WOTD 7 - IDEA

The two sisters who straddle me in age, Ann Marie (18 months older) and Libby (15 months younger) used to play this game with me. On hot summer days down at the Jefferson Swim Club, we jumped feet first into the corner of the pool between the deep end and the shallow end; sank to the bottom and bent our knees as the ends of our long hair floated to the surface. Kneeling there on the floor of the pool, our arms flapping to keep us down at the bottom, we faced each other, eyes wide open, and played Guess What I’m Saying. We took turns talking, staring intently at each other, the backs of our tongues blocking the inside of our noses, holding air in our lungs until it was our turn to say something. The music of our voices rose from our throats, danced toward the light above us in families of bubbles, echoing in dolphin-like mysterious melodies. We tried to piece the muffled sounds to the movement of each other’s lips, guessing the words, taking a stab at full sentences. We took turns speaking underwater, then pushed off from the cement floor, our noses pointed heavenward, shooting through the surface like human rockets, our nostrils sucking in the scent of sunshine and chlorine.

"Was it Mary had a little lamb or my wee hat with a lamp?" We giggled and nodded then went back down. In my aging body, when I have a particularly bad head cold, or when I've washed my hair and the water makes its way into my ears, I am taken back to those aquatic conversations. I used to make up lots of games like that. I still can.

Every family has its invisible label maker, slapping titles on our foreheads. Most families have a social director -- that person who tends to arrange family gatherings and facilitate travel plans (that would be you, Libby). They have cookers, and cleaners, and the smart ones and the athletic ones, the mathematicians and the poets and musicians. If you asked each member of my own family what roles we all played you’d probably get a similar collection of labels from each of us.

Early on I took it upon myself to be the idea person. Not just in my family, but pretty much in any setting. I'm not talking about the really life changing, monumental scientific ideas people like my genius brother come up with. I'm talking something more like a gift for making the unnecessary look enticingly colorful if not fun. Truth is, my sisters have the same gift. I'm just not so good at anything else so I kept that label on the top of my forehead.

Ideas are not hard for me. They sort of bubble out like our underwater conversations. I don't know why. I think I have one of those magnets inside my head; the sort they glue on the end of that red pen hooked to a black string attached to that odd fellow's face with metal shavings you could move around, changing hair styles or making beards and mustaches.  My mental magnet grabs onto miscellaneous fragments of general inconsequence, calling unruly orphaned children of possibility to gather and hold hands in my head. They do their little leprechaun-like jig in my brain and out pops an idea. Or two. Or five.

Executing the idea is as fun as the coming up with it, depending on your access to the correct raw materials. Sadly, however, the end result is not always so dandy. But the process sure is fun, if not slightly (or abundantly) exhausting.

I have pondered for many years how this gift for ideas could be marketed. Don't you think it aught to be worth something? I thought once that I should contact Utah Dept of Transportation and offer my services. They have real signage problems. Signs placed in the wrong places. Locations ambiguously labeled. "You know", I think, "if they would just paint a little arrow on that piece of cement right there people would actually get what you want them to do." I think like an ordinary person, with average intelligence. That, coupled with an excess of creative Pop Rocks in the brain, makes me the consultant they should hire, don't you think? I mean who is the voice for common sense these days? I am surprised at how little creative use of plain old common sense one can find these days.

Our mom taught us that there was usually a way to solve a problem if you used your brain right. Most people forget to move outside the box, so to speak. When Lib and I took art lessons at Carnegie Museum on Saturday mornings I always started too big and my paintings went off the page. They were not very tidy. Not very well executed paintings. But I made it on the honor roll enough times to earn a recommendation the Carnegie Mellon University School of Art. The whole reason why, and I know this with certainty, is that Mr. Fitzpatrick was intrigued by the unique choices I made in the depiction of my subject matter. I knew what I couldn’t do and I stayed away from that. But I could creatively use what I could do in all sorts of unique ways. If the whole class was painting a meal at the dinner table, mine was painted with the focal point being the convoluted reflection of my face in the back of a soup spoon. It wasn’t the best art. But it was a pretty good idea. I thought to myself, when they had me stand at the recognition ceremonies, “Gee, I’d like to see what a real artist could do with my ideas.”

The way Mom taught us to think outside the box, or off the page, was not with any sit down lessons. She taught us with the medium sized brown leather purse she kept in the trunk of the car. She called it the Fishin’ Pack. Whenever a problem presented itself, and we were away from home, the solution always seemed to lie in the Fishin’ Pack. To the little girl in me the words “Go get the Fishin’ Pack” were as comforting as “Go get the consecrated oil” in a time of crisis. We had confidence that somewhere in there was something that would make a trouble less troublesome. The purse was crammed to the gills with an amazing assortment of items, all tidily contained in little packages or pill bottles or zipped into miniature purses. A pair of needle nose pliers along with a pair of half jaw toe clippers. Strike Anywhere matches in a pill bottle. Band Aids, and aspirin, and Chooz antacid gum. Scissors. Money. Knives. Tape. A comb. Nail file. Paper. Salt and Pepper. A magnet. Safety pins. Dental floss. A candle. A paintbrush. I can go on and on. Whenever something happened for which we needed a physical solution, we knew the answer lay somewhere in the trunk in Mom’s trusty Fishin’ Pack. It was more than what they now sell as First Aid kits. It had all that…but it had more. And it all didn’t exactly belong together; like there was no real logic in the selection of items stored in the bag. And it was exactly the “unknowness” of what was in there that gave me the hope of a solution to any problem we might encounter on a fishing stream or anywhere else. We all watched our mom as she set the bag in her lap, her eyes looking up and to the right, her hands holding the zipper pull at the top of the purse. She sat there frozen for a few seconds while she thought, then she would slowly pull the zipper across the top of the bulging purse and reach in, coming up with the magic solution that would save the day. I learned to imitate the way she thought. She too, had ideas.

