WOTD 14 - OPEN

“Wooo Hoo! It’s OPEN!”

I hear eight-year-old Maddi scream as the tires of her bike skid to a stop at the bottom of our driveway. Behind her comes the parade of her twin sister Sophie and her triplet brothers Aiden, Evan and Luke, flowing down the bend of cement on wheeled chariots; bikes and scooters and modern-day-descendents of the Big Wheel. I’ve just pulled into the bay of our garage, the fan still hums as it cools the engine in my van. I’m almost knocked over by the stream of kids: sun bleached hair, soft glistening skin the color of browned butter, flip flops and sockless canvas tenny runners. They shoot past my van, straight to the front of the garage where the neon glow of the OPEN sign reflects on the silver tops and colorful sides of aluminum soda cans. Their little hands reach and grab at the top of the counter, looking like a human octopus stuck in a whirlpool, in and out they go, picking a root beer…no wait, a Fresca…ooo, you have caffeine free Mountain Dew!...nah, I’m picking a root beer! One or two take a cup and scoop ice from the ice machine, then open the drawer and retrieve a straw. The others drink it straight up; no ice, no straw, no cup. They scurry out the garage oblivious to my presence, till Aiden calls back “Thank You” and they all echo as they rise up the hill and into the cul-de-sac, They leave me a sweet trickling chorus of thanks.

Dave’s Pop Shop.

When we built this house we realized we were closing off a pathway long used by neighborhood kids to travel between two housing sections. The developer should have seen this and made accommodations for foot travel between the Hollow and Summerwood. But he didn’t. Anyone else would have done all they could to preserve their privacy when they built on our lot. Not Dave.

I love people as much as anyone I know, but even I want my privacy.

Not Dave.

I should say he respects privacy and understands our need for it on some level, but it mattered more to him that we not interrupt people’s access to each other. He simply did not want to even appear to be the snob who took away the foot path. So we have a gate that remains open 24/7, allowing anyone to pass through. We lock the gate one day every 10 years so the land does not become public by habit (there’s a law about that that I should remember from our real estate classes.) People walk past our messy garage and rather undisciplined grow box garden, up our driveway or down the path and past the big rock behind our house. I wouldn’t mind keeping my mess to myself.

Not Dave.

He’d rather not have the mess. But the mess does not stop him from welcoming any weary or not-weary traveler to stop at his Pop Shop for a little respite from the heat of travel.

We bought some cabinets from a friend’s kitchen when they remodeled. Dave installed them in the garage. It was great for quite a while, relatively tidy out there. That was until our kids started going to and returning from college. Things started to pile up out there. And the more there were piles, the more we piled on. It’s some universal rule of magnetism that messes beget messes.

One year, for Mothers Day, Dave presented a most glorious gift to me. A stand-alone ice machine that made little square cubes of clear, hard, crunchy, yummy ice! I am the grand-daughter of the man who owned the Blackfoot Ice House back in the day, when there was no Freon flowing through tubes in the refrigerator in the typical American kitchen. There was only an ice box, with a compartment fit to hold a block of ice, replaced every other day by a fresh block, sawed to size from the gargantuan blocks my grand-Dad and uncles had cut from the Snake River in the winter and stored in sawdust through the summer.

That big dark Ice House loomed over their living space. By the time I was born people had electric refrigerators in their houses and only bought ice for their camping trailers in the summer. When I was quite little I remember my brother chiseling a small chunk of ice from a block in the chilly dark cavern of that ice barn. I held the frozen chunk in the fabric of my cotton blouse, lifted it to my lips and licked until it was small enough to pop into my mouth. I laid in a pile of sawdust and let the coolness drip down my throat. The crisp light air cooled my sun steeped skin until the ice was melted and I was chilled to the bone. I love ice.

Dave installed our little electric ice machine in the garage to avoid the possibility of drainage problems on the wooden floors of our kitchen. He placed it smack between two of the cabinets. Next thing I knew he came home from Smith’s with a van full of soda pop, all varieties. He arranged the pop on top of one of the cabinets, beside the ice machine, and invited passing neighbor kids to stop for a drink when he was out there working.

Next he bought a little fridge.

