbled over on her kitchen stove, and then again on the old church banquet tables in his first official lab.

Here’s to the mothers of Geniuses, and their blessed tolerance. And here’s to the Brains themselves; for making things happen in un-ordained places and in unorthodox ways. If we all waited for the perfect tools to make our magic,…well, where would the magic be?

Today, when I was wiping down the kitchen counter after browning the meat for dinner, I watched the steam rise from the little release valve in our rice cooker.

Made me think of George.
Always does.

WOTD 42- GUITAR

2011-04-21T03:28:00.001-06:00

Some words are too large. Simple six letter words, too massive to describe well; too important in undefined ways. I have pondered what other small words have meant to me; words like mom and family and faith. I’ve allowed those words to hover over me while I examined them, the way I watch hummingbirds near the glass bulb feeder filled with red sugar water on Grams back porch. I have held very still and examined such things. But I am surprised by this word: guitar. It is so familiar, so every-day in my life and in our house. And yet I have not yet stilled myself in a purposeful way to focus on what this one thing has done in my life.

Christmas morning, 1971. I cannot recall all that was nested under the fragrant blue spruce arranged with beads and lights and tin icicles on the thin slatted wooden floors of our living room. Somehow Mom always seemed to find enough to make that moment magical, and, even if it was purchased on credit, there was abundant treasure to be found on Christmas morning. At thirteen I was no longer the girl who wanted Chatty Cathy or and Easy Bake Oven. And yet we had not discovered what it was that my maturing spirit wanted to grasp onto; what gifts or interest or talents were bubbling inside the cocoon of adolescence. So I suppose Mom guessed; and on that blessed holy morning I found under the tree a golden hued Yamaha guitar, cradled in its open case, angled to reflect the colored lights strung around the tree. Bright golden wound bass strings and virgin translucent nylon treble threads stretched from the bridge to the headstock. An exact replica sat nearby, with Libby’s name attached. We sat cross legged on the floor, holding them the way we had seen our brother do with his electric one. We muted the strings with our left hands and slapped the fingertips of our right hands back and forth across the strings, closing our eyes and pretending to be rock stars, our heads banging to some undefined beat, my unbrushed Christmas morning mop of hair flopping back and forth. The poor thing must not have known what hit it when my teenage hands took hold.

It was nearly a year before I actually tried to play it. Mr. Cameron had come to Pleasant Hills Middle School when I entered 8th grade. His office was in the back of the choir room. I can’t recall if he was a band teacher or an assistant choir teacher. He was a slight man, though sturdy enough. Young, with hip clothes and short cropped curly brown hair. When the school newspaper came out in September there was a notice that Mr. Cameron was starting a Guitar Club after school. My best friend Betsy, who sang with me in Mini Singers and also had a Yamaha guitar, tugged my arm when the sign up sheet came around in choir. On Tuesday’s and Thursdays Lib and I trekked up Old Clairton Road and down the steep driveway to school, our midi coats flapping against our calves as we walked, the black shapely cases of our instruments making us feel much more cool than we ever were. We sat three or four seats apart from each other on the multi-layered choir risers, our cases open at our feet, our guitars nestled against our budding breasts, our lengthening awkward arms stretching around their curved bodies. We willed our fingers to follow the patterns he taught us. Commanded our picking hands to do their thing. It reminded me very much of that trick where you pat your head and rub your tummy at the same time. Some people could not do it. But I could.

I could! I found that my left hand and my right hand could obey different sets of orders. I learned rather quickly what shapes to make my fingers take against the fret board; where to place my thumb on the back of the neck. I learned to make the fingers on my right hand dance in complicated patterns near the sound hole. Pivotal in all of this was the fact that Betsy learned at a similar pace, probably faster than me. We sat in the choir room long after the others left. We spent Friday nights at each other’s houses, learning tunes from Betsy’s Simon and Garfunkel album. We began going to school early, pulling the cold and heavy front doors of the school out into the dark early morning air, making our way down dimly lit empty halls to Mr. Cameron’s office. There in the tiny office about the size of mu upstairs laundry room he gifted us with Blackbird, and Stairway to Heaven; Dust in the Wind and If You Could Read My Mind and American Pie. Taught us to pluck our strings cleanly and succinctly. Showed us how to love the music in the way he played his own instrument. Betsy started calling him by his first name, Denny, when we jammed together. I just couldn’t. By the end of 8th grade, when we left the familiar space of the Middle School and entered the halls of Thomas Jefferson High School, I had learned basically everything I now know about guitar. There was no guitar club at TJ. No guitar class, and no Mr. Cameron.

Wherever you are, Mr. Dennis Cameron, I hope that the angels you brought to me are watching over you. Thank you. So much of my self definition involves what you gave me, unpaid, and likely underappreciated at the time. All teachers who give such gifts to their students…thank you!

I wrote my first song on that Yamaha guitar under the stairwell next to our apartment on East Bruceton road. “I Love You Mama”. I sang it, hesitantly, quivering with fear of rejection, for my mom on Mothers Day that year I was 15. She must have approved enough for me to want to try again. I wrote my second song in the same place, tucked there under the steps where someone stored their bike. The acoustics in a stairwell are fabulous. I have always had a need to compose in complete privacy. I sang so softly no one would hear me outside the thick firewall doors, and I kept one ear always open to the sound of a door opening in the ten stories above me. Then I would stop abruptly, nearly stop breathing as well, until the person had exited. My second song, Nativity, was a Christmas gift for Mom that year as well. That old Yamaha must have felt a sense of completeness when it was played on Christmas morning. My most recent composition, commissioned for the Clytie Adams Ballet School recital, actually uses the same chord pattern as that particular song written all those years ago.

There are many, many words that want to fill this space, telling about the places I have played, my first love songs; performances and late night rendezvous with my faithful wooden friend. She gave me voice, not just from within my throat but from the pit of my stomach and the inner chambers of my heart.

She took the anguish of my young girl life and let it swirl around inside, then spit it out of the sound hole and into the universe. She allowed herself to be held by that stunningly beautiful dark haired man who met me in the lobby of the dorms at Slippery Rock College. We took turns playing for each other, allowing the exchange of songs to fill the awkward space of flirting. We sat, just he and I and one guitar, until just before the sun rose. The next summer we both played that guitar for the people we love most in the world, all gathered around us, the layers of white lace in my dress cradling her like a cloud, the frothy net of my veil laying softly over her shoulder as we sang to each other, “I’ll walk in the rain by your side….” I found lullabies in her, and stories that came out in rhyme and meter with lilting melodies. My friend Merlyn found the harmonies from within her chords.

One year, when my third baby was newborn, David gifted me with a treasure beyond treasures. A 1953 Martin OOO18. Steel strings, with wood that had vibrated long enough to make her sing exceptionally well. David had recruited the help of my gifted guitarist brother, John. He found the perfect instrument in Boise and secretly snuck it down to Dave for our anniversary. It was my first beloved steel string acoustic. Like a child, I held her against my chest, feeling her heartbeat, aligning my breathing patterns with hers. Songs were born from her, songs incubated like chicks waiting to hatch, carefully plucked out and refined in my quiet places where only my guitar could hear as I stirred the simmering songs: The Builder, Heavenly Choirs, You Would Have Loved This, The Old Singer Sewing Machine, Pontiac Rocket. Songs of that place where I had first held a guitar: Sleepy Little Town and Is It Snowing Tonight. Like a faithful and tired grandmother, my old Yamaha found rest in her hard black case. Never to be sold or given away, though she has been lent to virgin hands occasionally. It was that old Martin that carried me up the stairs to the next level, who allowed me to stand before a microphone and risk my heart. That old Martin allowed herself to be used and abused by a young boy’s curious hands. She gave release to my boy, the sound of her drifting up to me as I laid in my bed at night. Later she released the magnificent voice of my Kate, easing the way with the safety of chords plucked from her strings. Sarah and annie, both gifted on the piano, also learned the basics on that old Martin.

I acquired new guitars from my gifted friend El McMeen; a massively lovely jumbo bodied Franklin, custom made of beautiful Koa wood. My shoulder struggled to fit around her large body and ended up with calcium deposits. So El took it back and sent instead a sweet little Collings that I use to this day. I found other songs in her: One Small Boy and Broken and Memoria and so many others. John also found my happy and dependable Taylor guitar for me. There are different songs in different guitars. I must remind myself of that. I love them all, my children made of wood and steel and bone.

I must make my way down to the basement and dig out that beautiful, faithful old Yamaha and see what songs she has been saving for me. I must find her, and free her from her tightly hinged case. Give her some air, and some light, and some space. Give her a fresh new set of strings and a reverential rendition of Blackbird for old time’s sake. Then maybe she will warm her wood, free the sweetly silent notes from her strings, and embrace me once again.

WOTD 41- NORMAL

2011-04-20T02:16:00.001-06:00

I saw her once, stepping off the curb outside a department store in New York: Normal. She hailed a cab in a simple, pleasant, flowing sort of way. One stopped immediately in front of her, the fella stepping from behind the wheel and opening the door for her. I’m pretty sure it was her. I’d heard about her for years, since I was just a kid playing on the playground at Pleasant Hills Elementary School. Everyone there tried to be like her. I couldn’t figure out exactly what they were talking about, so I started paying attention, keeping an eye on the billboards lining Route 51 all the way into town. I pretty much saw everyone in those ads trying to look like her, but I was never really sure if any of those small-waisted, straight toothed, long lashed women were Normal herself. People generally don’t wear name tags around in public. What I ended up doing was taking the things that were similar in all those ads and making a composite in my head of what Normal looked like. So that day in New York, when we were having to go to dinner with some Law Firm humpty-whumps and I could not suck my tummy in far enough to feel adequate, I felt pretty sure that gal just about to get into a cab was either Normal herself or her twin sister. I thought about her all night. Totally ruined the delicate flavor of that Veal Piccatta I had ordered. I reprimanded myself through each bite, denying the poor girl in the mirrored walls the pleasure of cream and butter and white wine, telling her Normal would never indulge like that if she could not suck her tummy in. She would have smiled her brilliant white smile and ordered a green salad with vinegar. I ate it anyway. But I could not embrace it.

My best friend Cheryl decided that Normal was her new best friend when we were in sixth grade. She got some lipstick samples from her aunt who sold Avon and we tried them on in her bedroom one Saturday. We stood in front of the mirror and smacked our lips together like she said Normal would and I thought we looked really silly. But Cheryl liked it. Pretty soon her cheeks turned all pink and her eyelids bright blue and the boys started to make circles around her in the lunch room and that was that.

Later, when we were in High School, I started to feel more at home with the anti-Normal bunch. I wore football jerseys and my old Levi 501’s and a pair of hand beaded moccasins bought at the Fort Hall Indian reservation on the way home from Idaho one year. I wore my hair straight. No make-up. No nail polish. The closest I got to the pro-Normal girls was an occasional ribbon in my hair, flowing down the back in a semi-feminine sort of fashion. When the soles wore out on my moccasins I layered duct tape on the bottoms, extending their life by months if not years.

Every once in a while I flirted with the idea of Normal. Tried curling my hair, or dressing in something matching. Tried catching the occasional wave of confidence that wafted through my unstructured abnormal life, allowing me to stand in a circle of kids and think anything I had to say might be worth hearing. There were seasons when that confidence was healthy and vibrant. My whole eighth grade school existence was on Team Normal, but I think that was in large part because I was in the Mini-Singers ensemble choir and Mrs. Tucci allowed Betsy Gerson and me to sit in the hall and play Gordon Lightfoot songs on our Yamaha guitars. This was the early 1970’s. This was cool.

Cool was short-lived. Pretty soon I convinced myself that cool was too much like Normal and I would never be like her so it was not likely I could sustain the coolness. Instead I made myself responsible. Even though that was a show as well. When my classmates selected people to fit in arbitrary categories they did not select me as best smile or most likely to succeed. They voted me most dependable. This is not normal for high school.

You’d think a girl of the 1970’s would be quite comfortable not hanging out with Normal-ites. It was after all the age of free spirits, free love, people marching to all sorts of off-beat drummers. But I could never be that kind of ab-Normal or Normal; not with the back of my ears still wet from the waters of baptism. They never dried out, the divine water constantly trickling down my neck, reminding me I was designed to be peculiar. I could not hang with Normal, but I didn’t fit in with Funky either.

When I got grown up and thought I had comfortably found my place in line, a bit to the left of Normal, I realized that Normal was not exactly what I thought she had been all those years. She began to age, and the wrinkles that soften the tight brow of super models found their way to her and to me. She hated them. But I didn’t mind. I’d learned through the years to live with flaws. I didn’t mind them so much now. I don’t even try to suck in my tummy now. We are quite a ways past that. Now I think that I have the charge to be a missionary for diversity. I don’t so much keep my peripheral vision on the lookout for Normal passing by, worried that others will see us both and start comparing. Instead I push myself through the typical, hoping if I kick hard enough I will push through the thick jelly of average and pierce the membrane, rising up into fresh blue sky of individuality, my mouth wide open gulping in the freshness. Normal can’t kick like that. She had super high heels on, and tight skinny jeans, and she just can’t kick like she’ll need too to get free.

So in the end, it doesn’t matter if that gal getting into the cab those years ago was actually Normal or not. I used to like to say I thought I had seen her. Now I don’t really need to know where she is or what she is up to. This, my friends, is one of the beauties of being over baked and over weight.

It may well have been Normal I saw getting in a cab that day. She sure was beautiful. Not knock-out eye popping gorgeous, just pretty pretty. I salute her, wherever she is, and hope she has a nice ride.

WOTD 40 - UNIT

2011-04-19T00:39:00.000-06:00

When I was 14 years old we moved from the old English Tutor house on Old Clairton Road to the high rise apartments down on East Bruceton. We had lived in that house from 2nd to 8th grade. That’s my perspective. George would see it that we lived there from Jr High through Graduation. Mom might see it as the time between hopeful denial and stark reality. We who lived there knew it as the charming but tumultuous era when Dad was there and not there; when you never knew if he’d come home happy or come home drunk or come home at all.

The walls of that old tutor can tell stories. They hint of Iron City beer and cigarette smoke in the basement going fist to cuffs with the April freshness of laundry soap. Dad sat in the chair in one room watching the Pirates in their hey day while Mom worked in the laundry room right next to it, forcing the cloth of our lives through the repentance process of baptism by water and fire, pulling pieces one by one from the dryer, warm and clean and innocent.

I don’t rightly know why we moved. I think maybe the landlord decided to sell the house we had rented all those years. Ann Marie and Libby would know this. I lived in my own little world. Still do, I guess.

I have a vivid memory of seeing my father for the last time in the parking lot of that apartment building. It followed a hefty argument on our way home from Idaho. He never spent one night with us in that place, just drove away in a cab without ever walking in. But that’s another story.

We four girls; Mom, Ann Marie, Libby and I, did the best we could to pretend nothing had happened. There was plenty of work to do, and school was just starting, so it was natural enough to push the piercing knife of rejection over to the side of my brain and just …just…exist, I guess. We had lots of stuff to deal with, shifting from a large home to a three bedroom apartment. In the week before we left for the west we made the trip from the house up and down the steep hill to the apartments countless times. It reminded me of a bouncy red rubber ball attached to a rubber band, which was attached to a wooden paddle. We bounced back and forth, back and forth- the same distance, the same motion, repeated and repeated. It quickly became obvious things were not going to fit in our apartment and the single storage unit assigned to apartment 101. In the bustle of volunteer hands moving things for us, Mom suggested people just put the stuff no one knew what to do with in empty storage units on alternating floors of the building. The units had simple padlock hinges. The apartments were fairly new, and many were unoccupied, so Mom bought a series of locks for the apartment numbers she knew were not yet occupied and we sort of “borrowed” the units until we got back from Idaho and could figure out what to do.

After we returned from the dry arid summer air to Pittsburgh smog and humidity; after we had hung the curtains and discovered what wanted to be where in the apartment; after Ann Marie had painted her bedroom dresser yellow; Mom needed something that must have been stored in one of those units. In the long search through the various closets, tucked in sections on every other floor, we discovered someone had removed one of the locks and replaced it with a new one. Turns out our cubby full of treasures had gone to Good Will, since the manager did not know to whom they belonged and new tenants were in need of the space. After that Mom negotiated with the manager to use empty units until new tenants moved in. Thus began the occasional Saturday scurry of shifting things between storage units. We’d get word that a certain unit was leased and we had a very short time to empty the storage unit. So we sorted and consolidated, shuffled and discarded. This process repeated until just about everything had to be given away.

In the end what we stored in the one storage unit assigned to our apartment was a couple hundred pounds of hard red winter wheat, a symbol of faith more than anything. It was awfully painful for me to sort through those storage units, not so much because I was a restless teenager who did not want to be sifting through junk on her day off (though there was no doubt a hefty measure of the grumps), but because I found everything to be useful, and desirous, and it was awfully painful for me to agree that something needed to go. It wasn’t until years later and I was standing beside my mother in the garage of her condo here in Utah that I figured out the psychology of letting go. Dave had loaded the old red truck with the dregs of our garage sale; all the left over items; things nobody wanted, even for a measly nickel. He picked up Mom’s old Singer sewing machine, hefted it into the truck bed, and turned to Mom, asking if she was sure she wanted him to take it to DI. She nodded her head, without hesitation, and said:

“Yup, take it. Someone needs it more than I do now.”

And so the truck drove off, up Sweetwater Lane toward Deseret Industries, where I hope someone wonderful bought and cherishes that machine and is currently sewing away all sorts of soft fabric delights for their family.

When I get that old panic, rising up from inside, at the prospect of giving some treasure away, I try to repeat Mom’s words. Like a mantra:

Someone needs that more than I do now.

I know, Dave, you are wondering when I am going to start using that mantra in a meaningful purposeful way! Sorry, Love. :)

WOTD 39- FRENCH

2011-04-17T23:13:00.000-06:00

I wrap my fingers into the edge of the metal handle attached to the wooden door on my Sub-Zero fridge. It requires intentional strength to pull the door open, the air suctioning the cold inside. Finally it gives way and the door swings out, revealing layer on layer of leftovers stacked in Rubbermaid containers, two gallons of 1% milk, a carafe of orange juice and six pounds of butter. We have our priorities around here. I grab three brown eggs from their scooped cradles inside the door, and one of the jugs of milk. With eggs in one hand, and milk in the other, I kick the fridge door shut. I can hear the air sucking inside, like the thing has lungs. I set the milk on the counter and open the maple cupboard door to the right of the sink, lifting a vegetable bowl and pushing some dirty dishes off to the side making room on the counter near the sink. I set the bowl on the cold granite and tap one of the eggs against the stone. I lift the cracked egg with the flow of a conductor raising her baton for the upbeat, stretch my thumb and ring finger away from each other while still gripping the shell. The egg gives way and divides itself. I raise my hand again and let the liquid, all jelly like with a golden orb in the middle, fall into the vegetable bowl. As I repeat the process on the second egg I reach behind me, pulling on the wooden handle of the utensil drawer, and retrieve, without looking, a fork. I whip the eggs in a rolling motion, the yellow-gold swirling into the gelatin white. Soon it is all a frothy pale yellow. I place the bowl next to the sink, lift the gallon of milk over it, and pour a few tablespoons into the whipped eggs. As I continue to whip, my hand reaches into the narrow spice cupboard to the left of the stovetop. A waft of miscellaneous fragrance floats out as my hand reaches in, past the bottles of sage and cinnamon. It comes out victorious, with a bottle of Mexican vanilla. Still whipping, I tip the bottle and allow two drops to fall into the eggs.

At the stove I bend over, way to the bottom roll-out shelf, and pull out the square griddle. As my left hand places the griddle on the burner, the right hand twists the ignition knob. A yellow blue flame leaps out around the edges of the griddle, then settles into a slow steady hiss as the griddle heats up. I dip a knife into the ceramic container of butter, the one we bought in England years ago. The rectangular terra cotta butter box says Original Suffolk Butter Box – for Home or Safari. I slide the chunk of butter from my knife and lift the pan, watching the creamy oil disappear as it slides, singing, over the hot griddle.

