Category Archives: Writing

Hear Ye, Here Ye

26 Monday Dec 2011

Posted by in Life at Home, Soul Care, Writing

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For days I’ve thought about what I would say if not for lassitude.  And now that I’m actually saying something — now that I’m here — would you be surprised to hear how none of it matters?

Yet who can say what matters in the here after — or for that matter, in the here now — and who knows whether what I write today is really my true self talking or whether it slips off the tongue of lassitude?

Yes, with lassitude lurking about, it’s better I draw a few lines around facts — even limiting myself to answering the unasked question of where “here” is.  Describing my here and now is enough  — and unless I’m careful, too much to hear, should I slip and fall between the facts and talk of feelings and memories and all those things fuzzy soft, that change with perspective, with one’s value’s, or on one’s being there.   Or here.

So, keeping to hard facts, here at this very moment of time, I lie in my soft comfy bed with a laptop propped against my legs.  I’ve nothing I must do today.  No where I must go or be.  The  day is mine to spend as I wish.  On this second day of the season of Christmas, while the waiting within the season of Advent is over, I instead wait within the in-between days of my mother-in-law’s death and funeral.

To avoid falling into feelings, I skip to the next fact:  My sister-in-law, who stayed here ten days — and my brother-in-law who stayed two — are now gone to stay elsewhere.  Living with in-laws very different from me — who smoke cigarettes and/or depend upon drinks of alcohol to live — left me in a very un-Christmassy spirit, which is another way of saying, a very non-Christian frame of mind and heart.  Why, living with in-laws lifted my lassitude — if only for a bit  — to take charge of life.  These, I know, as facts.

The in-laws departed Christmas Eve, the very day I ran away from home myself, seeking refuge with my sister, who thank God, is always good at taking in strays who show up on her doorstep, no questions asked.  There we visited and watched movies and make fried bologna sandwiches and watched more movies and ate popcorn in a room heated by a big lovely fire in the hearth that we shared with three other strays Sis had taken in over the years — a chihuahua named Taco, a schnauzer named Eve and a large ragdoll cat named Sophia.  Until my arrival, Sophie was the newbie.

I’ve never run away from home before, though I ended last year wanting to and, if I’m being honest, have thought about it many, many times since.  But never have I given in to the urge to do so.  But two days ago, on the morning of Christmas Eve, I knew if I stayed, I’d end up having ‘words’ with my in-laws — and that those words would become words of regret not long after their speaking — and sometimes — maybe always, though I can’t say for sure since this is not fact — I think it’s better to flee rather than fight.

My plan was to come home right after the funeral, after the in-laws had departed for their next visitation.  But something happened Christmas Eve which caused plans to change:  My husband called to tell me they’d departed early — that the house was quiet in a good way — that my house and life were ready for me when I was ready to come home.

I returned the next day.  And then, as if none of that running away or any of the departures that had come before had happened, we dressed up in our casual-but-festive finery and drove down to the home of my son and new daughter-in-law.  And there, we dined on food that was a pleasure to eyes and palate.  And some drank wine, while others had water or iced tea.  And long after we’d consumed creme brulee, we stayed gathered around the table, doing our best to be merry and make light conversation with members of Amy’s family.  And in spite of all the year has wrought and wrung out of me — in spite of that lingering lassitude within me — it wasn’t hard at all to eat, drink and be merry.

And isn’t this just what another long ago writer expressed, when suffering from his own bout of lassitude?

“Then I commended mirth, because a man hath no better thing under the sun, than to eat, and to drink, and to be merry: for that shall abide with him of his labour the days of his life, which God giveth him under the sun”  — Ecclesiastes 8:15 KJV

Sans letters

02 Friday Dec 2011

Posted by in Life at Home, Writing

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By Monday, they should be at their destination — delivered to mailboxes, which if anything like mine, will be full of the too-familiar chorus of catalogs and flyers — each shouting for attention with color and bulk — drowning out the rare voice of a personal greeting — like that annual Christmas Carol of mine.

I Imagine most on my mailing list will make quick work of their mail.  Like me, they’ll sort.  Then make short stacks — one to discard now; one to discard later.  And in so doing, they’ll come across that little card. It will stand out because of its handwritten address — not done by computer, made to look handwritten — and the mere sight of it — if they are anything like me — will make their hearts sing.  Oh, the joy — that comes from receiving a piece of personal mail.

My Christmas cards always contain a letter.  The tradition grew out of handwritten notes which in recent years, graduated to being typed and professionally printed.  Many tell of how they enjoy my letters, how they look forward to receiving and reading them —  how my words inspired them to pen their own annual letter.  One friend on my list has a rather small printing:  she sends out one.  And this — I probably don’t have to say but will anyway — makes me feel all-day special —  for many days.

Yet, I wasn’t up to writing and packaging my year in 500 words or less this time around.  So sans letters, I sent out cards..  And in a year where I’ve written so little, relative to others — releasing them into the world without weight of  personal words felt right — in keeping, in harmony, in tune with my year.  And at this moment, in the now, I can’t imagine any will mind.  Most, in the busyness of life, won’t even miss my missive — why, if truth be told, I probably wrote more for myself than any one on my list.