The word got around. Lots of people started passing through our gate. Just about every one of them is exceptionally kind and delightful. The school bus started picking up and dropping off neighborhood kids right by the gate. We soon found we needed to set some rules. Like all good rules, there were just a few of them, and they were easy to understand. Here are the rules I posted on the gate the first day of school. They now hang above the Pop Shop on the cupboard door:

When one of my favorite stores in Kaysville closed their doors, I asked the manager if she’d like to sell me their OPEN sign. This was before places like Costco sold them. She said sure. So I brought a nice neon sign home and Dave installed it above the Pop Shop. Parents are pleased that we have some sense of responsibility and don’t over-supply their kids with unnecessary sugar every day. And we need to be able to have our garage to ourselves if we want. So we yank on the pull chain under the sign every few days, and nearly every Saturday in the warmer months, and on Sunday afternoons in the summer when our neighbors tend to take their Sunday strolls. The Shop is traditionally closed on Fast Sunday. No sense in tempting our youth.

We know soda pop is not healthy. It’s not the means though which we should be getting our fluids on a regular basis. We suspect some people wish we didn’t have this available. (We do keep water out there as well, I might add here.) But in a society where so much is ME oriented; where we teach our children to protect what is theirs and preserve our entitlement to things we’ve earned; we see Dave’s Pop Shop as an attempt to swing the vote to graciousness, generosity and good humor. This is such an inexpensive way to teach kids how to be nice and share. Heck, who would not spend 20 measly cents to help a neighbor kids feel special?

I don’t love having my whole life exposed to the public. This might surprise some people, because I’m pretty open personality-wise. But I have my pride. And I like a little privacy. I even placed this door mat by the door coming into the house from the garage:

I don’t particularly love the exposure the Dave's Pop Shop gives us. But I DO love that the man whose name I took as my own three decades ago has a tender place in his heart for all God’s children. I love that he is willing to give up his own time and money and space to bring a half-a-minute of pleasure to our neighbors and their friends. I heard a teenage companion of one of our neighbor boys talking as they walked through the gate, their soda cans whooshing as they clicked the tops open, “Wow, so cool that your neighbors just give you that!”

Such a cheap way to appear cool!

I empty my van of the groceries as the parade of Harris kids disappears up the hill. I step on the Leave floor mat and press the electric opener to close the garage door. It pops back up. Something has triggered the electric eye. Looking back I see the littlest Harris boy, Nick, run in, focused on the row of soda against the wall. He grabs a pop and scurries back out.

“Fanks, Coe-wee”, he calls out behind him as he runs to catch up with his siblings. I yell over my shoulder, “You’re welcome Nick Nack!”

Love.

Open.

WOTD 13 - LAZINESS

Years ago a friend introduced me to one of my favorite books on writing, selling me on the value of the piece by noting Chapter 10 in the book.

The book is called, If You Want to Write, by Brenda Ueland, published by Greywolf Press.

Chapter 10: Why Women Should Neglect Their Housekeeping for Their Writing.

I loved Brenda Ueland right away.

That week I drove down to Salt Lake City, parking on Main Street outside Sam Weller’s Bookstore. Down in the basement where the used books line up like dutiful sailors in the hull, I cruised through the chilly basement aisles, sniffing the familiar scent of books whose pages have been opened and exposed to all kinds of air: dry Utah valley air; fresh mountain cabin air; wet salty seaside vacation air; damp bathroom reading air. Pages read and turned then closed and set in piles for decades before they found their way to this musty old bookstore basement. I recognized the blue cover of Ueland’s paperback from the one my friend had shown me, a little azure stripe amid thick textbooks in the Writing & Writers section, just around the corner from the massive Self Help bookcases. I picked up her book and fanned the pages like a stack of playing cards, pressing my thumb a bit to stop the fanning right around where I thought Chapter 10 might be. Indeed, the title still remained. Validation, printed right there in black and white!

I read propped up on a pile of pillows in my bed that night. Discovered early on that what the author has to say is not that women should be liberated with the same bra-burning anger as they were in my youth when we started crawling out from under the dominion of unrighteous men. (Note that I say unrighteous men. Men who truly align their lives with the gospel never did dominate women.) She does, however, encourage those of us who feel a cultural pull to perform well in the home to let go of that self imposed definition of adequacy. What I got that night, and other nights when my kids were finally in bed and I had a moment to read, was more of a confirmation that what my soul wanted might actually be good for it, in regard to the battle I fight between the poet in me and the dishwasher.