Grandma Sycamore bread: soft, white substantial, fiberless and delicious. I pull it from the bread drawer, untwist the tie, and pull out four pieces. Fork in one hand, I dip the bread, a piece at a time, into the egg mixture, shake it two times and then place it on the griddle, one lined up next to the other. I have an instinct about things on the stove. When my cooking angel tells me, I slide the edge of a spatula under one of the pieces and flip it onto the opposite side of the griddle where the butter has turned brown, smells yummy delicious, right there on the edge of burnt. I listen to the egg sizzle for just a moment, then silently heat the mixture infused in the bread until it is slightly firm, the outer skin of the bread looking all golden brown and mottled. I slide the slices onto a plate from the cupboard, spread a generous chunk of butter atop and move it across the landscape of the toast until it looks like a golden swampy earth spot in early spring when the snows have melted. Atop the pond I sprinkle soft, virgin powdered sugar, straight from the bag, the sweetness falling like snow from heavy evergreen branches.

It is early morning, on a test day, and my boy or my girls scurry down the stairs. I bless the food myself, asking the Lord to help them recall what they’ve learned. I pour a cup of juice and set it before them. They inhale the toast and drink the juice down in three swallows; grab their books, call out a “Thanks, Mom”, and (depending on the child) slip over to the stove to give me a hug or a kiss. Then they are off to school.

In the fresh cold silence of my kitchen I find there is just enough egg mixture left in the bottom of the vegetable bowl for maybe one slice for myself. I dip the soft white bread in and slide it around like a dinner roll in the last trails of gravy on a Thanksgiving plate. It’s not quite enough to cover all the bread, but I make it anyway. Sit at the counter by my lonesome and sprinkle powdered sugar on top. Soft, white, sweet and buttery powdered sugar on top of French Toast.

WOTD 38 - BIRD

2011-04-17T00:24:00.001-06:00

There is a day; a morning; a moment: Late in the winter when hope awakens with the rising sun. Our bedroom sits on our lot down near the wooded hollow, filled with ancient scrub oak trees and orphaned miscellany brought to the mulchy space by fierce Farmington east winds. Three purposeful columnar maples shade our windows in the summer, just outside the bay facing the mountains to the east. In the autumn I leave the blinds open all day and all night. The leaves provide privacy and the glorious golden apricot blend of color in those large flat leaves stuns me every time I enter the room by light of day. I close the blinds in the winter when the trees are bare, mostly to protect the private space between our window and our neighbor’s. All winter long the space is somber and silent; until that one morning when the sun has begun to rise earlier, the light of morning pushing through the blinds, appearing like a blank sheet of radiant lined school paper waiting for a story to be written.

I lay in my bed and notice, for the first time each year, the two toned melody of a bird in the trees. One simple song, by a single winged creature somewhere out there in the woody place where leaves have not yet begun to bud. I take note of the day in March, often close to my birthday, opening the spot in my heart where hope is kept.

I keep hope safely tucked in a rather organized cupboard, unusually organized for one like me. It requires certain keys to open the cupboard door; some distinct hard evidence to serve as a trigger to pry it loose. The song of the winged one is the key in the hand of spring, hope of seasons impending. So often I forget to recognize hope for what it is. So often I think it only appears as the elusive quest in our human hearts for things unseen and eternal. I forget that it shimmers in the distant lights across the bay when we are headed to Salt Lake City at night. At dusk, when the waning light confuses the landscape, hope tells me the city is there because it has always been there and cities generally don’t disappear in real life. Hope reassures me my Kate is alive and happy in Houston, and that Annie’s baby is growing in perfectly healthy ways with her belly. And it sings to me in wordless melody that spring is coming. I know that song. Each time I hear it hope throws its roots deeper and deeper into my soil of belief, so that soon hope becomes trust.

Spring is in the offing. My skin can feel the rising sun through the window blinds. The solitary bird is joined by other songs as the days progress; a cacophonous set of harmonies much like the Debussy choral piece we did in high school choir. I leave the window on my side of the bed slightly cracked open throughout the year, inviting fresh crisp air into our space regardless of the temperature. We are sheltered by the architecture of the brick structure, the large bay in the Living Room protecting us from wicked winter winds. Only on the bitterest winter days do I seal that window shut. In the spring the music of the birds echoes off the brick, rises to the Bailey house to the east of us and reflects back at us from there as well, the sound amplified as it travels. By the time summer comes there are flocks of small-beaked creatures nesting in those trees and the sound is so abundant that it awakens me in the early hours, often not too long after I have fallen asleep. There is a first chorus around 5 am. Still dark. Not even the hint of a rising sun. Like monks in a pre-dawn chant they gather their songs and offer them in an Avant-Garde chorus. The song is not long lived, maybe ten minutes, maybe twenty. Then the silence returns until the first rays of sunlight peek over the mountains. Then they sing unceasingly. All the live long day. I recognize their compositions, repeated like eternal musical stutterers. For seventeen years I have bathed in their songs and I do not know who they are. Sort of like all the years of my youth I repeated lyrics to tunes I knew by heart, though I cannot tell you even now who the artist was or the name of the band. I realize as I write this how narrow minded I can be, that I would drink the auditory flavors of three full seasons a year and not even attempt to know from whence the offerings come.

I have just spent the bulk of this Saturday morning searching the internet for the sounds of my hollow. I’m overcome with the ease of access; that I, a completely anonymous searcher, can find recordings of the songbirds outside my window tucked here in the foothills of the Wasatch Mountains. I’m thrilled, and then moved to tears that the songs I know so well have names attached to them. I feel like the pauper who has just discovered the benefactor who has been leaving bread, mysteriously, at my doorway for nearly two decades.

We get so used to the ease of finding things on the internet I forget that someone has spent hours, weeks, months, even years collecting and arranging words and pictures and recordings, then making them available to Mrs. Anonymous. I type a few letters into a search box, click my mouse, and up come my options. This one from the WESTERN SOUNDSCAPE ARCHIVE has given face to the voices I hear every morning, calling me from the softness of my down pillow. Thank you University of Utah J. Willard Marriot Library Digital Collections, for lifting the blinds and swinging wide open the window to my woods, when my own feet are too feeble and my own blurry eyes cannot see through the trees.

I can now recognize the jack-hammer pulse of a northern flicker, followed by the crescendo of his song, the pitch rising in staccato notes then falling again.

The beautiful but brash-throated stellars jay, whose bright blue wings look stunningly brilliant against the crystalline innocence of new born leaves.

Swallows, and titmouse, and sparrows and robins. A whistling warbler, and the doves who make their way down my chimney on a regular basis. They combine to create a chorus I can hardly define but which I know so well. I’m an on-listener at my own bird convention.

And thanks to the Western Soundscape Archive I can now know exactly what to curse on a warm summer afternoon when I am trying to regain some strength through a moment of afternoon repose. Down in the hollow a song repeats, unrelenting, two notes, a third apart. Over and over. I pound my pillow into a new shape, lift my head and turn onto my other hip there on my bed. I cover my ear with another pillow. Still, the shrill notes pierce through. Now that I am educated I can grumble a nasty remark specifically to that black-capped chickadee out there. There’s only so much of two single notes, sung repeatedly, that is appealing to the human ear.

(BTW- in case you didn't already know this; when text is blue in a blog post that usually means you can click on the word and it will take you to a link. The two colored texts above will lead you to sites where bird pictures and sounds can be seen and heard. Click on the "black-capped chickadee" and you'll see the pretty little thing. Then click on "listen" within the link and you'll hear the charming-annoying little thing.)

WOTD 37 - TOILET PAPER (The Truth in an Organic Process)

2011-04-15T20:48:00.001-06:00

Warning. This post contains terms not approved by my mother.

(My friend, a fabulous writer named Kristen Randle, offered a challenge to write about something pivotal in our lives. I decided to write about toilet paper.)

My mom came from that old school; the one where things were not balanced; the kind of school where you might wear a nice Sunday dress with stretched out athletic tube socks and fishing boots. Some things are very earthy and raw; others are more refined.

OK, so I am going to just jump in on this one….

We were never allowed to say the word “pee” when I was growing up. I feel weird writing it. I can name people who will feel icky reading it. We didn’t say pee, and we didn’t say poop, and we didn’t say bum. It was “urine” and “bowel movement” and “butt” (as slang as we were allowed to get, for “buttocks”).

I cannot believe I am actually writing this.

There was no shame in any of this, my mom said. It’s all part of being human, a natural process of the body. But it was private and not all that pleasant and so we were required to use the medical terms, though we have used the term “tinkle” for…well, you know what I mean. And “potty, potty” is used for the other.

Oye Ve! Words can be delicate modes of communication.

We weren’t allowed to say Shut Up either. We got a nice lather of soap on the tongue for that one.

I don’t know how it happened; they didn’t learn it from me; but my kids say pee and poop. Not that it’s the topic of Sunday dinner conversations. They are in the process of raising little children and it’s a fact of life that we use some term to express what’s happening. It must be that the generation after mine just refused to use those medical terms. Little Ruby has decided she is done with diapers. So you can imagine we are talking a lot about this stuff. It is as simple a fact of her little life as eating Cheerios and watching Yo Gaba Gaba. She has taken to putting three or four or five pair of princess panties on at once. The layered look.

So I’ve been with my grandkids a lot lately, which is great. I am tired, though. My head is tired. And my bones. I was standing in the bathroom at John and Ashley’s yesterday, waiting for Ruby to go potty. Tinkle, to be exact. Pee, as she put it. “I go pee!”

She insisted that she had to do more than pee though, and she sat there on the toilet swirling her feet in little circles, humming a little tune, pointing to Mommy’s shampoo and Daddy’s shaving stuff and telling me what it was and to whom it all belonged. I stood there 15 minutes waiting. Tried to lift her off at least half a dozen times but she clamped her legs around the porcelain bowl and screamed bloody murder that she wasn’t done, so I relented. Over and over. It was nap time, and she had been zipped into the tent covering her crib once already. “Potty! Potty!”, she screamed from her room; and since I was on the team designated to help her learn, I went in her room and unzipped the net over her crib that keeps her from climbing out. She stood there in her crib, buck naked, her nose dripping from crying, with a victorious grin on her face. I gathered her clothes, including the dry pull-up she had been wearing when I put her down, and placed them on her changing table. I carried her into the bathroom and set her on the toilet, her little legs straddling that big bowl. Her knees just barely reached the rim. Ruby is only two years old. She is yet young to be doing this.

When Ruby decides something, watch out! So I stood there in front of her in the bathroom. Waiting. Waiting. She had already gone tinkle. As I repeatedly tried to remove her and put her back to bed she dug in her figurative heels deeper and deeper. That little beast that lives behind my right kidney started climbing up my esophagus, ready to burst out with some not so nice verbiage. I thought that monster had been conquered in my “maturity”. I realize now it just has not been beckoned forth by little childish demands. He is alive and well and living in ME! Sad. I have an image to uphold! I am GUMMY! I am thinking it is not good for our grandmother-grandchild relationship to have this much intimate time together, at least not when Gummy has an eternally throbbing headache. I finally pulled her kicking and screaming from the potty, forced her twisting hips to let me put the pull-up back on, and put the closest dirty shirt on her so she wouldn’t freeze. I wrapped her in her blankie, tucked her pale pink elephant “Ellie” in her arm, handed her her Bah-Bah and rocked her to sleep. Rocked us both to sleep.

I woke a few minutes later in the darkness of the room, the afternoon light barely diffusing from the edges of her soft pink curtains. I awoke with this image in my head.

The roll of toilet paper.

I woke thinking about the roll of toilet paper Ruby kept pointing to there in the Battle of the Bathroom. And this is what I was thinking as I shifted back and forth in that rocker in Ruby’s room.

I remembered years ago, on a hot summer afternoon, sitting in my own bathroom, tears streaming down my raw salt-worn cheeks. We had answered the call, the one we all have nightmares about receiving, on that sunny summer afternoon, having just returned from our family vacation in Michigan. We had sobbed and groaned and clutched our own empty chests; turned to each other and embraced, our pulsing shoulders throbbing against each other as we walked into the valley of the shadow of death and began the long painful process of grieving.

Mom Connors was dead. Grandma Connors. Helen. She had died in a car accident after dropping us off at the Saginaw airport. It was a truth that kept trying to chisel its way into our heads, but we could not allow it in. Logic told us to process it. Our hearts refused.

I found privacy and thinking space in the bathroom. I remember sitting there looking at the roll of toilet paper beside me. I remember distinctly thinking that the last time we used this she was alive and vibrant, her soft warm arms thrown out to her grandchildren, her loving eyes catching the gaze of her second son. I remember resisting using that roll of paper, thinking that if we left it the way it was time might have stood still where we left it before leaving for Michigan. I sat there a long time. Weeping. How dare the sun dip into the lake to the west of us, the world keep spinning, neighbor children keep playing out in the yard? The world should stop, out of respect if nothing else! Shouldn’t everything stop? For just a minute at least.

And yet I felt my body doing what it has done from birth. I got thirsty. And hungry. And tired. Just like it did when she was alive and well. And life-giving water processed through my body like it always had. The water I had ingested in Michigan processed through in Utah, just like nothing had happened. It just did not seem right.

Finally, I felt an overwhelming peace come to me. Right there on the toilet. God, I guess, is no respecter of people or places. I felt the warm embracing arms of faith come round me, like some angel had picked me up and wrapped me in my heavenly blankie and was willing to rock me to sleep.

It’s ok. It’s more than ok, it’s comforting to know this old earth will continue spinning, spinning, spinning. It will spin when I am gone, too. Indeed, we pause in the misty dusk of grief when we lose those we love. We pause sometimes for a long, long time. Still, the ebb and flow of life goes on around us. We think it disrespectful, when in fact it is wholly and completely respectful. We are only here for a little while. This is temporary. It is not an unimportant thing that we are here, true. But it was designed to be temporary. The earth will turn with or without us. People will drive past us when we go out to get the mail and they will have things on their mind that are important to them, but they will have no idea our world has just turned upside down. The same shows will play on TV; same clocks will rotate their arms at the same steady pace. All this says, in repeated choruses of daily existence, that we are meant to move on. We jump in, then we jump out, like Sophie in her jump rope games. The rope keeps turning, up then down, slapping against the days of all life. We enter, then we exit, and the rhythm continues without us.

I will one day jump out myself, and Ruby will take my place with her own grand-daughter. She will perhaps stand there as frustrated as I, waiting for her to go “pee”. And I, in the meantime, will hover over…up high….way high above her, and chuckle from my heaven place.

WOTD 36 - CHIEF

2011-04-14T22:13:00.001-06:00

Thanksgiving, 1990-something, not sure of the exact date. My brother’s new wife, the second wife..the one unfortunate enough to have to follow the first wife whom we all adored... was joining us for the first time. We were all a bit nervous, no more than she, I suppose. They drove down from Boise the day before. Next morning she, (let’s just call her L.) jumped in to help with the Thanksgiving feast preparations. A risky thing for anyone, if you catch my drift. We have our "ways", established no doubt before the creation of time. I imagine our spirits hovering over a cluster of clouds, peering over the edges on a late November day, watching Pilgrim women stoke their fires and dress their birds and simmer their cranberries over open flames, long wooden ladles poking out from black iron pots. We watched again, much later in the history of the world, year after year, as the commemorative feast evolved from the late 1800’s until the day the Gatekeeper of Heaven called our names and told us to line up. We five women slid on down to this spot, under our mother’s wing, and started the earth-life journey.

I feel it each November, after the Trick or Treater’s have finished their quests, and the leaves have succumbed to the blast of snow that inevitably hits after an Indian Summer. I feel that familiar yearning to gather wood and check my store of spuds in the cellar, likely something I had imagined once upon a heaven-time.

So that Thanksgiving morning L. shimmies through the crowd of us in the kitchen, moves to the sink and lifts the turkey out of the basin of water it has been thawing in all night. She proceeds to rub it down and opens the seasoning cupboard at Gram’s condo. We glance at each other and hold our breath, wondering what in the world she thinks she is doing. Next thing we know she is sprinkling Lawrey’s Seasoned Salt over the sacred bird! I drew a slow deep breath and held it while I thought about what to do next. It just would not do to have seasoned salt on the turkey. I can’t even remember what we ended up doing, whether we opted to let it ride, or if one of us spoke up. I guess, thinking back, we must have spoken up, because I don’t remember ever tasting our Thanksgiving bird with paprika and turmeric flavoring. Chicken at Sunday dinner, crispy skinned with spicy flavoring; maybe. But never turkey!

So I suspect L. found out that’s not how the tradition went for us. I suspect she found out a lot about us that first day she met us. No one…seriously NO ONE…should meet their new in-laws while preparing a holiday feast. There is a secret sacred dance one must know on such occasions. Even we ourselves are not aware of the dance and wouldn’t know how to describe the steps. But it is a dance nonetheless and one is wiser to watch it a few times before jumping in. Sad, I know. But true.

So anyway, my brother asks L. when they are finally alone, when the meal is completely devoured and the dishes are done and our tummies are stretched beyond their natural capacity and everyone is settled into reading the ads for the upcoming sales; he asks her what she thought of his family.

“Well,” she said, “its sort of like being around six of you! All chiefs; no Injuns.”

And so it was.

And so it is.

(They’re not married any more.)

WOTD 35 - TRIGGER

2011-04-14T01:18:00.003-06:00

Doug met us at the dock. We sat on our luggage washed in the light of a waning moon, one week after Equinox, wet from the spray of the water spewing from the speed boat that had brought us to the island. The light of a thousand stars danced their fairy dance over the waters of the Straits of Mackinac, the gentle drift of waves lapping against the sides of boats bound to the wooden posts jutting from the rim of the dock. The clip clop of hooves against asphalt pierced through the quiet of the night, moving closer and closer as Doug brought his wagon down the hill. He pulled the reigns in to his belly, calling a gentle Whoa as he leaned his back toward the wagon bed. The horse rocked his head back, his mane caught the breeze coming off the straits, his neck stretched tight, then released as he bowed his head, stopped, and tapped his foreleg against the dock.

“You two the newlyweds?” He asked, with a sort of tease in his voice. Dave introduced himself, then me, and thanked him for coming out so late. We had missed the last ferry, having driven eight hours from Pittsburgh after opening our wedding gifts with family that morning.

Mackinac Island sat in the distance, six or seven miles from the shore where we stood. I watched as Dave found a phone and made a few calls. Before long we heard a motor in the distance, coming over the water, and soon we were aboard a small private boat pouncing through the misty night toward the lights in the distance. As we approached the island Dave wrapped one arm around my shoulder and with his other hand pointed toward a string of sparkles along the shore up ahead, sitting higher than the rest of the lights on the island. A long steady stream of silver-gold specks: “That’s the Grand Hotel. Now count seven lights up from there…that’s the cottage.” I squinted my eyes, as much to protect from the lake spray as to focus on the scene. As we approached it became apparent that this cottage was nothing like the cottage of my childhood imaginings. I thought of a cottage as something from Goldilocks, or Red Riding Hood, or Snow White. Small and quaint and dripping with charm. I realized there in the water still a mile from the shore that this was no small residence.

Grand Hotel & West Bluff Cottages

Doug lifted our luggage onto the wagon bed and jumped up to the buckboard, offering his hand to me as I lifted my foot onto the small step at the side of the wagon. Dave placed his strong hand in the small of my back as I rose into the wagon. I scooted over behind Doug and Dave scooched in next to me, wrapping his arm across my back and cupping his warm hand over the knob of my shoulder. Doug clicked his tongue against his cheek and flipped the reigns. The wagon started with a slight jerk, and we were off, the creature in front of us prancing at a pretty good clip to get a good enough steam behind him to make it up the hill to the West Bluff.

Front of cottage

We took the road back behind the Grand Hotel, back on that little one lane trail of a road situated between the mansions on the bluff and the carriage houses behind the massive shingled summer homes. Dave’s cousin, Pam (who would later marry Doug) was waiting for us, welcoming us to the cottage. Grandma and Grandpa Roy had left for the Tawas Cottage so we could have the place for our honeymoon; left us the whole stunning place, with an open tab at the grocery store in town and some money for a nice dinner at the Island House. This is the stock from which my husband came.

