PAUSE

March 8, 2009 pause

It is the comma; the moment between inhale and exhale; that space where words and shapes are not. I remember taking an art class from my friend and neighbor, Rebecca Mann. The basis for our lessons was a book called Drawing from the Right Side of the Brain. One of our lessons was an exercise that required us to draw the spaces around a chair. Of course, in drawing what is known as the “negative space”, the “positive space” of the chair emerged. It looked a little skiwampusy, and I certainly would not want to sit in the one that ended up on my paper, but it was indeed a chair. It was interesting to participate in the creation of it though, because my focus was so intent on capturing the chunk of air between the rungs of the seat back, and the painted wall behind the legs, that it took a blink and a shake of the head to re-focus on the spaces I was not drawing, which in the end became the chair. I remember sitting in Rebecca’s basement and thinking here was life, on this sheet of paper, and the pencil in my hand was my gift of choice. I can choose whatever I want to do…to think…to plan or imagine…it’s my gift from God. I wake in the morning and decide for myself if I want to talk to God. It feels like a one-way conversation, but I usually decide to do it anyway. It is my pause, my “negative space”, the portion no one sees in my life sketch. Only me and God.
I pause on purpose nowadays. Maybe it’s my age and out-of-shapeness. Maybe not. Maybe its wisdom. On the back of the door to my bathroom (maybe I am revealing too much here), in a place you would only see if you were sitting on the potty in your own private space, I have three little reminders to pause. It started with a teeny little red foam heart I found on the floor and stuck up on my door. Every time I see it I offer a prayer for my Sarah Love, because at the time she was struggling, and I was so far away and felt so helpless. But I knew God could do things her mom could not, so I figured since that room is used more regularly than any other room in the house, and it is certainly private, I would beg God’s forgiveness for praying to him in a non-traditional un-kingly setting and ask His help. When Kate came home from her mission and left for Houston to immerse herself in the agony of Jr High in an inner-city school, I added the sticky backed luggage strip from the Hong Kong airport to the door. It underlines the heart. Then, on a random day not too long ago, after Sophie had been visiting, I found little Post It Notes stuck all over the house. Some people would see them as a mess, but I saw them as love notes she left for me. As I stacked them back on top of each other, clearing some room in my bedroom and bathroom, I saved one and opened the door to my pause space. Above the Hong Kong luggage strip, and the little red foam heart, there is a post it note that says Sophie to me. It speaks of all my little ones, of Soph and Park and little Ruby, and of Timo and Anna who are so far away right now. When I see that Post It Note I pause and ponder. I let the angels tell me who needs a prayer for what; but it always begins with Sophie. I could cover the back of that door with a thousand little reminders of people I love and want to pray for. But something tells me to keep it to three. There are other places that bring me to pause for other people.
I could hurry and get things taken care of. Rush from here to there and have my life all figured out. I could focus on all the positive spaces as I draw my own life sketch. But what kind of composition would that be? The moodling moments, the afternoon dreams, the idling engine of my heart that leans on the kitchen counter and thinks of absolutely nothing in particular…these are the pauses that help define me. They not only give me rest from the do-ing; they set the really visible and well crafted moments apart. If Sophie were to draw the sun and she took the whole page, we would not see nor appreciate the beauty of it. It needs a large empty sky, save maybe a cotton candy cloud or two, to make it so wonderful.
Thank you, Rebecca, for teaching me about negative space. I needed that lesson as a songwriter, and I needed it as a mother and a wife and a daughter and a friend. In the end my life is defined as much by the pauses as by the music.

FRY PAN

March 7, 2009 fry pan

When the wind comes whispering through the branches of the scrub oak trees in our front yard; when the leaves are molting from their winter nubs into fresh baby-green see-through ruffles, I can hear the streams of my childhood. Though there is no water here, I can hear them. We are warm in our sweatshirts, our wet shoes are nearly dry and we are huddled near the fire, the fresh gathered wood cracking against the heat, releasing a spew of sparks that rise into the starry sky. Pine smoke sifts into tall evergreens. The smells of the mountains change when the sun sets. Wet and earthy aromas of a warm sunny day have drawn the shades and bedded down for the night and we are left with fresh and crisp and clear, cold in our nostrils. We speak in quieter tones, an instinctive reverence overcoming all living things. There is a ring of strategically placed flat faced rocks in the coals of the fire, off to the side where Mom has shifted pieces of charcoal, where the flame has inverted into blackened chunks of heat which blush like embarrassed schoolgirls when she blows on them. Mom’s old black cast iron fry pan sits on top of the stones, appearing unaffected by the heat, looking rather lifeless, until she flings a fork full of Crisco into it. Then it screams and screeches as the white glob shrinks and glides across the hot thick metal. Beside her, on a large platter laid out like soldiers, is our catch of the day. Fin against fin, clean and headless and shimmering in the moonlight. She shakes a generous portion of salt and pepper on their rainbow skin, sprinkles a little flour if she has some, and lifts each one by the tail, gently sliding them into the hot oil like tired housewives lay themselves into a hot bathtub after the kids are in bed. They sizzle and curl, turning brown on the outside and pink on the inner. Their slivery spines pull away from the layers of meat when they are cooked just right. We stand in a line behind her as she bends over the fire, her hot pad wrapped around the handle of the fry pan. She shakes the skillet, turns the fish one more time, then edges the tines of her fork under the backbone to see if the flesh flakes off easily. “Here you go, Doll,” she’ll say as she lays one on my plate. I scurry back to my canvas folding chair, the one that smells like rubber and mildew and pine needles. I push my knobby little girl knees together and make a little table for my plate. Tiny bite by tiny bite I pull the delicacy from the skeleton, counting the ribs, knowing that if one is missing I’d better chew carefully. I do not need a fork. I can do it bare handed, once the fish has cooled a little. You can feel the bones better that way. It makes my mouth water to think of it.
This is the bright red cherry on top of a super banana split kind of day. A day that starts as a dark chilly Idaho morning, slipping out of my sleeping bag and following my mother, tiptoeing, down to the stream; fishing pole in hand, a square cork container with mulch and earthworms, a Big Hunk and Chick-O-Stix in my left coat pocket and my old tenny-runners on my feet. My mom stands beside me in the stream and we speak beautiful silence to each other as the sun rises over the shimmering ripples of the Snake River. There is a tug on my line, and a tug on hers, and we know that with the rising sun there is hunger below the waters. All day long, that blessed timeless kind of day, we gave ourselves to the wild.
Here, beside the fire, tummy full and body happy-tired, I take my plate to the stream and wash it off. This is the gift of a day. I am warm, and I am loved, and I am safe, and I am fed. There is no sweeter memory. Truly, no sweeter memory.