Her book repeatedly makes the point that everyone is creative, that creativity is hardwired, as it were, into what it takes to be human. She opens the book by telling us: "This is what I learned: that everyone is talented, original and has something important to say." The rest of the book, in one sense, is the persuasive case for this proposition.

Ueland wrote this book in the first half of the last century, after having taught hundreds of women in evening community classes at the YMCA. She quoted Burns and Blake and other poets, who had a love for God and an understanding of the creative self. She taught me that what we perceive as Imagination is often the Holy Ghost. I had missed that lesson in Sunday School. She also suggested that in order to be truly connected and creative we must be idle. Missed that lesson in Sunday School, too. She did not mean that we should embrace laziness, by any means. We must work hard at being idle. Turn off the television and the radio. Remove ourselves from temptations to flitter our time away with fulfilling tasks of a menial nature. She challenges us to be intelligently, purposefully idle; still enough to let the Holy Creator inside find a safe way out.

I began an exercise in stillness. This is a rare and difficult thing for someone living in a culture based on accomplishment. A strange and beautiful thing. Sort of like those magic pictures, where you stare and stare at jumbles of color and dots and swirls, knowing that if you look long enough and let go of trying to see what you THINK is there, you will eventually see what is REALLY there. In 3D no less.

Yup. Creative writing is magic pictures.

I pulled out my copy of If You Want To Write last month in preparation for a songwriting series I was teaching. Laid in my bed in the darkest hours, the little crook necked lamp clamped to my bedpost pulled down above my pillow so as to not wake Dave. The dim light washed over my little blue paperback. I first re-visited the picture of Ueland printed in side the cover. She was something like 90 years old in the picture, and she reminded me of Beetlejuice. Take a look and see for yourself:

Next, I instinctively opened to chapter 10; brushed my fingers over the page for some strange reason, like a blind person reading Braille. I shut my eyes a moment, imagining myself a young mother, torn with desire and demands, aching to have a voice and finding it crouched in the tight crevices of the binding of this book.

I wonder if down the road... way, way down the road…we will be surprised to see that what we thought we were supposed to be doing was a trick of the devil made to look all clean and tidy the way God likes things. I worry about this. Too much.

What I think I know is that the only way I can comfortably live my life is to invite that Imagination creature, some call it the Holy Ghost, to visit with me on a regular basis; He needs to be able to tap on my door and not be drowned out by the wheezing of the vacuum and the drone of the dishwasher or the chattering of the TV and iPod. Not that I have to live this way all the time; but I need to – purposefully - some of the time. I want Him to be safe enough, at least, to comfortably come in and sit a while. Welcome enough to whisper and smile and have me understand. It’s my welcome that makes Him feel at home with me, even if my house looks like the consequence of laziness. This is, I tell you…hoping you can understand… an intentional mess.

WOTD 12 - MITT

March.

Wet, windy, warm, unpredictable March.

The rumblings of life churn up the earth in my flower beds. If I pause to look when I go get the mail I find new lumps of newborn green pushing up through the winter-worn dirt. Crocuses have burst through the earth in the cement flower bed in the entrance to our neighborhood. Dafodils are hinting buttercream yellow at the top of their pregnant stems. Nights are crispy cold. We still use our down comforter on the bed. Days tickle us with hints of heat. Schoolchildren zip their jackets closed on the way to the bus in the morning, then leave them lying on the grass in the schoolyard at recess, destined for the Lost and Found. My car does not know whether to surrender to the heater of air conditioner. Every day is different. Every night is cool.

