3-30-19 HAREM

Ah, the memories! What seems like yesterday and a lifetime ago, my mother, sisters and I decided to take a trip to Germany and Austria. My sister Libby's friend Jim had offered to let us use his beautiful large condo in Burghausen, Germany just across the Salzach River  from Salzburg, Austria. It was a wonderful journey, memorable not only for the awesome collection of firsts and the stunning beauty of nature where history planted itself, but for the miracle and the magic that came with the assemblage of my mom and all my sisters but one. How amazing would it have been to have Ann Marie with us? But as it turned out, in those days before smart phones, Ann Marie became the communication hub for us when Libby was bumped from her flight and half of us had to overnight in New York when they cancelled one leg of our flight. So we all found each other through long distance international calls to Ann Marie in California. (Thanks for the sacrifice, A.M. You must have been inspired to stay home.)

I could fill a chapter book with our adventures; climbing the steps of the Salzburg fortress, looking over the hills and valleys where Julie Andrews swung her arms open wide in the Sound of Music, skipping down through the twisting roadside from the enchanted Neuschwanstein castle, German pizza and our introduction to down comforters and crusty bread with freshly churned butter from the market; pewter and wax ornaments and wooden hand carved cherubs and sheep and such. It would be a good read for at least the five women and their chauffeur.

Personally, I had a thing for the chauffeur. He was awesome; handsome and able and he spoke perfect English. He was a master at handling the large rental van we acquired at the airport. He maneuvered that thing through traffic with German, Austrian and Italian signage. He spoke Italian, so once we dipped into Italy for a cup of their famous hot chocolate, he was flying easy. Even though I sat in the very back of the van as we flew at devilish speeds over the autobahn, I couldn't take my eyes off him, up there in the driver's seat. And even though I'm not super experienced with the art of flirting, I had a sense he might feel the same about me because he repeatedly stretched his neck to find the corner of the rear view mirror that gave him a view of my seat in the van.
Turns out I bedded down with the chauffeur under one of those luxurious down comforters in the condo. Yummy, soft, thick comforters with crisply ironed duvet covers that matched the pillowcases. I couldn't help myself. And, it turns out, my husband didn't mind at all that I slept with the chauffeur. 
Yup.
It's a good thing  I was married to the chauffeur. None of my sisters flirted with him, so there wasn't any competition. So far I've been riding with the same chauffeur for more than four decades now.

The two women who wove in and out of my daily life since I was very small, before I could walk, are as comfortable with Dave as I am. Mom and Libby love him as deeply and dearly as I do. And my other sisters, while they may not at that point have had as much daily interaction with him, feel emotionally, physically and spiritually safe with him, just like I do.

Since I was raised by a single mother, and my best friend/sister is single, it didn't take long for us to have a blessed understanding that Dave didn't just marry me, he married a harem. That trip to Germany was a microcosm of our lives. Dave takes care of all of us. On some level or another. He is fiercely loyal to me, and so I am fine with sharing him the way we do.

I'm perfectly comfortable sitting in my house tapping away at my computer while he and Libby take Rags for a nightly walk. He was the one, besides Libby, around whose neck my mother could most comfortably wrap her arms as he shifted her from the car to her wheel chair, then from the wheel chair to her red recliner. He is just as comfortable having my sister Sherry sitting next to him on a drive as he is with me. He is the first call at midnight when the water heater breaks, the surest feet behind the snow blower after a winter storm, the most willing set of arms trimming trees at our house and the house up on the corner where the rest of the harem lives. He is good, and kind, and strong and funny and I will gladly share him with the people I love, as long as it's me who, at the end of the night, gets to pray beside him there at our bed, which, by the way, has had its own down comforter ever since that trip to Germany.

Happy Birthday, Dave. Your harem loves you.

3-29-19 TRIP

If I remember correctly, (which is always a little iffy), in our 41 years of wedded bliss there are only two times Dave and I have bought brand new cars. We are “those people” who subscribe to Consumer Reports, check the ratings, and purchase solidly recommended pre-owned vehicles, a.k.a. used cars. Then we drive them till they die. So far, Consumer Reports has never steered us wrong.