The Snake River and the Tetons

After a good day....Ann Marie, Libby, me and George in Aunt Edna's kitchen

PERSPECTIVE

March 6, 2009 perspective

Legend has it that the valley of the Great Salt Lake was known by ancient Indian tribes as the Valley of Smoke. Fog would rise from the lake and surrounding areas, held to the ground by inversions that were the result of air flow from the ring of mountains surrounding the lake. When the pioneers got here it became a true valley of smoke as the settlers used soft smelted coal to heat their homes. The rising smoke got stuck in the bowl of air that swirled in that same mountain basin. Nowadays it’s the exhaust from cars and the residue from refineries that make us have to strain to see lights in the distance. Tonight, however, as Dave and I drove home from Salt Lake City, the air was remarkably clear. We could see all the way out to the copper mines and the Oquirrh Mountain range to the west. To the east the Bountiful temple looked like, if we rolled down the van window and reached out, we could pluck it off the side of the foothill where it stands. Its white marble reflected in the moonlight, making it look like a glass nightlight we might have purchased at Deseret Book and plugged into our car. It was so clear, but it was also so far that it seemed it would fit in the palm of my hand. Relatively speaking, it was the size of the moon. Logic tells me that the temple is massively larger than a nightlight, and that the moon is massively larger than the temple. Without perspective they all fit together in the same little jewelry box in my mind.
Perspective requires a few things. I learned these things at the art classes Libby and I took every Saturday morning at the Carnegie Museum in Oakland PA. Perspective involves a point of view; a vantage point. It requires an origination point, where the eye of the observer is; and at least one vanishing point, where the observer can no longer see, past the horizon. Mr. Fitzpatrick stood in the front of 200 students from various schools in the Pittsburgh area. He placed one dot on the paper with his long paintbrush, then another on the opposite half of the sheet. “Here,” he said in that large Irish American voice, slightly graying in its timbre like the color of his hair, “is the corner of the barn.” He painted a long black line down the middle of the page. “This dot is your left vanishing point, and this other is your right” He proceeded to paint lines between the dots and the corner of the barn, adding more lines in perpendiculars and parallels, until there was a stunning arrangement of triangles out of which a barn emerged, looking for all the world like the real thing. This was not the barn of my childhood, a rectangle with a triangle on top. This felt correct because it understood and incorporated perspective. It was remarkable to me, and quite empowering. The other day I showed Sophie how to draw a house using perspective and, much to my surprise, it seemed logical to her. She has the soul of an artist, and the eyes of a painter.
I ended up, after years of Saturday art school, getting on enough honor rolls to receive a recommendation to the Carnegie Mellon School of Art. But I am not an artist. Not the kind that can draw very well, at least. The reason they called my name out for the honor roll every other Saturday was because I knew what I did not know, and I stayed away from it. What I could do…well, I used it. What got me recognition was not the science of my art, it was the creativity of my pieces. I had to compensate for not being very technically gifted, so I sketched and painted unique and symbolic pieces that caught the eye of our professors. The class is assigned to paint a self portrait…, I do mine as if I am looking into the scoop of a spoon. Everyone looks askew in the reflection of a spoon! That’s how I made it work. Even in my youth I knew I was getting away with something, that I was faking that I belonged in a room full of true artists with talent and skill. I wish I had listened more; that I had tried harder to do what they taught us and not what made me appear unique. Though I may not know exactly how to use perspective to interpret a scene on paper, I did learn that perspective is part of every realistic artistic work. The lesson bled over into my songwriting…into my parenting…into my personal life story, still being written. I am grateful to know about it, even if I do not fully understand it.

YEARLY

March 5, 2009 yearly

Here’s the day that comes round yearly
Where the past and future meet
Yesterday is bound to memory
And tomorrow’s bright and sweet

Here they gather round the table
These who share my heart and name
Birthday flowers, Birthday greetings
Birthday candles set aflame

Bless the woman here who bore me
Gave me breath and showed the way
Blessed as well, that I would bear
My own sweet girl on this same day

Here the night has come upon us
Starry preface to the dawn
Another year has come to meet me
And another year is gone

Today we celebrated my birthday, and also the birthday of my Sarah. Born on my 22nd Birthday, she is the best Birthday gift I have ever received! I always sing the birthday song on this day, because I always have her to sing to. This year she is a thousand miles away with her little family in Kansas City, entering her very last year of Medical Residency (she's a Pediatrician). One more year and we will celebrate together again! Tonight, as the beautiful cluster of people I love gathered around the table and sang, (sadly, minus our Houston Kate's beautiful harmonies, too) I could not bear to just listen, so I jumped in and sang. To my Sarah Bella Boo.Even though she couldn't hear me. Happy Birthday my Sarah Love. Having you was like being born again.

DITTIES

The word today is- Ditties. (I know you are wondering what this picture of laundry has to do with ditties...in fact you are probably wondering what ditties are. Read on. ) I cheated and did not use the Random Word Generator on this one because it is actually a response to a request from someone. Covenant Records is putting my song Broken on their Mother's Day album, An Angel To Watch Over Me, and they wanted a little piece about my mother for publicity purposes. So I made the word of the day work for this, since I have a heavy duty busy day and am not sure I would get my Lent writing in before midnight.
Cori

March 4, 2009 ditties

I was raised in Pennsylvania, where the winter air could be biting cold. Icicles would hang from the corners of our Tudor house, reaching all the way to the ground. Those were the days I most enjoyed the chore of helping my mother with the laundry. We'd trudge down the stairs with our baskets, into the cellar where the washer and dryer lined the outside wall and where a long wooden board laid atop a set of drawers was our folding table. The steel framed single paned window steamed over as we worked, the warmth and aroma of the room infusing into freshly dried clothes. My task was to pair and roll the socks. I can still hear in my memory, these decades later, my mother's lilting voice, making up little ditties about our task as we worked. Silly little lyrics, set to made-up melodies. Things like:
"This one's blue, but this one's black.
I think we'll put this one back.
Lay them in a little stack.
Let's...keep...folding"
The rhythm of her songs set the pace for our chore and made it fun. We sang these musical snippets back and forth to each other, like little boys toss balls to their dads. If I was slightly under pitch she'd sing the note and urge me to meet it., always following with some comment about how beautiful it was.
All my life, even still at the age of 85, my mother has spoken love and laughter and sorrow in her little songs. I suspect she sang in the heavens to me as well... "Let's go down to that new world...you can be my little girl...."
When Mom laid my first guitar under the Christmas tree, in my fourteenth year, she sealed my fate. She has been the biggest supporter of my songwriting, from that first Mother's Day song I wrote for her back when I was 16, to my most recent recording, where images of her influence are woven into sentimental lyrics throughout the album.
A year ago my mother was very ill. We seven children gathered around her in her hospital room, our guitars ringing with familiar tunes. Mom hovered in that sacred space between heaven and earth, the doctors predicting that she would go and we children begging her to stay. For two weeks she teetered there. She did not talk. But when the strains to a familiar song came from one of our instruments, her lips quivered and soon the full lyric was wrapped in her comforting mother-voice. Thankfully and blessedly, Mom recovered.
Most of who I am I owe to my mother, and when I sing, I can feel her pleasure.

HORIZON

March 3, 2009 horizon

Distance. Distance is the key to seeing a horizon. Where I grew up it was hard to get a visual on distance. Too many hills and trees got in the way, so that when the sun set, it just sort of disappeared behind the hillsides, daylight sinking into the woods. In a matter of minutes the hairs on your arms could stand up straight with the humid chill of the dropping temperature. Cold and wet is so much colder than cold and dry. Same with warmth. Hot summer days in Pennsylvania could be tasted. Walking through the heavy brush under the eternal trees that hung over each other like snakes in a pit, you could open your mouth and chew on a chunk of air. It tasted green and muddy and sweet.
Where I live now there is need for lotion. For lip ointments and sesame oils and conditioning shampoo. When Dave decided to take the job in Salt Lake City we looked at every available house in our price range north of the city. We kept going until we reached this neighborhood in Farmington where the car strained to climb the hill and trees lined both sides of the road. I took a deep easy breath when we drove into our neighborhood. This would work, we thought, and so it did. And so it does.
Every time I drive down that hill out of our neighborhood I look out over the horizon. It stuns me still, nearly every time. I set my eyes in the sweet spot where I can see the road in a responsible driver sort of way, but still seek the horizon. I find the out there, the way out there over the lake; past the mountains to the west and on into eternity. Every evening God sets His easel out there and mixes umber with crimson, dips it in amber and gold, then sweeps His gloriously large brush over an azure wash. It swirls and runs, evolves and deepens with the elements until, finally, He covers it all with a ripe, wet indigo and lets it rest until morning. Some nights, according to His good pleasure, he will fill a stiff, short bristled brush with silver and flick it, shimmering, over the night sky.
Horizons need distance to be seen. Space and vision. I pity the poor soul whose eyes are set on the goal, so sternly and absolutely that he fails to look up at the horizon. “Here”, God says, “Here you go. I’m here now, see? Everything will be just fine.” Stock markets crash; fear rears its head, jobs are lost and panic sets in. We roll our shoulders in over our hearts and forget to look up; to look out. All we see is a double yellow line in the road, when up and out in front of us is a brand new creation every single hour of every single evening, whispering hope; regardless of the tragedies of the day or the pleasures of the flesh. Every single day, out there on the horizon. Look up.