March.
My boys start to sniff, like puppies who can tell the neighbor is grilling. Their heads tip up, turning to the spanse of grass in the yard. The door between the kitchen and the garage slams shut and I know just what they are doing out there. They are shuffling around, digging through the mountains of stuff, the shavings of a season gone now left in piles beside our cars. They dig past the miscellany and find the bin of baseball supplies. Pull out their mitts and unwrap the shoelaces tied round them. Hard white balls are lifted from the pockets of their mitts. They toss them into the air, awakening the sleepy young boys they keep hidden the rest of the year, the ones who had cleaned and conditioned their mitts after fall ball last year; planted a good white baseball inside each leather pocket, the stitching on the ball infused with red dirt, the off-white leather stained with the oils of green grass from the summer past. They had strategically wrapped the mitts, balls planted inside, with old shoelaces to keep the shape through the winter.

Their hands pry the faded brown leather apart, like stiff new textbooks opened on the first day of school. They tuck the balls into the pockets of their jacket and sweatshirt then stick the mitts under their armpits, softening the chilled leather with the heat of their human furnaces. When the life returns to the glove, incubated there against their chests, they slip their hands inside and lift the soft warm mitts to their noses, inhaling the fragrance of hide and earth and sweat and pleasure – long deep breaths with more inhale than exhale. Dad slaps the button on the wall by the door. The garage door slides up on its metal rollers. The boys punch their fists into their gloves, talking boy talk as they move toward the grass, their legs gradually dipping lower then lower as they walk until the walk becomes a run. There is no plan stated. They know instinctively what to do. One stops, one runs further out. One hand dips into the pocket of his golf jacket. As soon as the younger one reaches the edge of the yard the elder one twists his torso. One leg rises before the other, steps out slightly as the right arm rises from behind, lays its elbow forward then flings the ball out across the green. Out below the blue, between the earth and the sky, spinning through that familiar space toward a woven pocket of leather. My boy’s left arm rises nonchalantly before his face and with a slight twist he presents the ball from the pocket of his mitt to his throwing hand. It’s a pattern the two repeat, then repeat again, until the sun has moved ten degrees across the hemisphere, until after they have removed their jacket and sweatshirt, until after the neighbor’s yard is mowed and trimmed. Long, long silent conversations on an early spring afternoon.

Father to son, son to dad. Back and forth and back again.

Old, old friendship re-kindled every spring.

Mitt.

WOTD 11 - VOWEL

Wooden tiles snap against a wooden table, clicking like the keys on the old typewriter in Dad Connors' den on Rolling Green Drive. Thin flat squares of sanded grainless wood, probably pine, polished and stamped on one side with a letter from the alphabet. Gathered from an old Scrabble game, we keep the collection of consonants and vowels in a small canvas satchel in the flour bin drawer of Gram's old baker's cabinet. The game board is long gone. We don’t need it anyway.

Years before, Aunt Becky and Aunt Mae had sucked us into one of their games when they were here visiting, later than late at night, probably more like early in the morning when the menfolk had gone to bed and it was just us women-folk left chittin' away the hours. Mae had dumped her little sack of tiles on the dining table, scooted to the front of her dining chair, back erect, hands moving swiftly and intently as she turned the tiles upside down, blank sides up.

"OK," she said, "Draw 7 tiles."

We reached into the pixelated collection in the middle of the table, feeling for ones that had the aura of success. Once drawn, we were instructed to turn them over and begin assembling words, connected like crossword puzzles. They called it Speed Scrabble.

"When you've used all your tiles shout 'GO'", Aunt Becky said, never looking up, working the letters into words as the talked.

We scrambled to make sense of our random collections, scampering in our brains like teenagers in a library the week before term papers were due, searching for treasures of the lexicon.

"How in the heck am I supposed to make a word with no vowels?" I say, slumped in my seat, elbow plunked on the table, head leaning on my extended palm. "Would someone hurry up and say Go?"

Someone uses up their tiles, calls the word, and we all reach for two more. I draw two more consonants. Are you kidding? My tiles just pile up in front of me waiting for some a,e,i,o or u to make them complete.

Again someone gets their tiles used up and gives us permission to draw two more letters.

“Finally,” I grumble aloud, “an A!"

I never do catch up to the rest. By the end of the round I have something like 47 points. The objective is to use all your tiles and have 0 points.

Danged vowels. You never realize how important they are until you don’t have them.

Tr_ t_ c_mm_n_c_t_ w_th__t th_m!

Like most things in life, we don’t really appreciate them until they’re gone.

The converse is true as well. Sometimes we don’t realize me need something until we get it.

