12. FIND

I know it’s here somewhere, that box of Pottery Barn lanterns, the ones with the pretty silver tops and the cloth accordion covers that I tea stained for Annie’s wedding. They’re usually in that spot in the closet in the garage. If they’re not there then they were accidentally left in the garage itself. I look, shifting a wooden coat rack and stack of Christmas lights and an antique grape gatherer’s basket in the search of the closet. No luck. I cannot find them. I sift through the pile that has taken the spot where Kate’s car used to park in the garage; moving aside the pile of Saints on the Seas costumes and banners, the pillow Anna and I sewed at the cottage last summer, a plastic pink flamingo and the jawbone of an ass. Not there either. I head to the basement, to the back room behind the recording studio that turned into another storage room, back where the 200 dinner plates, ten red Pottery Barn umbrellas, 400 cloth napkins, 150 glass goblets, 6 water dispensers, 50 feet of red carpet and thousands of other miscellanea are piled on top of each other. Nada.

I wrack my brain trying to remember who borrowed them last. All I get is that demonic voice that creeps up through my Achilles tendon and screeches obscenities at me. I end up telling my niece, who needs them for a wedding tomorrow, that I can’t find them anywhere. She drives off with whatever else I’ve dug up in the jumble that might work instead, and I turn to cleaning up the mess I’ve made in the kitchen, and the garage, and the locker room and the basement in the search. As I bang around in the kitchen Dave is reading sentencing reports for work tomorrow and asks from his perch at the kitchen table, how I am doing… sweetly asks, I might add, even though he’s dealt with crime and divorce and other ugliness from the bench of justice all day, and now he’s reading other cases about people who are drowning in mistakes. He is pleasant and gentle and kind to me, and I respond, “I’m feeling a Grump at the moment, thank you!” He tells me he’s sorry, and he truly is. He’s not just saying that. As I clang dishes around, throwing them into the dishwasher and over-scrubbing the metal pot with a scraping stainless steel sponge, I analyze myself. This is the luxury, I think to myself, of not having children pulling at me constantly. This is the “blessing” of being a part of the AARP generation. I can actually have self-actualizing thoughts and not have to lash out at children. I am so grateful they are not under my angry flapping wing at the moment!

I realize, under the scent of Clorox cleanup mixed with overtones of marinara sauce, that I am grumpy because I live in a MESS!

I’m really pretty good at denial. I’ve kind of perfected it after all these years. I’ve taught myself to overlook certain things because I have to do other things that matter more. I am almost daily cooking for someone other than us. And I am almost daily singing of playing for someone other than us. Or writing or editing for someone other than me. And I still, even in the grumps, think of these as first priority things and I do not feel bad about the fact that I am not doing other things that normal people do because I choose to do these other things instead. I can even brush my teeth and not feel rotten about the mess on my bathroom counter, and serve dinner to twenty people when my kitchen floor hasn’t been mopped in three weeks, and I let kids come into the mess of my garage to get a pop from the pop shoppe.

It’s when I have to dig through stuff to find something that it gets to me. I mean REALLY gets to me. Like something happens when I am looking for something I KNOW should be somewhere that the reality of my disastrous disorganization comes into the light and just about does me in. And because I have sifted through piles and piles in a variety of rooms in this large abode of ours, I end up feeling massively overwhelmed, because I cannot, even though I have a really strong imagination, picture myself ever being able to find my way out of this. That demon that slithers up my leg tells me it’s my own *&%$# fault! Curses!

It’s ironic that I cannot find something because of all my “find’s”. Treasures I come upon that are rare and potentially precious. (emphasis on potentially). When it’s time for someone to come up with some sort of something, and they need ideas and supplies, they know who to call. This is my joy and my sorrow. Such a joy when somebody needs a life size cut-out pf Chris LeDoux, or a bolt of lace, or a half gallon of parade-float quality glitter, instruments for a spontaneous children’s marching band, or a bunch of pioneer games and costumes and a cardboard handcart, or a dozen ukuleles and camp song booklets to go with them. Such a sorrow when you just need that stupid box of wedding lanterns, and you’re pretty sure you’ll find them day after tomorrow when you go down to get a jar of bottled raspberries. If I were a pessimist I would entertain the possibility of repeating the phrase “I hate my life.”

But, even though I am currently trying to push away the grumps, I do not hate my life.

I still, on a deeper level than my need to have sterile order in my life, think that it’s funny to have pink flamingos in the planter in my front yard. It makes me giggle. And someday someone is going to need the death mask replicas of Joseph and Hyrum that are out in the garage, and the jawbone of an ass, which may not actually be of an ass but it looks like it to me, as visual aids in their Sunday school lessons. Where else are they going to find them?

As for the negative emotional consequences of my DDD (dysfunctional-disorder disorder), it’s not something that a bowl of popcorn, a handful of Lindor Lindt truffles, a root-beer Popsicle and an episode of NCIS won’t fix.

11. ALBUM

When you have something to say, and that something takes the form of art, then the part of our humanness that desires order will plant a seed. That seed grows into a thought, which becomes a plan, and pretty soon we are taking steps toward creating some sort of artistic collection. Books, plays, movies, dances, displays, exhibits and concerts – these are all proof that our left brains are married to our right brains. For singer-songwriters, that seed sometimes sprouts into musical projects like concerts, recitals or albums. I’ve done all of them. They are all invigorating and taxing for creative sorts like me. Ideas, from my personal perspective, are never a problem. Execution, on the other hand….