I was telling my class of songwriting students last month that I sort of think we songwriters have a little satchel we wear on our hips: A little invisible leather bag with a drawstring at the top. In the bag are all the songs we will ever write. We pull them out one by one, like nuggets. Some end up being pretty little pebbles, some end up being chunks of cinder. And every once in a while we get to pull out a shiny little nugget of gold, if we keep working at it. I think maybe it’s the same with our ideas; like Heaven gave us so many of them before we came down, and its up to us to find them when we need them.

What happens when you get old and weighed down with …well, with life…is that we tend to forget how to look in that little personal idea satchel on our hips. We forget that there’s a Fishin Pack in the trunk. We just go to the same-old same-old when trying to solve a problem. I feel it happening to me. Not that problems are the only reason to come up with ideas. We just get so hammered that we learn to save our energy to use in reaction. Something happens -- We react. So few proactive ideas are let loose these days.

Gotta do something about that.

WOTD 6 - PLATE

I keep forgetting. There are so many I-didn’t-mean-to’s in my disjointed life. Stacked in the cupboard next to my pile of cobalt blue I-really-intended-to’s. The stacks nearly reach the top now, and the shelf is beginning to bow under their weight. My good intentions are so, so heavy.

The cupboards in my kitchen are custom made. Nice ginger stained maple doors with distressed panels to hide my bang around kind of lifestyle. Large, beautiful cabinetry that was once so crisply clean and tidy. I unpacked the boxes when we moved from the old house, placing my dishes on the virgin shelves in neat little stacks, shifting and rearranging as my logic re-thought how I might be moving and working in the kitchen five years down the road. There are two dozen dinner plates with red gingham borders. Practical Corelle dishes; ones the kids could bang into piles as they lifted them from the dishwasher. I’ve used those very dishes as long as we’ve lived here, not far from two decades now. They do not make anything in Corelle nearly as charming any more. I’d buy new ones, only I don’t really care for anything they make these days. So I continue to fill and use and wash and stack the same old dishes over and over.

Below those plates is a set of green plaid china, once used at the Thanksgiving tables of my childhood. We rarely set those, unless we have a very large crowd, but I feel a sort of safety knowing they are there, holding the feast of memory: of brown autumn carpets of grass outside the windows of the homes in my past, of mounds of mashed potatoes next to strips of turkey meat covered with a volcanic flow of gravy, fragrant molten deliciousness filling the spaces in a clump of stuffing like lava covers pridefully built little villages at the base of old volcanoes. I cherish those old green plates. My children would not know why, but for these words.

Under that stack of china are two plates made of thick red ceramic with words written on the rims. “You Are Special Today. Something like that. Obviously I am not too sure of this because I keep forgetting to use them. I joined the mass of consumers in the 90’s who thought this a clever idea, to have a special plate for special people on their special days. Dave or Gram or Libby purchased a second plate one year, so on March 5th both Sarah and I could have them set before our seats at the dinner table, since we share the same birthday. Once in a while I’ll remember to use one when I’m setting the table on someone’s birthday. Inevitably I arrange everything, then notice the rim of red at the bottom of my cupboard.

I lift the heavy weight of our regular lives off the plates then run some warm water over them to make sure the dust of underuse is cleaned off. It reminds me that I must also go to the living room and open the little cupboard in the antique mahogany high-boy originally designed for the storage of top hats.

That’s where I store the party décor. Noise makers for New Years, balloons and colorful paper hats and little rolls of rainbow colored paper which, when divided and released from their rolled-up state, curl down in ringlets from the dining room chandelier. Their sole purpose in existing is to proclaim “There’s a party here!”

You are Special Today.

Truth is those red plates should sit on the top of the pile. Perhaps there should be two dozen red You Are Special Today plates stacked there in my cupboard. When I use my truest eyes I realize some aspect of every day and every person is special. That’s a no brainer. Problem is, a table full of those plates used day after night after day would make them no longer special. It would make them ironic. Would make you not want to eat off them eventually.

So we keep the bright red plates for those very, very uniquely and yet universally accepted days when we celebrate each others' accomplishments and token anniversaries.

That’s how it should be.

If only I could remember they were there.

WOTD 5 - SURPLUS

Surplus. Now there’s a word for me! Just take a walk down our driveway through the gate. On your way glance on over into the garage.

Surplus!

Poor Dave. He’s not such a surplus kind of guy himself. He actually tries to throw things away. But he’s lived with me long enough to know I might call him in his chambers on some random Tuesday afternoon when he’s just putting on his robe after being called into court:

“Hey, do you know where we put that (insert random item)? You know, the one we used for (insert random event)?” He’ll pause for a minute, because he is considerate to pause for a minute even if he doesn’t really have one, then say “I’m not recalling at the moment, Love.”

A few weeks ago Merlynn texted me, asking if she could borrow the old silver angel-of-the-Lord horn for the school play. I searched upstairs in the Christmas cupboard (talk about surplus!) and couldn’t find it. I searched in the garage. Finally I trekked downstairs to the two large storage rooms and gave it a go.

I texted Merlyn:I looked again when Libby and I went down last week in search of the leather I had bought a few years back to recover chairs. Let me say here that I have the most perfect sister for someone like me. She does not make one single statement to shame me for the condition of the things in my life. She just digs in and looks with me. She listens to me complain cuz Dave rearranged the stuff and now I can’t find anything. (I know, can you believe it? Blame Dave!) We dive into the back room. Look under the Indian head dress, and the giant foil nickels, and the three sets of kitchen stools. We leave the room and look in the dark room that turned into storage behind the laundry room. Stand there in the doorway because…well, because you can’t really walk into that room any more. Stand there and scan with eagle eyes the vast expanse of surplus.

“So far I can’t find the horn. That doesn’t mean it isn’t here though. Will keep looking.”

“Let’s go back to the other room and look again.”

So we head on back, searching with new eyes, this time lifting the golden fur fabric I bought to make a camel costume for our family nativity. Opening boxes of books and other miscellaneous items.

