NOTE

March 16, 2009 note
The other day, when I sifted through a pile of junk on my desk, I found an old note to Sarah from Jenny. They were probably in Jr High when the note passed under the desk from one hand to the other. There are little stick figures and hearts drawn around the perimeter of the words. I let my head drift for just a moment to what a note between the two of them might say if it were written today. First of all, it would need a stamp, and the post office would reject it because it was not rectangular nor was it flat. It was instead folded into itself in the shape of a triangle. Last week I taught a couple girls how to fold paper like that, then hold it with one point on the table and another under the fingertip. I showed them, rather unsuccessfully, how to flick the middle finger on the other hand and send the "football" flying. These are the things I learned in Detention when I was a kid. Jenny's note to Sarah would still sound like Jenny, so kind and positive and flattering. She'd probably write something like; "Hey there Mama Doctor! How cute did you look today in your pony tail and white coat?" She'd use her chunky curly handwriting in the salutation, but by the end when she is running out of time because the baby is screaming to be fed so she will resort to cursive. I have no doubt that if Jenny and Sarah meet up again there will still be the same sweetness between them.
When I served in the Davis County Jail notes were not called notes. They were known as "kites" and they were illegal. Inmates could get time added for passing kites, but they did anyway. Sometimes I just looked away when I saw one being passed while I stood in the front of the room, flipping through the pages of a book. Every Wednesday night and Sunday morning for three years I walked through the series of thick metal doors into that sterile facility so I could talk about Jesus to the women inmates. It was such a great gig! It was so great partly because every Wed night and Sunday morning I also got to walk back out those doors into the fresh Farmington air and drive home. I understood that there, but for the grace of God, went I and every one of us, and I loved those ladies. In the three years I served there I saw ladies come in and go out of that facility multiple times. "Welcome to Relief Society, Sister. My name is Cori...oh, hey there Tanya, good to see you again." At 6:45 a Sherriff's deputy would tap on the window at the guard station in the Charlie/Delta/Echo pod and ask if anyone wanted to go to Relief Society. The women would line up in their bright orange "outfits", some of them pushing in front of others with their shoulders, their eyes avoiding direct contact. Someone would curse and a guard would grunt and the cluster that had formed would shift back into a line. Seventeen women were allowed to attend at once, since we met in the small Jail Library. Some of them came only because we met near the men's pod. Inevitably by 7:00 the small window at Alpha/Bravo was steamed over with testosterone and whiskers, the males of the species preening and gawking through the thick tempered glass. Sometimes our new arrivals would come in shaking from withdrawal. The more seasoned inmates would have their blue paper books of scripture with them. It was a random recipe of people gathered there, and I learned to love all of them. I know of one, out of all those women who passed through the door to the library, who successfully pulled her life out of the shackles around her legs and bound herself to goodness. Not the best record. She makes my heart swell when I see her, or get a funny email message from her. If we were in Jr High I would pass her a note. It would be written in pink ink and it would say this:
"Dear Jan- I heart you! "