When Kate was in grade school she had a hard time getting up in the morning. It’s ironic that now she rises for school every day, including Saturdays, at 5 am. However, in first grade, 8 o’clock was really hard. In an attempt to help her rise through the mist of her dreams and enter the “real world” without too much agony, I used to go into her room and softly scratch her back. The sensory stimulation helped her come into consciousness.

One morning I could feel her breathing quicken, though her face was turned away from me as I tickled her back with my fingernails. She laid there a while, letting me scratch, her soft little girl skin warm and silky, stretched on her strong back and broad shoulders. Finally, she turned her head and looked up at me, maneuvering her back so I could continue as she talked.

“Funny thing about backs,” she said, her voice raspy from the silent night, “Sometimes you don’t even know it itches ‘til someone scratches it.”

Kate has always been really good at gathering the stuff of life and presenting it neatly on tiny little verbal platters. A few weeks ago she said something that has been crucial to my sense of self. We were talking about teaching, about our stewardships. She is a teacher of adolescent boys and girls. Well over a hundred of them. She teaches in a KIPP school in Houston. The philosophy of KIPP is to immerse the student in learning, among other things. So the KIPP student’s school day starts at 7 am and continues until 5 pm, 6 days a week. Indeed, Kate teaches on Saturdays, too. If you get a chance to see the movie Waiting for Superman you can get a sense for the demands of her job. But it’s a noble thing she does, and hopefully she is paid in tender wages. Still, she is teaching adolescents – 11-13 year olds. Disadvantaged 11-13 year olds. They’re a tough crowd.

I have a stewardship to a couple dozen teenage girls in our church, known as the Young Women. We meet every Sunday for spiritual lessons, and every Wednesday for an activity, and we have Girl’s Camp and Youth Conference every summer and other activities throughout the year. It’s a very demanding job, though not unfulfilling. I do love the girls! But they are teenage girls. I get worn out, exhausted with worry and effort. I wonder if the girls are getting anything at all out of the efforts I and a bunch of other YW leaders put into our callings.

A few weeks ago I spent about 10 hours preparing for an activity, which was probably a mistake on my part. But that evening as I presented what I had prepared three of the girls sat playing with each others’ hair and tickling each other’s arms, and one of them outright said to me, as I was talking, “Can we be done now?”

I had to fight back the tears as I tried to ignore her and finish up. But it hurt. More than I want it to have hurt.

Kate called that night and we were exchanging our struggles with teaching kids.

“I guess we can’t expect the people we teach to tell us if we are doing a good job or not.” Kate said, trying to find a way to comfort me as well as herself.

She was right. She often is. Most of us don’t know how we are being changed until after we are changed. We cannot appreciate a fire in the daylight.

Sometimes, in life’s big game of Speed Scrabble, we get a wad of consonants and not a single vowel. It’s not fun. It sometimes even feels unfair, until you realize it was you and no one else who drew those wooden tiles from the pile. Still it’s a downer. But we keep playing, waiting for someone to shout “Go”, hoping that one of the new tiles we draw will contain a vowel and we can get back in the game.

WOTD 10 - COUSIN

Christopher sat beside me Wednesday night at our Young Women’s activity. The girls had invited their younger siblings to come, a follow-up opportunity from our Sunday lesson on strengthening family ties. Jess brought her 9 year old brother Chris. I chatted with him while he painted a little wooden box with his 18 year old sister. We talked about random things, nothing of much consequence really. Jess mentioned that they had been looking at the video their parents had made of Christopher’s early years (as if he were not still in them).

“I never realized,” Chris said as he smoothed BYU blue paint across the top of his box, “how wrinkly little babies are. And they have this long grey wrinkly tube coming out of their bellies.” He scrunched his face. “Ewww.”

“That’s your umbilical cord Bud. We all had them. That’s where our belly buttons are now.”

I was about to explain how blood and nutrients passed from mother to baby, but thought better of it, knowing there were other kids a the table and thinking maybe we should lighten the topic.

All those cords, connecting us to our mothers, and them to their mothers, and so on. Like stitches in a seam. As independent as we like to think ourselves, no one is completely of their own making. All we have to do is poke that little divot in our tummies to be reminded of that. We carry the blood of our mothers, who carry the blood of their mothers.