PUSH

I use a website called Random Word Generator to get the Word of the Day, the jumping off place for my writing exercises. The Welcome page on that site has a scattered mosaic-like picture with the caption “Using randomness to create order.” Does this not sound like the perfect place for me? I just never quite get from the “random” spot to the place of “order”. The website offers a word at the click of a button. The page with the word on it says something like; “This site generates a random common noun”, which is exactly what we are looking for in this particular exercise. So today the word was “Push”. Where is the noun-ness in that?
Anyway…here goes:
PUSH
The sign says PUSH, but the handle says ignore the sign and PULL. Thick tempered glass with a pull handle on it, and behind the handle is a red rectangular message saying PUSH. I suppose for a door to fill the measure of its creation it would need to be either pushed or pulled; though I suppose it could also slide to the side. But it needs to be openable. Otherwise, why be a door? I wonder to myself, why would they put a pull handle where a push plate would suffice? It contradicts itself. But it happens all the time. Check it out next time you go shopping. I suppose they might put a pull handle there in case there is a robbery and they need to let the negotiating cop in really quickly and then close the door from the outside. The handle is there so they can pull it shut faster than the hinges want to allow. I’m not sure. I think it makes for confusion in a world already excessively confused. Like those IN and OUT doors between the kitchen and the dining room in a convention center. Or like the page in the middle of my favorite Dr Seuss book, Go Dog Go…”One big dog going IN…Three little dogs going OUT.” I wrote a little poem when I was 15 about In and Out. It was published in the New Era magazine, but I don’t recall it at this moment. I know it ended with the words “I realized I had been going IN the OUT.” It was some sort of social commentary; a typical poem of a 1970’s teenager. Was I a typical 1970’s teenager?
Maybe retail establishments put PUSH on those PULL doors so rebellious adolescents will find their way in to spend their parents’ money.
I'm imagining a pioneer handcart with the word PULL painted on the handle in the front, and a big red PUSH painted on the back board. Some things just don't need instruction always being yelled from them. But to take it to a worse scenario, how irritating would it be if you were all day straining your back behind a handcart, pushing it through the sandy desert as you stared at a mislabeled sign that said PULL?

I’m also thinking about that picture from Sunday School; that one where Jesus is standing at the side of an arched wooden door, his beard all trim and tidy and his robes all pure and clean. He leans his head in toward the door and has his hand in a fisted position, like he’s knocking. When you look closely you notice that the door has no doorknob. No PUSH sign either. It is intended to mean he will not force his way into your space, you have to open it for him if you want him to come in. That painting simply would not work if there were a message painted on the door…PUSH.

UNCERTAINTY

March 1, 2009 uncertainty

There are a handful of life moments which, when piled together chronologically, end up telling a story; whether one gets the full length novel version or the sonnet version or, perhaps for some a two line couplet is enough. Less than three months ago Ruby’s story began. That day she journeyed with her mother down the hill and through the valley of the shadow of death. They both rose, victorious, with one quivering cry in a small hospital room, her mama’s forehead dripping with the effort, and Ruby’s little body shivering in the newness of itself. That was a beautiful opening scene. Soon enough the holidays rolled through and she wrapped her little fingers around her mama’s pinky when she nursed and curled into her daddy’s lap when she was done. Winter sifted through the weeks, like powdered sugar on heart shaped cookies. It stayed this year, steadily white on the hillside and the mound in the front yard grew and grew until it became a magical sledding run that children played upon after school and where mommies and daddies slipped out to after the kids were in bed. This week, these past few days, the sun has made himself known. The sidewalks are almost all clear now, and under the scrub oak trees there is evidence of impending crocuses, little bumps of deep earthy green pushing their way up through the dirt. Thirsty primroses lift their withered heads to the sunlight. We push aside the curtains and let the warmth come in, and with it comes the hope of Spring. Of tomatoes in the grow boxes; of fresh snap peas; and of afternoons in Gram’s back yard watching the kids splash in the wading pool. Hope eternal.
It seems fitting, on this Springlike day, that Ruby made her fist appearance to the outside world in the little white cotton dress I found nine years ago in an antiques shop in Wales. Dave and I had journeyed across the ocean to retrieve our son, fresh with the spirit and sweetness and verve of a missionary. It was a sacred and precious time, being with him in his element, in the place he loved, with the people he loved, watching him in the final few days of doing work he loved. It was a precious time. I knew somehow these would be the last moments when my boy was just my boy. And I was right. Today that boy-turned-man stood in his Sunday suit and carried his third child, little Ruby to the front of the church, that long white 100 year old blessing dress wrapped around his precious angel of a girl. I watched from the pew where I was sitting and felt the convergence of powerful forces. The past, with its glories and sorrows, its moments of struggle followed almost certainly with wisdom if not joy; met face to face with the future of one little girl. Today… with all the beauty of Ruby’s father’s tender words of blessing, pronounced from worthy lips; with the joy of loved ones coming together in celebration and worship; with one sweet little family of five huddling together in prayer… I recognize today as the meeting place for all of Ruby’s tomorrows. What tomorrow brings to Ruby, on this her Blessing Day, is a brilliant bouquet of uncertainty. It is her gift. Uncertainty. It opens for her all the world of possibility: dances she will dance; still and silent moments; songs, and stories and kisses and tears. All is uncertainty and possibility and wonder! Take this and cherish it, little child of our hearts. Wars, on this earth and elsewhere, were fought for this gift alone.
The Maker of all good things gave our Ruby many treasures: a mother and father who love each other and who love their children; a household of warmth and candor and thoughtfulness; beauty for the world to behold in her father’s laughing eyes and her mother’s smile. All good and dependable things, which make her future likely and shining, but by no means guaranteed. Therein lies the beauty. The tension…that same kind of tension that makes her daddy’s guitar strings ring so sweetly…is in the uncertainty. It keeps us on our toes. It compels us to remain interested. We are wise to be aware of it. Uncertainty is the gift.

Blessings on you, little Ruby, that your uncertain future lays comfortably in the nest of probability; for you are, irrevocably and unconditionally, and eternally loved. It puts the odds in your favor.