For that first brand-spankin’ new car we purchased we must have been in some sort of new-parent, tired student stupor, because it was so far from anything we would have ever purchased before or after that time.And, I might add, we did not consult Consumer Reports at that point. It was a baby blue two door Ford sedan. I don’t recall the model. I have no idea what compelled us to even look at such a thing, let alone buy it. My family still teases us about it. We didn’t own it for long. It was quickly replaced by a trusty used yellow Toyota Corona or Corolla or something like that. Honestly, for me cars are just vehicles of transportation.

The second new car we bought was a mini-van. This was in the era when the mini-van was a new and exciting mode of transportation for the large families that sprouted from the fertile soil of northern Utah. We had the van for two days before Dave and I left for a trip somewhere. I think maybe it was St Croix. Generally all Dave's trips were attached to business. Occasionally, if we could figure out what to do with the 4 kids who insisted on using our last name, I would join him for a get-away. 

For this particular trip, wherever it was, we had enlisted my mom and sister, Libby to watch the kids. They both had jobs with some flexibility, and we were blessed by their willing hands and massively good hearts. Mom drove us to the airport. When she returned home she and Lib loaded the kids into that new van and drove to Peter Piper Pizza. The excitement of a brand new car, with all the new car smells and shiny dashboard, met with the comfort of spaciousness, where everyone had enough space to breathe. I think that new car smell went to their heads and they decided, on a whim, that they should all take a trip. So while we were flying off to some legal conference somewhere, they loaded up a couple suitcases of no-doubt unlaundered clothes for the kids, a large bag of nibbles and drinks, and headed west toward the San Francisco Bay area, where three of my sisters lived.

I can’t tell you much about their trip, because obviously, I wasn’t there, but they still talk about it… about how each kid was assigned to hold the hand of their adult-buddy as they traipsed around Ghirardelli Square… about the adventure of handling a van on the zig-zag slopes of Lombard Street… about feeding the seals and eating Boudin’s sourdough bread and fresh Dungeness crab bought on Fisherman’s Wharf. These were the memories of my own childhood trips to that magical place, and I think Gram and Lib just decided that my kids should have them, too.

These are not our kids,
but I imagine this is how it looked
and sounded in our van that week.

When Dave and I got home from our get-away, we never would have known that anything out of the ordinary had happened for our little clan. John was playing in the back yard, Sarah was at the piano, Kate and Annie were trying to dress our cat, Mittens, in some Cabbage Patch clothes. Dinner was on the stove and the laundry was done and stacked in neat piles on the counter. It wasn’t until we got in our new van to drive to the grocery store that we suspected anything. Our first clue was the 2,000 miles on the odometer of our week-old car.

The odometer on our current Honda Odyssey van
 says 250,000.Our mechanic says it has a
 terminal disease. We are letting it fill the
measure of its creation until it goes
to mini-van heaven.

Thanks, Mom and Lib, for breaking-in that trusty old workhorse of a van for us, and for trippin’ with my kiddos.

3-28-19 ICE

Like the pearly pink flesh of a newly plucked chicken, I stared curiously at my forearm. Tiny blonde hairs stood at attention from each goose-bump as I shivered there, snuggled into a pile of sawdust in Uncle Parks’ ice house. It was early July in Blackfoot, when the Idaho sun had found its happy place up there in the cloudless sky, set plump and glowing against a soft baby-blanket blue. The skies of my typical non-Idaho summer days were a murky grey, washed over a distant blue, the residue of belching Pittsburgh steel mills painting a dirty wash over God’s intentions. But for a few sacred weeks Idaho was home, and that trusty Idaho wind kept the skies clean and clear.

The ice house was, now that I am old enough to think through these kind of things, actually the domain of my Uncle Parks, the second eldest of eleven children in my mother’s family. It was one of his many entrepreneurial ventures. He and his brothers-in-law and some sisters and other hired hands travelled by horse and wagon and early versions of flat bed trucks up toward the mountains, through Ashton and Island Park, up to the edge of the Snake River where the altitude in winter kept the air well below freezing.

Uncle Parks, Uncle Archie and Aunt Mary (my mother's sister)

Deep into the wild winters up there in the mountains they took their long wide-toothed saws and their well-earned muscles and set to work. Before the era of power-tools, they raised large pick axes over their heads and hurled them down into the surface of the thick frozen river, then turned massive drills to create deep holes in the frozen skin of the Snake. From that beginning they sawed large rectangular chunks of ice, which they rolled over logs and up onto the wagons.