Grandma & Grandpa Roy in front of cottage at Mackinac

We entered through the kitchen door. Dave’s cousin Pam, who was working on the island for the summer, was staying in the servant’s quarters, up the small set of back stairs. Dave set the luggage on the floor of the kitchen and took my hand, leading me through the place like Prince Charming showing Cinderella his castle. The dining room, just off the kitchen, laid itself out like royalty, the eternally long table flanked by a matching set of 36 antique press back chairs. A fine walnut antique high chair sat in the corner. Through the other door of the dining room we came into the official entry hall of the house, beautiful massive doors set against a wrap around porch, arched entry ways and doorways going off the lobby to studies and drawing rooms and sitting rooms where Grandma and Grandpa Roy played cards or where Grandma knitted while Grandpa read the paper and smoked his cigar, the sweet scent swirling above his head and finally resting in the ornate tin work on the ceiling. A genuine Tiffany lamp sat next to an ornate antique table. The whole place was furnished with valuable, beautiful, dignified antique furniture, originally placed there when the house was built in the late 1800’s. Grandpa, who had made his fortune with Roycraft mobile homes, the first mobile homes ever commercially sold to the public, had bought the Mackinac Island home after a fire had damaged part of it. He was a carpenter, and a little hammering and sawing and building was no big deal to him. The home came intact, with all its furnishings. Grandpa was meticulous in his woodcraft. Grandma was tidy and diligent, keeping the place clean and friendly, hand washing every sheet used by the hundreds of guests flowing through the place, ironing the wide swaths of white cotton before she put them back on the beds, the aroma of starch and fragrant soap rising from the hot Iron Rite as she wiped her forearm across her sweaty brow, her breasts tucked snugly into the bib of her cotton apron, the thick beige stockings on her legs sagging around here ankles. She could have hired the work out. She preferred to do it herself.

Helene & Antoine Roy in drawing room

Swirling up from the entry was a large gracious stairway. The staircase on the movie Titanic very much reminds me of it. Up the stairs, lined with loomed wool runners, red and gold and taupe and blue woven into elegant patterns, we chose the Washington Room for our Honeymoon Suite. Its walls were covered with windows, tucked into the turret above the wrap around porch. The windows were graced with flowing draperies, elegant and timeless, with gauze-like under-curtains diffusing the light of the morning and dancing in the breezes as the weather shifted in the cool of the night. A striking antique bed waited, two little night stands and a pitcher and basin set on a wash stand. There was a secret passageway to the next bedroom through the closet. Indoor plumbing was added to the house years before, a real luxury at the time. I washed up a bit and then explored the house with my handsome prince of a husband, exclaiming and sighing at each turn. Thirteen bedrooms. All with matching bedroom suites. It was something from a dream.

Grand Hotel (photos by Dave's cousin Roy Chamberlin)

We spent nearly a week in the cottage, waking to the sound of horse hooves and wagon wheels. No cars are allowed on the island. We golfed, and biked, and swam and ate. In the evenings we sat on the porch and watched the light disappear around us; walked down the road overlooking the water from the bluff, stepped onto the long historic boardwalk of the Grand Hotel; stopping to watch Man of LaMancha in the small theatre at the Grand; making our way down the steep bluff to the sandy shore below, strolling arm in arm, counting the stars and doubling the number by the reflection in the rocking waves of the straits of water connecting Lake Huron and Lake Michigan.

David had spent his summers at this cottage, and at the smaller one…a true cottage…on Lake Huron in Tawas Michigan. He knew the ins and outs. His name was pressed into wet concrete when Grandpa had finished the walkway up to the front porch steps. His name and those of his brother and sisters and cousins, remain there today, though Grandma and Grandpa sold the Mackinac Place not too many years later. Grandma and Grandpa were aging, and were tired, and I believe they wanted to alleviate any possibility of sibling tension if they died and the place was left to the kids. Besides the upkeep was very costly and they did not want to burden anyone with that. So, before we were established enough to even know they were doing it, they sold the place where so many of the grandkids had honeymooned and were so many babies had toddled across the wide porch; where night games and board games and card games facilitated laughter and warm conversation for so many summers.

For the rest of their years we gathered in the summers at the Tawas cottage, a warm and charming and loving place we all adore; not so much for the structure itself but for the people who lived there. There were never two more gracious and welcoming people that Antoine and Helene Roy.

When we knew the Mackinac Cottage was going to someone else’s future memory books, we cherished our last summer vacation there. I asked Grandma if she would mind if I looked in the carriage house out behind the main house to see if there was anything we could keep for a memento. She smiled and said, in her French flavored English, “Of course, though I cannot imagine what you might want out there.”

I walked out the kitchen door and across the road to the white carriage house. The horse stalls were cleaned and unused for many years now. I found a couple old tin toy cars, and a few jars and utensils. A piece of the wool runner that matched the one on the grand staircase in the main house. And a sign hanging above the first horse stall, with jagged edges cut out and the name TRIGGER written in paint across the front.

Dave came out and joined me. I showed him the Trigger sign and he smiled when he saw it.

“Trigger was Grandpa’s old white horse, the one we all rode from the time we were small. He was a gentle old thing, slow as molasses, and stubborn when he was worn out. You couldn’t come close to the Grand Hotel when you were riding him in the evening, because he always turned his head toward the carriage house, knowing he would get a treat. He was done when he was done, and no amount of prodding or kicking or hollerin’ would turn his head away from the road to the carriage house.” Trigger was as much a part of that home as the Tiffany lamp in the entry. He had died years before I came to the family.

Watercolor painting of the Carriage House by my daughter Sarah

I gathered up the toy cars and the glass jars and the roll of carpet and the Trigger sign and put them in a cardboard box. Asked Grandma if it was ok if I took them. She shook her head and giggled. “What in the world do you want them for?”

“I just do.” I said. What I wanted to say was that anything that carried the scent of a musty Michigan summer, that held the sandy grit of years of wear on a historic old resort island, that may have been held in the hands of a small boy grown to an old man by now…anything that spoke of these two beautiful people who gave life to my husband’s mother…I wanted that in my home. Not for any kind of show, but to remind us of what we love and loved.

We loaded that box onto the wagon bed when we left the Mackinac Cottage for the last time. I turned back as we hit the steep edge of the road down below the hotel, leading into town. Looked at the grand old lady of a West Bluff Cottage shrinking in the distance.

I’ve lost just about all that was in that box but the TRIGGER sign. When Sarah was four or five years old she and her friend Ashley decided to have an over-the-top lemonade stand where they sold who knows what from our pantry and basement. They set a play cupboard out on the lawn in front of Kensington Street. Placed their wares on a small table they had also dragged out across the grass. And on the front of the cupboard they hung the Trigger sign, to which Sarah had added the word “Restrot”. I’m not sure if anyone stopped at Trigger’s Restaurant that afternoon, but I sure cherish the sign from that venture. I have hung it in my kitchen for two decades now. It reminds me of that little girl who grew into a beautiful mother and sister and doctor and friend. And it reminds me also of the charmed past I have to pinch myself to believe was my reality: a cottage like a castle where I spent my honeymoon; a king and queen of warmth and grace and poise whom we called Grandma and Grandpa; a history of charmed summers where cousins chased cousins over grassy hillsides and raced them across sandy beaches, and the gateway to the larger part of my life with a man beyond my wildest dreams.

Trigger's Restrot sign hanging in my kitchen

WOTD 34 - POET

2011-04-13T00:03:00.002-06:00

We stopped by our friends’ house the other night, dropping off a few things and gathering a few others. Their triplets were at the kitchen island, pencils in hand, school papers strewn out across the granite like they were designing some sort of academic collage. I leaned over the counter as we talked, one part of my brain glancing at the writings of seven year old boys and another part talking about the quality of vanilla in Mexico. You know how it is when you multi task and the different parts of your brain assigned to the varying categories shift their weight and one thing drops into consciousness almost all of a sudden? My first-position thoughts shifted from vanilla to Luke’s little essay on his trip to Mexico. It soon took my full attention as I read it, charmed right off by his neat handwriting, methodically chiseled across the lined elementary school homework paper. He sat right in front of me, and out of consideration for his privacy, I asked for permission to read it. He nodded his head. I picked up the paper and scanned it, then almost instinctively asked if I could read it aloud to him. Again, he nodded.

“My mom used to read my writings aloud to me when I was little.” I told him.

I lifted the paper in my hands in a rather official sort of way, not too showy, but respectful-like. I watched out of the corner of my eye as he listened to me read, his little head shifted to an angle of pondering, like it was totally new information he was hearing and not something he had created himself not ten minutes before.

Watching the corners of his lips curl up; watching him fight the desire to smile; this was just precious, because I knew what he was feeling. I have felt it before myself.

Fourth grade. Sitting in seat three of row four in Mrs. Euler’s class. Invisible little blonde haired girl. Quiet, dutiful, not at all stellar in any way. I was simply the girl in seat three. Until that day we had to write our first essay. The assignment was to write something about the wind. I decided to write about a Gale wind, having just learned about different kinds of air movement. Using my best handwriting, I copied what I wrote on the grade A paper reserved for special assignments. I signed my name…Corinne Hansen…and set it on Mrs. Euler’s desk.

A few days later Mrs. Euler called me up to her desk while everyone was working on their arithmetic.

“Mr. Parker would like to see you.”

“Right now?” I asked, my voice instantly shaking, my little heart pounding in my chest.

“Yes.”

That’s all she said. She looked down at the papers she was grading and I turned, glanced over at the kids quietly scribbling numbers on their papers, and shuffled out the door into the wide green linoleum covered hallway. Down the stairs, through the glass topped doors and into the first level, I looked up at the wall and turned where the sign poked out, the one that said: Mr. Parker, Principal. I walked into the secretary’s room and told her Mrs. Euler said I needed to see Mr. Parker. Her hands were hovered over the large keyboard of a typewriter, her fingers pouncing rhythmically on the keys, the slap-slap-slapping of her work shocking my senses until it repeated enough to feel familiar and less threatening. She motioned for me to take a seat. I sat there, my knees pressed together, my tennis shoes barely touching the floor, my back not quite hitting the back of the chair. I fiddled with my fingers, wondering what I might have done wrong, and why Mr. Parker needed to see me. Maybe he found out my dad had come home drunk last week and I was in trouble for that. Maybe I wasn’t ready for fourth grade cuz that math stuff still confused me and they decided I needed to be in third grade again. That would not have bothered me, because Mrs. Hobgood, my third grade teacher, loved me. I knew she did. And Mrs. Euler definitely did not.

The door to Mr. Parker’s office creaked open and a kid I didn’t know walked out, his face looking straight down to the ground. I watched him scurry out, then turned my head forward, looking down at the line in the wax where the rooms divided, peeking up very carefully at the open door to the principals office. The secretary stopped typing and leaned over to me.

“Your turn.” She smiled, then went back to her work. I stood, tugged at my skirt, and tiptoed into the doorway, waiting for permission to enter. Mr. Parker sat, bespectacled, at his desk, his receding hairline reflecting the light streaming in through the window. He looked up at me, asked me my name, and told me to take a seat. I sat on the edge of the chair in front of his desk, my hands tucked under my thighs, elbows facing out, eyebrows raised as I shifted my eyes from the floor to his desk and back to the floor. He reached over his desk to a pile of papers, lifted one up, and looked it over. Next thing I knew he laid the paper on his desk top, grabbed the wooden knob of a stamp, then flipped open the inkpad on the corner of his desk. He tapped the stamp against the ink and then hammered it onto the top of the paper. He blew on it briefly, then handed it to me.

“Very nice, Corinne.” He looked me in the eye as he handed me the paper, a sparkle of warmth shot through his glasses, and then he told me to hurry back to class.

I left, smiling at the secretary as I passed by, and scurried up the stairs to the long green hall. There I paused and looked at the paper. In my own handwriting, with my own name at the top, was my essay; A Gale Wind. And stamped in blue ink next to the title was Mr. Parker’s approval : VERY GOOD.

I took the paper home that afternoon and told Mom about my meeting with the principal and how I was really surprised Mrs. Euler gave my writing to Mr. Parker because she hated me and I wondered aloud if every kid had to meet with Mr. Parker about their essays. Mom sat for a minute and looked at the paper, then began to read aloud:

“A gale wind wizzing trough the almost broken branches of the trees makes a whistling sound that nearly stings your ears….” (I can hardly believe I remembered that!) I can hear my mother’s voice reading it to me. When she read, it sounded like poetry. When she read it sounded beautiful, like she loved my words and knew exactly what I meant to say.

Through the coming years my mother read many of my own words aloud to me. Way back…way, way back in the caverns of my memory I can hear the words, lilting and melodic and well paced. So much better than they sounded in my own head when I read them on paper. Thinking back on it, I believe she could have read me a recipe and it would have sounded poetic. She had a powerful voice. Not thunderous, just powerful.

Mom believed I was a poet. And because she believed; I believed.

There is something markedly different in the sound of a word versus the look of a word. Hearing it gives it a second life; a validity. Mom had vinyl recordings of poets reading their own work, and we especially loved Robert Frost’s rumbly throaty readings of Stopping By Woods, The Mending Wall and Swinging Birches. It was her voice that gave life to Where the Red Fern Grows and The Bird’s Christmas Carol on dark winter nights. Mom taught us to love words, well selected, sparingly and carefully used. Poetry, to her, was a form of prayer and we approached it as if it were a piece of divinity.

Maybe my choice to write words destined to be set to music began with this basic belief; words are to be heard not seen. Sadly, it’s probably why I read so slowly as well. I must speak the words in my brain when I read a book. Auditory learner…I think that’s what they call it.

When my kids were growing up Mom bribed them to learn poetry: $5 for the first recital; memorized, appropriately recited, the number of stanzas determined by the age of the child. After that, each recital of the poem earned them a Quarter. She gifted them with their own personal copies of 101 Favorite Poems, her graceful handwriting in the front being cherished today as her arthritic hands no longer flow like they used to.

I learned, when our kids were learning to write, to read their work back to them. I had learned from the master how to make the words sound as they fell off the tongue. A child owns his writing best when he hears it respectfully and lovingly read aloud.

And so I stood in the Harris’ kitchen and read Luke his little essay about his trip to Mexico.

“Very nice, Luke! You are a writer indeed!”

He smiled his little crooked smile, his eyes twinkling as they looked into mine. Perhaps, little boy… perhaps there is a poet in there.

WOTD 33 - DARK

2011-04-12T01:17:00.001-06:00

Will someone leave a light on, even just a little one? A crack in the bathroom door, or a nightlight over by the desk? Maybe push the curtain aside just a teeny bit so the diffused light of a streetlamp can filter in? It worried me; troubled me to the point of fixation as I anticipated sending my quiet, tenderhearted daughter off to the Mission Training Center. She would spend nearly three months learning Cantonese. With Strangers. In a strange place. Without being able to talk to us. Without much of anything familiar and comforting. Except God. (Silly me to think God might not be enough ) Still, I worried about the dark, and I prayed that there would be a little light for her. Ironic, really.

Our beautiful timid girl endured…no triumphed…in the MTC, then in Hong Kong, and in every subsequent situation and locale she encountered: conversing in a strange musical tongue with people from a more blunt and spare culture. It was good preparation for the service she gives now, teaching underprivileged sixth graders how to read in Houston Texas. She pushed through the dark.

Dark is a relative term. It is, in the visual sense, dependant on the situation. At night, when Dave has gone to bed hours before me, coming into the study first and kissing me sweetly by the light of the computer screen, he slides the dimmer up on the table lamp on my side of the bed so I will be able to see when I come to bed. There’s a transom over our bedroom door, leading out to the hallway. The light from the hall generally spills into our bedroom and sometimes he forgets to turn on my lamp. When I tiptoe back to our bedroom after my nightly writing, and flip the light switch in the hall, it is pitch black in our room and my inferior feet cannot comfortably find their way through our space. I reach out my arms, my hands patting the lightless air, my feet shuffling painfully against the carpet. Lately I am comforted by knowing I can use the dim light of my iPhone when I go to bed. I don’t need a lot of light, just enough to indicate where not to step. I slide the dimmer higher on my lamp, just enough to reveal the words to the Guideposts or Readers Digest that ease me out of what I’ve been creating and into sleep. I don’t mind the dark when I’m sleeping, if I know my space.

Like just about everything, when dark approaches slowly and gradually, we adjust without realizing it. Leave it to a gentle God to make our earth spin evenly enough to allow for sunrises and sunsets, giving our eyes time to adjust, our feet energy enough to run home before dark. Imagine if He had decided to jerk the earth around, dropping us into darkness with no warning. Or just as bad, thrusting us into light so quickly our eyes feel like they’ll burst, unable to focus, unable to see anything really. I know the feeling well. Thick window blinds closed on a grey Pittsburgh day, a filmstrip mundanely clicks through a projector, a cassette recording reciting the geography of the Antarctic, or the scene of a Civil War battle, or the anatomy of a grasshopper; the recording methodically piercing my respite with a shrill ding indicating it’s time to advance the filmstrip. When the celluloid was rolled underneath the projector and the recording had ended, on went the fluorescent lights blanketing the ceiling of the classroom. Our eyebrows pushed the skin up to our hairlines, our heads instantly throbbing with the painful rush of light. Light, for all its divine attributes, sure can hurt.

Light can sting. Blind us even. But darkness is a long, dull ache. A frightening look into an abyss. Sometimes I close my eyes and pretend I am blind. I pretend so I can evaluate whether or not I think I have the internal strength to endure such a thing. I am always so, so grateful to open my eyes.

When I lost my sense of balance the Neurologist ran some tests, asking me to do some interesting things, or at lest attempt to do them. He asked me to stand on one foot, holding the other foot in the air beside it. I was able to do that with much effort. Then he asked me to close my eyes. As soon as I did, I fell over. He explained that when we lose one of our senses the others will compensate. But if we lose two, then our brains are confused and will not let us accomplish such a task as standing on one foot. “You cannot balance, having lost the sense of touch in your lower extremities, if you do not have visual contact with your feet or the space around you.” In this way he evaluated further evidence that I had indeed sustained damage to the sensory aspects of my legs. Blind people who cannot hear, like Helen Keller, are at a marked disadvantage to people whose only sensory loss is sight. We learn to compensate. So now I have to keep one eye slightly open when I’m standing and we bow our heads to pray, because I lose my balance in the darkness.

When I was little I remember thinking, down there in the basement art room in Pleasant Hills Elementary School, that when I scribbled all the colors in my crayon box over a piece of soft pale yellow art paper, the page turned dark. Black, I thought, was the accumulation of all colors. It took me growing up, covering my body with the purity of white robes and veils, to learn that it is white which contains all the colors of the rainbow. White, the purest reflector of light, represents the presence of all color. Light, indeed, is the palette of the heavens, from which are painted powder blue summer skies and verdant spring meadows splashed with golden daffodils; deep tangerine sunsets across the lake to the west; the bright red crown on a bold chested rooster. We are reminded of those colors in light when it rains and the air is filled with speckles of water reflecting the colors in the shape of a rainbow. We are surrounded by color and we don’t really know it, though I am sure somehow our spirits do.

I respect the dark. I don’t love it, but I respect it enough to not toy with it any more than I have to. There is no dark that the flickering of a small flame can’t seize, warming my fears and setting them in a peaceful place of calm.

Dark. Thick, massive, frightening dark. It would do me in, but for my trust that just one small flame is enough.

WOTD 32- SINK

2011-04-11T00:47:00.003-06:00

I was thinking about this yesterday, somewhere in the middle of nowhere Arizona, out in the endless desert on what felt like an endless drive home from Mexico…(Long drives are really good for random thinking. Everyone should take the wheel for a long drive on a regular basis, just to get the mind flushed out.)… I was thinking that when I got home I was going to have a day of regulars. That’s what I might call it. Maybe. Or I might call it “Ordinarily This....” and the object would be to make note of all the regular things in my ordinary days. I guess my head went in that direction because of the pictures on our digital cameras, the ones we were looking at on our drive home from our Mexico vacation. Sarah was wishing aloud that we had taken a picture of everyone together. So I got to thinking that we have these photo journals of our lives that we leave behind, and in them are all the exciting glamorous things- like trips and parties and birthdays and anniversaries; and the showy things like recitals and programs and games. We have all those things recorded well in our photo albums and in our journals. What is lacking is a reminder of the repeated, seemingly mundane motions of our daily lives. What the family car looks like. David sitting at the table studying legal briefs. Libby lifting Gram into her wheel chair. Jordon buttering a piece of bunny bread or sitting in the driver’s seat of an EJ Bartells truck. Johnny digging in the dirt with Parker. Kate, Annie, Ashley interacting with their students. Sarah using a stethoscope. Timo pounding his drumsticks on the headrest in the car. Sherry opening the back door for Pi. Jill sitting before her computer, her face bathed in the glow of a book in embryo.