But while at peace with the act of going letter-less, what wouldn’t go away was a desire to make my greeting personal.  And with a wish to put my best face forward —  and other faces in my family forward too — I enclosed something better than a letter — a glossy little card, offering a small collection of six black and white images — each depicting joy, peace and hope, to harmonize with my card’s printed message:

“May the gifts of peace, hope and joy be yours at Christmas and throughout the New Year.”

No need to embellish these words with my own, I thought when I found them.  But how good and right to underline them — to show rather than tell, as they instruct in the world of writing  —  with faces of joy, hope and peace from my everyday life.  And so I did.  The photos were easy to choose.  The first, captured last January — seconds after her birth, almost a year ago now  —  is of my newest granddaughter, Reese Caroline, with her newborn parents.  The second, a cropped photo of our new front porch leads to the third, an already poignant photo of Don this past June — where he sits at his mother’s kitchen table, in front of a lit birthday cake baked by his dying mother — in a wordless poem, her back is turned to the camera.  Four, five and six celebrate the wonders of an October wedding.  And all of these, I pray, let me never forget.

***

Go now, my best bits and pieces of joy, hope and peace for 2011.  Make your way into the world, as I cover you with this borrowed benediction from a favorite pastor:   Today.  Always.  “Go in peace.  Not in pieces.”

Hallelujah!  My little Christmas Carolers.  Handel with care.

Habits to Dreams

16 Wednesday Nov 2011

Posted by in Life at Home, Writing

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The patterns of our lives reveal us.  Our habits measure us.  Our battles with our habits speak of dreams yet to become real.”                    — Mary Oliver
 

I enjoy Mary’s Oliver’s prose — as much or more than her Pulitzer-prize winning poetry.

Even when the full meaning of a particular passage is beyond me — like that last line about habits and dreams — I take pleasure in what I do understand.  Like a small child at a Disney Pixar film, I don’t worry that others — with wider experience and better minds — will receive more than me.  And who knows but that maybe, in some mystical way, my spirit absorbs what mind fails to grasp, since Oliver’s words fill me with hope of a better world.  And a better me.

Sometimes it’s good to tarry over words, to not speed-read through life.  Sometimes I linger over language with little choice — as I do every time I encounter a sentence that unites any form of the words ‘dream’ and ‘reality.’  Who knows why I wonder.  What is it about these words — that their combined weight stops me in my tracks, at least within my interior world?  And this, no matter how used and arranged to convey thought.  Yet, I take comfort that in the exterior world, a blinking yellow traffic light cautioning me to slow down works to similar effect.

This hasn’t always been so.  A reminder of a different reality sits on my desk, near my computer — an old photograph of Cousin Deb and me, taken by my Aunt Carol.   As most old images do, this one bears a date stamp in the white frame surrounding it telling its age.   It reads September 1957.   Deb was three.   I wasn’t yet two.  And poor Deb’s doll, probably younger than both of us, looked older than its years.

This wasn’t the photo Aunt Carol wished to give me last August, the one Sis and she and I spent hours looking for.  But I suppose she gave it to me anyway, to serve as an icon of remembrance — to help me remember myself as a young child.  Perhaps even to help me remember her.  But most of all, to help me remember her favorite, oft-told story of me that  —  though she tells it better  — goes something like this:

One day, when I was not much older than that pictured child above,  I turned up at her front door unexpected.  She opened the door.  Stepped outside to see who had brought me.  To find no one.  When she focused her attention back on me, I told her what had brought me. “I’ve come to play with my cousin.”  As if running away from my young father  — who was busy visiting with the shopkeeper of the local fruit stand a couple of blocks away — was no cause for alarm.

Strange how Aunt’s Carol’s recounting her memory of that day stirred my own to life, for I now remember walking down the street from the market, then crossing a bridge, wondering if I was on the right track. But too young to fear — too young to know I was throwing caution to the wind — I plowed on, knowing all would work out.  Because the line between dreams and reality is all but invisible in a young child’s life.

Running away to chase a dream was something I did more than once as a child; it wasn’t difficult with Daddy left in charge.  Unlike Carol, who was always immersed in reality, Daddy lived in a dream world of his own making. But no matter how different, they were close in other ways that mattered more.  Surviving a tough childhood, they had learned to watch after one another.  And in some ways, that never stopped — as I learned a few months after Daddy’s death —  when Carol shared how Daddy was always after her to give up smoking.  If not for her sake, then his, he told her.  He didn’t wish to be left behind.

It took years.  But Daddy’s hopes and dreams waited for Carol to catch up.  Only later did I learn she quit smoking the day Daddy quit life.  She went cold turkey, as they say, without special aids.  Without much rhetoric.  Without thought of consequences.  Why the way she let go of that habit — to allow her reality to converge with Daddy’s old dream — was almost childlike.

Maybe this scrapes at the reality of Oliver’s dreamy last sentence.  But if not, those words with their weighty meanings will wait for me to catch up.