When the sun had crossed the sky and was already working its way into tomorrow, they harnessed up the horses, strapped down the logs and the ice, covered them with canvas and burlap, and made their way back down to Blackfoot. Next morning, they rolled those large blocks of frozen water off the wagon and onto the hand-made conveyor, up into the darkest corners into mounds of sawdust there in the massive barn behind the house. The cold from the ice wrapped itself around each block, creating a natural refrigerator, insulated by the darkness and the sawdust and the thick wooden walls of the barn. By the time June arrived, the ice was still frozen, and would remain so even into the hottest months of the year.

Every human child should have an icehouse to visit on hot summer days. A dark, cool space that raises the hair of their innocent arms, where the air enters the nostrils chilled and clean, with a faint hint of aromatic wood. And every child, then, should have access to a Parrish Ice House ice pick, so they, too, could plunge that thin steel pick into a chunk of ice, chipping off pieces small enough to plop into their mouths. Then, refreshed by the frozen waters of the old Snake River, every child should also have an accommodating pile of sawdust in which to daydream away a hot summer afternoon.

3-27-19 MITE

The marketplace was already overcrowded. Swirling colors and cacophonous noises echoed against the temple wall. Pungent smells melded into each other; earthy root vegetables wilting in the sun, body odors and fish odors mingled with the smoky ever-present scent of burning flesh with overtones of incense. Weaving through the mass of people and animals, Lemek set his eye on the outer gates of the temple. It was later than he had planned, and his velvet robes had become hot, heavy and cumbersome by then. Nonetheless he swept the ground with the hem, swishing his way through the Court of the Gentiles, past the signs of Soreg, warning the unworthy against entry. He scooted past the money changers and into the Middle Court. His servant followed him, humped over with the weight of his master’s offering. Tiny brass bells jingled from the fringe of the bag, He shifted the weight from arm to arm, shuffling behind his master’s sweeping robe. Finally, they stopped, planting themselves in a line strung against one of the tables outside the temple doors. Coins clanged on the table tops, falling from bags and boxes and pockets. 

Three times a year Lemek brought his gift to the temple, diligent in the least that was required of a faithful Jew. This day he stood in line because he was late, his servant bowed quietly beside him. Standing in front of him at the table was a waif of a woman. Her  linen shawl was pulled around a sleeping child tucked against her breast, the stretched weave revealing patched fibers and lost fringe. Her shoulders cupped around her lowered head and a few stray strands of her long dark hair fluttered out from under her veil. She was not dirty, nor did she stink, yet her presence was repulsive to Lemek and he stepped back, trying to create a little distance without forfeiting his place in line. When she stepped up to the table her hand brought forth two mites, and as she did  the child awoke. She lifted him to her shoulder, trying to subdue his hungry wail while she completed her offering, but the baby strained his face, his toothless cries bouncing off the holy walls. The child’s dark liquid eyes looked right into Lemek’s. Turning his head toward the temple gate, Lemek tried to ignore the cries, but the baby’s gaze was magnetic and he could not resist staring at the child. The priest at the table mumbled in glottal tones “Two mites, from the widow of Hadar.” With that she lowered the child to her empty breast and turned from the temple wall, sifting like a grain of sand into a sea of strangers.

Lemek’s shoe had caught the hem of his robe and he stumbled slightly as he took his place at the table. He cursed at his servant in the process of righting himself, as if to say it had been his fault. “Give him the bag!” he shouted, sweeping his arm up into the air, arching his neck to see who might be watching. The servant hefted the bag onto the table top, the bells jingling against the stony top, coins falling onto the floor. The servant knelt to retrieve them, his head bowed to the floor, his forearms sweeping under the heavy table.

Eventually the priest, having counted the offering, stood and made his way to the temple steps. He climbed to the top, just outside the heavy doors, and boldly announced to the crowd the generous offering of the benevolent Lemek and his house. The pitch of the mass of people rose and fell and Lemek turned to bow. 

Across the courtyard Jesus sat and watched, while in the distance, weaving in and out of the throbbing throng, a hungry infant wailed. 

3-26-19 PITCH

We sing in church. We sing in the congregation, and then after our church meetings we shuffle back into the chapel for an extra hour of choir practice. I figure it’s the least I can do; for the Lord, for our congregation, for myself. 