SKIN

Word of the Day: February 28, 2009 skin

I sometimes play this game with myself where I pretend I do not speak English. Then I try to figure out in my non-English-speaking mind what some random English word might mean. I think I started this game when we were visiting Germany, years ago, and words would appear on signs regularly, ones that looked rather odd to my American eyes. We’d come up with our own meanings after a while. One does such things when they travel the Autobahn for hours on end in a van full of relatives. Words like einfart and ausfart and sparkasse. After a while we figured out the real meaning of einfart and ausfart had nothing to do with bodily functions. They meant enter and exit; obviously freeway signs. Einfart and Ausfart sound so much more interesting than enter and exit. I still tease my sisters when I go over to pick them up for something and they are not ready, shouting up the stairs that they had better sparkass. I think in reality that would mean something like: you’d better bank, or cash machine, or something like that. So for some reason this morning I look at the word skin and repeat it over and over in my head. (Such practices lead to odd thinking.) I wonder to myself who in the world came up with that word. Repeated over and over again it spins out of the realm of logic and takes on an alien form up there in the left side of the brain, jumping over on its alien feet into the right brain where all sorts of strange ideas play hide and seek all day long. I think skin joins the ranks of words whose sounds do not match their meanings. Skin, the surface of the being of God’s most complex creation; flexible and vast and living and essential…it should first of all be a much bigger word, at least three syllables, and it should sound sort of royal. Or at least scientific, being after all the body’s largest organ. So then my head clamps onto the thought that skin is an organ, which sort of blows me away, and I think strange things like, “if one were to cut the skin all the way around the arm like the bark of a tree – all the way around until cut meets cut – would the arm die like the tree would?” Duh, self! That’s why we have doctors. And tree doctors.
Ever since I had Guillain Barre syndrome I’ve had skin trouble. Maybe it came before Guillain Barre. I think it came with my first allergic reaction, come to think of it. Dave says that if I ever disappeared and became the topic of a late night re-run of CSI, they would only have to look at Dave’s fingernails to get my DNA. I can tell by the familiar “impending itch” feeling when I am having a reaction. Allergic, perhaps, to my own skin, because we can’t find what else it might be. When we were in Houston with Kate last summer I think I had a reaction to the new soap I bought for her shower. Dave was loading the car for our trip back to Utah and I started the old itch thing. I immediately took two Benedryl. Soon my breathing got shallow, and then my vision blurred and I told Kate to find my purse and get my epi-pen. She was worried, and Tiffany, her roommate, ran out to get Dave from the parking lot of their apartment complex. The mother in me, not wanting to traumatize my daughter, sort of non-chalantly said, “Oh Kate, this happens to me all the time. Aren’t these epi-pens just amazing?” and as I said this I took the pen out of the tube and said, “See, it’s just like a ball point pen. You just jab it into your thigh and…” Next thing I knew I had shot myself in the thumb. Not the thigh. Not the large muscle of the human thigh, but the tiny fleshy pad of the thumb, underneath which is a bone. So the thin soft needle, when it hit the bone of my thumb, bent like a fish hook and I could not get it out. Meanwhile my thumb is swelling up and I am losing consciousness as my blood pressure drops with the allergic reaction, and I am scared to death that I have wasted the only epi-pen I had in Houston! But, praise be to the Lord and the wonder of medicine, the Epinephrine entered my bloodstream, even through the tiny human thumb and, though nauseated, I came back to myself. Only I had this 8 inch epi-pen sticking out of my thumb and I could not for the life of me get it out of my skin! Poor Kate, I made her take one end and pull while I held my thumb with the other hand and pulled in the opposite direction. Seriously, it would NOT come out! Eventually I twisted and pulled and it responded, bringing with it a nice chunk of thumb flesh. Just then Dave came in, incredulous to the thought that all this had happened in the few short minutes he had been loading the car. After a blessing and a prayer and some gentle hugging we took off into the Texas desert, my poor freezing cold swollen thumb tucked into a down pillow on my lap. The Benedryl started to kick in and sleep overcame me. Somewhere in the middle of Nowhere Texas I called Libby and asked her to Google “epi-pen in thumb”, cuz my thumb was colorless and numb. Fifteen minutes later she called back. “Get to an Emergency Room!” Turns out people lost such digits under such circumstances. But ER’s are hard to come by in the Texas desert. So I called Enrique Baires, our friend and neighbor who is also an ER doctor. “Yes, you need to get to an ER,” he said. “But if you can’t, find some way to keep the thumb warm so the blood will circulate.” So, like any normal thinking human being would, I stuck my thumb in my mouth, while we looked for a hospital sign. I imagine cars passing us got a kick out of that picture. Turns out, thanks to Google map, there were no hospitals within a hundred miles. But there was a Walmart. So we worked our way back to the camping department and bought some hand warmers. I wrapped one around the poor white thumb and put a sock over it then wrapped that in my pillow. Eventually, praise be to the Lord, the thumb took life again. By morning it was the color of healthy skin, except for the bruise and scab where the needle had einfarted and ausfarted.
Maybe my poor skin is just rebellious about having to be stretched so thin. Hmmmm.

RAILWAY

WORD OF THE DAY

February 27, 2009 railway

When we first moved to Farmington UT the rails lining the Western edge of Interstate 15 were pretty rusty. If there were trains on them, they were old and silent, looking like graffiti wrapped storage units waiting for the parade to start. Then something happened. I'm not sure what spurred it, or why, but the rectangular dinosaurs started to move. The rails cleared and yellow capped workers bent in little clusters along the eternal equal sign at the top of the mound on the side of the freeway. Then those old, beautiful, solid engines fired up and started to roll. Now, nearly every time I drive this ribbon of highway between the Great Salt Lake and the Wasatch Mountains, I'll see a train working its way toward Canada or Mexico or somewhere in between. The yellow headed workers in canvas overalls even built a second set of rails next to the old faithfuls. Our shiny new red, white, and blue commuter rail, Front Runner, uses that line. I can tell when we drive along and see the lights of Front Runner illuminating the western desert that David feels an emotion akin to proud parenthood because he was one who helped shepherd in the creation of that commuter train when he was mayor and a leader in the Wasatch Front Regional Council.
The sound of a train is beautiful to me. I think if a person spent a relatively happy childhood near a railway, the sound of a train would be beautiful. Comforting, sort of like the clock in our Family Room which chimes every 15 minutes; or the one in our entry hall whose swinging pendulum is the heartbeat of our house. When we first moved into this house I could not sleep well at night. Mom Connors had just died unexpectedly, and I recognized my kids were growing up, and my husband was mourning painfully, and though this new house was lovely I missed the familiarity of our old place. I could function in the day, but at night I tiptoed out of our room and wandered through the house, ending up sitting on the couch before the fireplace, weeping. One night, as if it were told to me in a holy whisper, I realized the grandfather clock in the entry hall was not running. We had neglected to raise the weight which created the tension which kept the pendulum swinging. I opened the glass door and pulled on the chain, feeling the therapeutic resistance of that weight. I tapped the pendulum and set it swinging. The steady clicking of the clock, echoing against the wooden floors of the entry hall, soothed my mind and calmed my heart. The moan of a train as it passes across my space in the desert does the same.
When I was small, seven years old to be exact, our family lived for one year on Jean Drive in Whitehall Township, PA. That was the year I fell on the ice and slammed my brain against my skull, giving me a doozy of a concussion, a face that turned completely black and blue, and welcoming the disjointed lifestyle of an ADD person to my private party. That was also the year I discovered the tadpoles along the railway behind our house. Down the hill and up again, behind a bank of trees. We watched them daily go from teeny little fishies, to fishies with feet, then fishies who lost their tails. Soon enough they jumped out of the rusty pool of water beside the railway. I also learned that, indeed, pennies could be smashed flat on the rail. We left 5 of them one afternoon, setting them at random spots on the wide thread of steel, walking across the wooden strips that smelled of tar in the summer sun, to the thread that ran steadily along on the other side. Then the voice of our mother pierced through the trees and we ran up the hill for dinner. When we came back the next day three pennies were missing, one was intact in the dirt along side the rail, and one lay oval shaped and wafer thin, bent across the rail like a pancake. I learned as a child to sleep comfortably through the train whistle right behind my bedroom window. To this day the sound of a train whistle is lovely to me.
When Grandpa Connors was still with us; when he was steady in his walk and speech, before Parkinsons altered him, we drove up to Corinne UT to visit the place where the Golden Spike was driven. That was a good day; our kids all with us, their grandpa holding their hands as they jumped across the rails. We sat on a wagon and had our picture taken. We pretended to be pioneers, so excited that we could get to California on a train rather than a horse and wagon. We stopped along the road on the way back to Farmington and picked some sage from the sandy swail at the side of the asphalt. It had rained, and the desert had that sweet earthy aroma of wet wild sage. It made the car smell like we were on the fishing streams of my youth. I did not want to exhale.
My mom tells me she figured out how to correctly spell my name from the exit sign at Corinne. So I suppose I was named after a town. The town where two railways met and connected a vast and powerful nation. A town with a golden spike driven into her heart. No wonder I like the sound of a train.