COMPOSER

March 15, 2009 composer

The Bishop's counselor sat back in the settee and thought a minute. "Really? I guess I can go ask him if you want. I've just never done that before."
"Well," I said, " I just don't want to outright say no, and I have never said no to a calling before, but I just think he didn't have all the information when he thought of this one."
The conversation had started on a Sunday afternoon, when Dave Snow knocked on the door and said he needed to talk to me. We Mormons know what that means, when our neighbors show up on a Sunday afternoon in their suits and ties and say they wonder if we can chat for a minute. It means we are about to be invited to lay ourselves on the assembly line of a well organized church. I actually quite love that our church has a lay ministry, and that all of us take turns participating in what we know as "callings". Our bishop and his counselors ponder and pray over who should serve where when, and I generally trust their inspiration. But when Dave Snow told me the Bishop wanted to call me to be Ward Choir Director I told him he had to be crazy. It's a good thing Dave Snow knows me as well as he does, or he might have been offended.
"Don't you think a choir director aught to be able to read music?" I asked.
"Well, Ummm, I don't know. Maybe? But you do read music.", Dave said.
"Nope."
"But you are a composer. You write music." He said this as his left eyebrow scrunched up toward his hairline, shifting in his seat as he talked.
"Yes, I write songs, but not on paper. You don't have to read to talk do you?"
He shifted his book in his lap and thought for a minute. I'm sure he had never pondered this question before, and he probably didn't particularly care to ponder it that Sunday afternoon. All he wanted to do was get his callings made and get home to the dinner Margene had prepared. There was an awkward moment of silence. I waited for him to say something like "never mind", but he didn't. He just sat there. So I spoke up.
"Maybe you could go give this information the Bishop and ask him to pray again."
I was sure he would see the light and call someone who had at least stuck with more than three piano lessons when they were 12. Someone who could tell if the altos were coming in at the right time. Someone who could tell the altos what their part should even sound like. Someone who was ...not me!
So Dave did that. He went back to Bishop Simmons and told him the truth. I was sure the Lord would back me up on this.
The next week Dave came back and tapped on the door. "I told him what you said."
"Oh, good," I replied, grateful to have reasonable people as my neighbors and leaders. "Did he pray again?"
"He did."
"OK, so now what would you like me to do?" I'm thinking I might teach the five-year-olds on Sunday mornings in Primary. I'm thinking I could be on the Compassionate Service committee because I like to make chicken soup and take it to people. I'm ready to hear what my new calling might be.
"We think you should still be choir director."
So I became our Ward Choir Director for two very long and troubling years. Every rehearsal I stood before the choir and bawled. "Sheesh, I am so sorry you guys." There were people in that choir who could read music with their eyes closed. They tried very hard to be diplomatic in telling me how to do what I couldn't do. A number of very dear friends sang in that choir out of pity-love for me. Reed Gardner, and my sister Libby; they came to every rehearsal not because they loved choir singing but because they knew I needed the emotional support. I am still touched by that.
Eventually Dave Snow came to my door again and offered another calling and things set themselves right in the world again. Nowadays I am most happy to sit among the small group of sopranos in our Ward Choir and follow the fabulous imaginary baton of Dave Thomas. Now there's a guy who can read music! And he's a composer to boot.

FLOUR

March 14, 2009 flour
On good, good days there is flour on my counter top. Flour and some sprinkles of sugar and the aroma of gingerbread. Flour with little hand prints angled like angel wings, the swirl of deep green granite underneath: Joy taking flight. There will be one big apron and two…or if I am REALLY lucky: four… little aprons hanging from the hook on the back of the pantry door when we are done. The little dancing ginger fellows we frost and anoint with raisins taste so yummy, but the most delicious of all life’s delicacies is the moment with my little ones. One generation down from the last batch I made.
My great- grandmother, a number of greats ago, was named Rebecca Rhodes. “Sister Rhodes” to the Brethren who had come to visit that night in their home near the water of the Mississippi. A hard, cold Nauvoo winter had left her cupboards nearly bare. No more bare than her neighbors, though. So when she heard that the children down the road were crying with hunger she threw her cloak around her shoulders and excused herself while the Priesthood huddled with her husband, discussing matters of survival in a hostile environment. She lowered her head as she approached the door, preparing for the wind that hurled itself against the house. Joseph stood and walked to her, leaving his conversation mid sentence. “Sister Rebecca, what do you carry under your coat tonight?” She kept her eyes fixed on the floor, her hands crossed around her belly, and paused just a moment. He had asked her a simple question, but the suddenness of it and the secrecy of her act caused the emotions in her to bump against each other and she needed a moment to think.
“Just a bit of flour, Brother Joseph.”
She unfolded her woolen wrap to reveal the last of their measure of grain. Her eyes scanned the floor, rose to the cluster of men gathered near the fire, then met straight-on the eyes of her prophet. He smiled when he saw it, and her cheeks flushed with heat. He opened the door for her and watched her push her way through the deep winter to the neighbor’s place. When she returned, Joseph Smith asked if he might pronounce a blessing on Sister Rhodes. Family records give the gist of that blessing as this; that the Lord was aware of the goodness and selflessness of Sister Rebecca Rhodes, and He cherished her as His daughter. It was promised that as long as Rebecca, and her posterity, remained faithful to the Gospel of Jesus Christ, they would not want for the necessities of the earth.
That same blessing was pronounced again to my mother’s generation when Uncle Fred was called on his mission to the Eastern United States in the first half of the last century. From what I can tell this is truth. I feel it in my own life. Not that the Lord thinks any more of me or my family than he does any other of His children. It’s just this little promise helps my faith reign over fear. I feel the goodness of Rebecca Rhodes coursing through my veins, like I feel similar traits of other ancestors alive in me and my family: the dedication of Henry Strong Parrish; the poetry of Elizabeth Mae Wood; the entrepreneurial spirit of George Parrish.
I lay the side of my hand in a scoop shape against the cold granite of my counter top. I sweep it across the layer of flour left over from our cookie making afternoon. I lift a paper bag to the edge and drop the dry dregs of our festivities into the garbage and realize I am tossing away more than she gave; a handful of flour on a winter night, so small, yet large enough to fill the bellies of her children, and her grandchildren and grandchildren’s grandchildren. I am the product of many good decisions made through the years by people whose names I share. I embrace the gospel, as they did, not because I want the prizes some people attribute to “being good”, but because it feels right to me; it makes me feel like I am being true to the me of many eons ago. I am the grand daughter of Rebecca Rhodes. How could I live otherwise?