The thing is, I’m pretty confident when I'm singing my own little folk songs with my guitar, and I can do it quite comfortably in front of rather large audiences, but I am a decidedly inferior choir member. I have terrible breath control, and my vibrato is out of control, and most disconcerting  of all, I am not good at reading music. I am remedial at best. This is where sticking with piano lessons more than three months when I was twelve years old would have helped me. Reading choir music is like attempting to do math and read an essay at the same time. I say “attempting” because I don’t think I ever really did math. Reading music is one eye trying to figure out the pitch, one foot tapping out the beat, the other foot interpreting the length of notes and rests and such, and the second eye is bouncing up and down finding which musical staff the altos are singing and following that lyric. To the unskilled it is a virtual circus act, with spinning plates in one hand and hula hoops in the other while treading on the apex of a small red ball. The only consolation I have in singing in church choir is that we are, supposedly, all hacks. At least half the members of our church choir are better than I am at reading music, so it helps to plant myself next to one of them.

This is not the church choir I am talking about.
But it is the same church.

Now and then someone will pull me aside in the hall and ask if I teach voice lessons. I chuckle, feeling a little bit like a con-man must feel when he thinks he's gotten away with something; like I tricked another one into thinking I can actually sing. I refer them to Sarah, or Susan, or Natalie, my friends who actually understand music and know how to teach the voice to interpret it . It only takes one short choir rehearsal for me to realize I can’t actually “sing” very well. What I do is tell stories with pitch.

I have said, and still say, that I can embrace just about any musical performance in any style from any singer as long as they are believable and they are on pitch.

Sometimes, even for those of us who sing a lot, the dang pitch can win at the game of hide and seek, like that time in high school when our Young Women's group was singing for opening exercises of Mutual. I was accompanying on guitar, and I plucked away at a sweet little intro to Edelweiss. As usual, the rest of the girls waited a millisecond for me to sing the first note and they all joined in. But this time the note eluded me.

I sang the first syllable on one wrong note, and then another, and then another as the rest of the girls stood there dumbfounded. Finally, I took off my capo and announced “We are going to sing One Tin Soldier” and I started plucking away. Michelle poked her knuckle in my back and whispered under her breath, “I don’t know that one.” But off I went, my fingers hopping over the strings in an upbeat Travis pick while the rest of the clan dragged half a syllable behind me with the melody and the lyric.

I heard somewhere that no-one if truly tone deaf, unless they are biologically deaf, as in unable to hear. The task is matching the note in our ears to the one in our mouths. One of my earliest memories is of my mom and me folding laundry in the basement on Old Clairton Road. Singing was part of most mundane activities of my youth. It still is. My mom was really good at making up little ditties. We sang all sorts of random songs that I still keep tucked in my heart-file. My mom made me feel emotionally safe singing. She sang to me, I sang to her. It was talking, with pitch.

 I always came home from school on the days our music teacher taught us new songs and shared the new tunes with my mom. She sang them along with me. I remember specifically this one moment when Mom, interrupted me in the middle of rolling a pair of socks and asked me to find the note. “Try it again, Cori. Can you hear it? It’s up here….” And she sang it for me. My little thin voice slurred up and met hers. Something happened inside me when out pitches met. Something powerful enough to make me remember it all these years later.  With the wisdom of age, I believe it to have been the Holy Ghost manifesting truth to me. This is absolutely the kind of thing the Holy Ghost would be in charge of. I felt it then, and I re-feel it now just thinking about it. 

Mom and the Holy Ghost were both teaching me that certain things need to be matched absolutely to be eternal. In that regard music meets covenants and love in the path of truth. And that’s the path where I want to plant my feet.

Lord, make me an instrument.

This Prayer of St Thomas of Assisi is set to a
one of my favorite pieces of music by John Rutter,

If you want to hear yourself better when you sing, plug one ear.
Do this and try matching pitch. It's good kid training (and adult, too)

No wonder I feel iffy all the time,
I am perpetually infected.

3-25-19 BREAK

Break. The word itself is perfectly suited for life with kids as they fit in a society of school and after-school lessons. It’s says, if it could talk: If life goes on like this very much longer I am going to BREAK!” And then there’s a break. Spring Break.

When I was Primary chorister I could never start teaching a new song at one of the school breaks, because there would be so few kids in Primary. I kind of did a secret cheer for the kids who remained on home base for Spring Break. 

Frankly, for me as a parent, the most wonderful part of Spring Break was the lack of homework. Homework was the bane of my parental existence during the school year. Just give my kids a break from getting up early and staying up late doing homework and my life is changed for the better!