I remember my mom standing at the kitchen sink. Regardless of where we were living; what job she had at the time; whether it was before or after Dad left. No matter what season, or how many people sat at her table for dinner…there was always the kitchen sink. It was a constant amid lots of changes. I can hear in my memory the clanking of dishes, the ringing of silverware being stacked into utensil drawers, the rushing sound of the water flowing through the tap. Sometimes she hummed, or whistled, but more often than not she was silent, unless there was something to be said. Mom almost always preferred quiet. I guess that happens when people have seven children and lots of noise all the time. Noise on the outside, mixed with the noise of a mind troubled with marriage woes. Things can get awfully loud in the quiet of a lonely bed. Something about the motion of working with the hands makes the sounds in the head line up a bit more quietly. She often folded laundry and washed dishes in silence.

I wish I had a real picture of my mom at the kitchen sink, not just the one conjured in my brain. I wish I had a picture of her at the wheel of the car; or of her pounding a real estate sign into the ground. I wish I had a photo of her hand patting my back, paced against the rhythm of her rocking in the old white rocker that used to be the old brown rocker before she re-covered it herself in that evening community continuing ed class she took on upholstering and refinishing furniture. I wish I had a picture of my sister Sherry holding me. I think we might have an old home movie of that. But not a still. She was a normal teenage girl, darling in her poodle skirt fashion and horn rimmed glasses. So beyond typical in the way she loved and cared for her little little sisters. I imagine her holding me, and when I think of it I can sense her love infusing into me. Wish I had a snapshot.

And so I am thinking we should all take our cameras, or cell phones with cameras, and snap a picture of ourselves or someone we love at the kitchen sink.

Go ahead. I dare ya.

Blogs have been a blessing in this regard. They allow for photos to be added to the journals of our daily living. Hooray for blogs! Go write in yours, people! (And I want to see your kitchen sink pictures.)

WOTD 31 - COOKBOOK

2011-04-09T02:50:00.000-06:00

On a rusting metal shelf, perforated and warped with paper-weight, I imagine my blue and white checkered cookbook waiting. Sealed edges of vinyl covered cardboard cracking with age, like the wrinkled halo around the lips of the woman in the chair next to me at the beauty parlor last week. I imagine it there, waiting on some ignored shelf in some thrift store, waiting to be selected. Who but me would want such a thing? Hand written recipes in no particular order, evidence of hardcore usage splattered on its pages, chocolate and tomato and Crisco casting their votes for most congenial if not most beautiful.

I cannot say how it got there, my very best most personal cookbook. Someone must have wanted a recipe and one of the kids probably just lent out the book. No one would know that those stories were compiled from our lives; recipes born in distant places, brought home and refined in the trenches; proven through hot summer evenings over the cooktop, and chilly December afternoons when the kids were home from school and the house smelled of gingerbread; when little fingers were sticky with sugar squeezed from raisins planted in thick layers of buttercream frosting on flat little men lined up like soldiers on my cookie sheets. The most proven recipes sealed their rank with pocks on their dog-eared index cards. These were coiffed to our taste, refined and redefined for our lips and the outer edges of our tongues, custom tailored to my little family. I can see that old cookbook spread open on the cold tile of my kitchen countertop, adjusted by wide inked X’s with hand written scribblings added to the side: a quarter cup less milk, or a teaspoon more vanilla; two tablespoons of flour when we moved from Pennsylvania to Utah. I searched every DI store in the Wasatch Front for nearly a year, hoping to retrieve it. Aching in the same way I yearn for the lost photographs of my children when the photo lab closed with my film still inside.

If you find yourself in some second hand store that sells cookbooks, and you happen to see one about 7 inches wide and maybe 10 inches tall with thin blue lines; grab it for me. You can tell if its mine by looking for Gramma Roys Michigan Baked Beans somewhere inside. I'll love you forever...and I'll indeed make you one of those pots of beans (and maybe even a garbage cake, too!)

WOTD 30 - WARP

2011-04-08T01:48:00.004-06:00

In order to weave any kind of textile, the weaver needs to start with the warp threads. Warp threads tend to be stronger and more coarse, because they must be able to withstand tight stretching. They also provide a core of support for the finished piece, giving the textile body and form. The warp is stretched onto a loom before weaving begins, and it may be coiled onto a spool for very long or large projects. This spool is unwound as needed, while the finished weaving on the other side is rolled up to get it out of the way.

You know how you know some things, but you’re not sure how you know them, and you’re pretty sure that what you know is probably a little off base but still it makes you sound like you know what you’re talking about (unless you’re talking to somebody who really knows what you’re talking about)? MmmHmmmm.

I don’t know much about weaving. I do own a rather dandy antique spinning wheel. Two in fact. One of them won the blue ribbon for antique furniture in the Idaho State Fair one year. It was displayed in the Joseph Smith Memorial Building one summer, right in the middle of that big round table in the center of the massive marble lobby. It has a nice skein of flax on it, with a little leader twisted onto the spindle and bobbin. I’ve used the wheel once or twice, just to remind myself that I know how it works. I probably couldn’t work it right now without really thinking about it, and probably Googling it. But if we had to we could spin wool and flax at our house, I guess.

My cousin was a weaver, if I recall correctly. She had a large loom right in the middle of her living room. She showed us one day how she did it; stretching strands of tightly spun wool across the loom, left to right, creating the warp. Once the warp was set she used a variety of colored threads to weave in and out of the warp, pressing a pedal with her foot, raking a comb with her hands in a rhythmic pattern that involved multiple pulls toward her chest. The loom clicked and groaned as she worked the fibers in and out of the warp. Her work was meticulous and beautiful. Mom bought some place mats from her, and I purchased a nice neutral colored shawl made of linen and silk.

Anyone who really knows about weaving will think me silly to write about weaving; but I have this image of my family that involves a loom and even though I’m probably off base in what it represents in symbolic terms, I’ve had this picture in my mind for a long time; and since the word for today was “warp” I decided to go with it.

The thing about a warp that means something to me is that someone sets it, with their own hands. Someone selects a particularly strong fiber, tightly spun to give it additional strength. Someone uses their muscle to stretch the threads across the loom tightly. A loose warp makes for weak fabric. The character of the warp fibers are usually pretty universal. It’s the waft, the more delicate fibers woven through the warp, that provide variety and color and pattern. Waft is interesting, and gets a lot of credit in the Ooo and Ahhh department. But it’s the warp that does the labor, that takes the beating - flipping up and down as the waft is woven in and out of it. It’s the warp that bears the tension, and it’s the tension that facilitates strong fabric.

Tonight we shared dinner at a restaurant here in Puerto Penasco, Mexico; a fine Italian restaurant overlooking the ocean, situated on a bend in the beach where the sunset can be seen through the west wall of windows. Our friend Neal introduced us to the owner, a man named Julio, who is the District President in the Mormon Church here in this area. He was gracious and friendly, shaking our hands and looking into our eyes with that familiar warmth of one who loves God and his fellow man. David paused as they met, then asked if they had met before. “Were you at Jared Parker’s house in Salt lake City, grilling shrimp last year…during General Conference?”

“Yes. Yes, yes! Were you there?” The pitch in his voice raised slightly with the excitement of recognition.

“Our son John is married to Jared’s daughter, Ashley! We met you at the Parker’s.”

Julio took David’s hand with both of his, shaking it in that warm and meaningful way, like when you have a deeper respect for someone.

“Ah, you are the parents of John? Oh, that John is a hard worker. A fine hard worker. Very good man, John Connors. I knew when Neal said Connors there was something strong in that.”

Julio nodded his head, as if to add an exclamation point to his words.

John and Ashley come with the Parkers and dozens of other people, sometimes a couple times a year, to help build houses for underprivileged Mexican families. Their non-profit organization, Families Helping Families, facilitates those who want to work for a better life, not by handing them what they want, but by working alongside them. They give up their vacations, even pay their way to come, pay for materials, and sweat their hearts out for two weeks, leaving grateful families with solid walls and doors and windows around them.

When John was 16 he helped our neighbor Ron lay sod. A volunteer service project. Ron came over to tell us how much he respected our son for the hard work he did, without complaint, and longer than most other teenagers were willing to work. This only represents one aspect of who he is, but it represents the same dependable selfless intensity evident in the whole of his life.

John is warp in my weave.

Libby spent yesterday driving our mom and sister to Provo to be with our brother and his family. Our sister in law Cyndy was diagnosed with lung cancer, though she has never in her life inhaled anything but the residual smoke of a campfire. Libby understands there are times we just need to be by each other, not to fix things, just to “be.” Our mom is wheelchair bound. Libby lifts her, dresses her, takes care of her personal needs, showers her. She makes her food, and cleans up afterwards; manages her medicines and makes sure her feet are covered when she finally settles in her easy chair. All this while she takes care of the rest of us; making sure we are all ok, making us feel important and loved. Today she spent the time between caring for Mom reading to a neighbor rendered speechless from brain cancer. She listened and talked to our friend’s husband, who is struggling to accept the inevitable. I have six siblings and she talks to every one of us at least once a day. No one understands me like Libby does; and she loves me in a way no one else can love me.

Libby is warp in my weave.

My ever faithful mother, pilot of the Pontiac Rocket and keeper of the tenderest places in the yearning heart of my youth; she is warp.

And David; and Sherry and all my sisters. My tender, strong and brilliant brothers. Each one of my capable, loving, inventive and intelligent daughters, their spouses, their children. These are the strands that are stretched over the loom, steady and strong and dependable. All of them strong enough to handle the tension necessary for a good weave. I lay myself beside them, allowing myself to be stretched as well, hoping I am strong enough to bear the tension, too.

The daily grind, the talents and trials and trips and treasures all color the delicate fabric that weaves through the warp; the waft. This trip to Mexico. Our time in Michigan. Our Sunday dinners around Gram’s table. Our Saturday afternoons in ball fields. Our moments on stage and in front of the stage. Dull and repetitive hours spent at the kitchen sink. Irritating tense moments trying to figure out how to make our kids , ourselves, do things we don't want to do. These make the story of our lives colorful and interesting. But they are all held together by the warp. And as warp, we understand the need for tension. Not that we love it. But we understand the need for it. Without tension our guitars would not sing; our vocal cords would not give us pitch, and the fabric of our lives would give way with the slightest tug.

Great Weaver of all things good, use us well. Spin us into good sturdy thread, strong enough for the most meaningful looms. Stretch us tightly beside each other; then weave.

WOTD 29 - DON

2011-04-07T00:51:00.002-06:00

Don, Dave’s dad, was a warm and brilliant man. Dave is much like him. What was good in Don is also good in Dave. He taught his son how to use every tool in his tool box. He dissected every moving part on an automobile out there in the garage on Rolling Green drive, the sound of his voice bouncing off the inside of the hood while their heads hung over the engine. Don even shared the table in the dining room at night, where the kids did their homework. While Dave was learning the basics of Algebra and Geometry, Don was taking night classes to earn his Juris Doctorate degree from Duquesne University. He had already earned a doctoral degree in Nuclear Physics at Notre Dame, but thought it might be interesting to see what it was like to be a lawyer, too.

I first met Don on a snowy night in mid December. Dave had left for BYU Law School the previous August; an unattached single student. By Thanksgiving we had fallen in love and become engaged. I flew home that Christmas to meet the parents.

Dave drove over to my mom’s place to pick me up that evening. I dressed in my grey pant suit, spent extra time on my hair and make-up. The whole way over to their house in Bethel from my apartment in Pleasant Hills I sat with my knees tense, my hands nervously twisting in my lap. Dave reassured me they would love me. I had my doubts. I already knew I was in the painful position of being a faithful Mormon girl marrying a beloved son in a devoted Catholic family. Bad start, I thought.

I have a photograph in my head of me standing in the doorway of the kitchen, all eyes on me, comforted beyond words by the presence of ten year old Chelle who was…well, ten years old. She wasn’t weighed down with adult worries. Dave’s mom, Helen, was cautiously friendly. Rightfully so. I remember seeing Don from the corner of my eye, looking over at me as Dave slipped his arm around my waist. He smiled his irresistible smile, his eyes reflecting the light from the kitchen window. Looking back I realize I should not have worried so, but that friendly compassionate look from Dad Connors was so meaningful to me. I don’t think I ever told him that.

Helen and Don could be pretty funny together. Subtly humorous is probably more accurate. For instance, when the cottage in Michigan was finally completed and Mom and Dad Connors were arranging and furnishing, Mom brought home a kit for a wooden end table from the shop in Iosco. It was packed in a tight rectangular brick, wrapped and stapled with cardboard. ASSEMBLY REQUIRED, it said. So Helen handed it off to Don. She sat in the red gingham rocker in the family room while Dad unpacked the thing, laying the pieces out like it was the living room on Christmas Eve. He methodically stacked each screw and nut and bolt, washer and Made-in-China Allen wrench in specific order. Helen worked on various projects through the afternoon, occasionally returning to the rocker. Each time she listened as Don cursed under his breath.

“Who wrote these instructions? These things do not fit where they are supposed to!”

She returned to her tasks; unloading glasses into the kitchen cupboards; washing new sheets and pillowcases and stretching them onto new mattresses.

And again she returned to the family room, checking on the progress of the end table.

“Can’t they count in China?” Don pulled his tool box over toward his knees, searching for a screw in his own collection, none of which matched the size he needed.

After a few hours Helen walked through the family room.

“Aren’t you done yet? She asked, her arms full of folded towels.

Don was exasperated!

“Who in the world could understand these instructions! They’re beyond me!”

Helen put the towels in the linen closet, shut the door, and returned to the rocker.

“Gee, Don,” she said as she sank into the soft cushioned rocker, “I wonder what people who do NOT have their doctorates in nuclear physics do.”

Not two years later Helen was killed in a car accident down the road from the cottage. She had dropped us at the airport in Saginaw and was headed home to that place she loved. We feel her when we sit in those rockers. For the next decade our time at the cottage in Michigan and Pittsburgh was spent with Don. His warmth and kindness, his gentle nature and generosity underlined all he did. Parkinson’s Disease eventually robbed him of some of his independence, but his good nature remained.

Dave’s sister Jill called finally, beckoning Dave home to Pennsylvania. He was able to be with his dad as he walked to the valley of death, reassuring him that we knew he would be ok, that he would still have us, that we would still have him in the end. Dave stood at the head of his father’s hospital bed and laid his worthy hands on the silken head of the man who taught him just about everything, bowing his own head and whispering a prayer of gratitude and comfort. He eased the journey with a blessing, his brother and sisters encircling their father in that small space.

That following year we returned to Pittsburgh to help prepare the house on Rolling Green Drive for sale. We stripped the old blue carpet from the living room, exposing beautiful hardwood floors that were so “not cool” in the 1960’s. Took the mural wallpaper off the wall in the study. Painted the walls with fresh neutral paint. I remember taping off the trim in the dining room one afternoon, looking out the window into South Park, down over the grassy space where the pool used to be. The awning over the porch by the pool was attached to the house. You looked over the top of it when you looked out the dining room window. In the winter Helen used to toss birdseed out the windows onto that awning, feeding the winter worn cardinals that harbored in the woods. She loved seeing the flash of their scarlet feathers against the white snow and green pine trees out in the yard.

When we moved to Utah from Pittsburgh, I was conscious of the fact that we were taking the only grandchildren away from Helen and Don. I was saddened that the winter scenes of my kid’s childhoods would look markedly different from the scenes of my childhood, and David’s, too. So I wrote a little song to remind them… to remind me. It’s called Is it Snowing Tonight Where You Are. There’s a line in that song that tickles my funny bone every time I sing it:

Do the red birds still come for the food

You toss from the window at dawn…

The song takes me to the scenes of their home at Christmas time. I think of Dave’s dad. And I think of Helen. And though I didn't originally write a double entendre' into the song, I discovered one in a light moment once. I imagined that the word “dawn” was replaced with the word “Don.” I imagined Helen being a little irritated at Don about something. And I imagined that humorous delivery of sustenance. You won’t see it necessarily on my face when I sing it on stage, but I am thinking it you can be sure: Helen tossing food from the window at Don. It's dry Connors wit, probably not funny to anyone else and way too irreverent. But I find it helps take away some of the sting of loss. And I also find the lightness of that image takes me back to that beautiful, warm smile of the man who gratefully let me also call him Dad.

WOTD 28 - MESS

2011-04-06T01:22:00.000-06:00

Four year old Anna sat in her car seat in the back of the van, her waist-length sable red hair woven into a rippling French braid, a pink bow the size of a sand dollar clipped to the side of her head. I sat in the front next to Gumpa as he turned onto Revolution Road. Instinctively I started singing the Beatles tune… “You say you want a re-vo-lu-shu-u-un, well you kno-o-ow….” Sarah immediately jumped in with perfectly aligned harmony as we bounced over the semi paved Puerto Penasco roads. From her seat in the back, Anna called out: “Hey! Hey! You’re messin’ wif my song!”

We kept on singing.

“You guys, did you hear me? You are messing wif my SONG!”

I turned in my passenger seat, trying to throw my voice back to her even if I couldn’t see her face. “You can sing with us, Bella!” I invited her to join in. She replied, rather irritated; “Not THAT song! You’re messing wif duh song in my head!”

Timo, sitting next to her with his iPod Nano headphones in his ears, remarked:

“It’s not in your head, Anna – I can hear it!”

Anna totally ignored Timo, and the rest of us for that matter, since we had ceased the harmonies. She continued with the little ditty she was making up at the time. Something about shopping in Mexico and Tuesday being Amy’s day.

Anna Bella is the ultimate pretender. She can seriously be in your space and totally not there, if you know what I mean. This afternoon I was chopping garlic and browning pork for marinara sauce. She sat at the counter beside me as I worked, probably a good 90 minutes. The whole time she had her lips moving. Half the time there was a pretend conversation going on between a small bobble head penguin wearing a cowboy hat and a little wooden bobble head turtle. She encircled them with the spent glow sticks from last night’s night games. She hid them under the rim of her cereal bowl, and slid them to the next stool as she shifted closer to the pineapple sitting on the granite counter top. Half the time she speaks for her imaginary cast of characters. The other half she sings a sort of narration. Writes little songs, some of them amazingly good, changing the lyric as her story progresses, but often coming back to her make believe chorus. She sings to herself alone, not caring a whit about who might be listening. This afternoon she sat in the sand in front of us as Gumpa worked on some legal cases and Gummy dozed off between paragraphs in her book. I listened as she told her story, the one about the princesses and the sand castle and the little boy and whatever else she wanted to add to her story. She sat in her yellow swim suit, her chest bent over against her knobby little knees, her feet looking like cute little emery boards with the sand collected on her wet skin. Her hands moved, and her legs, and her feet and her arms, all responding to the story line in her lyrics; the music in her head drifting out like the music that wafted over the porch in the condo down the beach.

Anna has her own little world, sweet and pure and friendly. There are interesting stories in the neighborhoods of her world; and behind them all is Anna’s soundtrack. It’s in her head all the time. If you try singing your own songs while her show is playing she will let you know it! “You’re messin’ wif my song!” she’ll say. As soon as you’re quiet she gets back to business, like nothing ever happened. Her high pitched falsetto four year old girl voice dancing up and down a storyline of her own making. Everyone in our family is welcome to write their own songs. That’s cool. Just be careful if Anna’s in the room, cuz you won’t want to mess with Anna!

WOTD 27 - INDIGO

2011-04-05T02:50:00.003-06:00

Under the indigo sky, punched like tinware with the light of a million stars peeking through, the shrimp boats line up on the horizon, out past the sand bar; the lights on their small masts twinkling against the water appearing like a string of café lights hanging in the distance. John has labored over the fire in the fire pit, up on the top of the ridge where the grass ends and the sand begins. The smoke refuses to float out toward the sea, insisting instead on coming back to the crowd of friends clustered under the porch; Kirt lying on the lawn couch, paperback in hand, his leg hanging casually over Linda’s golden brown knee. Children run across the sand, across the cropped green token of grass, across tiled floors, their arms and ankles bejeweled with glow stick bracelets and necklaces Sue Ann had spread across the dining table when dinner was done. The kids scampered to the table like crabs on the shore, scurrying and grabbing and twisting the plastic bands, releasing neon yellow, violet , pink, chrystalline, and chartreuse strips that bounced across the dark night as we watched them run off, giggling, shouting rules for night games as they ran, their energetic voices trailing off, buried under the throbbing pulse of the waves and the chatter of friendships old and new. The Smiths have taken the baby home to bed. We paused and wished them well from our various places. Christian sits on a lounge chair out by the fire, his face glowing in the reflected light of his iPod. Neal has just finished telling us about his risky encounter with that man who stole Sue Ann’s iPhone last year. We take turns looking over the ID card Neal convinced the man to give him in the store.