“Keep your eye out for the angel-of-the-Lord horn,” I tell Lib, even though our primary purpose is to find the leather. We dig through wedding supplies; a dozen tablecloths and yards of extra muslin.

“Oooh, what’s this bolt of satin for?” Libby looks at the underside of the bolt of fabric resting against a pile of boxes.

“Oh, I got it for Annie’s wedding. Isn’t it pretty?”

We did not use it for Annie’s wedding. So it’s there in case anyone needs a beautiful light milk chocolate raw satin in bulk quantity.

We find the half hide of leather back in the corner at the top of the shelving. We have to move three fancy water dispensers, two boxes of tablecloths, and Lib crawls on top of a stack of boxed café umbrellas.

Meanwhile I am examining the room for the perfect reaching thingy, something she can hook the leather with and drag to a place where we can reach it. I hand Libby a microphone stand, which she extends toward the corner of the room, the leather caught on the mic clip. I pride myself in finding ways to accomplish things other people give up on. My mom taught me this. We can both figure out how to open a can of olives out on a fishing stream, without a can opener. It’s one of our talents. My sisters and brothers are pretty good at it, too.

I think my hankering for surplus is genetic. Like ingrown toenails. My Uncle Parks had 17 box cars lining the perimeter of his yard in Blackfoot, Idaho. Each one was filled to the gills with surplus. My Grandpa Parrish, though I never met him, had that collective spirit which often marries an entrepreneurial spirit and bears a passel of little surplus treasures. And we like bargains, too.

One day back in the butcher department at Smiths I was looking over the meats in the bargain bin. I actually prefer beef steaks from this spot. They’re aged perfectly. As I was bent over the chilled racks between the chicken and pork sections, I was startled by a little voice nearly whispering beside me.

“You like bargains?”

I looked up at a woman I had seen before. A familiar Farmington face I knew I knew but didn’t know how I knew.

“I’m Dan Cluff’s mom, Carol. Dan says you’re real down to earth even though you’re building that monster house on the hill. So when I saw you here at the bargain meats I though maybe you liked bargains like I do.”

“Oh, Hi! My name’s Cori. We just love Dan Cluff. He is amazing!”

Dan worked for our builder, Jerry Preston. He was 16 years old and worked every day after school lending a construction hand and cleaning up the site. Our house was seriously broom swept every day during construction, before there were even walls, before there was a floor. Just nice clean plywood. It was very wise of Jerry to make sure the site was clean every day. It reinforced my confidence in the work he was doing, and it made it so much easier for me to stand by where the kitchen table would be and look at the fireplace and pretend there was a Christmas tree in the corner and kids on the stairs that weren’t there yet either; that there was a nice dancing fire in the rock fireplace and this beautiful place was the keeper of our future memories. I loved Dan Cluff! I remember thinking that he was an anomaly among teenagers; so hard working and very, very pleasant. So when Carol introduced herself as Dan’s mom I instantly liked her.

“So…” Carol said, a little hesitantly…”If you like bargains I’m wondering if you want me to show you some of my favorite bargain stores.”

“Would I?” I knew we were kindred spirits!

You know how some people, myself included, say things like “one day I’ll have to show you my favorite stores?” only we never really do it? Well Carol did.

A week later she picked me up and drove me to Salt Lake City where I was initiated into three surplus bargain stores: Clem’s on Redwood Road in North Salt Lake; The Lynn Wilson Mexican foods surplus outlet in SLC (now closed), and NPS market Square on Empire Blvd. in west SLC.

After our amazing adventure Carol dropped me off at home with my bags and boxes of treasures. Mom and Libby came over to see what I had found. When they walked in I declared:

“I have found the perfect store! It’s a Five Hour Store!”

Indeed it would take you 5 hours to go through everything they had there. Such a beautiful mixture of miscellanies! Tennis shoes next to cowboy boots next to bed linens, across from kiosks of jewelry and knick knacks and bric a brac of all sorts. Hand knit Irish sweaters mixed in with cheap tee shirts made two sizes too small in China. Collectibles and antiques in one room. Fine art in another. Ethnic foods and Easter candy for half off and fresh flowers for a fraction of the florist’s price. Electronics and crafts and toys and office supplies. Luggage and fabric and sea salt & cracked pepper potato chips. Greeting cards and vitamins. All blended in a mysterious arrangement some person with serious ADHD likely designed. A store full of surplus from lost shipments, dropped shipments, overstocks and retired products.

My family and friends began to frequent the 5 Hour Store. Neighbors quietly searched the Yellow Pages under “5” looking for its location, having seen the cool pitcher I’d bought there, or the neat lamp at Libby’s, or Cindy’s groovy bowl in the middle of her island. Friends started answering their own questions when they came to visit:

“Where did you find that?...Wait…don’t tell me…the 5 Hour store.”

It’s not really called the 5 Hour Store, of course. Its called NPS. And it’s not nearly as groovy as it used to be, though I still manage to spend way too much when I stop in just to see if they have blank postcards in the office products aisle. My Aunt Becky tried to write a check to the 5 Hour Store when she checked out the first time. The clerk took her check and stared at her. “Um…that’s not the name of our store.”

I think they should consider changing the name because it’s much more memorable than NPS, National Product Sales. But what do I know?

When I have gigs in Salt Lake City my car sort of turns itself toward Redwood Road, over the rail road tracks onto Empire Boulevard. Dave will call to see what I’m up to because he comes home from work and I’m not home yet. I wince a little and pause, knowing I shouldn’t lie. “I stopped at the 5 Hour Store for bananas.” What I don’t tell him is that I stopped three hours ago.

For a few years NPS had a satellite store in Kaysville, so close to home. It only had clothing and shoes and jewelry and a few other things. Still it did it’s emotional job for us. It’s where my brother John got his high end cowboy boots for something like $24. We called it the 45 Minute Store. It closed after a year or two.