I’ve noticed lately that Spring Break has become kind of weird in that people think something big has to happen over Spring Break or it won’t feel like a break. If we don’t do something big we risk becoming members of the family-fail club. 

Why can’t spring break just plain be a break from school? It’s taking on the personality of “holiday” where there are certain expectations that are, quite frankly, artificial. Once you get started taking a vacation every Spring and Fall Break there is a painful let down if you don’t go somewhere. It’s crazy!

Instead, why can’t we make a simple little plan on a couple of those days, something like, “OK kids, we are going to sleep in until 10 am, then we will make real pancakes on the griddle with hot butter and syrup. We gather in the family room for the reading of one book or chapter of a book. Next, we will set a timer and we will gather up all our winter shoes and have a shoe sorting, separating the winter from summer stuff, and then we will go to the park and we are going to make a short movie on mom’s phone. Then it’s little Caesar's pizza on a park bench. Then we are going to have a little down time and maybe a nap and then two of you kids are going to make dinner, and mom and dad are going to do the dishes and then, ta-da, we are going to watch the movie we made at the park, followed by another movie of one of our kid’s choosing. Why not that? That takes as much planning, is as much of a break, and costs a whole lot less than a trip to the Grand Canyon.

Here, therefore, is a worksheet I prepared for a stay at home Spring Break for a family with kids in school. 

Day 1

Sleep in until it is uncomfortable to try to sleep any more. Let’s say 10 am.

The rest of the day needs to be flexible and not subject to times, unless we use a timer to make a hard task seem easier by making it a game against the clock.

BRUNCH:

Menu by:______________

Prepared by:_____________

Book, chosen by:____________________

Timed task:_________________________

Fun outdoor Activity:____________________________

Recorded by:________________________

DOWN TIME until:____________________

Dinner menu chosen by:_________________

Prepared by:__________________________

Movie:________________________________

Or bowling, or roller skating, or hike

If you let a kid choose the activity each day, and another one select the menu, and another film the activity, and another choose the movie, then everyone owns the day.

I would suggest you do this one day of Spring Break, and see how it goes. You can choose to do it another day, or you can veg out and do nothing, which is another definition of “break”. And here's another idea, grandparents can be a part of Spring Break too! (Use us!)

Break means change of state, and it doesn’t require us to go very far.

All this being said, if you just plain need a break from home, then by all means, go for it!

3-23-19 CARRIER

We are carriers of more than biology.

When two people decide to dive into parenthood there is a new energy that sifts down to earth from heaven, and it meets, as it approaches the people planted here, a similar energy rising up from hell. The process of raising children is like walking through dark, dank, musty caverns with weepy walls and while you are walking these unbelievably beautiful little explosions of light and sweet fragrance pop all around you. They light the way into the next dark chamber. And so it goes until suddenly you find yourself at home one night and you realize you want to sit down and watch a show, or read a book, or actually go to bed and YOU CAN! While you were in that twenty-five-year stupor of utter exhaustion the kids went off and grew up and left home.

There’s this particular spot early on in parenthood where it seems that you are bound to be in this space for a devil’s eternity and those sweet little sparkly explosions have ceased to manifest themselves. At least it was that way for me, and since parenthood is a highly personal thing, I speak only for myself. We had four kids in six years, and I was done bearing children by the time I was 27. When you have them that close you don’t get the added bonus of older kids being able to help with the babies. You’re on your own, with a hula hoop of needy little fingers spinning around you, and their fingernails need to be trimmed and they all need baths and all they’ve had to eat since you all got up at 5 am is graham crackers and water that they got for themselves by dragging a chair up to the overloaded kitchen sink. 

I remember sitting in a church meeting during that time and the ladies in the meeting were discussing motherhood and got onto the topic of teenagers and they shouted in what felt like unison, “If you think babies are hard just wait until they’re teenagers!” I sat in my chair in the back, by fourth baby asleep on my droopy shoulder, my eyes filling with overwhelmedness and hopelessness. After the meeting a friend came up to me and said: “I feel like I need to tell you there is no time that is as exhausting physically and emotionally than when they are all little at once. You will get through this, and those kids are lucky to have you.” This gal had eight kids, and she knew what she was talking about. That little cluster of words she gave me got me through years of parenting.