Ash stands at the kitchen sink washing off his grilling tools, a granite countertop between us, telling us he’s a blend of Fijian, Irish, Welsh and something else. He tugs at his shirt to prove he burns like the rest of us, even though he was raised on a hot tropical Fijian island. Someone walks by with a stack of plates, the residue of barbeque and fresh fruit falling into the trash bin, forks clanking in the sink. Annie, sore and swollen from her sun rash and weary with her pregnancy, decides to head back to the beach house two doors away. We kiss her cheek and tell her we’ll soon follow.

Out by the ridge we stab long sticks with soft white marshmallows, poking them into the radiant glow of the logs winking in the fire pit, exclaiming when they accidentally hit the wood and burst into flame, lifting them to our faces and blowing in a fervent attempt to save what we can. We take our charred sweets over to the hot tub and lay them atop chocolate bars placed on graham crackers, lay another cracker on top and pull the sticks out like swords out of the mouths of circus fire eaters.

Our bellies full; the flames reduced to embers; we shift to the porch, sliding our chairs into the circle. I listen to the music of conversation. Someone picks up a guitar and the soft gulf breeze carries the notes in and out of our conversations, the sweet soft music like the breath of a newborn against our necks. The sound invites us unconsciously to find a place to be still, to rest a minute, to slow the pace of the evening winding down. The descending tide down on the beach lulls the tired ones to settle in, the stinging of the day’s sunshine on their cheeks coming gradually to their consciousness, the cool night air against sun tinged skin causing goose bumps to rise on their arms and legs. Little Anna crawls into my lap and asks for a blanket. Timothy leans his weepy head over on his mama’s soft legs, overcome with the impending sadness that always comes when he realizes his cousins have to go home tomorrow.

We convince John to sing us his car song. Little Ruby walks around shouting Hi to everyone as her daddy sings, finally crying that she needs her blankie. We all search the piles of beach towels and blankets strewn over the place. Finally we spy a corner of it on the Bailey couch. McKay shifts his weight, stands up from his spot smashed between his mom and his little sister, and produces not only her blankie but Ellie, her ragged old beloved pink stuffed elephant. Mama Ashley thanks him for keeping them warm! The Robinsons come through the screen door, carrying their empty plates from the potluck dinner. We call out to them, wishing them a good night, thanking Ash for grilling all that shrimp and chicken and hamburger. Maddi, tired out from night games, finds Sue Ann’s lap. We examine her toe, relieved to see her scrape healing over. Ruby’s mommy and daddy gather their children and thank the Harris’ for a great evening. Dave lifts Anna from my lap and does the same. We hug and kiss and whisper good nights to our friends. Sophie takes my hand and we walk through the starry night across the short cool grass, over the slate porches, carefully through the sandy spots, unsuccessfully attempting to keep the sand out of our sandals. Finally we come to the porch at our own home-for-a-week. The kids shake their sandy hair on the porch, take off their clothes and get into their jammies. Parker is so tired he cannot reason, sobbing that he simply cannot leave tomorrow, he really, really needs to stay two more days. He collapses on the couch in his parent’s bedroom. Even Ruby’s insistent cries will not stir him. I sink into the soft fabric couch and three little ones curl into me. We read two books. By the second one Bella has slid from my lap and bunched her legs under her belly, face down on the floor, sound asleep. Her daddy carries her to her bunk bed. My daughter and my son retrieve their oldest children from beside me, leaving me exposed and chilled in the cool night air. We whisper good nights. I move to the computer. Find a word.

All is still, the only motion is my fingers tripping across the keys of this computer, the light of the screen casting an eerie glow in this dark room; the only sound the rhythm of the fountain outside the front door, the clicking of the ceiling fans as they rotate above me, and the gentle, pulsing lapping of the ocean under an indigo sky.

WOTD 26- WHISTLE

2011-04-03T23:07:00.002-06:00

From our apartment on East Bruceton Road to Cinema World we only had to walk along the sidewalk until we got to Route 51. We’d press the button at the steel pole by the cross walk then cross the street at the light, heading up through the strip of shops at Southland Shopping Center. In no time we were at the corner of the vast asphalt parking lot, heading up to the front entrance of that dome shaped edifice. Cinema World became a dollar theatre when I was maybe 15 years old, which would make Lib 14 and Ann Marie 16 or 17, depending on the month of the year. One dollar was the equivalent of four hours babysitting when we were twelve, but by the time we were official teenagers we could get that in one hour. Or if I folded laundry for the lady in apartment 718; or made one meal for the Sobaslays on the third floor. If I hadn’t been saving for a pair of skis I’d have had many dollars to spare. Still, we had enough that when Sound of Music came to the dollar theatre that year Lib and I went probably 8 or 10 times. Once we stopped at the steak house restaurant on the strip mall and got ourselves rib eye steaks and baked potatoes before the show. $5 for the whole dinner, including a drink. Looking back on that it makes me giggle. I think we felt very mature and indulgent in that decision. We never ever bought drinks or popcorn at the movie house. We always felt just fortunate to be able to see the show. To this day I get all giddy thinking about being “allowed” to get popcorn if I want now at the movie show, and I’m always a little sad if we go to dinner before the show cuz I love that feeling of the holy trinity: Popcorn – pop – AND the movie…and I’m bummed if there’s just not enough room for it after having had dinner.

One summer afternoon, when Lib and I were walking over to Cinema World for the show, I asked Libby to teach me how to whistle with my fingers. I’m a fair to midland whistler of tunes with my lips, but I never could do the Boy Scout whistle thing, either with four fingers and two hands, or two fingers on one hand. Lib was a master. She could stop the whole gym full of people at Rec. Night if the teacher couldn’t find her metal whistle and needed to get peoples’ attention. At Girl’s Camp she took the place of the dinner bell. She’s really good. I guess I wanted that kind of power, to call people to attention in an instant without harming the energy in a space by yelling. So she showed me how to hold my fingers, thumb tip to fingertip, nail touching nail. Make a ring out of the fingers, then set the ring on the tip of your tongue like this…she showed me how. I imitated her, watching very carefully while we waited for the stop light to change.

“Now push the tip of your tongue back into your mouth and blow,” she produced the high pitched whistle on demand, just as the light changed. I tried it as we crossed, producing only air that sounded like it was being squeezed through a pile of cotton balls. Over at Southland we stopped in front of the candy store and inhaled as she explained in more detail, watching me as I made the attempt, analyzing the style and technique.

“Looks to me like you’re doing it right,” she said, shrugging her shoulders. I sighed, hung my head and complained, as I am wont to do. “I just don’t have the gift. You have the gift. Forget it!”

Lib takes words like that as a signal to intensify the encouragement: “Wait. Try using two hands.” She took the pinky fingers on both her hands and pushed on her tongue. People stopped walking and talking and turned to us. We smiled and ducked into the candy store; pretended we were looking for something to buy, then stepped out onto the sidewalk again, calling “Thank You” behind us the way our mom taught us to do. I blew and blew, using two fingers, then the finger and thumb, then the two pinkies. By the time we got to the Cinema World parking lot my lungs were saturated with Pittsburgh smog, my brain spinning in a descending vortex. I had to sit on the hot asphalt and put my head between my knees. We almost missed Maria throwing her arms out on that Austrian mountain top singing “The hills are alive with the sound of mu….sic.”

Every year at Girl’s Camp I give it a go till I get light headed and just yell instead. Last week, trying to get the kids attention to say an opening prayer in our joint Young Men’s – Young Women’s activity, I tried it once. I guess I think that by some divine intervention one of these days it will just come to me the way I’ve heard language comes to some missionaries. No such luck. Even now, as I’ve typed this little essay, I have attempted no less than three times to whistle like this. Now my head hurts.

I guess if I had to pick the kind of whistle I would prefer, in general, I’m glad I can do the one that can carry a melody. My dad used to lip whistle little ditties, at least I think he did. Songs like “There’s a Pawn Shop on the Corner of Pittsburgh Penn-syl-van-ee-uh” or “How Much is That Doggie in the Window”, the first note in the song rising up to the second note in the melody; cutting off sharply, much like the whistle of a boy when he’s calling his dog. Maybe I dreamed that. I do know for a fact my mom used to help me find the right pitch in the songs I whistled as a kid. There’s something peaceful and joyful in the sound of someone whistling at a workbench or the laundry counter, out on the coke batteries in the steel mill or in front of an open window at the kitchen sink.

I remember, not all that long ago I guess, catching myself whistling one day after I had been struggling emotionally for some time. I remember smiling, thinking to myself, “Well, hello there. Welcome back my whistling friend!”

WOTD 25 - CHARM

2011-04-03T03:18:00.000-06:00

There are certain moments in a person’s life when it’s sort of expected that something special happen. Special in the sense that people put forth an effort to make note of the occasion. Of course tradition and culture and social settings affect the equation, but in general, certain “thresholds” are crossed with an extra hug, or a little curly Q at the end of the signature on a card, or a bit of creative flair in decorating or even a big splash of a party.

A few years ago I dipped my big toe into the fifth decade of my mortal life. I know, it may shock you that I am actually this old ;) First of all, I am really glad to have lived this long. I’m not one to bemoan my aging condition too much, though there are aspects that are surely less desirable. And it would be dandy to feel young in my flesh again. Yesterday, in a public restroom, after I had washed my hands, I placed them under one of those new fangled drying machines where the air pounces out of a faucet-like nozzle with supersonic force. The hands are dry in like 6 seconds. As I listened to what sounded like the exhale of a vortex, I watched my skin ripple, as if it were liquid. I made an audible comment about my poor old hands, their abundant flesh flopping under that powerful tunnel of wind. Oye Ve.

Every time I catch myself feeling sort of sorry for being on this side of prime, I remember the day I stood in the shower, weeping, wondering what was happening as my limbs began to lose feeling and my face froze with paralysis. There was no diagnosis, and the paralysis was quickly advancing. I lifted my face into the falling water over my head, my saline tears flowing down with the soft water weeping from the spout of my shower, and prayed. “Is this going to take my life, God?” My heart throbbed as I held my breath, the way I tend to do when I am overcome with emotion, as if breathing will move time along too quickly and I need it to stop. You know…that kind of cry where you think you won’t be able to inhale ever again, you just keep pushing air out past your vocal cords and just before you pass out your mouth opens like the doors on the spook house ride at the amusement park and you suck in oxygen like your lungs were deflated balloons. That particular moment in my life It was one of the most lonely, desperate moments I can recall. The unknown is so powerful.

Miraculously, the illness did not take my life, and I healed, mostly, with just enough residual effects to keep me humble and grateful.

Dave and I walked through Libby and Gram’s kitchen door on that day in early March and a warm, friendly, energetic cheer went up as all sorts of voices I cherish united in a massive chorus of HAPPY BIRTHDAY! What a great night that was! My brothers. My sisters. My friends. My children and grandchildren. My beautiful ageless mother. So fun! Hours later, When the crowd had cleared, the people closest to me huddled around in Gram’s family room and handed me their presents. Tiny boxes, wrapped in dainty little papers with neatly tied bows.

I have always looked admiringly at the silver charm bracelets girls wore when I was young. I saw someone with one a few years back and those old feelings stirred to the surface again. It got me to thinking. And with the thoughts evolved a plan. Since I have been teased mercilessly all my life for thinking everything is “symbolic”, I allowed myself to imagine having a bracelet singing on my wrist the songs of all the people I love. And so came my request.

One by one I untied those little boxes and smiled, wept and cheered for the little silver and gold symbols that would fit on the silver bracelet Dave also bought for me. Each person had thought of something that would represent them to me, so that I could in some way carry them with me always.

Every now and then, on a Sunday morning when I think enough to include jewelry in my wardrobe, I snap the hinge on my silver charm bracelet and shake my wrist down, letting the charms fall into places.

During Sacrament Meeting I I roll the little charms through my fingers, or show them to a child who has found a spot on my lap: a little silver pony from Annie, for whom I wrote the lullaby, Ride a Blue Pony; a Chinese symbol for Mother from my Hong Kong Kate; a painter’s palette from Sarah; ball bat from Johnny; the number 5 for my 5 sisters and the 5 Hour store; so many other deeply meaningful things: a writer’s pen made of pure gold, as well as a golden Grand Hotel from Mackinac Island where we honeymooned. The Washington DC Temple, a little silver mixer from my baking pal grandkids, as well as a silver Christmas bell and a rocking chair; a British sixpence, Mickey Mouse ears reminding me of our birthday trip to Disneyland that year. So many more. So many more my arm jingles and rings when I reach for my Young Women’s bag at Church, or lift my hand to write on the chalkboard. When my wrist plays its music I remember my 50th birthday. I'm old enough to have such fabulous memories distilled into symbolic tokens. How cool is that!? And when I remember, I feel the love going deeper…deeper…deeper into the place where only love can go. It may also be noted that I do not have to find a place to store so many sentimental things as I have in my basement. I have instead a small charmed cluster of memories dangling happily from my aging, fleshy wrist.

So I am not a Jr High maiden. Maybe a charm bracelet is a weird thing to want at my age. I don’t care if it is. I love having it, because I love those who gave it to me.

WOTD 24 - COMMANDMENT

2011-04-01T18:20:00.000-06:00

Testing. Testing.

I’m doing this little test on myself. You can try it too, if you want.

Here goes:

Recite the 10 Commandments.

Ready? Set? Go….

10.

If you’re like me you are at this moment hearing the voice of Charlton Heston, covering dual roles as both Moses and the voice of God, pronouncing each commandment as a flaming finger shoots from the heavens and burns symbols onto stone tablets, roaring sound effects swooshing and retreating behind the booming vocal track.

As I am preparing Easter dinner at our house or at Gram’s, inevitably someone is watching The Ten Commandments. After this many years I should have this memorized. I can see it, and feel it, and hear the “Thou Shalt’s”…but I have to admit when I wrote out the basics of the ones I recalled off the top of my head, I earned probably a C. Maybe a C- even. Seriously, Cori? We are talking the basics here!

So here, in full disclosure of my frailties as a C average Christian who prays to God every day and attends church every Sabbath, asks a blessing on every meal and who partakes with regular soberness of the Holy Sacrament…here is what I wrote in my one minute see-what-you-can-spit-out-of-your-brain self test. Before you read on, I challenge you (if anyone is reading this besides my sisters – and I’ll bet they get all of them)… test yourself and see if you know all ten. One minute. And no peeking! Go back up to that blank list of 10. Ready…set…go!

******************

Here’s my scribbled list:

Love God

Love Neighbor

No Idols (graven images)

Not kill

Not covet

Not steal

Not bear false witness

No adultery

Here’s what I missed:

Sabbath day

Honor parents

Lord’s name in vain

Let me say here that according to a United Press International article "Only 68 of 200 Anglican priests polled could name all Ten Commandments, but half said they believed in space aliens.” I’m just sayin’.

I think it’s kind of ironic they play the Ten Commandments on network TV at Easter time. Jesus isn’t anywhere to be seen, except maybe in that finger of God. A long time after Moses lived, Christ came to change that old Law. He came to thank Moses, and then to override some of the misproportioned rules that had evolved through generations. It’s said He brought a new law. A change; however hard change may be for us underlings. He came to give us, to some degree, autonomy. He came to advance us to a higher standard. The deeper the understanding, and the more mature the participant, the less “law” is needed. If I love God as I should love Him, which first requires me to know Him on a deep and personal level; and I love my neighbor – my family – my friends and my enemies, with that same level of love as the first commandment; then all else should basically fall into place and I don’t need those more specific rules. They’re still rules, I just don’t need them written out for me. I will naturally respect the right to life; cherish my covenant relationships; speak and act with honesty and integrity; be grateful for what I have and don’t have and not crave what is not mine. I will understand the value of a day “set apart” from my worldly existence, and I will choose naturally to make that a day to renew my focus on the divine. I will be grateful for and represent my heritage with dignity, understanding the divine nature of the family unit. And I will revere the name of my maker, using it appropriately and with honor and use it only in addressing Him or speaking respectfully about Him.

(In that regard, I’ve always been a little shocked that good Christian people will casually take the Lord’s name in vain, even in conversation on the steps of the church after Mass. It’s one of the 10 most basic commandments, isn’t it? Kind of shocks me. But I shock myself with some of the stuff I do, so we’re all good company for each other, no?)

The sounds and images of the movie The Ten Commandments are now a fixture of Easter tradition for me. That’s fine. But what I see at Easter time, not on the TV screen but in the quiet places of my heart, is a scene in that upper chamber in an anonymous building miles and millennia away from here, where a cluster of men have gathered for Passover Seder. The air is scented with fragrant oil mixed with the aroma of suckling lamb roasted on a spit in the open fireplace downstairs. There is the rumbling chatter of men coming together in a common cause, embracing and exclaiming as they recognize each other, reunited from their various travels. Into this gathering a single man rises, and as he rises a hush falls over the room. He smiles, moves to a small table in the corner by the doorway, lifts a clay pitcher of water and tips it above the basin set on the floor at the threshold. A sense of surprise buzzes over the heads of the guests as they look at each other, querying with their lifted eyebrows. He tucks a linen towel into the sash around his waist and bends before Peter.

You know the rest. Things were turned upside down. The master washed the feet of the servants. The sacrificial lamb eaten in remembrance of the past became instead a foreshadowing of events to soon follow. The creator submitted to the created. So much that was traditional and sacred was turned upside down. And a new commandment was given.

When I made my list of commandments I made the mistake of putting the New Commandment second on the list, which of course threw my numbers off and made for 11 instead of 10.

Rules are good things. It’s good for a child to know she should not lie. Good to know precisely what we should and should not do as we are learning.

But I have put away my childish things. Not that I am always happy about this…happy in the giddy pleasurable sense of the word. I have willingly put up the part of me that needs to always be told what to do and what not to do. Without cap and gown, or perhaps, in a deeply symbolic sense, fully dressed in cap and gown: I have graduated. My Jesus spoke at commencement. I may have expected a long and brilliant intellectual academic rendering of philosophy and wisdom. What I got…what we got…was simple enough for a child to understand:

A new commandment I give unto you, that ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another. By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another. John 13: 34, 35

WOTD 23 - SEW

2011-04-01T00:02:00.001-06:00

Sew…Ape rill is hear. Maze jest a round duh coroner. Eye mist trussed peep hole awn ape rill first. Day tees us, dew wing whiled Trix, braking trussed, jest fur a muse meant.

Eye wood knot dew anything sew rued! Eye jest right tails from won plane whirred – hear inn this vary silly blog. Win eye started know won tolled me howl hard it wood bee. Two bee on nest, eye wood pre-fur two halve given up chalk lit fur LENT.

O will.

Eye well paws fur a wile end tink sum moor….

Never mind - Eye halve uh soar brain. This peace is threw!

Buy!

(Eye bet yew whirr thinking eye wood rite a bout duh old sing her so wing machine, huh? Knot sew!)

~Eh prill fulls!~

WOTD 22 - CARD TABLE

2011-03-31T00:52:00.001-06:00

Tucked into the edge of the closet, hiding like a shy schoolgirl behind her mother’s long woolen coat, the old card table lays in waiting. A product of the 50’s, vintage now; almost antique even, it was once the master of Friday nights and occasional Sunday afternoons; taking center stage in the living room after the couches had been slid back against the wall and the coffee table moved to the bedroom. Now we pull it out as our third option, behind the new Costco plastic tables, for the massive gathering at our Thanksgiving feast.

That poor old table is glad to see us. Four metal legs tucked in the edges for storage, a little rusty at the hinges. The slender legs click as they are pulled into place, the square table top rolling like a caveman’s wheel over the carpet as each leg is released, one at a time. Because the top is made of compressed cardboard, it’s very light and I flip it handily once the legs are out; lean on it to make sure its stable, then swipe a damp kitchen dishtowel over the top, clearing the dust from the vinyl covering, brownish-beige and speckled with gold glitter. I carefully cross the tiny tear in the right hand corner. The tear has been there for almost a whole generation. I remind myself to find the Elmer’s glue and fix that, but instead reach into the drawer of our long black hutch and pull out a tablecloth. Taking it by the corners I flick it through the air and carefully guide it as it falls to the table, like those plastic camouflage parachute soldiers we tossed into the air when we were kids. I push my forearms over the fabric, like opposing windshield wipers, pressing the wrinkles out to the edges. The scent of fabric softener rises to my nostrils as I lean closer to the table. From under the kitchen sink I retrieve a plastic spray bottle, filled with water. Pumping it over the cloth I let the mist sink to the table top, set for a minute, then call Dave over to take the other two corners and pull out the creases. Here in this desert place it dries in a minute and the creases are gone, almost like I had used an iron. The tablecloths unify the variety of tables in the kitchen and adjoining family room. They are all ageless and rank-less once they’re dressed for Thanksgiving Dinner.