So there you go. True confessions in a random blog. If you know me at all you already know all of this. I have a hefty level of shame about it. Like a druggie with an addiction, only I’m better than I used to be.

We never did find that angel-of-the-Lord horn for Merlyn. It actually makes me sad. I had retrieved that horn from the trash bin at Pleasant Hills Middle School when I was in 8th grade. We had completed our Christmas Choral Concert. The horn had been used as a prop. It was bent and a little rusted where it had been dinged. But it seemed mighty fine to me, so I carried it home after the concert. Our Christmas child Kate, born on December 21st, used it each Christmas Eve when she was a child, puffing out her cheeks and blowing air into it, sounding the trumpet of he angel at the birth of a plastic baby Jesus in a small laundry basket under our Christmas tree. We cannot lose that horn! It has history! It has sentiment! I will make it a matter of prayer.

I wonder how the Lord feels about this surplus? I beat myself up about it.

Then again, last week someone from the 8th Ward called wondering if I had that large Salt Lake Temple wall hanging Sarah had made for our Young Women’s Evening of Excellence something like 7 years ago. They wanted to borrow it for their New Beginnings.

“Let me look. I can’t imagine I threw it away.” Indeed, I once retrieved some cardboard waves, the height of a short man, from a neighbors trash can after a stake Road Show. I stored those waves for years in my basement. They were used for every luau and nautical themed party in North Farmington Stake for a dozen years. Someone finally borrowed them and never returned them. That was a sad loss.

I searched for the temple, tied up in a large roll which when unrolled rose to the top of the wall in the church cultural hall. I tried Dave at work. No go.

Finally I called Libby.

“Oh yeah, I have it downstairs,” she said.

Atta girl, Lib! My kinda gal!



WOTD 4 - BUGGY

I think I’ve always had an entrepreneurial spirit; always thought there must be something I can do that is worth something to someone. Poor Libby and Ann Marie had to live with me thinking everything I created could be sold to someone somewhere, if only we had some way to tell them about it. Seriously, who wouldn’t want a button made of swirled string arranged in a Mason Jar lid which had been filled with Elmer’s glue? As the glue dried clear, I added a safety pin, making…(TaDa!)…a button!

When I grew up and had a nice husband who was willing to foot the bill for capital investment, my first business cards read “Cori’s Unforgettable Edibles.” The investment money went to a cart full of Halloween candies, marked 50% off after the holiday. With it I designed and crafted gingerbread houses. We lived in New York at the time. I was 21 years old, pregnant with my second child, and my husband was at the mercy of a hard working judge in the 2nd Circuit Federal Court of Appeals, working eternal hours not unlike poor Bob Cratchet in A Christmas Carol. I lived in a rented home in a strange town with babies; and built gingerbread houses. I marketed them, rather successfully I might add, to Real Estate agents. They’d order them from a fine selection of Victorian shingled houses (Necco Wafers make fine shingles); traditional brick houses with Bit-O-Honey bricks; or Tootsie Roll log cabins with yummy Junior Mint roofs. (I ingested every mistake, which was the beginning of my demise.) I delivered the confectionery edifices to families to whom the agents had sold houses. I continued that side-job when we moved back to Pittsburgh.

A few years later we moved to Utah. We brought a large truck full of antique furniture to sell. I designed little parchment business cards with the words: Pineapple Enterprises- Antiques and Interiors. The pineapple was the colonial symbol of warmth and hospitality, which I thought represented what antique furnishings can do to a home. Eventually I sold off all the antiques and bought music equipment with the profits: guitars and microphones and mixers and speakers and multi-track recording devices. Now my business card reads: Seven Roses Music – Performing Songwriter Cori Connors.

I suppose it is the sentimentalist in me that leans toward a home filled with antiques. I like to imagine who may have owned that table before I did. Who might have ordered that walnut bedroom set from the Wells Fargo catalogue before the turn of the last century. Or who pulled the blade of their planer over that small table in the basement, the one with the uneven top and the hand hewn joints. Or who had the patience and the eyesight to chisel those dainty dove tailed drawers in my high boy, in a place no public eyes would ever see. These days the backs of our drawers are stapled together on an assembly line where they pay school boys minimum wage with one 15 minute break in the afternoon.

When we lived in Rochester I acquired a few treasures I hoped would accompany me through life. We bought some at auction on a Saturday night out in that auction barn in a neighboring town near Pittsford, NY. One of those purchases was a wicker baby buggy. It was in pristine condition, nearly 100 years old, and the wheels were still round and the rubber had not disintegrated. I used to stroll my baby Sarah through the streets of Pittsford, the canopy shifting forward and back depending on the direction I was walking in relation to the sun. Little Johnny trailed behind us, or helped push as we walked, his chubby little hands reaching way up to the wooden handle. The buggy bounced as we walked, riding on tension bars bent like scrolls meeting each other above the sidewalk. We walked up to the raspberry patch and picked two pints of berries; one for eating on the walk home and one for dinner; or we strolled down to the corn stand, picking out half a dozen beautiful chartreuse ear of bread-n-butter corn, their golden tassels hanging out of the bag we set in the corner of the buggy like a squad of Barbie Doll cheerleaders with bouncy pony tails. We tucked a fragrant ripe cantaloupe in the other corner of the buggy, down by where Sarah’s feet would be if she had been any older than a few months. I imagined walking all my future babies in that dandy old wicker buggy.

When August came and David’s clerkship ended, we packed up our few belongings and prepared to move back to Pittsburgh, where Dave had taken a job with Kirkpatrick, Lockhart, Johnson and Hutchison. We rented a Ryder truck and loaded it up ourselves. The truck was hardly full. We didn’t have that much. A few boxes, a crib, a small dresser and the buggy. I miss that way of life.

We took off around midnight, thinking we would drive through the night while the kids slept.