At one point, when they were all in elementary school and I was PTA president and living at the school myself, we went through a whole season where Kate, Annie and I kept getting strep throat. It got to the point of ridiculousness. Finally, after too many months of antibiotics, I dragged the whole dang crew down to Instacare and asked for strep tests for every one of us, even though half of us were never sick.

Dave went along with it because he was in that young parent daze as well as that young attorney stage and was just as stunned and lost as I was. Turns out that Dave, Sarah and John all had strep, with no symptoms whatsoever. They just carried that germ in their back pockets and handed it over to Kate, Annie and me as soon as we got over the last case. The doctor explained that they must have been carriers.

Who knew? 

He put us all on a course of antibiotics and finally we were able to sleep at night and were back to our regular level of dysfunction during the day.

The concept of carrier, at least in biological terms, has been brewing in the back of my head ever since then. I realize that in many ways I am a carrier, unaware, of all sorts of things; biological, spiritual, emotional. 

Hanging clouds at midnight.

The concept bubbled up to the forefront of my consciousness the other night while Dave and I were down at the Farmington Art Center helping our son John and his daughter Ruby work on sets for the community youth theater play, Pirates of Penzance.  John had volunteered to do the sets. Ruby is a policeman in the play and John saw it as an opportunity to spend one-on-one time with Roo. The director had asked for a black and white set, alluding to the sea , while at the same time making it possible to be on dry land. Anyway, as I stood in the center of the hall, surrounded by my son’s creative efforts, with a silhouette of a church to my left, a large black tree to my right and a cluster of seagulls at my feet, I watched as John and Dave hung clouds from the rafters. I was planted in the audience space to tell them how high or low to hang them. I had a sudden sentimental recollection of one of those magical sparkly explosions that occasionally popped in the caverns of my young parenting. I realized, with joy and delight, that my boy was an artist, and he was letting that artist in him out to play. And while I stood there evaluating the position of that cloud, I realized that each of my children had recently begun to manifest the artist in themselves. Each of our four kids have unusual gifts in visual art. Neither Dave nor I have that gene actively working, and yet these kids who came from us all have it. Dave and I are carriers. Awesome!

John and Ruby.

We are all carriers of something. Good or bad, or both at once, we place in the pockets of our children nuggets of something that we cannot do ourselves. It is part of the magic of parenthood to watch them pull those nuggets out of their pockets and polish them up. 

Carry on.

a photo of John taking a photo of Ruby

John's large portrait of Queen Victoria for the play.

Annie and her kids painted this happiness
on her laundry room wall.

Free hand flowers. She bought the paint in the
Home Depot reject paint bin.

Sarah's large oil painting of Duck Creek.
The walls of our home are blessed by her artwork.
Her undergrad degree is in Fine Art.

Kate wanted to make some Star Wars
gingerbread men, but couldn't find cookie cutters,
so she made her own out of a foil pan.

And then there was that whimsical day I found these on
the kitchen table. Kate decided to make miniature
Santa dinosaurs.

And finally, because tonight was closing night for this girl,
here's Ruby in costume.
(She's the one on the left.)
Brava, Roo.

3-22-19 MARATHON

Predawn in Logan, she rose from her motel room bed and showered, waking herself against the dark with the aroma of Dial soap and deodorant. Then she layered her clothing, thin shorts under sweat pants, a binding sports bra under a snug sweat grabbing sport shirt, under a sweatshirt. Lastly, she stretched clean socks over her calloused feet, slipped on her running shoes, and laced them snugly. Her long dark hair she had tied back in a pony-tail. Out into the chilly indigo air she joined a flock of similarly attired strangers on a bus that drove them through the twisted canyon roadway, up into the snowy places where the race began.

Meanwhile, her mother slept.

We of the lumber legs woke with the sun, then sat in nice leather chairs attached to engines and wheels with nice heaters and air conditioners and drove up to Logan, an hour or so away from home, with poster board signs we had splattered with colorful words of good cheer and encouragement to our daughter, Sarah. 

We planted ourselves on the corner of a gentle intersection, not too busy, but right along the race route. We pulled our nice compact nylon red, white and blue cheer chairs out of their carrying bags and plopped ourselves into them. The dew had already burned itself back to heaven by then, and when runners began to appear we could see that the outer layers they had worn in the morning were tied around their waists. We clapped and cheered for each individual runner, and each little cluster. It amazed me how fresh some of them looked, after 20 miles of running. It amazed me that anyone could still be running after 20 miles of running! And the thought of over six more miles to go; well, that was beyond my understanding. In the first place, why would anyone want to do that? Just, why?