LENT & TURNTABLE

The family whose name I took when I married Dave has a rich Catholic heritage. Dave was an altar boy and attended Catholic schools until he was in high school. I was that strange Mormon girl who went to school with all those Catholics and Presbyterians in Pittsburgh. (A big shout out to my childhood friends who did not rustle my hair in an attempt to look for horn stubs. Thank you!) I believe with all my heart in Jesus Christ, the Savior of our world. I like him. And I love him. And though I love Christmas I understand the depth of value in what we celebrate at Eastertime. Christmas is when I celebrate what God the Father gave us in that tiny little baby. It is a childlike celebration. Easter is when I celebrate what that baby-grown-to-full-awareness gave us in the garden and on the cross. This requires of me a more mature understanding.

Yesterday was Ash Wednesday. We were sitting in the family room watching Lost last night (there is irony in the context of this post and the name of that show). Anyway, we were watching Lost and Annie commented during a commercial that her supervisor had ashes on her forehead today, and it took her a few minutes to realize it was Ash Wednesday. Libby and Dave and I were instantly hurled back to our youth when we would see people in all places with ashes on their foreheads, smudged in the shape of a cross. These were the faithful; the ones who attended Mass before school or work and bowed before the priest, who dipped his thumb into the ashes of the burnt palms from the past year's Palm Sunday, whispered a blessing and rubbed the symbol of their faith across their foreheads. I am always touched to see people willing to continue in their daily lives unashamed of their commitment and faith. Libby said our new Vice-President, Joe Biden, conducted a public meeting yesterday with ashes on his head. I wear a wedding ring for a similar purpose: Evidence of my commitment. Other things I wear for the same reason.


Ash Wednesday is also the beginning of Lent, the season of worship and sacrifice which lasts for 40 days and ends in the Holy Week, which culminates at Easter. I remember people giving up random things for Lent. Things like TV shows. Chocolate. Licorice. Pop. It was supposed to be something that hurt. I thought it might be a good idea to give up homework for Lent, but was informed that this was not a sacrifice. Lent follows the pattern of Jesus when he went into the wilderness and fasted for 40 days and 40 nights, battling with the temptations of Satan.


So, in reverence for our family heritage, and as a sign of my willingness to commit, I have made a couple Lenten promises to my God and myself. One of them is to write every day for 40 straight days. I usually write, but it is not always the kind of writing that takes my energy, creativity, and intelligence. So herewith is the first of my 40 days of Word of the Day writing. I used to be good at this; creative writing every day. Now I look at my computer file for Word of the Day 2009 and I can count the entries on my fingers.


Word Of The Day (WOTD) I get these nouns randomly off the Internet from a site called Random Word Generator. I use the word as a jumping off point for my writing. It is intended to exercise my writing muscles, but hopefully each piece also speaks a bit of who I am and what I believe.


February 26, 2009 turntable

Go back nearly 40 years. Go up the stairs, left at the landing, through our bedroom and into my brother's bedroom. Look back on the dresser or counter or whatever was back there in the corner, tucked into the wall connecting to our bedroom, and you'll find my brother's Hi Fi. It was beigy-cream colored with a gold thread running through the fabric in front of the speaker. The turntable was black. Hi Fi meant High Fidelity. It was an aural step up from the console in the living room, the one that held the big tube TV that was broken. The turntable in the console still worked though. My brothers introduced me to Bob Dylan and the Beatles on that Hi Fi. Before I understood the power of a lyric as it wove through a melody I thought Bob Dylan was so strange. I suppose I think, even still, that he is strange. But I think most people are somewhat strange, myself included. Bob could not sing! I mean, really, how in the world could this guy be so popular when he sang like that? That was before I understood what he had to say. He sounded so different from the music of my mother's turntable; Greig and Tchaikovsky and Van Cliburn, with a peppering of Hank Williams, Nat King Cole, Johnny Mathis and Mahalia Jackson. Their music insisted on pitch accuracy. Bob didn't care. I think part of his statement was to rebel against the pitch. Thinking back on it I suppose more parents were turned off by Bob's music not for what he said but for how he said it. Now that I find myself squarely situated in the heart of middle age I find his tunes moving. But I didn't then.

When my oldest brother John moved out he left the Hi Fi for George. One summer when George went somewhere for an extended period of time I took over his bedroom. Had my own private space for the first time. I must have been 11, maybe just over the brink of 12, but no older because after that we moved from Old Clairton Road to the apartment on East Bruceton Road. I owned one record: a 45 of Build Me Up Buttercup, which I had won in a game at Cheryl Shatting's Birthday Party. It is a sad picture to imagine a twelve year old girl standing over the turntable on her brother's Hi Fi playing Build Me Up Buttercup over and over, not because she loved the song, but because she was mesmerized by the turntable, the needle, the rings and ridges in the small disc going round and round. I remember setting the tiny yellow haired troll I had gotten in the gum ball machine at Rexall on the edge of my record. Poor troll smiled his plastic smile as he circled past my eyes and was slammed off the table by the needle arm. Must have been some sort of sadistic part of me eking out in the privacy of that back bedroom. Could have been, come to think of it, the numbing influence of a song like Build Me Up Buttercup on an adolescent mind.

One day I came upon my brothers' collection of LPs, and that was the moment my life changed and my feet were set irrevocably on the path that led to my here and now. I laid on my brother's bed-now-my-bed-if-only-for-the-summer and listened to John, Paul, George and Ringo go through their own musical journey of discovery. I swirled in the metal psychedelic spaces of Led Zeppelin, I climbed the Stairway to Heaven then slid back down when mom called us to dinner. Gordon Lightfoot. Cat Stevens. Jim Croce. I really don't remember all of them, and I'm not sure which tunes were my brothers', which were lent by friends, and which were mine, eventually bought after months of babysitting for 25 cents an hour. I do know that when we finally moved to East Bruceton and the Hi Fi became a stereo and was in Ann Marie's bedroom, she was kind enough to let me go in her room with my newly purchased Rocky Mountain High album. I spun the cellophane wrapping off the cover and squeezed the cardboard case to reveal the envelope, which contained the large, shiny black disc that would speak my heart over and over in the months and years to come. I laid the pristine LP on the turntable, clicked the knob to turn it on, lifted the arm to the edge, bent over and scanned the range of ridges, then set the needle. Through the air sprang the first magical ringing bass tones of John Denver's guitar. I can hear them now, decades later. I can feel the sunlight of a summer afternoon sifting through the yellow checkered curtains on her window. My breath becomes deeper and more intentional. My shoulders relax... "He was born in the summer of his twenty seventh year. Comin' home to a place he'd never been before...."