Dave crawled into the cab of the rented Ryder truck, with 18 month old Johnny in a car seat beside him. It was normal to put a kid in the front seat in those days. I strapped Sarah into her car seat beside me in our old green Toyota Corolla. Through the night we drove south on I79, generally in tandem, sometimes breaking stride and passing each other just to keep the journey interesting. We reached Zelienople PA as the sun was starting to rise. There wasn’t much traffic at that point. I was hunkered down, in the driver’s groove, chipping away the miles in the left lane of the two lane divided highway, when suddenly the hood to my car flung up and slapped against my windshield. Stunned, I grabbed the steering wheel with both hands and instinctively hit the brake, only for a moment though, as I recognized the danger in a sudden stop in the middle of the freeway. I could see nothing but hood through the windshield. It must have come loose from the latch in front of the engine, though for the last 300 miles it had shown no sign of instability. I checked the rear view mirror and started to pull over to the left, but heard the monotonous voice of my high school driver’s ed. teacher Bap Manzini reminding me in my head: “Never, never, never pull off to the left. The shoulder is not made for cars to pull off there. Besides, it’s against the law.” So I again checked my mirror and started to make my way to the right hand shoulder. David had seen what had happened and was travelling behind me at the time. I saw him moving with me. All of a sudden he banked his truck to the right, sharply. I could see nothing but the lines on the side of the road, and his truck in my rear view mirror. As I approached the right hand shoulder, the Ryder truck came shooting past me, squeezing between my car and the guardrail, scraping its side against the metal rail.

“What the….!” Stopped straddling the line on the shoulder, I sat in my car, my heart throbbing violently in my chest. I reached over to check on the baby, waiting for David to come back and explain himself. Why had he done this foolish thing? Was he moving too fast to stop reasonably?

“Where IS he?” I thought, starting to fume at the whole ordeal; frustrated at our old car betraying us; wondering why Dave had put himself and Johnny in danger by stopping the truck like that.

It felt like minutes passed, though I’m sure it was only seconds, before I opened my car door and looked beyond the upended hood. There were broken tail lights on the truck, and then I noticed a large flatbed semi-truck loaded with cement pulled over up the road. It took a few breaths for me to realize the back of the truck had been creased and crinkled. I ran to the cab and found David frantically trying to get our screaming boy out of his car seat. Windshield glass was shattered and scattered everywhere. Dave pulled Johnny into his lap, cupped his hand over his little head and spoke comfort to him, telling him they were ok, we’re ok, everything’s ok Johnny. The driver side door was jammed shut and he could not get out until he removed Johnny’s car seat and crawled out the passenger side. He stepped from the truck onto the guardrail, overlooking a small cliff, and shimmied back around the truck to me. He placed Johnny in my arms. As I scanned the setting once again I began to realize what had happened, the realization illuminating my mind like the rising sun to the east of us. The semi had hit him! With the speed that we were already travelling, multiplied by the force of the heavy truck’s impact, David had miraculously steered the truck in the minimal space between my car and the guardrail.

“You couldn’t see him.” Dave pulled me into his chest, our boy sandwiched between us, our little girl still sleeping in the car behind us.

“I could see you couldn’t see him, and he couldn’t see… that you couldn’t see.” He spoke with the breathless stammer familiar to athletes and laborers.

I had been decelerating unaware that the heavy laden semi was moving at freeway speed in the right hand lane. I was moving directly into his path.

“I knew I could take a hit better than you could.” So David purposely moved himself between the semi and our little Toyota, knowing he was likely to be hit.

And he was hit, with such force that it totaled the truck he was driving.

The buggy was crushed, with the rest of our belongings in the back of the truck.

A tow truck took the Ryder away, and I believe Dave drove us the rest of the way home to Pittsburgh after tying down the hood with some rope or wire. I really don’t remember those details.

I do remember, though, the feeling that overcame me in what felt like a wash of love…a full immersion, baptism of love for the man who calls me his wife. I remember holding my baby, tears rolling uncontrollably down my cheeks and into the collar of my shirt. I remember looking at her daddy and thinking how beautiful he was, how strong and worthy and manly and brilliant and beautiful he was. He had literally risked his life to protect us, willing in an instant to put himself directly in the path of danger as it hurled itself at me. All these years later, if I close my eyes, I can hear the scraping of metal on metal, hear the crying of my little boy , feel the crunch of broken glass under my shoes, smell the strange combination of pale green morning dew mixed with the nasal sting of the steel mill in the distance and the burning distinct smell of hot brakes and burnt rubber. I feel the warm arms of my young husband pull me to the safety of his strong shoulders, where I bury my head and cry. His scent is divine, in my memory. So beautiful and dear. So beloved. There are mornings, even now, when he has gone to work or is downstairs working out on the treadmill, when I roll over and bury my head in his pillow to inhale that scent. He is a man among men, better than I ever dreamed I could have. Proven in the fire. Willing to give anything…literally anything…for the people he loves.

I never did stroll the next two babies who came to us in that buggy. It went to the buggy graveyard. But I remember it. And in the remembering I am awe struck once again by the selfless, godly gift I have in the man I call my husband.

WOTD 3 - FLIGHT

When Kate was in high school but not old enough to drive yet, we used to make the trip to Viewmont High down I15 every day, waiting at the freeway entrance to jump into the steady stream of traffic like little girls waiting for the jump rope to come around. Each morning as I approached the overpass at the Centerville exit I paused, mentally, altering whatever was running through my brain for a moment; remembering.

That winter there had been a heavy snowfall. So heavy that the snow plows had nowhere to push the snow and it piled up on the sides of the overpass, all the way up the guardrail, so that the road looked like a ditch; like a new carton of vanilla bean ice cream into which the scoop had dug a straight strip; like a snowy luge where the sides had been air brushed gray by the chugging exhaust of traffic rumbling across the bridge. A Jr. High girl was walking over that bridge late one night after the snowfall. They’re not sure what happened - if it was intentional, or accidental - but she slipped over the edge and landed on the freeway below. Cars didn’t know what they had hit. News of it spread like stomach flu among the kids at school the next day. Parents drew their daughters into their chests and told them to call if they needed rides home; whispered I love you’s when they dropped their kids off at school that next morning; they drove away vowing to never let arguments escalate to where their kids stomped off angry; they turned on their car radios to try and overpower the images haunting their brains as they drove away. I did the same.