That old table has held a lot of our family history on her thin metal legs. Early on she saw the underside of bridge cards, way back in the arid air of Shelly, Idaho. The cards fanned out face-down on her shiny new top. I picture my aunts situated across from each other, their high heeled shoes tucked against the foot rests of their folding chairs, their wrists leaning on the table edges, infusing traces of rose scented toilet water into the vinyl. If I close my eyes I can hear their voices; low pitched and glottal with that familiarly comforting nasal quality and crisply enunciated Idaho accent. Very few sounds are as comforting to me as the voices of the women who nurtured and raised me. I recall the sweet calm of falling asleep as I waited to ask my mom a question when she was on the phone. I’d sit there on the side of her bed, waiting dutifully for her to finish. Eventually I’d plop over onto the pillows, drifting peacefully off to rest, lulled to the music of my mother’s voice simply talking. Didn’t matter if it was business or pleasure.

I'm thinkin' table must know an awful lot of secrets, sitting silently all those years as my mom and her sisters gathered around her. When we moved to Pittsburgh the games ceased. The table was relegated to the basement, where we kids took over. At Christmastime we glumped our miscellany on top, pieces of this and that used to make something or other; the stuff imaginative kids will use to create treasures. One year I spread wood shavings on her, gluing and clamping with potato chip bag clips, making ornaments for my Christmas gifts. Another year I made clothespin dolls. I recall cutting into pieces of lace found in mom’s sewing box, tacking collars onto those clothespin dolls. I found out later that the lace I had snipped was a precious piece of heirloom tatting made by Grandma Jenson. It’s to my mother’s credit that she did not reprimand me for that.

Later on, the table held balsa wood ornaments we cut and painted to hang on our tree. When mom finally moved in with Dave and me, after we were married and had bought our home in Pittsburgh, the table joined our limited collection of furniture. I stored gingerbread houses on her, lined up assembly-line fashion, waiting to be delivered to clients of Cori’s Unforgettable Edibles. Christmas Eve we slapped rolls of wrapping paper atop her, cutting and taping and ribboning till the wee hours of Christmas morning. It became the base of Lemonade stands, of bake sales, of garage sale cash boxes and concert CD sales. It held utensils and plates and bottles of pop at open houses; root beer floats at youth activities and brightly wrapped packages at birthday parties. Thinking about it, she was so much a part of the family she could have joined us in family prayer if her legs had been able to bend.

It’s a sweet thing to have a portable table on hand. It means there is enough room in our home to shift things a bit and welcome more people in. More chairs at more tables. Bounty beyond what our foremothers could have dreamed. So much, so easily obtained, and so gratefully spread on our large wooden dining table, two long Costco banquet tables, and one beautifully dependable well worn card table.

WOTD 21 - FLIP FLOP

2011-03-29T23:44:00.002-06:00

The flip flop flings against the flesh of my feet. Left says flip; right says flop. Flip-flop-Flip-flop: alternating pitches, a third apart, like the bouncing bass notes on a Hawaiian ukulele song. When you hear a sound repeat often enough, like walking in flip flops, you end up not noticing it at all; like the chiming of the clock in our family room; like the lady sitting next to you in church breathing heavy through a whistling nostril. She’s used to it. You’re not. Or the guy two rows back from us in the movie theatre last month who snored through the show. Kind of an expensive nap. And really irritating for the rest of us. Don’t you think snoring on certain levels should wake the snorer up? I know I wake up sometimes and think to myself, “Golly, it’s awfully quiet in here.” I think it’s really weird that the people we are closest to know certain things about us that we just don’t know ourselves; such as how we sleep. I’ve listened to our kids talk so much about our sleeping habits that I once asked them to record me sleeping so I would know what they were talking about. None of them ever did. I think they were embarrassed for me. I think they still are.

When they were making sleeping assignments for Stake Girls Camp two years ago I had to be candid with Kathy Wood, our Stake Camp Director. The cabins sleep 16, which is really great. Right?

“Uh…” I was a new Young Womens president and was trying to find my definition with the girls, trying to make myself fit somewhere respectably between mature and deeply spiritual and fun with a little pinch of crazy.

“Uh, I have a little problem Kathy.” I know Kathy pretty well, which is a blessing. I know she fits really soundly in the ideal and hard to achieve “fun and really spiritual” category, and I know she knows and likes me.

“I’m afraid I’ll keep the girls awake with my snoring. I’m afraid I’ll take a dive in the coolness department when I keep them awake with my snoring. Either that or I won’t get any sleep cuz I’m afraid I’ll keep them awake with my snoring. I keep my own kids awake. Dang this deviated septum of mine! I think we need a separate cabin for snorers. We can call it the Snoratorium.”

So Kathy, much to her credit, and maybe because some of her counselors have the same problem, did just that: she created the Snoratorium in the sleeping rooms behind the kitchen. She arranged for our campsite to be close by. So every night after we made our Smores and did our figurative jigs around the campfire, I sat in my canvas camp chair in the middle of the cabin where most of our girls slept. While they situated their worn out bodies on their blow up air mattresses I sang them songs, plucking the strings of my guitar like a ticking clock, like a pendulum swinging back and forth, back and forth…you are getting sleeeeeepy.

After I could hear the rhythmic pulse of 16 girls sound asleep I would slip on over to the Snoratorium and get some rest.

One night, it must have been around 1 am, the whole campground was sawing logs. I was down to the really quiet songs from my repertoire. I tried to finish every night by singing a hymn, feeling like it left a kind of musical blessing on my girls before I tiptoed out. So I am halfway through the second chorus of How Great Thou Art… “Then sings my soul – My Savior God to Thee – How great thou….” Suddenly one of the girls, who’s name shall go unmentioned, a girl not in our ward but who was visiting, threw her blanket off the top bunk she was sleeping on. She let out a triple-nasty word, which shall also go unmentioned but which began with the letter between e and g in the alphabet, followed by a grumbled… “Why is it so *@#%! hot in here?!” I sprang from my seat, banging my guitar on the table in front of me, stung and startled and feeling really responsible for the protection of the other girls’ soft skinned ears. I immediately called the name of the unmentioned, moving toward her as she started climbing off her top bunk. It didn’t take long for me to realize she was still asleep. I gently helped her return to her bunk, opened the window a little wider beside her, and asked her to sleep gently and softly and gracefully. And quietly. Actually, she didn’t hear me. I asked God to help her do that.

I felt like I needed to open the door and let the nasty out, (like these girls didn’t hear this kind of stuff every day at school). I actually tried to apply my powers of energy to shoo the bad out the door and beckon the good fresh mountain air in with a wave of my hands; to cleanse the space where my young innocents were situated in a mode of sweet repose. After enough time had passed and the girls who had stirred were back to their steadily paced breathing, I picked up my guitar and sang I Am a Child of God, feeling like we needed another blessing on the place. When I was done I tucked my instrument in its canvas pouch and ever-so-slowly zzzzipped it shut. You know how long it takes to silently zip a guitar gig bag? I placed it in its corner in the cabin; walked to each set of beds and whispered a little prayer for each of my girls, then slipped out the door. Outside, walking along the gravelly path under the shifting light of the moon through the trees, I got to thinking.

Maybe next time, I thought, we should suggest they create another isolated cabin.

We’ll call it the Swearatorium.

WOTD 20 - BELIEF

2011-03-29T02:06:00.003-06:00

“What happened to this orange!”

“What do you mean?” Lib replied as she backed the car out of the garage.

I had dipped my hand into the box of small mandarin oranges sitting outside the kitchen door as we made our way out to the car. A seasonal treasure sent by our California sisters, we waited all year for the harvest, anticipating the juicy sweetness of those bite sized segments dripping with California sunshine. I pulled the thin layer of skin from the fruit, picking tiny threads off as we talked. Popped a one inch segment into my mouth and cringed.

“It tastes like salt!”

“Huh?” Lib was focused on backing out; raised her arm and pushed the garage remote to close the door; shifted the car into drive and headed up the hill from their condo.

“It tastes like salt. Taste it! “

I handed her a segment.

“Tastes fine to me.”

I tried another piece and, again, it tasted like that salt lick I tried that one summer out in Uncle Archie’s corral. I wrapped a paper towel around the rest of it and set it on the seat, trying to figure it out, imagining that maybe the orange had accidentally been set on a pile of rock salt and the stuff infused into a portion of it.

The next morning I sliced a grapefruit at home. Slipped a serrated knife carefully around the rim and dipped my spoon into a section, the juice seeping up and over the lip and into my bowl. When the spoon touched my lips, once again the taste of salt attacked my taste buds. I threw the grapefruit away and headed off to school. That week I spent each day substitute teaching at Viewmont High; History and Guitar classes. We spent the evenings that week watching Annie perform in the high school musical version of Les Miserables, volunteering as concession sellers and ushers. Thursday my hands started to tingle. I thought the strap of the guitar hanging around my neck for hours had perhaps pinched a nerve. Friday my feet kept falling asleep. I remember standing in the back of the auditorium, watching the show, and kicking the toes of my sandaled feet on the floor, trying to wake them up. By Saturday both legs were electrically numb, that hyper alive zingy kind of numb you feel when you bonk your crazy bone, like my body was in a vice and little electric worms were wiggling through thick rubber flesh under my skin. My arms were the same. And portions of my face. I remember shuffling on my stinging, burning, electric feet to the study at 3 am, tears streaming down my numb cheeks, Googling my symptoms. The next day, frightened, I sat on the table at my doctor’s office as he spoke.

“I can’t tell, without diagnostic tests, what is causing this, but it is neurological and it is fast moving. Let’s get some steroids in you and send you to the U for testing.”

Thus began the long, painful, wearisome journey with Guillain Barre Syndrome. Without going into a long detailed explanation of the variety of tests they performed on me the following week, I will say, in the end, that a diagnosis of Guillain Barre Syndrome was the best of the options I found on the internet that night I entered my symptoms in a Google search. In the end, while the recovery was long and painful, I was comforted by the stack of papers with test results that indicated hundreds of maladies I did NOT have. Looking at the possibilities they tested for, I marveled that any of us are functioning, healthy individuals when there are so many things that could go wrong with our bodies!

I saw seven different Neurological Specialists that week. Lib pushed me in a wheel chair from room to room, clinic to clinic. I asked each doctor, at some point, about that salty citrus, wondering if this malady was at all related. Six of them said no.

Our daughter Sarah was at the time a student at the University of Utah School of Medicine. Ironically, they were studying neurology at the time. Even more amazingly, they specifically studied Guillain Barre Syndrome, taught by Dr. Renner. After class Sarah made her way down to the professor.

“My mom has Guillain Barre Syndrome,” she said.

“Really? Was she diagnosed by an M.D?”

“Yes. Right here at the U of U.”

That afternoon his office called and asked if I would come in. GBS is a rare syndrome, only diagnosed after many tests including EMG and spinal tap, and he was intrigued to hear of one of his students here knowing someone with that definite diagnosis. Dr. Renner had done a medical fellowship in Guillain Barre Syndrome. Sarah went with me to his office, where he taught her as he examined me. I got all weepy watching him tutor my daughter as he ministered to me, meticulously administering test after test, evaluating my condition, asking me to close my eyes and stand on one leg (impossible); pounding and poking and scraping and gently bending, all the while softly instructing my daughter as she sat in the corner of the exam room, a notebook in her lap, pen in her hand.

He verified the diagnosis, suggesting plasmapheresis. Just before he left the room I stopped him:

“Can you tell me, maybe I’m crazy…but can you tell me if any of this would make an orange taste salty?”

“Indeed, it could. The ninth nerve goes down the side of your face, in the vicinity of the jaw, and interprets sweet, sour, bitter and salty. If that nerve was stripped in the GBS process then it could absolutely misinterpret, making sour citrus seem salty.”

Things got worse before they got better, though they never did get completely better for me. But considering where I was, and what other options I may have had to deal with, I am feeling profoundly blessed. I can play my guitar, can chop celery in tiny little pieces, can caress the soft hair of my grandchildren when I hold them. I can walk. Not without pain, but I can absolutely walk and that is a miracle. And oranges and grapefruit taste like oranges and grapefruit once again.

I wonder, in moments of reflection, how often we misinterpret things without knowing it. Had I never eaten a fresh ripe mandarin orange from the orchard in Roseville would it have surprised me that this particular one tasted salty that day? Or would I have simply believed mandarin oranges were supposed to be salty?

Belief, it is said, is the psychological state in which an individual holds a proposition or premise to be true. I guess you could say it is not necessary for something to actually be true in order for someone to believe it. Thank goodness much of the mundane in our lives has consistent evidence; humans have heads; lungs need air; sound travels without being seen; the sun provides light by day and the moon and stars reflect that light by night…stuff like that. Easy to believe. We all know it because the evidence consistently proves it.

The older we get, the more we struggle with belief. Newborn babies have no need for belief, I suppose. Their minds don’t search for testaments. They only know what their bellies and their pain mechanisms tell them and it wouldn’t matter if they believe someone will feed them or not, they’re just hungry. You couldn’t even say they trust someone to feed them. They’re just hungry. And if they die hungry, they just die. No anger, no questions. This is before they form attachment. Things change when we become more intelligent and attached. It takes the gently dissipating innocence rising from them as they age, their loss of naïveté, to form the questions which open the window to belief. We do not baptize our babies because they simply have no need for baptism at such an innocent age. We wait until they are old enough, tried enough, challenged barely enough…to believe, or at least to want to believe.

When the great maker of all good things molded us and breathed mortality into us, I imagine him setting us, figuratively speaking, on the chess board of life. He places us in our little first squares, and sits back in his chair. I don’t know how we move, whether we shift ourselves, or whether he lifts his hand and moves us himself, or whether he lets the board rise and fall, sliding us to and fro haphazardly. However we move; we move. Even if we don’t feel like playing; we play. I choose that candid chess scene as a picture in my head, not as fact, though I do believe in a great majestic hand overseeing me. It simply represents how little I know about why things happen.

What I believe and what I know are categories separated by one simple thing. Some call it the Holy Ghost. The Holy Spirit. Inspiration. Spiritual Instinct. That thing which causes the hairs on my arms to stand on end, springing out of little goose bumps when someone says something particularly stirring. That trigger in the back of my head which switches the tear ducts during certain tender moments. That soundless bell of validation I feel ringing in my chest when someone speaks something I consider to be true. It’s as real to me as the sun rising in the east and setting in the west. Because someone else does not perceive it the same does not diminish the evidence I have accumulated through the years: that this mechanism serves as a form of revelation to me, just like the test tubes and glass slides and microscopes served in my high school Biology class. Without it I would be wingless – unable to rise from the starkness of earth life. I’m not talking fairy wings, I mean figurative functional flight wings with power and purpose. Without it I think I might be able to feel happiness, but I would be devoid of hope; and without hope I cannot imagine being who I am.

Without that one little measure of Heaven our maker sent down with us, to emulsify our earthly mixture of ingredients, I would be resigned to basing what I “know” on pure hard evidence. And had I only eaten one mandarin orange in my life, and it tasted salty, I might never know that oranges are sweetly sour and delicious to the taste. I would presume them to be only what I personally knew them to be. But something in us is gifted to us, to tell us the true nature of an orange…of a child…of human hearts.

Belief does not need truth.

There would be no war, no classes on comparative religions, if we were unable to believe in something un-true. That’s a risk we were willing to take when we took on our human condition from our pre-mortal state.

But I think somehow truth needs belief.

In a metaphysical sort of way. Divine truth, the less obvious truth that requires something not seen through the lens of science, compels us to resign and surrender, having received enough visible evidence, coupled with that powerful ingredient of the Holy Spirit. That surrender is the umbilical cord to hope. We are nourished and grow, strange as it may seem, because we know something we cannot completely nor immediately prove; and because we cannot prove it we must hope it is true. Just hoping something is true does not mean it is true. But it also does not mean it is not true. When “I believe” grows to maturity, having been nourished by hope; it receives a new name. We stand at the pulpit, our hearts pumping, our minds focused, our arms covered in goose bumps, and we speak these words:

I know.

I like to think when I say those words; in my heart, with my voice, in song or in action; that it is the beautiful union of truth and my God given right… exercised in wisdom…to believe.

WOTD 19 - SOCKS

2011-03-28T02:55:00.002-06:00

He sheared the muddy wool in long thick strips, fallen onto the floor of their small thatched shed, the musky earthy glandular smell of sheep filling his nostrils. She gathered the wool in her wicker basket, swung onto her hip, and walked out to the sunshine; crouched onto a small wooden stool, set the basket beside her, and drew the oily wool through two wooden paddles embedded with metal tines, carding it into cooperative units, cleaned of burrs and mud and thistle leaves. She cards, and washes and dyes and spins; knits and weaves and stitches. Stretches the newly knitted, newly washed stockings onto wooden forms to dry in the radiant warmth of the kitchen fire. I see them only in my dreams, my great-great-greats, working the land and their animals, pushing their way through their earthly existence. I only imagine how they do it, composing the scenario from casual scenes found in PBS documentaries and from one particular book purchased in that musty bookstore in Hay on Wye, England; The Downlander Shepherd. No department stores for them. No racks of shoes or drawers of socks, all neatly stitched and seamless. Just an early spring lamb fed from the land, grown till its back and belly grew thick with wool, harvested and spun and knitted and worn under hand cobbled leather boots with button latches.

Yesterday I drove to Kohls, walked back to the Customer Service desk and returned the pair of boots I had bought for Sarah at Christmas, which she decided not to keep. Even though it’s been three months they happily traded the boots for in-store credit, electronically registered on a small plastic card. I traded the card for six pair of socks, three tightly woven running socks with special wicking to pull the sweat away from the soles of the feet - and three pair of argyles, all purchased for David's birthday this coming week. The socks were uniform in size, nicely arranged on thin colored cardboard, a chunk of thin black lines nested under the price on the upper right hand corner. The sign in the Men's department said buy one get one 50% off. The extent of personal labor in obtaining socks for David begins with turning the key in my Honda van and ends with pulling the zipper on my pocketbook. We hardly break a sweat.

For those of us who live in places with seasons, socks are a common denominator. The homeless fellow under the viaduct on 4th South wears them just like the Governor in the mansion on South Temple Street. They may not smell the same, but they both wear them.

When the kids were little and I was busy being PTA president and writing songs and recording albums, we had a laundry room between the kitchen and the garage. There was just a thin path in front of the washer and dryer. The rest of the floor was covered with a bulging mound of laundry. I am not proud of this. Every once in a while, when the mountain began to rumble like a volcano about to burst, I gathered that laundry into big black garbage bags and loaded the van, adding a stack of empty laundry baskets, a box of Tide, a gallon of Clorox and a jug of Downy fabric softener; drove up Main Street through Kaysville past Gentile Street in Layton, to Faye's Laundr-o Mat. I sorted the bags into washing machines, their tops lifted like the beaks of hungry baby birds. Dark's, whites, pastels, reds, sheets and towels,...they each had their own machine. Each fiber, each color, sorted into the bellies of those extra large commercial machines. I left the knits and hand washables at home for another day.

I learned to pace myself, starting the white's on hot while I prepared the colors, adding the Clorox after I pushed my strip of quarters into the batch of towels. The first batch was ready for fabric softener as I sorted the last batch. I worked my way back and forth along the row of washing machines like a suburban Kansas housewife on a trip to Las Vegas, drumming a row of slot machines, stuffing them with quarters and pushing and pulling handles.

Out of the washers, my arms embraced cool wet fibers stinging my nostrils with a waft of bleach or the scent of springtime “for clothes you love to live in!” I loaded the wet clothing into a large wire basket on wheels, my hand leading it along by the rod that rose from the base and bent to a rack for hangers at the top. Rolled the squeaky wheels over to the large bank of dryers, their round glass faces glowing in the reflected sunlight of a Saturday afternoon. It took me most of the day to complete my task. Various people came and went, their small batches washed, dried and folded in the wink of an eye. This was no ordinary laundry day; it was the ultimate test of a woman’s ability to multi task and achieve an end. The closest I come to it on a regular basis is cooking dinner on Sunday evening for a couple dozen people.