My son, the lover of pure aesthetic, has taken a liking to turntables. He has a few of them in his house, one situated right there in his living room when you walk in. He'll pour himself three inches of pure grape juice in a wine glass after dinner. He'll pour one for Ashley if she wants one, but it's OK if she wants to do something else instead. They are good with each other that way. He will sit in the living room and taste the music from his turntable in the openness of their beautiful living space. He likes the click, click, click of an LP. Likes it more than the clarity of a CD even. Likes knowing he is listening to the music from his father's basement just the way his father listened to it in his youth. Johnny told me he looked into having Sleepy Little Town put onto an LP once. It was cost prohibitive of course, but the very thought that he looked into it means more to me than he will ever know.

SET THE TIMER...

I have nothing profound to post today. Just thinking I should write something...anything...to prove I am still functioning. So in three minutes I will publish this post. Here goes, timer's set:

I'm loving these things lately:

Rides with my mom and sisters

Sleep overs with Sophie

Driving past the same house every other day with Annie

Valentines Day dinners with Dave

Being with the girls we call Young Women who will soon enough drop the Young from their titles

Talking to my kids who live far away, realizing I can talk with them

Teaching guitar with John

Spending full days in the recording studio with Michael Dowdle and Mark Stephenson, figuring out life between the chord progressions

Rediscovering how good my old Martin guitar feels in my arms

Snow melting on the driveway

Snow falling on the evergreens

Finally getting one line of a song just right

The way Carol King's Tapestry album can still get me semi-enthused about cleaning my house

The fact that I only occasionally listen to Carol King's Tapestry album anymore

This is by no means a full representation of what fills my days nor my heart. It is a ....

Oops...time's up.

and the word of the day is...CAP

January 29, 2009 cap

On Tuesday we loaded our mom into the van and took her on her daily outing. Sometimes we go to Bukoos or the 5 Hour Store. Sometimes we’ll go see the birds at the Bird Refuge in Farmington Bay. Sometimes its just a ride to a nearby canyon. Twice a month our outing includes a Heart and Soul gig. Mom and Lib will visit in the car and wait for me, 45 minutes or so, while I am singing to a group of people who cannot get out to enjoy live music. Janna, the angel behind Heart and Soul, calendars a number of musicians from the Salt Lake area to visit nursing homes and care centers, mental units and schools for the disabled. It's a good thing.
Tuesday I was at a Senior Assisted Living Center in the Fort Union Area. After years of visiting a different Senior Care center twice a month I can testify to the diversity of care facilities on the Wasatch Front. Some places are just lovely, with clean floors and fresh paint or wallpaper and a hair salon and library and employees of the month in nice wooden frames posted in the lobby. Some are more humble. Old renovated houses with a living room lined with a variety of plush recliners, like the furniture section of DI. I evaluate immediately the pleasure quotient in my singing experience when I enter a building and take a whiff. Of all the factors that would change the way I feel about a place for people to live, smell would top the list. Old and clean and friendly can work for me. So can new and clean and friendly. But old or new, if it doesn’t smell clean and it isn’t friendly, I have to pull out my “I Am a Good Christian” card and put it in front of my nose to get through the gig. I tell myself that these people probably did not pick this place, someone picked it for them, and they should be entitled to the same music everyone else enjoys. When they’ve left me in a room alone with 35 Alzheimers patients and not one staff person, I say to myself “There, but for the Grace of God, go I, and wouldn’t I enjoy hearing some sweet music even if I didn’t understand the lyric?”
Tuesday’s gig was at Canyon Creek Senior Care; new- clean- friendly. One of the top-of-the-list places where if I had to arrange for someone I love this might be it. They had a beautiful dining room with cloth napkins and menus on the tables, with a bank of large windows looking out over evergreens loaded with the fresh snow of Monday’s storm. I could smell dinner cooking in the kitchen and thought maybe I should stay the afternoon. There were around 20 people seated at various tables, all fairly astute and well groomed but painfully quiet. “Hello!” I said, in my loud assisted living voice, trying to stir up some energy in the room. They smiled, and one gentleman asked how I was doing. It took all the way through Old Singer Sewing Machine and How Great Thou Art to get to the place where their eyes met mine. Just before Pontiac Rocket, a short, slight fellow with a nicely shaped beard and a U of U Baseball cap came into the room. He sat facing me straight on, nodding with each phrase as if he were testifying. “Indeed, that is what we had in our grocery bag, too!” And, “Oh yes, I remember those days before radar guns.” He sat there, his white and red baseball cap bobbing forward and back as if we were in deep conversation, only I was doing the talking and he was doing the listening. Every audience needs a Mr U of U Baseball Cap; someone who confirms the best in us and encourages us to give more; someone who hears exactly what we mean to say and shows us he hears; a hoot and a cheer in silence, saying “yer doin’ good dear, keep a goin’!” I fell in love with this man in three and one half minutes of time. Funny how easy it is to love people who love us first. Funny how that goes.
After the songs were done and my guitar was snug in its soft gig bag; after I had shaken the hands of the fellow by the window and the lady in front of him, and the line of ladies over by the piano, I made my way to the U of U Ball Cap.
“You are baseball fan?” I asked.
“Don’t know the first thing about it,” he replied with a smile then a giggle. ”Just liked the cap!” He took my hand in his and held it for just the exact right amount of time. Like he was giving a blessing without oil.
As I walked out, leaning to the side to balance the gig bag slung over my shoulder, I formed the words of a silent prayer for the ball cap gentleman. That University of Utah baseball team would be awfully lucky to have him in their stands.

(Heart & Soul Website: http://www.heartsoul.org/)

ON THIS DAY

On this day I shuffled into our TV room as the light of morning tried to squeeze its way through the misty murky winter air; clicked on the television and watched Martin Luther King's vision from the mountaintop unfold on the steps of our nation's capitol. Like the dots on the canvas of an impressionist painter my brothers and sisters under the flag of freedom colored the grasses and the concrete of Washington; cheered and chanted and celebrated the swearing in of our new president, Barack Obama. History will tell how well his actions will be able to meet the power of his words, but on this day I join every American and non-American who harbors hope in the potential of our future under his leadership. I stood non-partisan alone in my TV room, in my pajamas, and held my hand against my heart as I sang the national anthem to no one but myself and my God.

President Obama's voice echoed against the granite walls of our national monuments..."We are a young nation, but it is time to put aside childish things." I pray we will have the courage to act responsibly, to see clearly and broadly, and to trust the source of goodness that inspired our Constitution and continues to oversee us today.

While there are notable things which set me apart from others; my gender, my religion, my values and commitments; my race and my social situation...there is more which unites me with every other person who entered the voting booth over two months ago. On this day I hold hands with people I do not know and may not agree with. On this day I am an American; and I pray for the success of our new president and those who serve with him.

I BIN TAGGED!

8 TV shows I love
(First of all, Love=people/Like=TV shows.)
In no particular order:
1. Lost
2. Without a Trace
3. What Not to Wear
4. Cold Case
5. 24
6. Whatever is on Disney Channel with a grandkid on my lap
7. Medium
8. The Mentalist


8 Favorite Restaurants
1. Market Street Grill
2. Libs Ribs
3. Royal Jade
4. Georges Rey( NYC)
5. Any kitchen in Tuscany Italy
6. Cinegrill
7. Roasted Pepper sandwich at Granatos Deli
8. Yet to be discovered

8 Things I did yesterday
1. Took down Santa collection from mantle
2. Washed sheets and towels from upstairs bedrooms
3. Rediscovered songs on my Taylor guitar at 2 am
4. Made tostadas with Katie and Elliott, Gram, Lib and Sherry...and Dave
5. Discovered the show 24 (yes, this is the first time I have ever seen this show, and we watched 4 hours of it in one sitting)
6. Organized and printed out YW class lists and calendar
7. prayed
8. Oh yeah...I had a root canal!