I made note of that spot every time I traveled southbound on the freeway, just as I passed under that bridge. I made note and whispered wordless prayers. Daily offerings, reminding God that we are feeble and weak, as if He didn’t know. Asking blessings on that girl’s family. As I prayed, eyes wide open, I pictured this in my mind: a girl, on the cusp of womanhood, whose name I cannot recall, moves through the chill of air on an anonymous January night. Her eyes look down at her feet, as much to protect her face from the icy wind as to watch where she is stepping. She quickly moves over to the edge of the bridge when a car passes. She loses her balance and cannot regain it. I imagine it is innocent and accidental. I know this is wishful thinking, but I let myself think it anyway. As she descends to the frozen road below I see two images separating, one hurling downward and one taking flight, rising wingless and weightless before the empty body reaches the earth. I imagine the quick and steady arms of an angel whisping in, scooping her up and rising heavenward, the only evidence a brittle winter wind hinting the scent from the collar of her jacket, familiar only to her mother and the boy to whom she gave her first kisses. It’s the same smell her father inhales as he buries his head in the cold pillow on his daughter’s empty bed.

One day a few years back Dave and I were having lunch with Del and Lynette Parson. Del had been commissioned by the church to paint a portrait of Jesus Christ wearing a red robe. A copy of it hangs in most of our LDS churches today. Del told about creating that painting, about the progression of the piece, and what he went through trying to represent the Savior as best he could. Del was invited often to speak about it, and about peoples’ reactions to the piece when it was first released.

I heard that Del was speaking in a Fireside one Sunday evening when a young woman in the congregation announced through her tears; “That’s him! That’s him!” The story goes that she had been a small girl when her mother’s boyfriend entered their apartment stoned and violently angry. The mother gathered her daughter into the closet and told her to stay there no matter what. From her dark small chamber she heard things no child should ever hear, witnessed the murder of her mother in darkness. Frightened and shaking, she felt the embrace of good strong arms come around her as she crouched there listening. The arms drew her into a firm strong chest, and she looked up into the eyes of someone vaguely familiar to her. He gently laid his hand over her ear and held her against his chest. She said she felt an uncommon calm in spite of the emotional chaos surrounding her. She does not recall words; only that the warmth of the person who had comforted her remained until a neighbor came into the silent aftermath of the crime and discovered the child alone in the closet. She told the neighbor that the man helped her not to cry. But of course no one saw him. Even the girl eventually decided she had imagined it.

Until that day when she saw the gentle eyes in the portrait Del had painted.

It may be an urban legend. I will ask Del next time I see him if there was such a woman with such a tale. It doesn’t really matter though, because if it’s the reality or if it isn’t, it doesn’t change the fact that it is a possibility. I have no doubt that it could have happened. I deal, in general, with lots of doubts. I am not a doubtless kind of believer. I fight doubt demons on a regular basis. It keeps my testimony alive.

But I do not doubt that angels exist, that we lived and will again live beyond this realm, and that Jesus Christ has the capacity to do miraculous things that defy our human logic. I believe He could in fact, have visited a child whose life was altering in unfathomable ways. And He could have dispatched one of his heavenly hosts to swoop down to earth on a snowy winter night and reclaim a daughter before she experienced an agony with which He was all too familiar. He can transform our falls into flights. I can’t say for sure that He did. But knowing He can is enough.

WOTD 2 - PEDIGREE

On a Wintery Christmas morning when the snow layered itself like frosting along the roof line of our old house; when my kids were still kids, when their hearts still pumped with excitement as they stood at the top of the stairs all hunched together in their new PJs, waiting for permission to come down and see what Santa had delivered; on that particular Christmas morning my sister Libby carried her gift to our kids in a basket or a stocking or some-such delightful holiday wrapping. I don't exactly recall how it was delivered. I do recall my reaction to the gift itself; an interesting juxtaposition of emotions: the joyful thrill of watching my kids exult while at the same time dealing with the shock of how my own life was going to change from this moment forward.

Indeed the gift was a living breathing kind of treasure. Four little paws, a smirk of a mouth under a wet little snout, and a pair of long floppy ears like a shawl draped over her little head. Oh, and she had a pedigree. Her pedigree declared her as a purebred Basset Hound, and she certainly looked the part. The pedigree also said her name was Loretta Lynn, though the fellow who had owned her had called her Sally for a full year before he decided to sell her. Her sister showed better, he said, so he let this one go.

Libby had decided my kids needed a dog. She's like mother #2 to them, so it was not really out of place for her to decide that. It's just that I'm not such the dog person. I was bit in the eye by my brother's Afghan hound when I was seven, and ever since I've had a rather innate fear of dogs and other creatures. This aspect of my character has felt shameful to me my whole life. I try to fake that I like animals. Try to talk in that baby talk way people do when they meet a new creature: "Ohhh, what a cute puppy. Here darlin', let me scratch behind your ears. Good girl! Good girl!" I am confessing, since this is the holy season, that this is a lie and I am faking it as much as I faked respect for my son's 9th grade English teacher who decided spelling should be 1/4 of their English grade. (Seriously? In 9th grade? With spell check? I refuse to let my children get away with using easy safe words when they write just because they might not know how to spell the more appropriate word! But I digress...)

Libby's heart throbbed with the kids' when she delivered Sally. She loves animals, dogs especially. Cats make her itch. My heart really was softened watching her stroke the soft folds in Sally's ears. If you stretched them out on your legs, they looked like elephant ears. We shoulda named her Dumbo In Libby's defense, she was only replacing the Bassett we had rescued from the pound earlier that year. A mistake. That's what Burva was. Burva Dawn. Burv was an attempt to fill a place for our little Kate. Burva slept with Kate. But she left trails of dog-ness all over the house, and I'm not talking sweet little doggie toys. Burva had to go back from whence she came. I was perfectly content to have only four children to take care of. But the spark had been struck and Libby could not resist.