Finally…finally…I am finished. Those little demons of guilt get pushed aside when I am done. I feel rather satisfied as I load my piles of crisply folded clothing into laundry baskets, ready for the trip back home. Ah, those beautiful stacks of clean fragrant clothing, anxious to fill my children’s drawers. I swear to myself as I roll basket after basket out to the car that I am going to get a handle on this aspect of my life and have this taken care of on a regular basis, because it feels just dandy to be organized. But the thrill of it never lasts for me and I cannot sustain the desire no matter how often I yell at myself or shake my figurative finger and whisper, “See, doesn’t that feel better? Told you so.” The sense of satisfaction over tidy things and places never matches the thrill of other things for me: a new song, a deep and spontaneous conversation; a nicely rendered meal; a well placed afternoon nap from which you awake at the well resolved conclusion of a dream, a piece of life preserved in word. I wish a clean tidy laundry room made me feel so good for so long. Alas.

When I am finished with my laundry day I load one last basket into the back to the van. The leftovers. A deep plastic rectangular weave filled with miscellany: a pair of shorts little Annie’s outgrown; a tee shirt with the hem coming unstitched; the belt to Johnny’s ball pants. On top of the basket of miscellaneous clothes I plunk a Smiths grocery bag stuffed with un-matched socks. I harbor hope of finding their mates, even though I know they were likely sucked into the big vat under the laundry mat floor where the sock monster hunkers; his belly groaning and gurgling every morning; his big green arm rising up from underneath the washing machines and dryers, the crook of his fingernail snagging poor unsuspecting socks. I gather the mateless matchless misfits in my grocery bag. I don’t know why I keep the widows of gobbled socks. I guess I live in denial that there is a sock monster, hoping that instead there are corners of closets and pockets in sports bags where long lost mates are imprisoned. I keep thinking I will find them and free them and reunite them with their mates.

Years down the road I finally toss them, first taking the best 100% cotton ones out to be used for washing my bathroom mirrors or polishing my guitars. I talk to myself, giving me permission to let them go, telling myself they have filled the measure of their creation.

I think of my Great grandparents, going to so much effort for a single pair of socks. I feel ashamed that I have so many. So many that I only need to wash them in my nifty difty electric washing machine once every few weeks. How fortune smiled upon us to bring our feet to this time and place.

WOTD 18 - NICKNAME

2011-03-27T00:43:00.001-06:00

I was sixteen years old, long blonde hair, hip hugger jeans, my absent father’s old letter jacket and hand knit red wool sweater with two deer facing each other on the front, a pair of tan suede square toed Wallabies keeping my feet warm.

My hair smelled of Clairol Herbal Essence. When the chilly winter air blew through it, I inhaled a little deeper, searching for that scent of artificial springtime. There was a single ski tacked to my bedroom wall, a reminder that every babysitting quarter I earned was getting me closer to a real pair of my own. There was a candle holder and a half spent bayberry candle beside my bed; a clock radio set to wake me to the music of John Denver, Joni Mitchell, or Three Dog Night; a well-loved well-worn Raggedy Ann, positioned like a contortionist, smashed between the wall and my pillow. I was Junior Class President at TJ High. Sang in the 10th grade choir. Shot hoops at the community center almost every day after school. I played guitar in church and sometimes in school. I knew who I was and it all seemed fine to me.

Poor girl. I look at her through the rearview mirror of memory and feel a wash of overwhelming sadness, knowing that very soon her little bubble of self would morph and twist and burst, like a blister on the heel, the watery defenses of a teenage soul seeping out over the floor.

We didn’t know what it was in those days. Now we raise our shields and draw our medicinal swords and attack depression with full force and no apology. But then, we didn’t know what it was, or that it was following me through the halls of school, on the long bus ride home, and straight to my bedroom. Didn’t see it until it snatched me in it’s steel hinged jaws.

Eventually it squeezed itself between my sister Libby and me, staring me in the eyes and flailing it’s big hairy blue arms like a defender in a full court press. Color drained out of the picture of my daily life, eventually going from black and white of full on gray. The color left, and the laughter, and the music. My grades plummeted, friendships sort of diffused into thin air. I came home from school and curled up in Mom’s old white upholstered rocker and glazed my eyes with Mr. Rogers and Sesame Street on our recently acquired second hand colored TV. Looking back, I want to stretch my arms around that girl who probably just wanted to be little again. Stretch my mothering arms around her and draw her in.

When someone is depressed people quit doing certain things around them. Probably in self defense. Or maybe because some things don’t seem fitting. They start to tiptoe in stocking feet. Speak in whispered tones. Sometimes walk down the aisles in the grocery store thinking “What would make her happy?” They shimmy around silently until something bursts from them, or until they can no longer contain the frustration. Then cluttered emotion spews like that fountain of bronze beasts in downtown Kansas City. Tensions spurt and explode into anger, then tears, until finally arms rise up to the heavens in resignation. They breathe deeply, hold their breath, bow their heads, then …once again… fall into silence.

We tend to lose the sweet slushy yumminess of terms of endearment when loved ones are depressed. Maybe because they don’t feel dear, and they make cynical faces at such terms in order to make us stop. “I am not dear. Not dear to you or me or anyone else, so quit trying to make me think I am.” That’s the logic of depression. And out of love we stop. Our self definition, once boldly dimensional and vibrant, thins to a steel blue shaft, almost unseen. We feel invisible. Nameless. It’s stunningly frightening to think of oneself without even a name. Pretty soon we just want to disappear. Pretty soon we do.

Cork MaLork. That was the nickname my mother gave me when I was little. Sometimes she called me Corinna, if she was feeling a little more nurturing. But when she was freely happy, I was Cork MaLork. My father had called me Sport. Dad took my name with him when he left. No one has ever called me that since. And mom, not knowing what to say or do with me that dreary winter of my discontent, stopped using my nickname. She may have tried once or twice, but I likely never responded. It’s a risky thing to tease someone bound in the shroud of depression.

Christmas morning that year, in the mid 1970’s, there was a gift for me under the tree. There were many gifts, I suspect, but right now I am remembering this one. A silver gift box, about the size of a loaf of bread. It was bound by a single red bow, drawn tight and tidy with my mother’s hand. Attached to the bow was a teeny little gift card, about one inch square. The card had a picture Flopsy Bunny on front; the soft gray bunny brother of Peter Rabbit. Inside the card, in the blessedly graceful handwriting of my mother, was this message:

“Merry Christmas, to Flopsy Cork”

Inside the box was a stuffed Flopsy Bunny, purchased from the Toy Shoppe in Williamsburg, VA. We had visited Williamsburg often, and at some point I must have said something admiringly about that stuffed animal. And at some point my mom must have returned to the store and purchased it for me.

I don’t know why I even think of this right now; why I even chose to write about depression triggered by the word of the day: Nickname. Don’t know why I remember that little card or that gift. I’d like to say that there was some magic that rose from the silver gift box under our tree that year; I’d like to say that the depression lifted and I got my old self back and the demons never returned again. But such things are almost never the real truth. The truth is I don’t know why that particular gift mattered to me or why I even remember it.

Maybe it was just that there was a tiny thin blue thread of hope in the ink scripted across that little gift card. Maybe I awoke for a moment, long enough to discover my old nickname written on that little card, in the handwriting of the woman who loved me more and knew me better than anyone else on earth. Perhaps I saw the shadow of that little girl that used to be me and I shifted the light to make her come into view.

Not very many people even know that was my nick name. It was sort of my mother’s alone. Maybe that’s why I cherish it so much.

My friend Susan and I play this game on our iPhones now days. A Scrabble game. I usually give it one shot at 2 am before I go to bed. I like to play it because it keeps me connected with Susan. She is very patient with me. Our friend Fran has joined us and now I feel connected to her, too. And once in a while my very busy daughter Sarah plays a game or two. We got to pick our game names when we started. Susan’s name is Mavin. I’m not sure why. Fran’s is Frannie B. Sarah is SarabellaC. And mine is Cork Malork.

WOTD 17 - YES

2011-03-26T01:45:00.001-06:00

She stood in the doorway to our room. Leaned in and called my name.

“I’m right here,” I answered, slowly whispering so she would know there was no need to yell.

Without apology she dove into her request. Something about going somewhere with someone. Immediately the porcupine of parenthood raised its pricklies under my ribs, and I began to construct my response. Coming up with reasons she could not go. Not really evaluating the request, just the manner in which it was given. I needed to wield my mother-sword to remind her who was boss. I had refined this tool of parenting when our oldest first started asking these kinds of questions in this manner. I think it was the day after his 14th birthday. Something about flailing in a pool of weariness makes bossiness rise to the top.

For a long time my instinctive response to my kids’ requests was NO. They had to convince me to change to a YES. It made me feel empowered I guess.

Then I read somewhere that I might try making my instinctive response YES. When I heard this I kept my arms folded in front of me, my lips pursed and my right eye scrunched under my furrowed eyebrows. “How dumb is THAT?” I thought.

And then I thought some more.

Next time Johnny asked if he could drive to Jeff’s house I gave it a go:

“Yes.”

That’s all I said.

John sort of hung there for a moment, his chest pumped full of air, prepared with his come-back. Finally he exhaled.

“Uh…OK. Thanks.” He looked at me, sort of a pregnant pause kind of look, then peered out into the hallway, then back at me.

“OK. Bye.”

“Be back in an hour?” I called behind him.

“Sure.”

And he was.

This is interesting, I thought to myself. I began considering that perhaps what my kids wanted to do was in their own best interest. But how could that possibly be true? It’s against the nature of the teenage beast.

Sometimes, maybe even oft times, it is true: kids do not know what is best for them. But at some point they need to figure out how to make personal decisions. Practice is helpful. Best to start young rather than waiting till they are hormonally driven teenagers.

The key is letting consequences fall naturally, like snow on a winter day. It lands as easily on the sharp needles of a pine tree as it does on the smooth table top on the back deck. Sometimes we need to lay out the consequences before the figurative snow begins to fall. In fact this is a pretty good idea.

I started asking my kids what the consequences should be for themselves. That was another groovy parenting tool.

“So what should the consequence be if you are late coming home from Jeff’s?”

“Ummmm, hmmmm, maybe that I don’t get to drive the rest of the week?”

Sounded good to me.

In this way my children raised themselves.

Kids like being trusted. If they are not manipulators (and some are) then they will do a lot just to keep your sincere trust. At least that’s how it rolled out with my kids. They probably were not conscious of it, but somewhere inside they really wanted us to trust them. I always said one of Johnny’s finest gifts was his strong conscience. He may not have always followed the CTR rule (Choose The Right) but at least he felt bad about it when he didn’t. Guilt is a God given mechanism, and is often given a bad rap, probably because we misuse it. A wise bishop once told me to reserve guilt for sin.

I think to myself as I sit here typing that if anyone reads this, and likely few will, they will be shaking their heads and chuckling about my profound gift of denial, wrapped in a bright pink foil of oversimplification. They won’t know the intense struggles we had, and the agonizing prayers we whispered concerning our kids. It’s not like I reached over on my desk and punched that Staples button that triggers a little recording saying “THAT WAS EASY.”

Truly no one knows. For me or for you. No one but the divine father of us all. Thank goodness He is the only one allowed to judge us.

I’m just sayin’ that when I started coming at responding to my kids from the north of YES versus the south of NO, my perspective changed and so did theirs. It reminded me that while I am their mom, they are first and foremost stewards over themselves. They have battles of their own to fight. And I want to be an ally in battle, not an enemy.

I don’t quite know how to emphasize that this is not an easy-out form of parenting. This takes considerable forethought, intelligence, and faith in divine guidance. It also does not mean that just because my first instinctive response was trained to be “yes”, that the actual verbal response was “YES”. As often as not what came from my lips was NOPE. But it came out that way after first considering that we had an option in YUP.

I dare say my kids remember none of this. They wouldn’t know what was going on in my head. To them I was still that rather controlling mom who wasn’t all too consistent in her parenting skills. Heck, I was still a baby myself back then. I had four teenagers by the time I was 37.

Sorry, kids. I didn’t mean to be so bossy. Just imagine how bad it could have been if I had never considered saying YES.

WOTD 16 - NOTION

2011-03-25T01:33:00.001-06:00

It must have been while she was sleeping. Or perhaps when she was out in the parking lot talking to the neighbors. She can’t recall when or how. Must have buzzed around her head for a while, so tiny she would not have noticed it. Circled and circled until it found the right moment, then entered behind her ear. Bored its way through the soft moist skin back across the hard bone behind the lobe, back where there was still a hint of the scent of her shampoo. She never felt it, though she may have shaken her head or flicked the hair behind her ear or sneezed or something. I mean, how can such a thing have happened so unawares? Nevertheless, it was there.

The teeny winged notion planted itself in her brain and waited. Through a week full of nights and equal days. The week spun itself into a year. Or more. While it waited it grew, its belly growing fat, stretching and bulging until, finally, it gave birth. Nested the frenetic swarm of notion until they ripened and the little nubs on their shoulders stretched and morphed into wings of their own. They fluttered and flitted in her brain until she opened her eyes one afternoon after a fitful nap. Looked in the corner of the room and decided it was time to go. Saw shadows of things she had never before noticed. Heard voices and music and some distant drum beat calling her. So she went. Took only the soft blue sweatshirt from the pile of laundry in her closet, and the patent leather shoes she had purchased for her cousin’s wedding and never worn. That was all. Left her nightgown, and her blue plastic strip of pills, and her make-up and suitcase.

No one heard from her. They searched for nearly a year, some searched more, some are still looking. Wondered where she ever got the notion to leave. Now, even all these years later, her neighbors stood in the parking lot talking to each other, wondering whatever became of her, chitting and chatting and pursing their eyebrows. The gal who lived across the hall was sure she followed the fellow who had visited her apartment that one day in early autumn. She rolled her eyes to the upper left quadrant of her brain, rocked side to side on the outer edges of her feet as she talked, her arms crossed in front of her like she was holding her ribs in place. All of a sudden she slapped the back of her neck. Held her hand in front of her face looking for a mosquito but found nothing. Flicked her head to the side and scratched the itchy flesh behind her right ear; the soft, tender, moist portion of flesh behind her right ear.

Note- This is not autobiographical.
Just a writing exercise.
I know you were wondering.

WOTD 15 - COPYRIGHT

2011-03-23T23:34:00.001-06:00

Copyright: the right to copy.
When the word copyright popped up in the random word generator today I raised my imaginary hand in my little invisible class, mumbling under my breath, ““Ooo, ooo! I know this one, I know this one!” Mind you this imaginary class is on the level of taking snack and recess breaks and as opposed corporate lunch breaks, but I am somewhat familiar with copyright as a writer and publisher. I discussed this topic briefly last month with a group of songwriting students in the basement auditorium of the Bountiful Davis Arts Center.

“Your song,” I said, “is copyrighted the minute you create it. It is simply not registered until you do the paperwork with the Office of Copyrights.” If its not registered people may assume its public domain, meaning it is free to copy by members of the general public without obligation to get license or to pay for use.

“Oh,” they responded, “so have you registered all your songs with the Copyright Office? Isn’t that kind of expensive? I mean, how many songs do you have?”

How to answer that and appear responsible and authoritative?

“Welllllll,” I shifted my weight back and forth, “I have registered my albums. And if I am not the publisher, my publishers have registered others I’ve written, since I share the copyright with them. But I look at it this way for many of my tunes: If my work is so good someone would consider stealing it, then I am pretty darn happy!”

Of course I don’t mean to be flippant and irresponsible. If I sense I’ve written a hit song, I am going to register the copyright for sure. I just haven’t felt that way very often.

Imitation is the greatest form of flattery.

It’s really good to know the most important things do not require licenses for us to copy them. Things like my mom’s recipes. My daughter’s wry wit. My husband’s dependability and my son’s inherent interest in other people. My brother’s ability to twist words in witty ways. My neighbor’s graciousness. Sisters’ undying interest and skill with wordless conversation. None of them even think of wanting a copyright, or patent. That’s a good thing!

The very, very best of life is free to copy. Seriously, the maker of the world Himself laid his life in an open book; a step by step tutorial on how to live. He sealed it with His own blood and delivered it to every single one of us. No license required. No payment. He doesn’t even require the tender wages of love. Anyone can copy for any reason at all. We don’t even have to love Him.

I’m quite certain, however, regardless of whether we believe Him or whether we receive Him; He is going to love us.

Note: It is always safest and most responsible for songwriters to register their completed pieces with the US Copyright Office. I am a right brained optimist and some things I do are really NOT worth imitating! You can register a compilation of songs for a reasonable rate. Visit www.copyright.gov for more info.

WOTD 14 - OPEN

2011-03-23T00:55:00.002-06:00

“Wooo Hoo! It’s OPEN!”

I hear eight-year-old Maddi scream as the tires of her bike skid to a stop at the bottom of our driveway. Behind her comes the parade of her twin sister Sophie and her triplet brothers Aiden, Evan and Luke, flowing down the bend of cement on wheeled chariots; bikes and scooters and modern-day-descendents of the Big Wheel. I’ve just pulled into the bay of our garage, the fan still hums as it cools the engine in my van. I’m almost knocked over by the stream of kids: sun bleached hair, soft glistening skin the color of browned butter, flip flops and sockless canvas tenny runners. They shoot past my van, straight to the front of the garage where the neon glow of the OPEN sign reflects on the silver tops and colorful sides of aluminum soda cans. Their little hands reach and grab at the top of the counter, looking like a human octopus stuck in a whirlpool, in and out they go, picking a root beer…no wait, a Fresca…ooo, you have caffeine free Mountain Dew!...nah, I’m picking a root beer! One or two take a cup and scoop ice from the ice machine, then open the drawer and retrieve a straw. The others drink it straight up; no ice, no straw, no cup. They scurry out the garage oblivious to my presence, till Aiden calls back “Thank You” and they all echo as they rise up the hill and into the cul-de-sac, They leave me a sweet trickling chorus of thanks.

Dave’s Pop Shop.

When we built this house we realized we were closing off a pathway long used by neighborhood kids to travel between two housing sections. The developer should have seen this and made accommodations for foot travel between the Hollow and Summerwood. But he didn’t. Anyone else would have done all they could to preserve their privacy when they built on our lot. Not Dave.

I love people as much as anyone I know, but even I want my privacy.

Not Dave.

I should say he respects privacy and understands our need for it on some level, but it mattered more to him that we not interrupt people’s access to each other. He simply did not want to even appear to be the snob who took away the foot path. So we have a gate that remains open 24/7, allowing anyone to pass through. We lock the gate one day every 10 years so the land does not become public by habit (there’s a law about that that I should remember from our real estate classes.) People walk past our messy garage and rather undisciplined grow box garden, up our driveway or down the path and past the big rock behind our house. I wouldn’t mind keeping my mess to myself.

Not Dave.

He’d rather not have the mess. But the mess does not stop him from welcoming any weary or not-weary traveler to stop at his Pop Shop for a little respite from the heat of travel.

We bought some cabinets from a friend’s kitchen when they remodeled. Dave installed them in the garage. It was great for quite a while, relatively tidy out there. That was until our kids started going to and returning from college. Things started to pile up out there. And the more there were piles, the more we piled on. It’s some universal rule of magnetism that messes beget messes.

One year, for Mothers Day, Dave presented a most glorious gift to me. A stand-alone ice machine that made little square cubes of clear, hard, crunchy, yummy ice! I am the grand-daughter of the man who owned the Blackfoot Ice House back in the day, when there was no Freon flowing through tubes in the refrigerator in the typical American kitchen. There was only an ice box, with a compartment fit to hold a block of ice, replaced every other day by a fresh block, sawed to size from the gargantuan blocks my grand-Dad and uncles had cut from the Snake River in the winter and stored in sawdust through the summer.

That big dark Ice House loomed over their living space. By the time I was born people had electric refrigerators in their houses and only bought ice for their camping trailers in the summer. When I was quite little I remember my brother chiseling a small chunk of ice from a block in the chilly dark cavern of that ice barn. I held the frozen chunk in the fabric of my cotton blouse, lifted it to my lips and licked until it was small enough to pop into my mouth. I laid in a pile of sawdust and let the coolness drip down my throat. The crisp light air cooled my sun steeped skin until the ice was melted and I was chilled to the bone. I love ice.

Dave installed our little electric ice machine in the garage to avoid the possibility of drainage problems on the wooden floors of our kitchen. He placed it smack between two of the cabinets. Next thing I knew he came home from Smith’s with a van full of soda pop, all varieties. He arranged the pop on top of one of the cabinets, beside the ice machine, and invited passing neighbor kids to stop for a drink when he was out there working.

Next he bought a little fridge.