8 Things I look forward to
1. Answers to prayers
2. Sharing life with the Young Women in our ward
3. Actually getting into the studio to start a new album
4. Watching Ruby grow*
5. A gathering at the cottage in Michigan this summer
6. Libby selling a house
7. Annie getting her masters and her dream home
8. Sarah and fam and Kate completing their current professional obligations and moving closer to home.
(9) John getting into the studio to record his own songs

8 Things I like about this season
1. The Holidays
2. The snow
3. The people
4. The music
5. The gigs
6. The food
7. The gatherings

8 Things on my wish list
1. More time
2. Less body
3. Joy for my loved ones
4. More order
5. More faithful writing habits
6. Spiritual health
7. Peace


8 people I tag (Annie, who tagged me just to get me to write a new blog entry, tells me that this means you copy the 8 thing thingies and submit your own responses)
1. Sarah or Dave
2. John or Ash
3. Kate the non-Blogger
4. Libby
5. Bob Pegritz
6. Dianne Arbuckle
7. Becky or Adam
8. Joe-Schleppi

*Ruby Louise Connors, one month old now, is the latest in the line of Connors children via John and Ashley. She's a keeper!

WHAT'S A SDEW?

K, so I teach 6 year olds in church every Sunday. 6 of them. And they are fabulous and crazy! Especially heavy on the crazy side today. More like WILD!

The twins kept sticking out their tongues and touching them to each other's, and Luke kept sliding his chair to the back of the room and then secretly escaping out the door. Bekah sobbed for a full hour and fifteen minutes because, in her own words, "Nobody cares about me." Drey flipped his suit coat over his head and huddled with Luke in the back of the room, stopping occasionally to act "reverent" so he might get chosen to pick a leaf off the Autumn Tree full of song titles.

Mason leaned over to me while we were singing and I was trying to comfort Bekah and said "What's a sdew?" "A stew?" I responded, "like...to eat?" "No, a SDEW! What's a SDEW?" I sat there trying to figure out where in the world that question came from when I realized we were singing the song "I Am A Child of God", wherein you will find the lyric..."teach me all that I must do....to live with Him someday." I pulled him in with my one free arm, the other being used to stroke Bekah's shoulder, and whispered, "It's MUST DO, buddy." "Oh," he said.

So then we got to class where I was going to teach about the Last Supper and we were going to pretend. Bekah was so upset I decided we all needed to just have a talk for a minute. So Bekah explained her feelings to the whole class, and Madi apologized for socking her in the tummy and Sophie said she was sorry for pulling the "hairs" out of her fake mink stoll, even though she said it was only just a few teeny little ones. And then I started to talk about bread and how there's a lot of times in scriptures where there is bread. I talked about the Jews and the unleavened bread of their escape from Egypt, and I told how Jewish people believed in the Hebrew religion like we believe in the Mormon religion and Sophie, one of the twins, said..."Madi HATES church". Madi, meanwhile, is over in the corner sliding the window open and shut, and I said, "Tell me about that Madi" and she said; "Yup, I HATE church!" "What is it that you don't like?" I asked. "It's TOO LONG!" (Tell me about it, I thought, you try reigning in six year olds for two hours) What I said was, "You know what,? It IS too long!" "Yeah", chimed in Soph, "It lasts the WHOLE DAY!" "You know," I said, "You are right. Church IS long! It's probably the wrong church, huh?" Mason looked at me in disbelief, almost shaking his head to clear his ears. After a half a minute I said "Actually, guys, it's not wrong. It's the right place to be on Sunday. And sometimes we do the hard things because they are the right things."

By the end of our lesson we had draped our heads like apostles. I had pretended to be Jesus and had washed their beautiful little feet, which fit perfectly in one of my pie tins. We had sung a hymn, just like the apostles had done with Jesus in the upper room. Bekah had filled my Bennion Pottery pitcher with water from the drinking fountain and we had broken bread and sipped water at our own pretend Last Supper. She whispered to me, "Can we do it (sniff) again?" But the halls were full of people and moms and dads were waiting outside for us to finish, so instead Madi said a prayer and this is what she said:

Heavenly Father. Thank you for church. And thank you that we could pretend. And please bless Bekah 

to feel not sad. And thank you for her, and for Mason

 and Sophie

and Dreyden

and Luke

And mostly thank you for Jesus."

Now tell me, what better thing could a human being possibly do on a Sunday afternoon?

IN FLANDERS FIELDS

Today's word of the day was: poppy

Our boy-grown-to-a-man John leaned his forearms down on the cold granite of our kitchen island and looked up. “It surprised them that I knew it.” In a flash not to be measured by time, I imagined him ten years ago, and I felt that tug inside, in the space between my heart and my belly button, where memories cinch themselves to me. I was not there with him then. He had crossed the wooded hill where I could not follow; nineteen years old, his hair cropped short and refusing to be trained to the side; over across the ocean, up the craggy shoreline, into the foggy streets of England and Wales, where he wore holes through the soles of his shoes in the name of Jesus Christ. It was the eleventh day of the eleventh month. On his lapel he pinned a blood red poppy, made of crepe paper. When people realized he was an American missionary, they quizzed him about the poppy.
Remembrance Day. Poppy Day. Armistice Day. Veteran’s Day here in America. Times had changed. The old men of the war to end all wars had left the round tin hats of their combat youth up in the attics of the stacks of townhomes lining the streets of England. Youngsters paid no attention any more. Even older people hardly cared. And certainly not an American boy. So they tried to trip him up, tossing their spent fags on the ground, twisting their shoes over the smoking butts. They lifted their heads like horses nodding and said “wha’s that on your lapel there?” The conversation would end up leading Johnny to these words:

IN FLANDERS FIELDS the poppies blow
Between the crosses row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

Gram-of-the-poet’s-heart had paid him to memorize it when he was a boy. She paid all our kids to memorize great poems. “You must stand erect, look me in the eyes, recite the title, the author, and the complete poem. Say it like you mean it, and do not let the break in lines and the use of rhyme make it sing-songy. Say it like you mean it.” Those were the rules. Then she would give them five dollars. Every time thereafter they could earn a quarter for each recital. Gram the patriot, who bore her first child alone in her youth while her young husband fought in the second war-to-end-all-wars. She worked in Los Angeles with the other wives of soldiers, stopping regularly at the post office after work to see the listing of names of the dead. Every afternoon the ladies huddled together around the list, grateful on the days when no one recognized a name, frightened and mournful on the days they heard a gasp from the crowd. Then they cradled their sister-wives in their arms and let them sob. Gram says she no longer knew the man she had married when he came home. Casualties of war.
When Gram was a small girl, she says, she sat in her classroom in the little school in Blackfoot, Idaho on Veteran’s Day or Memorial Day, both of which honor veterans. She recalls the quivering voice of her teacher as she held a book of poetry against her chest and repeated the words. “In Flanders Fields the poppies grow…” Tears worked their way down the cheeks of the teacher she loved, dropping onto her chest as she read. There was no need for a book. She knew the poem by heart. Her husband had died in the First World War. Gram cannot hear the poem without feeling the little girl sorrow.
I feel the sorrow, too. I feel it and embrace it when I hear my boy speak, his shoulders back, the title and the author and the lilt in his voice, like he had left part of his own heart over in the streets of England and Wales. Today I will open the drawer of my jewelry box and retrieve the crepe paper poppy from the American Legion. I’ll pin it to my lapel. Though I have been spared, for no good reason, from the personal knowledge of war-loss, I know what it means.