Loretta Lynn Sally was cute as could be, seriously! But it pretty much ended at looks. She had been kenneled as a show dog for her first year of life. It surprised me that she was a show dog because, at least from what I saw on Best of Show, show dogs could obey commands. Sal just looked at you with those droopy brown eyes when you called to her. Throw a stick and you simply had a stick out in the yard, and a cute little dog sitting staring at you. It was apparent that this darling little one was not going to sleep with Kate. We had to change her sheets the first two nights she tried that. Sally ended up in the yard. We got a dog house and a long chain because she liked to wander into the street and sort of flop down there, basking in the sun, oblivious to cars. But she was cute!

Sal made friends with Cheyenne, Bullard's dog next door. Cheyenne, a well trained but mischievous puppy, was not chained. So she'd come visit Sally. They'd giggle and roll in that puppy sort of way, then Cheyenne would take off and Sal would try to follow, until she ran out of chain. Then her stubby little legs would end up over her head, the folds of her abundant flesh gathered around her collar. She didn't even seem to mind any of that. She wasn't the sharpest tack in the cupboard. But she was cute!

We were in the process of building our current house when Sal arrived. My guilt over not being a dog person led us to build the world's most expensive dog world. We put a wrought iron fence around the perimeter of our yard, nearly an acre, so she would have room to run and run without a chain. We cut a hole in the back of the house and attached a dog house to our own house, even bricked it to match ours. The hole in the wall led directly into a large kennel where she could sleep and eat. We heated the floor of the garage so she would be warm in the winter. The kids would occasionally try to take Sally for a walk. Sarah attempted to take her running. Inevitably I'd have to get in the car and go searching for them. More often that not I found them, the back of one of my girls hunched over a lump on the side of the road, pulling on the leash, bawling or yelling: "Come ON, Sally! Get up! Let's go! Get up NOW Sally!" But once Sal decided to sit, that was it. You were where you were and that's where you were. I'd pull up in the van and attempt to diffuse the frustration. It took both of us to literally lift her stubborn bulk of doggedness into the car. As she aged she got heavier, (it happens to the best of us) and her bones more lumbering when she walked. Slow and stubborn did not begin to describe her. That is unless she found the door from the family room to the back deck open. Then she perked right up, shooting like a wound-up rubber band in through the french doors. She scurried about the house, her nails clicking against our Hickory wood floors, her ears flying like liquid pendulums as she ran, slobber whipping from her jowls onto the couch, the walls, the roman shades, the cupboards. I could hear her from my laundry room, or from the kitchen. A call to the forces rose up whenever anyone discovered she had "entered the realm." Like city slicker cowboys we rounded her up, shooing her back out through the French doors or into the garage where we could open the kennel door. She always had this sort of smirk as she ran. My little grand-daughter Ruby has that same smirk, come to think of it!

There was a period of time when we started to get a bunch of mail for Sally Connors. I figure John had used her name when registering for something once when he was in high school. Colleges looking for Sally to apply. Banks wanting to give her a credit card. We considered posing Sally and snapping some pictures: Sal goes to college. Sal opens a savings account. Sally in her first investment seminar. If we could have lifted her and expected her to cooperate we might have done that. But that would also mean we would have to bathe her, which was not a pleasant task. She had a bi-annual visit to the groomer whether she needed it or not. Oh, poor Sal! Like I said, I am not a dog person. Shame, shame, shame.

A full dozen winters we spent with Sally the Slobber Dog. Our back yard is multi- dimensional, with cement curbing dividing terraced grass and outlining flower beds.Sally, even with her sore old hips from her low lying belly, would tunnel through the yard,balancing on that little balance beam of curbing all the way down to the lower forty and back up to her red brick house. We called it Sally's Luge. If you looked down on it from one of the upper bedrooms in the winter, it looked like a virgin ant farm below.  When the snow was extra deep she would disappear altogether, the only evidence of her position being the tiny crooked tip of a tail waving like a truce flag as she shimmied through the trail of snowy ditches.

One winter we noticed Sal drank an inordinate amount of water. “Maybe she’s getting diabetes,” I said, as I refilled her watering trough. The next day I went out onto the deck to retrieve the Christmas ham Dave’s law firm had given us. Our fridge was already full of holiday fare, so we had this habit of using the table on the back deck and calling it “God’s fridge”. Of course the ham was gone. Plain disappeared out of its box. We found the ham bone picked clean in the snow outside Sally’s red brick house.

Sal was a survivor. She lived to be a little more than 13 years old. I'm not sure what that is in dog years. I am not a dog person. Nonetheless I thought my chest would sink into my back, straight through my lungs, crushing my heart on the day we drove down to Doc White's. “I think she’s done living,” he told us gently. We took her for one last pretty grooming the day before her last trip to the Vet. She always looked so incongruous when they put a bow on her after her grooming. We stroked and purred and wept as they laid her down.

“I’m not sure what you did to her, or how you did it, but this is the oldest Basset I’ve ever seen. Must have been a happy little puppy for a long time. Took good care of her, didn’t you?”

Mmmm. Well, in our own sort of way. Loved, yes. David had hand fed her the special puppy chow the vet recommended for the last three years of her life. And we gave her a pretty spectacular dog run. She seemed happy enough. Never complained. And she thrived in spite of chomping down box after box of Cheez Nibs, tossed regularly from Gram’s car window through the fence. She was strengthened in suffering: having her tail shut in the car door and ingesting a whole roll of masking tape (Lib discovered that one and retrieved it a week later. I’ll spare you the details.) Sal lived life on her terms, mostly because she would not live it on ours. So we changed ours and lived peaceably together for well past the average Basset life span.