POUND

March 13, 2009 pound
A pound of flesh. An ounce of wisdom. A pinch of salt. A ton of stuff. We sift and chip and weigh and measure. We lay our portion of life on the scale and ask the fates to put weights on the other side to tell us what its worth. Like a playground see-saw we watch the arrow bounce from one side to the other as the scale finds its balance. This earthly existence, with its weights and measures, is likely new to our very old souls. Relatively new, at least. Measuring usually involves comparisons, and that for sure is a thing of this realm. Not that this is evil. I know from the Word that we are to have darkness so we can know the light, and we have sorrow so we can appreciate joy. Contrast came with the separation of darkness and light on Day 2, after the gathering of Matter Unorganized. Way back When, before there was Adam and then Eve, before there was anyone with a body, we dreamt of today. I don’t remember of course. No one does, and we’re not supposed to. But I think a few things were across the board for all of us before we were born. We knew nothing about “time”, we had great hope in our potential when we did get bodies, and we likely did not even look at ourselves up there in our heaven space. It wasn’t until Eve looked into a glassy pond on the Western edge of Eden that she discovered she was delightful to look upon. People think it was the apple that was her downfall. No, it was that pond. Her reflection made her aware of herself (OK, I know this is random thinking, just go with it). She made note of which flower looked prettiest tucked behind her ear. It was the beginning of the fall. I have a theory about reflections. I think mirrors are actually tools of the devil (stay with me). Let’s say I am walking down the sidewalk, perfectly happy with my existence, when I happen to turn my head and see my reflection in a store window. “Eee Gad!” I say to myself, “Who is THAT?!” And I suddenly stop thinking about how I am planning to go to Ethiopia and build a school and start thinking about how pretty or not pretty I may look in the glass. When darkness is on the other side of glass, I see myself and what surrounds me in my little space. But if there is light on the other side of glass, say in a window, then what I see is the world beyond. To take the analogy further, if there is silver on the other side of glass, as in a mirror (silver representing worldliness) then we more clearly and completely see only ourselves. Light keeps all vision clear and pure. Darkness, with its shadows and reflections, makes us compare and measure. I vote for light. I feel so much prettier with light. And pounds don’t even matter.

MOD

March 12, 2009 mod
I'm not sure when the word mod found its way into the dictionary. Modernizing has been going on since Eve first discovered fire and decided to cook the squash she pulled from the garden. To me though, mod was the hip word of the early 1970's. Maybe a little before then, it's all sort of a blur, not for reasons the 1960's and 70's were a blur for most young Americans, however. I was a clean and sober Christian girl. But I did know who Peter Maxx was, the artist who created colorful psychedelic posters that the coolest kids had taped to the inside of their lockers. And I had a midi-coat and a pair of red paisley fabric covered platform shoes that hid under the cuffs of my bell bottom pants. Our dad, in a moment of uncommon fatherly normalcy, took us to one of the big Pittsburgh Department stores like Hornes or Kaufmanns or Gimbles and not only bought us those beige midi-trench coats, he also got me a pair of black and white saddle shoes, just like the cheerleaders wore. Man, I loved those shoes, too. If I wanted to look cute I put my hair in a pony tail and wore my saddle shoes with a mini skirt. But if I was feeling mod, it was hip-hugger bell bottoms with my platform shoes, my midi-coat floating around my calves when I walked; my hair in a pair of braids hanging gently in front of my shoulders and my brother's flat brimmed boy scout hat pressing my bangs against my forehead. By 8th grade I had reached the height of my mod-ness. I think the last time I felt really hip was in the halls of Pleasant Hills Middle School, sitting on the floor near the choir room with Betsy Gerson, our backs leaning against the wall and our knees holding the weight of our guitars as we practiced Dust in the Wind and every Gordon Lightfoot song in Betsy's songbook. It's been downhill from there for me, in terms of coolness. But hey, I had my moment.
During that time we knew if we were hip by watching Mod Squad on TV. They were like the Peter, Paul and Mary of crime solving. One white guy, one black guy with a super afro and big dark sunglasses, and that laid back chick with long blonde hair that flowed in slow motion when she ran across the dark asphalt between the two guys. I secretly thought I was particularly blessed because my hair was naturally blonde and straight like that, though in the Pennsylvania humidity it got a bit frizzy and did not flow quite like that girl-whose-name-I-do-not-remember did. But I could pretend on Tuesday nights that I looked just like her, or at least I would when I got older. The hippest of the cool hip cats was Lincoln, though. The black dude. He was totally mod.