But then you’d see someone with long legs and a lean torso and broad shoulders that held steady in the up and down rhythm of the motion, and you’d say that maybe they were made to do this and it’s awesome that they get to. It’s such a foreign concept to me. But just as many of these runners, in this race, were the most unlikely looking. Like, if I was in an elevator with them and we had one minute to analyze each other, I would never in a million years guess that they would participate in a marathon.

Yet here they were, doing it. It kind of blew me away.

We strained our eyes and stretched our necks looking for our girl. Then, sure enough, one of us spotted her down the road, working her legs like oars on a row boat, her arms dutifully pumping beside her like pedals on a bike. We stood from our lazy chairs and waved our signs in the air, screaming, whistling, and rearranging ourselves to get closer to her when she passed. 

She smiled, grunted her love through her heaving chest, threw us her extra clothing and set her eyes forward, never breaking her stride.

I’m not sure what I was expecting. I probably wasn’t expecting – and hadn’t thought it through. Usually, in the past, when we have waited for our kids in an attitude of celebration it was at the conclusion of an event. Flowers after a performance, ice cream after recitals, the kind of thing where you all give hugs and talk about how wonderful they were. But this, this was not the end. This was the cheer in the hardest lap, the CPR after the drop to the floor. OK, maybe that’s a bit dramatic. But I realized, at this first of multiple marathons for this daughter, that she was smack in the heart of a hard thing when I was ready for her to be done. And with that realization came a profound appreciation for her gifts. My Sarah is multi-faceted and uber-talented. For her, since she has had this body at least, if she determined to achieve something over which she had objective power, then by golly she did it. Her dogged determination is a blurse, a blessing and curse in one, because most things are not purely objective. Other people and situations have some of the power and bring in subjectivity. She is still in the process of learning, like the rest of us, that we cannot control other people. And, thankfully, because she loves God, she is also learning to let Him mold her as much as she molds herself. That’s not an easy thing for people who are by nature super capable and used to achieving big things.

After Sarah whisked past us there on the road outside of Logan, we gathered up our lawn chairs and her outer layer of clothing and our little bag of starchy goodies and our posters and loaded them back in the car. We shifted all of it, including ourselves, to the park where the finish line and portable bleachers were arranged. A giant digital clock clicked away, the crowd ebbed and flowed, cheers rose and fell in audible swails as the racers crossed the line. One by one they ran past the finish line, stopping for only a few seconds, their fingers stretched over their knee caps, their heads lowered as their chests pumped down and up, then off they went again, jogging or walking to cool down their overtaxed muscles.

There were tables with juice and water and cookies and fruit. There was a large tent with massage tables lined up like hospital gurneys. And there were photo booths and first aid stations. But mostly there was love and pride and grace, all covered in massive amounts of sweat.

Our Sarah was not born a runner. She was not, by godly design, built that way. She has the short Connors legs and the Parrish hips and petite shoulders and arms. I'm by no stretch of the imagination athletic. And though her dad did letter in track in high school and college, his events did not involve distance. They involved strength, and I suppose she inherited that. The fact that this girl has achieved this thing, worthy of remark, still inspires me. No one can ever take from her the fact that she has achieved this, more than once. 

When she was four years old I had told Sarah she would have until she turned five to figure out how to not suck her thumb. I didn’t hang it over her very often, though I occasionally reminded her in nonthreatening moments that she could do this hard thing since she was getting to be a big girl now. On her 5^thbirthday, when I tucked her in bed, I asked her if she knew what else this day meant. She looked at me with her liquid brown eyes, her thumb happily planted between her little-girl lips. She looked me right in my weepy eyes and pulled her thumb out, causing an audible pop as her lips closed against themselves. She kept her eyes focused on me as she pulled her little soft legs up toward her chest, there in her big girl bed, and tucked her hand between her knees. I don’t remember ever again seeing her suck her thumb.

My first-born daughter teaches me still the beauty of the human mind when it marries the human heart. She has survived things, trust me, that pretty much every other person I know would never have withstood, including medical school, residency, four pregnancies and other major stressers. They have taken their toll on her. But they have also made her shine. It’s the agitation of fibers against metal that makes it shine, like the sweet little collection of marathon medals that hang on a hook full of ribbons in some quiet corner of her closet.