Is it plasma or some other sort of blood that makes cousins…cousins? As far as I know there is not proof that a certain aspect of a person’s blood makes for a certain character trait. It could be true, I’ve just never heard about it. Nonetheless, there are definite aspects of my personality that run right along the same railroad track as my cousins. Things we do, things we say, even mannerisms that mimic each other, even if we are from different generations and sometimes even if we never really knew each other.

Since our mom was the next to youngest in her large family, and I was the tail end of her passel of kids, we really only had one chunk of cousins that were anywhere near my age. In fact I don’t think I have one cousin my same age. We didn’t know the cousins on our dad’s side, except for Sandra and Nancy. And we never saw them at all after my elementary school years since Dad left for good. But those Miskin cousins there in that little brick house in Ucon, Idaho were treasures to me. Pure treasures. First of all my Aunt Becky was pretty much the kind of person I wanted to be. She was creative and witty and spiritual and hard working and fun. She didn’t over-fuss about things, but we all had our chores to do. It made me feel like I belonged when I got my chore assignments along with the cousins when we visited in the summers.

My Miskin cousins were older than I, at least until Michelle was born and the second batch of Miskin kids came along. Not by a lot, but just old enough to make me want to be just like them. All girls: DeAnn, Gail, Jane and Mary Lou. They were bonafide teenagers, with long straight hair and make up and real bra’s and everything! They had jobs, and dates, and purses that had real money in them, too. In the afternoons, when our chores were done, we’d pump up the hi fi stereo and let Carole King thump out the opening beats of her brand new LP, Tapestry ... “I feel the earth ! Move! Under my feet. I feel the sky tum-buh-lin’ down. I feel my heart start a-trem-buh-lin’ when-eh-vuh you’re arou-ou-ou-ound.” Oh my gosh, that brings back so many brain pictures and little zingy feeling sparklers! To this day I use Carole King’s Tapestry album to motivate me to clean. (I don’t play it all that often, obviously.)

On hot summer nights we slept under the stars, on the grass in the back yard. We’d wait till the lights were out in the house and then unzip our sleeping bags, tiptoeing past Uncle Richard’s window, hunched in silence as we scurried to the road, then made our way out to Tucker’s farm for a rendezvous of the most wholesome variety. Night games of Duck Duck Goose in the freshly mown hay. Looking back I don’t really know how much of my memory bank is conjecture and how much was real. And of the real, I’m not sure how much of it actually occurred in sequence or if it got scrunched together like costumes in my imaginary family cedar chest. Doesn’t matter. What I take from it now is a tender place in my heart for those daughters of my cherished Aunt Becky; all of them grandmothers now. Cousins who lived far away became stitched to our hearts, in long untidy basting stitches, by these memory packed visits. I remember vividly pulling onto the highway, the little Idaho town of Ucon in our rear view mirror, knowing the town we called home, so far away in the east, had no such creatures anywhere near our house or apartment. I ached to turn around, to plant myself closer to the people who bore my blood, to breathe that Idaho air into my lungs in a season other than summer.

I watch my grandkids interact with each other now: see how thrilled Timo and Sophie are when they see each other. I’m conscious of how pivotal their time together can be. I take Parker and Anna Bella and tie their aprons on, lifting them onto the black counter stools, handing them rubber spatulas and measuring spoons. They each crack an egg, dropping them into the bowl before us. “Gummy, can I do the sugar?” Anna asks, “and Parker can do the flour?” We all agree. Little pre-school hands hold the beaters when we’re done, their tiny tongues wiggling in search of a smidgen of batter.

“Can we go play now?” They scurry off their perches, I untie their aprons, and they are off searching for some new adventure. They are young. Too young to have solid memories form like photographs in a pool of liquid developer. They won’t store these particulars in their minds, unless we take pictures and show them to them down the road. But they will sense, somehow, that something is different with these people. Something binding, even if personalities are not particularly aligned in the end. There was this time when blood flowed from their mom’s to them, and from Gummy to their parents, like the blood flowed from my mother to me and her mother to her.

There is no escaping it. Blessedly, wonderfully, gratefully, there is no escaping it. We are bound. We are cousins.