Here’s a link to the opening scene of the Mod Squad show. Coolness relived! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e0-XrZoHj2k

PHONE

March 11, 2009 phone

You will know I am old one when I tell you that the phone of my childhood had a round dialer with 10 little holes around the perimeter of the dial. There was a number, along with some letters, assigned to each. You’d stick your finger into one of the holes and roll it toward the silver half moon next to number “1…abc”. It took a bit of time to dial a number, especially a long distance one, and any numbers that had excessive “0’s” took extra long. This is how we were taught patience in our generation. Some of us learned. Some didn’t. The sound of the phone ringing was the clanking of a metal hammer against a real metal bell somewhere buried inside the hard plastic casing. Phone cords hung like shriveled up Slinkies down the wall in the kitchen, stretched and twirled into themselves, so when you answered the phone and had to take it over to Mom who was at the stove, it yanked you back to the wall until you uncurled it with your fingers. We were taught phone etiquette as kids; things like: always answer pleasantly, but when the person on the other end asks for your parents reply with “Whom, may I ask, is calling?” And if someone asks for you, then you were to reply “This is she.” It was also against the law to call anyone before 10 o’clock on a Saturday morning., Even if you knew Sherry Payne was up and watching the Monkees on TV, it was illegal to call the Payne’s house before 10, or anyone else’s house. Certain hours of the day are sacred in their privacy.
Phone numbers sometimes had letters to help you remember them. You’d have to look at the dial and figure out what letter coordinated with what number, so that was always a pain. But you did tend to remember the numbers. There is a musicality to telephone numbers. They sort of sing when you say them, probably because of the rhythm of the pattern. I can still hear in my head the commercial from my early childhood…Eight Oh Oh… three two five….three five three five. Just for fun I just now dialed that number and lo and behold, it is still the number for Sheraton Hotels! I can’t believe it!!! I’ll bet Libby knew this, since she was over Sheraton's Reservations Training for seventeen international offices before she decided corporate life was going to eat away her heartstrings. So she quit and came home to us! Yay for Libby!
I’ll bet you Libby and George and AM can tell you the phone number of our childhood. Quick, do you remember your own childhood phone number? 412-655-4547. Before that I think it was 653-1864. I’m not sure why I remember that number, but I know it is a Pleasant Hills prefix. Now that is diving back. My kids could sing you their childhood phone number…ready kids…do you hear the music? Four five one two eight three one…repeated four times, following the song “I know my number, my te-lephone number….”
It seems the fate of the land line is currently in jeopardy. We live our lives in cells these days. Last night I was at John and Ashley’s and John mentioned that he saw on Facebook that it was Tom Shults’ Birthday. I picked up their phone and dialed Tom’s number to wish him a happy one. Some robotic voice on the phone told me that I could not dial long distance on this telephone without an access code. What the???? “We don’t have long distance on our land lines, Mom,” John said. We use our cells for those. See what I mean? Pretty soon every aspect of our lives will be so portable we will no longer need homes. We can pitch one of those tents outside of Sacramento and live with the homeless without skipping a beat. I can hear it now, out there in the community of a large tent city. No electricity, port-a-potties, campfires, and cell phones ringing through the wild night air.