The word got around. Lots of people started passing through our gate. Just about every one of them is exceptionally kind and delightful. The school bus started picking up and dropping off neighborhood kids right by the gate. We soon found we needed to set some rules. Like all good rules, there were just a few of them, and they were easy to understand. Here are the rules I posted on the gate the first day of school. They now hang above the Pop Shop on the cupboard door:

When one of my favorite stores in Kaysville closed their doors, I asked the manager if she’d like to sell me their OPEN sign. This was before places like Costco sold them. She said sure. So I brought a nice neon sign home and Dave installed it above the Pop Shop. Parents are pleased that we have some sense of responsibility and don’t over-supply their kids with unnecessary sugar every day. And we need to be able to have our garage to ourselves if we want. So we yank on the pull chain under the sign every few days, and nearly every Saturday in the warmer months, and on Sunday afternoons in the summer when our neighbors tend to take their Sunday strolls. The Shop is traditionally closed on Fast Sunday. No sense in tempting our youth.

We know soda pop is not healthy. It’s not the means though which we should be getting our fluids on a regular basis. We suspect some people wish we didn’t have this available. (We do keep water out there as well, I might add here.) But in a society where so much is ME oriented; where we teach our children to protect what is theirs and preserve our entitlement to things we’ve earned; we see Dave’s Pop Shop as an attempt to swing the vote to graciousness, generosity and good humor. This is such an inexpensive way to teach kids how to be nice and share. Heck, who would not spend 20 measly cents to help a neighbor kids feel special?

I don’t love having my whole life exposed to the public. This might surprise some people, because I’m pretty open personality-wise. But I have my pride. And I like a little privacy. I even placed this door mat by the door coming into the house from the garage:

I don’t particularly love the exposure the Dave's Pop Shop gives us. But I DO love that the man whose name I took as my own three decades ago has a tender place in his heart for all God’s children. I love that he is willing to give up his own time and money and space to bring a half-a-minute of pleasure to our neighbors and their friends. I heard a teenage companion of one of our neighbor boys talking as they walked through the gate, their soda cans whooshing as they clicked the tops open, “Wow, so cool that your neighbors just give you that!”

Such a cheap way to appear cool!

I empty my van of the groceries as the parade of Harris kids disappears up the hill. I step on the Leave floor mat and press the electric opener to close the garage door. It pops back up. Something has triggered the electric eye. Looking back I see the littlest Harris boy, Nick, run in, focused on the row of soda against the wall. He grabs a pop and scurries back out.

“Fanks, Coe-wee”, he calls out behind him as he runs to catch up with his siblings. I yell over my shoulder, “You’re welcome Nick Nack!”

Love.

Open.

WOTD 13 - LAZINESS

2011-03-22T01:06:00.001-06:00

Years ago a friend introduced me to one of my favorite books on writing, selling me on the value of the piece by noting Chapter 10 in the book.

The book is called, If You Want to Write, by Brenda Ueland, published by Greywolf Press.

Chapter 10: Why Women Should Neglect Their Housekeeping for Their Writing.

I loved Brenda Ueland right away.

That week I drove down to Salt Lake City, parking on Main Street outside Sam Weller’s Bookstore. Down in the basement where the used books line up like dutiful sailors in the hull, I cruised through the chilly basement aisles, sniffing the familiar scent of books whose pages have been opened and exposed to all kinds of air: dry Utah valley air; fresh mountain cabin air; wet salty seaside vacation air; damp bathroom reading air. Pages read and turned then closed and set in piles for decades before they found their way to this musty old bookstore basement. I recognized the blue cover of Ueland’s paperback from the one my friend had shown me, a little azure stripe amid thick textbooks in the Writing & Writers section, just around the corner from the massive Self Help bookcases. I picked up her book and fanned the pages like a stack of playing cards, pressing my thumb a bit to stop the fanning right around where I thought Chapter 10 might be. Indeed, the title still remained. Validation, printed right there in black and white!

I read propped up on a pile of pillows in my bed that night. Discovered early on that what the author has to say is not that women should be liberated with the same bra-burning anger as they were in my youth when we started crawling out from under the dominion of unrighteous men. (Note that I say unrighteous men. Men who truly align their lives with the gospel never did dominate women.) She does, however, encourage those of us who feel a cultural pull to perform well in the home to let go of that self imposed definition of adequacy. What I got that night, and other nights when my kids were finally in bed and I had a moment to read, was more of a confirmation that what my soul wanted might actually be good for it, in regard to the battle I fight between the poet in me and the dishwasher.

Her book repeatedly makes the point that everyone is creative, that creativity is hardwired, as it were, into what it takes to be human. She opens the book by telling us: "This is what I learned: that everyone is talented, original and has something important to say." The rest of the book, in one sense, is the persuasive case for this proposition.

Ueland wrote this book in the first half of the last century, after having taught hundreds of women in evening community classes at the YMCA. She quoted Burns and Blake and other poets, who had a love for God and an understanding of the creative self. She taught me that what we perceive as Imagination is often the Holy Ghost. I had missed that lesson in Sunday School. She also suggested that in order to be truly connected and creative we must be idle. Missed that lesson in Sunday School, too. She did not mean that we should embrace laziness, by any means. We must work hard at being idle. Turn off the television and the radio. Remove ourselves from temptations to flitter our time away with fulfilling tasks of a menial nature. She challenges us to be intelligently, purposefully idle; still enough to let the Holy Creator inside find a safe way out.

I began an exercise in stillness. This is a rare and difficult thing for someone living in a culture based on accomplishment. A strange and beautiful thing. Sort of like those magic pictures, where you stare and stare at jumbles of color and dots and swirls, knowing that if you look long enough and let go of trying to see what you THINK is there, you will eventually see what is REALLY there. In 3D no less.

Yup. Creative writing is magic pictures.

I pulled out my copy of If You Want To Write last month in preparation for a songwriting series I was teaching. Laid in my bed in the darkest hours, the little crook necked lamp clamped to my bedpost pulled down above my pillow so as to not wake Dave. The dim light washed over my little blue paperback. I first re-visited the picture of Ueland printed in side the cover. She was something like 90 years old in the picture, and she reminded me of Beetlejuice. Take a look and see for yourself:

Next, I instinctively opened to chapter 10; brushed my fingers over the page for some strange reason, like a blind person reading Braille. I shut my eyes a moment, imagining myself a young mother, torn with desire and demands, aching to have a voice and finding it crouched in the tight crevices of the binding of this book.

I wonder if down the road... way, way down the road…we will be surprised to see that what we thought we were supposed to be doing was a trick of the devil made to look all clean and tidy the way God likes things. I worry about this. Too much.

What I think I know is that the only way I can comfortably live my life is to invite that Imagination creature, some call it the Holy Ghost, to visit with me on a regular basis; He needs to be able to tap on my door and not be drowned out by the wheezing of the vacuum and the drone of the dishwasher or the chattering of the TV and iPod. Not that I have to live this way all the time; but I need to – purposefully - some of the time. I want Him to be safe enough, at least, to comfortably come in and sit a while. Welcome enough to whisper and smile and have me understand. It’s my welcome that makes Him feel at home with me, even if my house looks like the consequence of laziness. This is, I tell you…hoping you can understand… an intentional mess.

WOTD 12 - MITT

2011-03-21T01:49:00.002-06:00

March.

Wet, windy, warm, unpredictable March.

The rumblings of life churn up the earth in my flower beds. If I pause to look when I go get the mail I find new lumps of newborn green pushing up through the winter-worn dirt. Crocuses have burst through the earth in the cement flower bed in the entrance to our neighborhood. Dafodils are hinting buttercream yellow at the top of their pregnant stems. Nights are crispy cold. We still use our down comforter on the bed. Days tickle us with hints of heat. Schoolchildren zip their jackets closed on the way to the bus in the morning, then leave them lying on the grass in the schoolyard at recess, destined for the Lost and Found. My car does not know whether to surrender to the heater of air conditioner. Every day is different. Every night is cool.

March.
My boys start to sniff, like puppies who can tell the neighbor is grilling. Their heads tip up, turning to the spanse of grass in the yard. The door between the kitchen and the garage slams shut and I know just what they are doing out there. They are shuffling around, digging through the mountains of stuff, the shavings of a season gone now left in piles beside our cars. They dig past the miscellany and find the bin of baseball supplies. Pull out their mitts and unwrap the shoelaces tied round them. Hard white balls are lifted from the pockets of their mitts. They toss them into the air, awakening the sleepy young boys they keep hidden the rest of the year, the ones who had cleaned and conditioned their mitts after fall ball last year; planted a good white baseball inside each leather pocket, the stitching on the ball infused with red dirt, the off-white leather stained with the oils of green grass from the summer past. They had strategically wrapped the mitts, balls planted inside, with old shoelaces to keep the shape through the winter.

Their hands pry the faded brown leather apart, like stiff new textbooks opened on the first day of school. They tuck the balls into the pockets of their jacket and sweatshirt then stick the mitts under their armpits, softening the chilled leather with the heat of their human furnaces. When the life returns to the glove, incubated there against their chests, they slip their hands inside and lift the soft warm mitts to their noses, inhaling the fragrance of hide and earth and sweat and pleasure – long deep breaths with more inhale than exhale. Dad slaps the button on the wall by the door. The garage door slides up on its metal rollers. The boys punch their fists into their gloves, talking boy talk as they move toward the grass, their legs gradually dipping lower then lower as they walk until the walk becomes a run. There is no plan stated. They know instinctively what to do. One stops, one runs further out. One hand dips into the pocket of his golf jacket. As soon as the younger one reaches the edge of the yard the elder one twists his torso. One leg rises before the other, steps out slightly as the right arm rises from behind, lays its elbow forward then flings the ball out across the green. Out below the blue, between the earth and the sky, spinning through that familiar space toward a woven pocket of leather. My boy’s left arm rises nonchalantly before his face and with a slight twist he presents the ball from the pocket of his mitt to his throwing hand. It’s a pattern the two repeat, then repeat again, until the sun has moved ten degrees across the hemisphere, until after they have removed their jacket and sweatshirt, until after the neighbor’s yard is mowed and trimmed. Long, long silent conversations on an early spring afternoon.

Father to son, son to dad. Back and forth and back again.

Old, old friendship re-kindled every spring.

Mitt.

WOTD 11 - VOWEL

2011-03-20T01:35:00.003-06:00

Wooden tiles snap against a wooden table, clicking like the keys on the old typewriter in Dad Connors' den on Rolling Green Drive. Thin flat squares of sanded grainless wood, probably pine, polished and stamped on one side with a letter from the alphabet. Gathered from an old Scrabble game, we keep the collection of consonants and vowels in a small canvas satchel in the flour bin drawer of Gram's old baker's cabinet. The game board is long gone. We don’t need it anyway.

Years before, Aunt Becky and Aunt Mae had sucked us into one of their games when they were here visiting, later than late at night, probably more like early in the morning when the menfolk had gone to bed and it was just us women-folk left chittin' away the hours. Mae had dumped her little sack of tiles on the dining table, scooted to the front of her dining chair, back erect, hands moving swiftly and intently as she turned the tiles upside down, blank sides up.

"OK," she said, "Draw 7 tiles."

We reached into the pixelated collection in the middle of the table, feeling for ones that had the aura of success. Once drawn, we were instructed to turn them over and begin assembling words, connected like crossword puzzles. They called it Speed Scrabble.

"When you've used all your tiles shout 'GO'", Aunt Becky said, never looking up, working the letters into words as the talked.

We scrambled to make sense of our random collections, scampering in our brains like teenagers in a library the week before term papers were due, searching for treasures of the lexicon.

"How in the heck am I supposed to make a word with no vowels?" I say, slumped in my seat, elbow plunked on the table, head leaning on my extended palm. "Would someone hurry up and say Go?"

Someone uses up their tiles, calls the word, and we all reach for two more. I draw two more consonants. Are you kidding? My tiles just pile up in front of me waiting for some a,e,i,o or u to make them complete.

Again someone gets their tiles used up and gives us permission to draw two more letters.

“Finally,” I grumble aloud, “an A!"

I never do catch up to the rest. By the end of the round I have something like 47 points. The objective is to use all your tiles and have 0 points.

Danged vowels. You never realize how important they are until you don’t have them.

Tr_ t_ c_mm_n_c_t_ w_th__t th_m!

Like most things in life, we don’t really appreciate them until they’re gone.

The converse is true as well. Sometimes we don’t realize me need something until we get it.

When Kate was in grade school she had a hard time getting up in the morning. It’s ironic that now she rises for school every day, including Saturdays, at 5 am. However, in first grade, 8 o’clock was really hard. In an attempt to help her rise through the mist of her dreams and enter the “real world” without too much agony, I used to go into her room and softly scratch her back. The sensory stimulation helped her come into consciousness.

One morning I could feel her breathing quicken, though her face was turned away from me as I tickled her back with my fingernails. She laid there a while, letting me scratch, her soft little girl skin warm and silky, stretched on her strong back and broad shoulders. Finally, she turned her head and looked up at me, maneuvering her back so I could continue as she talked.

“Funny thing about backs,” she said, her voice raspy from the silent night, “Sometimes you don’t even know it itches ‘til someone scratches it.”

Kate has always been really good at gathering the stuff of life and presenting it neatly on tiny little verbal platters. A few weeks ago she said something that has been crucial to my sense of self. We were talking about teaching, about our stewardships. She is a teacher of adolescent boys and girls. Well over a hundred of them. She teaches in a KIPP school in Houston. The philosophy of KIPP is to immerse the student in learning, among other things. So the KIPP student’s school day starts at 7 am and continues until 5 pm, 6 days a week. Indeed, Kate teaches on Saturdays, too. If you get a chance to see the movie Waiting for Superman you can get a sense for the demands of her job. But it’s a noble thing she does, and hopefully she is paid in tender wages. Still, she is teaching adolescents – 11-13 year olds. Disadvantaged 11-13 year olds. They’re a tough crowd.

I have a stewardship to a couple dozen teenage girls in our church, known as the Young Women. We meet every Sunday for spiritual lessons, and every Wednesday for an activity, and we have Girl’s Camp and Youth Conference every summer and other activities throughout the year. It’s a very demanding job, though not unfulfilling. I do love the girls! But they are teenage girls. I get worn out, exhausted with worry and effort. I wonder if the girls are getting anything at all out of the efforts I and a bunch of other YW leaders put into our callings.

A few weeks ago I spent about 10 hours preparing for an activity, which was probably a mistake on my part. But that evening as I presented what I had prepared three of the girls sat playing with each others’ hair and tickling each other’s arms, and one of them outright said to me, as I was talking, “Can we be done now?”

I had to fight back the tears as I tried to ignore her and finish up. But it hurt. More than I want it to have hurt.

Kate called that night and we were exchanging our struggles with teaching kids.

“I guess we can’t expect the people we teach to tell us if we are doing a good job or not.” Kate said, trying to find a way to comfort me as well as herself.

She was right. She often is. Most of us don’t know how we are being changed until after we are changed. We cannot appreciate a fire in the daylight.

Sometimes, in life’s big game of Speed Scrabble, we get a wad of consonants and not a single vowel. It’s not fun. It sometimes even feels unfair, until you realize it was you and no one else who drew those wooden tiles from the pile. Still it’s a downer. But we keep playing, waiting for someone to shout “Go”, hoping that one of the new tiles we draw will contain a vowel and we can get back in the game.

WOTD 10 - COUSIN

2011-03-19T00:42:00.003-06:00

Christopher sat beside me Wednesday night at our Young Women’s activity. The girls had invited their younger siblings to come, a follow-up opportunity from our Sunday lesson on strengthening family ties. Jess brought her 9 year old brother Chris. I chatted with him while he painted a little wooden box with his 18 year old sister. We talked about random things, nothing of much consequence really. Jess mentioned that they had been looking at the video their parents had made of Christopher’s early years (as if he were not still in them).

“I never realized,” Chris said as he smoothed BYU blue paint across the top of his box, “how wrinkly little babies are. And they have this long grey wrinkly tube coming out of their bellies.” He scrunched his face. “Ewww.”

“That’s your umbilical cord Bud. We all had them. That’s where our belly buttons are now.”

I was about to explain how blood and nutrients passed from mother to baby, but thought better of it, knowing there were other kids a the table and thinking maybe we should lighten the topic.

All those cords, connecting us to our mothers, and them to their mothers, and so on. Like stitches in a seam. As independent as we like to think ourselves, no one is completely of their own making. All we have to do is poke that little divot in our tummies to be reminded of that. We carry the blood of our mothers, who carry the blood of their mothers.

Is it plasma or some other sort of blood that makes cousins…cousins? As far as I know there is not proof that a certain aspect of a person’s blood makes for a certain character trait. It could be true, I’ve just never heard about it. Nonetheless, there are definite aspects of my personality that run right along the same railroad track as my cousins. Things we do, things we say, even mannerisms that mimic each other, even if we are from different generations and sometimes even if we never really knew each other.

Since our mom was the next to youngest in her large family, and I was the tail end of her passel of kids, we really only had one chunk of cousins that were anywhere near my age. In fact I don’t think I have one cousin my same age. We didn’t know the cousins on our dad’s side, except for Sandra and Nancy. And we never saw them at all after my elementary school years since Dad left for good. But those Miskin cousins there in that little brick house in Ucon, Idaho were treasures to me. Pure treasures. First of all my Aunt Becky was pretty much the kind of person I wanted to be. She was creative and witty and spiritual and hard working and fun. She didn’t over-fuss about things, but we all had our chores to do. It made me feel like I belonged when I got my chore assignments along with the cousins when we visited in the summers.

My Miskin cousins were older than I, at least until Michelle was born and the second batch of Miskin kids came along. Not by a lot, but just old enough to make me want to be just like them. All girls: DeAnn, Gail, Jane and Mary Lou. They were bonafide teenagers, with long straight hair and make up and real bra’s and everything! They had jobs, and dates, and purses that had real money in them, too. In the afternoons, when our chores were done, we’d pump up the hi fi stereo and let Carole King thump out the opening beats of her brand new LP, Tapestry ... “I feel the earth ! Move! Under my feet. I feel the sky tum-buh-lin’ down. I feel my heart start a-trem-buh-lin’ when-eh-vuh you’re arou-ou-ou-ound.” Oh my gosh, that brings back so many brain pictures and little zingy feeling sparklers! To this day I use Carole King’s Tapestry album to motivate me to clean. (I don’t play it all that often, obviously.)

On hot summer nights we slept under the stars, on the grass in the back yard. We’d wait till the lights were out in the house and then unzip our sleeping bags, tiptoeing past Uncle Richard’s window, hunched in silence as we scurried to the road, then made our way out to Tucker’s farm for a rendezvous of the most wholesome variety. Night games of Duck Duck Goose in the freshly mown hay. Looking back I don’t really know how much of my memory bank is conjecture and how much was real. And of the real, I’m not sure how much of it actually occurred in sequence or if it got scrunched together like costumes in my imaginary family cedar chest. Doesn’t matter. What I take from it now is a tender place in my heart for those daughters of my cherished Aunt Becky; all of them grandmothers now. Cousins who lived far away became stitched to our hearts, in long untidy basting stitches, by these memory packed visits. I remember vividly pulling onto the highway, the little Idaho town of Ucon in our rear view mirror, knowing the town we called home, so far away in the east, had no such creatures anywhere near our house or apartment. I ached to turn around, to plant myself closer to the people who bore my blood, to breathe that Idaho air into my lungs in a season other than summer.

I watch my grandkids interact with each other now: see how thrilled Timo and Sophie are when they see each other. I’m conscious of how pivotal their time together can be. I take Parker and Anna Bella and tie their aprons on, lifting them onto the black counter stools, handing them rubber spatulas and measuring spoons. They each crack an egg, dropping them into the bowl before us. “Gummy, can I do the sugar?” Anna asks, “and Parker can do the flour?” We all agree. Little pre-school hands hold the beaters when we’re done, their tiny tongues wiggling in search of a smidgen of batter.

“Can we go play now?” They scurry off their perches, I untie their aprons, and they are off searching for some new adventure. They are young. Too young to have solid memories form like photographs in a pool of liquid developer. They won’t store these particulars in their minds, unless we take pictures and show them to them down the road. But they will sense, somehow, that something is different with these people. Something binding, even if personalities are not particularly aligned in the end. There was this time when blood flowed from their mom’s to them, and from Gummy to their parents, like the blood flowed from my mother to me and her mother to her.

There is no escaping it. Blessedly, wonderfully, gratefully, there is no escaping it. We are bound. We are cousins.