WOTD 9 - UNISON

Their bows rose and fell like cabaret legs, shadows stabbing against the east wall of the concert hall, thrown there by spotlights, pumping rhythmically like the massive arms of oil wells lined up on the horizon in the crimson light of the setting sun on a midsummer Kansas night. Music flowed from their instruments, trilling harmoniously, fluttering and hovering aural hummingbirds.

The tones intertwined like ribbons on a maypole; but the violin bows rose and fell in unison to a rhythm unaffected by the music. I don't know the violin, so I can't say why it happens like that; don't know if there are markings on the paper sitting flat and lifeless against cold black music stands, or if the conductor has anything to do with it; or if each musician just looks out of the corners of their eyes at the concertmaster, following her lead, making the motion of their bows match hers. I am moved, always, by the way a section of strings moves in unison, often to the point of distraction, the image overpowering the music itself.

I am not a trained musician; not trained in any classical sense -- Don't read music, though my primitive understanding of some of the basics helps me hobble along with some of the company I keep. My cryptic understandings may have come down with me those years ago when I first inhaled mortality there in Grandma Eaton's Home for Birthing Mothers. I wonder sometimes if there are more complex and refined compositions stuck in the deeper folds of my brain and gut, tucked in tight, unable to get out because I know so little. Sadly, I am left to feel the music and not understand why I am feeling what I feel, like so many other commoners. Those infant emotions are peaked when a piece of music, having moved through beautiful harmony and counterpoint, the complexity touching so many different places, comes together in powerful unison. A whisper of a single note, rising in a fluttering staccato and diving like a melodic flock of sparrows is a stunning contrast from broad orchestration. Unison can be so powerful.

The thing about unison is that it can never happen alone. Maybe that is part of the power of it. Solo is so overrated. We pay so much attention to the solo, and the soloist, that we tend to weaken some solo performances just by our over-attention to it. Such distorted adoration makes for egos like Charlie Sheen and Lindsay Lohan, so much in the entertainment news these days. It's not that I am saying there is no place for the individual voice sounding its own unique melody. We must all account for our lives in one final solo appearance. But to rise or fall in unison requires there to be more than one participant, and that is beautiful to me.

The other thing about unison is that it requires focus. Focus on something, of some sort: either a note, or a word, or phrase, or beat, or motion. The focus must be mutually understood, without ego interfering. Like the tines in a loom, opening and closing uniformly, weaving an emotional fabric much stronger than any single thread.

Sunday I taught my 16-18 year old sisters-in-the-gospel a lesson about creating unity in the family. I handed each of them a string, about 8 inches long.

"Break this in half," I said. "However you can, without cutting it."

I watched as they wrapped each end around their fingers, tugging and pulling, to no avail.

Then, one by one, I watched them unravel their pieces of string, dividing the strands. The string was made of 8 or 10 strands twisted together. Once separated, they were easy to break.

Hopefully the girls understood the point of that exercise.

When I think of my own family as if it were a suite of some orchestral form, there is such diverse music. Indeed, like the variety inherent in symphonic movements, we ebb and flow, rising and falling from light lilting tunes in major keys, to heavy sorrowful portions steeped in minor tones. We harmonize fairly well with each other, taking turns with leading lines, and backing each other up when it's not our moment to lead out. But there have been times when there is a pause, when our lives converge on a cause, and we lift our voices in unison.

Nearly three years ago Libby and I sat in the Emergency Room at LDS Hospital, our mom on a table before us, curled in a heap of pain. We leaned into her, Libby's hand on her back, my hand in her hand. Doctors and nurses and technicians took turns entering the room. Finally, the surgeon on call entered and shut the door behind him. He lowered his clipboard, pressed on mom’s belly, asked her some questions, and then looked straight at my sister and me. Our eyes opened wide with our rising eyebrows, looking hopefully into his.

"You understand, don't you, that your mother is not likely to make it through this surgery."