This past winter the snow laid undisturbed in our yard. The red brick dog house, which for years bore a December strand of colored Christmas lights on its roof, looking a lot like Snoopy’s dog house, stood cold and dark. The grass is starting to grow under the Hornbeam tree next to the fence. Evidence is gradually disappearing.

But we who lived it keep her tucked in our memories, chuckling when we think of her; aching a bit when we see someone trying to walk a Basset hound on some anonymous sidewalk.

Even up to the end, when her face was sagged beyond saggy, and her hair was beyond gray, she was cute. Cute, and funny, smelly and slobbery. She held a pedigree, for goodness sakes!

Sal the Slobber Dog. Rest in peace, dear old girl.

LENT BEGINS 2011 (WOTD 1)

Lent Begins. For those who may not know, here’s what Wikipedia says about Lent:

Lent in the Catholic tradition, is the period of the liturgical year leading up to Easter. Lent is a time of sacrifice for Jesus. The traditional purpose of Lent is the preparation of the believer — through prayer, repentance, almsgiving and self-denial — for the annual commemoration during Holy Week of the Death and Resurrection of Jesus, which recalls the events linked to the Passion of Christ and culminates in Easter, the celebration of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Conventionally, it is described as being forty days long, though different denominations calculate the forty days differently. The forty days represent the time that, according to the Bible, Jesus spent in the desert before the beginning of his public ministry, where he endured temptation by Satan.[1][2]

This practice is common to much of Christendom, being celebrated by Catholics, Lutherans, Methodists, Presbyterians, and Anglicans.

Being raised Mormon, I didn’t practice Lent. I was aware of it, however, because on Ash Wednesday some of the kids at school had smudges on their foreheads. The morning of Ash Wednesday began for my faithful Catholic friends with a visit to their churches. During Mass the priest would dip his thumb in Holy Water then in the ashes of the previous year’s Palm Sunday palms, which had been collected and burnt. He would then pronounce a blessing in Latin as he placed the ashes on the forehead of the faithful with the side of his thumb, in the shape of a cross. It was not appropriate to wash the ashes off on Ash Wednesday, though the regular wear and tear of the day smudged and weakened them until it looked like a mascara smudge up above the eyebrows.

Looking back I nod my head at myself, reminding that life gives me lessons every day. Sometimes I am aware I am learning; sometimes not. Lately I’ve lived by the mantra: You can’t not grow. Similarly; You can’t not learn.

For years, unaware of the Catholic ritual, I judged those kids in school as untidy. Sloppy in their facial hygiene. It wasn’t until high school that I found out these were devoted and faithful people, who had risen early and altered their schedules to attend Mass, and whose youthful pride did not overshadow their devotion. I remember passing one of the cheerleaders in the hall at Thomas Jefferson High, her beautiful hair flouncing, her arms crossed in front of her as she held her books, talking comfortably with her friends as she walked. I noticed the smudge under her bangs. I felt an immediate pang of admiration for her that revisits me at this very moment as I remember it.

Ash Wednesday in the lunchroom was a bit more frenetic, in pace and sound; people talking about what they were giving up for Lent. Usually it was something like soda pop, or chocolate. Some gave up things like dancing, or sleeping-in. I heard of one kid trying to give up smoking even though his parents supposedly didn’t know he smoked. Mostly it was food they gave up, which made it notable in the lunch room.

Near that time my best friend Betsy would be observing the Passover season. We would nibble on Matzoh bread spread with peanut butter for lunch then, as she wouldn’t eat leavened bread in that season.

I remember wishing I could wear a smudge on my forehead to show my faithfulness. Or a Yamulka like my Jewish friends when I attended their B’Nai Mitzvah. (that’s plural for Bar/bat Mitzvah.) Once I asked my Bishop why we didn’t wear crosses. I had determined that I was different. I allowed myself to be set apart from the others in my school who practiced the casual comforts of the 1970’s. I was a devoted Christian wasn’t I? But there was nothing that would evidence to the general public that I was a believer.

“We don’t wear the cross because we cherish the atonement more than we celebrate the death of our Savior.” The Bishop tried to explain in simple terms for a teenage girl. “We focus on the fact that He rose again, not that He died. It’s not that His death means any less to us, but that his resurrection means more.” He looked down at me and smiled. “Let the light in your eyes be your symbol.”

I am a Mormon girl, with deep faith in Jesus Christ as my Redeemer. And while I do not practice the religion of my husband’s Catholic family, I respect it deeply, knowing that the Savior on whom they lean is also the Savior upon whom I lean. I am a believer in restored ordinances. I look forward to the invitation that remembering the meaning of Easter gives me, and everyone: to find Him and worship Him as the only means by which we can return Home safely and completely. So while I don’t feel compelled by my religion to practice the sacrifices required in the Lenten season; I have chosen to sacrifice in my own way.

For three years now I have chosen to make one of those personal sacrifices a token of commission rather than omission. I commit to sacrifice my leisure in an effort to dig deeper in myself. One of those ways of digging deeper is through personal writing.

For the next 40+ days I’ll be using the online Random Word Generator to give me a jumping off place for this writing. I call it Word Of The Day (WOTD). I allow myself to look at three words, usually nouns, then I must choose one of them and use it to trigger ideas in my writing. I try to incorporate my senses and use of metaphor, honing my writing skills as I do it. More often than not it ends up I go to a place in my memory, so in a way my WOTD becomes a sort of personal history, though the chronology is askew.

I publish these writings here in my Blog for two reasons: the first being that it makes me accountable. If it’s being published, even just to my family and closest friends, I feel accountable to get it done every day. Secondly, it gives the people I love a chance to see into my hidden places, and at the same time seek those hidden places within themselves.

I invite everyone to join me in the WOTD exercise. Here’s the link to the Random Word Generator I use: http://watchout4snakes.com/creativitytools/RandomWord/RandomWordPlus.aspx

Fat Tuesday is over. Happy Ash Wednesday.

See you tomorrow.