Here's a link to the story of the writing of In Flanders Fields by Leiutenant Colonel John MaCrae: www.arlingtoncemetery.net/flanders.htm

Photobucket Album

A BAG FULL OF LIFETIME

Today's word, generated by the internet's Random Word Generator Plus, was: LIFETIME.

I had my carry-on swung over my shoulder, and the flight had not been too long, so when our plane pulled up to the last gate in the terminal furthest from Baggage Claim, I planted my vision straight ahead and commanded my feet to engage. In the nearly 5 years since they were briefly paralyzed with GBS I have mourned the death of the child in me; the one who used to run up the street, take stairs one foot at a time, and kick her way through amber layers of crispy-downy autumn leaves. But the other day at the airport, for the first time in this many years, I actually felt my legs sort of move when my brain told them to move. It was so compelling I pushed harder and harder, never risking both feet being off the ground at once like when I used to run, but still! So when I arrived at the moving sidewalk I kept up the pace, stepping onto the fluid metal ribbon of floor with history behind me, knowing that it would not respond to my weight in any negative way; knowing that without breaking a sweat I would achieve my human objective with superhuman timing. Is it a comment on my simple life that such a thing gives me a rush? I just love those moving sidewalks. I feel light and able. I become conscious of the air against my cheeks, of the slight rise in energy exchange as I pass the people on solid ground. I whisper to my brain that this is heaven and in just 19...18…17…16 seconds we are going to hit the earth. I remember thinking once that this was going a bit too far, analyzing the moving sidewalk, and I reprimanded myself for making everything too symbolic. Take things at face value, I’d tell myself, and try to focus on what gate we were aiming for, or where all the kids were, or what time the flight was leaving. But this self talk always backfires on me and I am caught mid-thought when the sidewalk stops moving and I hit solid ground, and I cannot…CANNOT…not think about being born. “That was Heaven” I say as I lift my heavy legs and double my effort to cover the same ground with twice the work… “And this is birth!” Inevitably I imagine myself jumping from a swift moving cloud into my lump of flesh. My angel hands me a satchel of lifetime and reminds me to spend it well. Dipping my hand into the bag, I pull out an hour-sized chunk and rub it against my gown. I glance down and notice the shine. It’s a good one, with something magical coming up. Spreading my fingers out I hold the hour in my palm and watch it fizz away, leaving just a slight trace of purple smoke and the faint scent of baby sweat. The satchel, though lighter now, still swings from my side. I hardly ever notice it any more. I only ever think about it on the moving sidewalk, or when Anna Bella giggles and I know that the next time I see her her giggle will have changed. I look for everyone else’s satchels and they are invisible. Most people don’t even know they have them. But I am reminded of my handful of lifetime every time I go to the airport. It’s good I fly now and then.

PET TRICKS

October 22, 2008 Today's Word of the Day is: pet tricks

Back when my mother was my sister and my husband was my brother, before dog spirits got dog bodies, I think I struck up a conversation with Sally. Sal, who would be our lethargic but cute Basset Hound when my other sisters and brother became my kids. If I don’t force the memory too hard I can find it, and I think it came out something like this:

Me: So you’re going to be a Basset Hound?
Sal: Guess so. How bout you?
Me: I’m going to be a girl and I’m going to be beautiful.
Sal: Well good luck with that.
Me: Hey, you wanna be my dog? I can fill out one of those silver request cards and see if you can get your goods when I get mine. I’ll be sure to take care and feed you and bathe you and play with you and you can do cool dog tricks. Wanna?

So I guess I must have submitted the request because sure enough Sally appeared under our Christmas tree one December morning via my sister, Libby and a pet store somewhere in Salt Lake City. Cute she was. Darling, even. All cleaned up with those sad brown eyes and those soft floppy ears. She curled up in Kate’s arms and was content. Then Kate went to school, and so did the other kids. Sal did not know how to be an indoor dog. And I did not know how to be an outdoor girl. And I did not know how to make her into an indoor dog. So I researched dogs, and dog training, and I found out that the Basset Hound is historically one of the hardest dogs to train, even if they have not spent the first year of their life in a kennel. So Sal and I had another conversation, after the kids left for school:

Me: Sorry about losing my temper.
Sal: Sorry about the puddle. And the mess. Can’t help myself.
Me: Yeah, I know. But you know what this means don’t you?
Sal: Uh. No.
Me: Well, it means you are an outside dog. We’ll build you the world’s largest and most expensive running grounds, with a nice iron fence around a big grassy space. And we’ll build a nice big dog house that has a door that leads right to the garage, which we will heat in the winter. But…well, I’m not sure how to put this…you sort of leave a trail of slime wherever you go, so about coming in the house…well, we’ll have to do our pet tricks outside. Hope you’re ok with that.
Sal: Whatever.

So for 13 years we watched Sal through the kitchen window, weaving her way through the yard, making tunnels with her low lying belly in the winter, curling into herself under the Hornbeam tree by the back gate in the summer. Gram fed her Cheez-Its every day, throwing them through the fence to her. Dave faithfully gave her ½ can of puppy chow when she got old, because that’s what the vet said to do. We scratched under her chin when we had enough time to go back in the house and scrub up. Or shower. When the back door was left open and she got in the house we played catch me if you can until she found the light and headed back outside. It took towels and warm soapy water to clean up the slobber mess. She would swing her head back and forth, her ears flapping like paddle balls, her jowls scraping the floor and her lips like a spigot leaving a trail of slimy drool. Good old Sal. Sally the Slobber Dog. Never, in all those 13 years, did she ever even once attempt to do a dog trick. Never even turned her head to see the stick that went flying. I’m not sure if it was real or if she was just playing dumb. “Sit” might as well be “stand on your hind legs and twirl” or “Just lay there Sal”. I think “Just lay there Sal” was the only command she ever followed. No pet tricks. Then again, I didn’t hold up my end of the bargain so well either. In spite of what appeared to be less than adequate care, Sal lived a good long life. Doc White said he had never seen a Basset Hound live as long. It was a mournful day when Sally went the way of all the earth.

Someday I’ll have another conversation with Sal.

Sal: Well, hey. So you’re back, too?
Me: Yeah.
Sal: How is everybody?
Me: Good. Maybe a little sad, but they’re all good. Hey, you look great! How do you feel?
Sal: Sheesh, so much better! Hey look what I can do.

At that moment Sally the Slobber Dog stands on her two very happy and healthy hind legs, reaches her paws up into Heaven’s Heaven, lifts one leg to the side and twirls just like a ballerina.

Me: Wow Sal! A pet trick! Who knew.

That’s when Sal lowers her paws to the ground, turns her hind quarters in toward her snout, lays her fluid sparkling head on the ground with her cheeks spreading out like a wedding dress and winks at me.

Sal: Yeah. Who knew.

COUNTING BLESSINGS

8 - number of eggs in the batch of chocolate chip cookies I made last night

0 - number of cookies that are left

2 - wedding receptions we attended Friday night

24 - relatives who came to stay with Gram and Libby and us for one of the weddings

37 - number of Alaskans squished into our entry hall and living room for song sharing

8 - non-Alaskans in the same rooms (who knew both verses of the Idaho State song)

3 - am. the time we sang our last song

7 - am. the time the littlest kids woke up the next morning

25 - approximate number of rounds of speed scrabble played at the kitchen table

2 - number of rounds of speed scrabble that I won

1,867 - number of times we laughed in the last 4 days

19 - approximate number of hours we have slept the last 5 days

1 - fabulous family!

Happy Ever After, Rebecca and Rory. Thanks for facilitating a grand gathering and some great memories!