We nodded our heads. But truth is we did not understand. It had not entered our minds as a possibility. Libby’s shaking hand took his pen and signed some papers, then he left, the heavy hospital door compressing the air behind him, inching the light of the hallway out of our space. Lib and I looked into each others' faces, speechless, then embraced, trembling. Then almost on cue, in unison, we let go; put our shoulders back and wiped our tears. Instinctively we stepped in toward our mom, reached over her, hand in hand, and prayed. I have this sense that faith is believing in our innermost parts that something is necessary, like it is meant to happen with no hint of doubt. It is something more than a sincere wish. This was given to us, and we took it -- this solid belief. We took it gratefully.

We prayed with faith, feeling, quite sincerely, that this was not going to be her time, in spite of the doctor’s words. Our three sisters in California drove through the night, while she was in surgery. Our brothers drove from Idaho and Midway. Our pseudo siblings sat with us there in the waiting room, trying to divert our attention with magazines and news reports; pulling our consciences back to the position of prayer. Finally, around sunup, the surgeon entered the room, stopping our conversations, stopping our motion, stopping our hearts.

He shook his head, almost in disbelief.

"She must be some sort of stubborn lady. She made it through. There was a perforation in her duodenum, which we repaired. This doesn't mean she is out of the water, but by all estimates she should never have made it this far."

From then on we sang in unison. Our bows rose and fell together, even if the music that rose the following week from her hospital room was full of different chords and gospel choir like harmonies, our love and faith and hope and prayers rose in unison, up through the hospital room ceiling, clear past the rooms above us, clear up to the heavens.

We have relaxed into harmony once again.

I imagine the choir of angels on that holy night two millennia ago. I imagine them hovering over that hillside with shepherds, a celestial orchestra straddling them, the flowy white arms of their director keeping time, and endless stars twinkling to the rhythm. I imagine divine arrangements, astounding and intricate melodic swirls and dips, fully padded chords in voice and string and the finest woods and silver and gold brass. I hear the music in my head, swelling with full SATB harmony, each voice singing his own unique part until the final fortissimo crescendo; climaxing in a full bodied single note, where all voices and all instruments combine in unison; one pure, divine, single note, sung to one glorious word:
Jesus.

WOTD 8 - PROSTITUTE

Annie was a prostitute when she was 17. Now she’s pregnant.

I am proud of Annie.

Context.

Context changes and clarifies and relieves us of all sorts of anxiety.

Annie was indeed a prostitute when she was a senior in high school. I even spent a good two days searching out a black corset for her to look her best as a prostitute. Black lace with satin ribbing, purchased discreetly at a thrift store in Salt Lake City. She looked great!

Dave and I spent every night for over a week watching her strut her stuff while she sang:

Do you hear the people sing

Lost in the valley of the night?

It is the music of a people

Who are climbing to the light.

For the wretched of the earth

There is a flame that never dies.

Even the darkest night will end

And the sun will rise.

She joined the chorus of other prostitutes onstage, singing with Jean ValJean, Cosette, Eponine, Marius and Javert in Viewmont High’s fabulous musical feast Les Miserables. We laughed and wept nightly with the rest of the audience, most often from the back of the packed auditorium, slipping out before intermission to man the concessions tables. She was a beautiful, angelic prostitute, the colored lights hidden in the rafters above the stage casting light and shadow on her purposely frizzed hair and shapely form. Knowing she was so far from the actuality of her part made it beautiful to see her, to sense her sweet vibrato now and then among the voices she sang with. It was strangely alright with us that she could pretend for two hours a night to be …seriously… a prostitute? She was a good pretender. Thank the Lord she was a pretender.

Annie fell in love with Jordon that year. She missed her senior prom to help serve at his sister’s wedding reception. After Jordon returned from his mission to Brasil she married him. Dressed stunningly in her wedding gown, laced in the back just like that black corset, only all the way down her back to a lovely train that followed her like the princess she is in real-life, flowing like liquid behind her as she walked out of the temple and into the crowd of people who adore her, her elegant arm looped into the arm of the man who loved her enough to wait. The lights above her, far from artificial, came from heaven. She was radiant.

Now Annie and Jordon are nesting, fluffing their lives and preparing their home for the arrival of a new little one. Annie is pregnant. She is beautiful, blooming and full of laughter and happiness. She is bursting with divine potential. We can hardly wait!

Context. All things in their proper place. It feels perfectly right. Annie was a prostitute. And now she is pregnant.

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.