PROGRAM

March 10, 2009 program

We Mormons are a people of order. When Latter-day Saints in the British Isles were called by their prophet to gather in western America, they sold their belongings in order to purchase passage aboard tall ships. Lots and lots of them. Nearly 95,000, as a matter of fact. When a British newspaper set out to expose the "evilness" of Mormons they sent Charles Dickens to observe a group of them as they set up aboard their sailing ship. Dickens slipped through the crowds on the dock at Liverpool and made note of what he saw. Instead of decadence and chaos he saw a people who were clean and friendly and had established order even before they set sail. He wrote that they were, in truth, “…the very pick and the flower of England.” Yes, order is us. It comes to reason then, that we Mormons like programs. We like to create them, we like to follow them, we even perform them once a year with Primary kids in Sacrament meeting.
I knew for sure I would never be called to be Young Women’s President because I am not fully converted to the Personal Progress Program. Strike me dead perhaps, but I am one of those people who does not do particularly well when someone tells me I need to set a goal, in details defined on paper. I have goal issues. The second I say I am on a diet I am SO eating everything in sight! If my angels tell me it would be a good idea to do something, I keep it to myself and charge ahead. But when someone else is keeping track, some little demon on my left shoulder takes over and I run the other way. I am not proud of this. But I also don’t believe I am a bad person because of it. So I thought that, because I am not a big believer in requesting that all Young Women define their success by the award they get and a little gold pendant around their necks, I would not have to worry about getting called to lead the YW organization.

Wrong.

I do, I might add, have a Young Womanhood Medallion that I earned, by my own choice. But I am still not completely sure about the PPP (personal progress program) and how it fits for every girl. Nonetheless, I am LOVING these girls! Loving to the point of heart swells. Loving so much that I ache for Lisa Harris, the former YW Pres who left some gigantic shoes in the YW room for me. I ache because I know what she felt, and still feels, for these gems of wonderfulness. They make me laugh, they make me weep, they tug at my heart and keep me up at night worrying. I hear their voices and see their faces at all hours and in all places. If the PP program works for them, I’ll cheer them on! If not, I’ll cheer anyway.

FIND

March 9, 2009 find

I am a finder. Since I was small I have been known as the family shoe finder. Sunday morning, late for church, can’t find someone’s shoes…they called my name. It’s not like the shoes speak to me. I do not possess super psychic powers, though I did manage to make my teenage kids believe I did, which was quite the coup! I suppose I am able to think like a shoe. I simply say to myself, “If I were a shoe where would I be at this moment?” And more often than not the shoe and I agree in our thought processes.
I am also a finder of other things. There are legends in our family, at least among Ann Marie, Libby and me, that involve finding money in unexpected places. I am always finding coins in parking lots. I sense which coin returns have change in them. Heck, once I got almost two dollars in coins out of a single phone in Cheyenne. One wicked cold winter day we were walking to Pleasant Hills Elementary school and I glanced down at a mound of cinder pitted snow-ice and saw the corner of an envelope. The rest of it was imbedded in the ice, but when I tugged at it, it pulled loose to reveal a rectangular Seasons Greetings! I opened it up and there was George Washington smirking up at me. His face was framed with an ornate oval opening in a bank sleeve. There were two dollars in that frozen envelope, no name and no one to claim them, so we went to DiStefano’s Drug store after school. Another afternoon, on a windy summer day, we were playing up by the Presbyterian Church when I noticed a piece of paper fluttering in the breeze. I chased it down the hillside and in the bushes we found something like seven dollars strewn here and there in the weeds. I don’t know why I have this gift. I am not complaining! Unfortunately it seems to have lain dormant lately.
I find other things, too. Great finds! I have a garage and basement and closets full of finds! So many, in fact, that when I remember I have something cool I can’t seem to find it! Sometimes I’ll get a call from an acquaintance who has heard about my stache of finds. Then I find myself searching for that Indian head dress I know I bought at a Garage Sale. In the process of searching for it I find stuff all over again. It’s like a fabulous treasure hunt right in my very own basement! Sometimes, when I am in a grumpy and much-too-adult mood I get a little irritated by the multitude of finds in our house. I swear I am going to get rid of them next Saturday. I wake up and have a talk with myself about how we are going to sort through that stuff in the garage and make at least one trip to DI before the sun sets. But then Libby calls and tells me she is taking Mom for a ride to Bukoos or the 5 Hour Store and…oh…ummmm….well, I was going to clean the garage, but…maybe I’ll go with you. (You never know what you might find!)

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.