3-21-19 FORGE

Remember yesterday when I wrote about spirit beads, the mistakes we make on the road to perfection? Remember how I said if I were a piece of bead work I would be full of spirit beads?

Case in point: Even though I have what I call schizophrenic handwriting, the kind that changes angle and size and direction all in one sentence, by the time I was in eighth grade I became fairly expert at forging two signatures. First was my mother’s. I was never tempted to forge it in serious fiduciary documents. It was purely used to write excuses for missing school. I might add that I had my mother’s permission to forge her name. More often than not we just plain forgot that we had to turn in an excuse after an absence until I had arrived at school the next morning. That’s when I pulled out a little piece of paper and scribbled:

“Please excuse Corinne from school yesterday. She was sick.”, followed by what I thought was a perfect impersonation of my mother’s beautifully fluid handwriting.

Sadly, I have lost my touch with my mom's signature.

I wonder if anyone ever in the whole wide world ever believed it was actually her signature. Here’s hoping they didn’t really look very hard.

Mrs. Tucci was a tiny powerhouse.

Anyway, the second name I learned to forge was Mrs. Tucci, our middle school choir director. It was Mrs. Tucci, all four feet eleven of her, that gave me my voice. At least she held up the auditory mirror and helped me find it. The first week of school in eighth grade I mustered the courage to audition for the Mini-Singers. The Mini-Singers were the cool hip cats of the middle school, at least in my circle. For two whole years, in sixth and seventh grade, I looked at the kids who were Mini-Singers and stared secretly, trying to analyze what it took to be so cool, hoping against all odds that one day I could be…that. So I scribbled my schizophrenic signature on the audition sheet, trying on purpose to make it somewhat illegible, cuz if people knew I tried out and didn’t make it, then the not cool factor would increase considerably. The big bass drum planted in my chest pumped away as I stood beside the blond upright piano sitting on wheels in the center of the choir room. I stood on the back side of the piano, Mrs. Tucci’s black short cropped head of hair barely peeking over the top of the piano box. She raised one hand to indicate it was time to sing, and in spite of the drum corps in my chest I let the song rise out of me.

Two days later, waiting for a moment when the hallway was clear of all humans, I slipped over to the posting outside the choir room. Twenty names typed in small pale typewriter print, not in alphabetical order, but assigned by musical sections. There in the soprano section I found it: Cori Hansen. That old drummer inside started a rolling snare and I turned and walked away, my books pressed against my thumping chest, my footsteps increasing their pace as I moved to homeroom. Later, in the hall between classes, someone called out to me: “Cori Hansen, Mini-Singers!” I tell ya, I’m many decades old now, and have had some pretty magical things happen, but the recalled feeling of that moment rises right up to the top. I wonder if my angels knew what was ahead for me.

That's me, 4th from the left.

So eighth grade turned into a pretty magical year for me, school-wise. I’m not talking grade-wise, if you catch my drift. But that year I started learning guitar in the guitar club after school, and Mr. Cameron, who volunteered to teach us guitar, spent many mornings in his small office teaching Betsy Gerson and me  how to finger pick Blackbird and Vincent and Dust in the Wind. 

Mrs. T in the middle, Mr. Cameron far right.

My new found coolness gave me the sense of self that allowed me to sit against the lockers with Betsy and work through Gordon Lightfoot songs. Mrs. Tucci became Mrs. T. Her office became home base for us Mini-Singers. (Yes, indeed, we girls wore mini-skirts in performances.) We wove in and out, like friends in a coffee shop. Mrs. T taught Betsy and me how to forge her signature so we could mass produce late excuses for her choir kids. We were a machine. To this day I can close my eyes and scratch out the signature of Ida Tucci.

I forged I. Tucci a lot more than Afton Hansen.
I've still got the touch, if I say so myself.

I still can’t believe Mrs. T brought us into her inner circle, teaching us how to forge, giving us free reign of her office. That was our last year of Middle School. We were off to TJ High after that and, I’m sorry to say, it was generally downhill from there.

Thinking back on it, I never did feel pangs of guilt for forging signatures for either of those women. It’s probably because they knew I was not likely to abuse the gifted power. I wasn’t one to skip school or skip class. 

But late, I was. And I still am.

Nonetheless, I forge ahead!

For thirteen seconds I was a cool hip cat.