I recorded two “albums” before I was able to admit that I was really ready to record AN ALBUM. I call them learning curve projects, and their existence is part of my personal history and has merit. But I wouldn’t say I’m thrilled with them. Looking back, though, I was satisfied at the moment of creation, but the satisfaction was short lived. So when I had saved up enough money and emotion to attempt my first “real” project, I went forward with a little trepidation, though that fear was outweighed by excitement and anticipation. I do not recall harboring thoughts that anything I recorded might be played on a grand scale, like the radio, for instance. I’ve always wanted to be a good songwriter more than I wanted to be a good performer. So allowing myself to think of my recordings as demo’s was a nice way out, a sort of permission slip to be average as a singer because I didn’t intend for the recording itself to get more attention than the song. Nonetheless, when one artist gathers her songs in one place, and sorts and arranges them, there is no denying that she wants them to be palatable.  I watched my sister, for instance, arranging cheese and fruits on a platter the other day, for a dinner gathering, and I pondered the eternal tendency to make beauty in everything we do. My friend Carla will spend hours and hours designing and manufacturing a hand-made card. She has such a strong mechanism for creating beauty that it is almost paralyzing. She has only so much energy to create her beauty, and it is never enough. She was probably one of those Creation Angels who was given full access to God’s palette in the Way-Back of our existence. Her soul is so used to being able to create beauty that it hurts to be stuck in her body. And so she fights the Devil himself on a daily basis to simply survive. But her collection of songs is divine. I mean Divine, with a capital D, and I wish the Devil would get out of her way!

When I completed that first self-produced album project, which I duplicated and sold, I got a call from my friend Doug, who is a fabulous singer-songwriter, one of the best I know. Doug feels like a brother to me. He complimented me on my album, then asked how I felt about it.

“Man, Doug. It’s strange. I spent so much of myself on this project. All that time and money and family sacrifice, and I listen to it and think I should have done this differently, or that differently. That is something I had not anticipated.”

Doug said, “Well, I’ve always thought you need to look at a music album like a photo album. It’s a snapshot of where you were at that moment in your life. You’d go crazy trying to get anything perfect. It is what it is, and it has merit. Most living things change with time. Songs are living things, and should be allowed to grow. But if we don’t get them down, then there will come a point where no one knows they existed, and wouldn’t that be a shame.”

Doug is the most warm-hearted, gentle no-nonsense kind of guy. One of those men I can hug with full abandon and know he loves me with genuine truth and no guile. He has a resonant, beautiful voice, which is perfectly suited to his guitars. I hear his voice repeatedly in my head, saying those words to me. I can even see myself hearing them for the first time on the phone. I was sitting on the third step from the bottom of our basement stairs in the old house. His wisdom goes beyond music albums. It reaches past art, into the eternities. What we create, for good or for bad, is just a snapshot of where we were at the time. We will be different tomorrow, for sure. What we assemble in our various “albums” of experience is not a full representation of the whole of us. For that, we will need to wait a few thousand eternities.

Still, I wish Carla would let those songs of hers find themselves in some sort of album; some sort of beautifully, wonderfully imperfect album.

10. DEATH

I’m really looking forward to the day death dies. 

I've taught myself to think of things from distant perspectives. This is not difficult for a Believer. 

At some point, in the church lessons of my youth, someone gave us a handout or a bookmark that said:

“Will this matter in a thousand years?” 

It really struck me at the time, and it has obviously stuck with me. Even now, at this very moment, I am sitting at my laptop doing my word of the day/Lent writing while floating in a sea of playful destruction; toys and books scattered all around the family room, a bowl of peanut butter with half gnawed celery stalks sticking out of it, a matchbox tractor peeking out of a toddler size sock and a broken Jack-in-the-box clown staring at me.

I seriously said to my achy head, spent from a day full of grandkids (their mom was working a 12 hour shift at Farmington Urgent Care Clinic) “Will these toys and such, being strewn about, matter in a thousand years?" And then I chuckled without chuckling, because I’m too tired to laugh…”Heck, it won’t matter tomorrow, even.” And so I sit in a colorful pool of grandparenthood. 

I get to thinking about a thousand years from now and I wonder if, by then, we will finally have been through the much anticipated, mysteriously unpredictable but threateningly close Second Coming. 

Then I get to thinking about the fact that I have sung at an average of three funerals a month in the last while. It’s been sort of insane. I’m a real believer in being present at these pivotal times in life. Funerals pretty much trump all other activities for me. I finally had to change the payment method for my daytime guitar students because I had to cancel so many times for funerals. I am blessed to be able to use my voice to comfort, and not have my own emotions overtake me. I acknowledge this as a gift and I do not take it lightly. I don’t mind the time, and travel, and rescheduling that funerals require, but the picking away at the heart that repeated loss brings is disconcerting. And exhausting. And frankly, is hurts.

So I, for one, will be celebrating in a major way, however spirits get to celebrate, when we as a massive family of God finally get to be done with death. Can you even imagine?

Years ago, when it was possible for people to buy up to four city cemetery plots per household, our family purchased 20 plots in the Farmington City Cemetery. I was really surprised how comforting it felt to know where we were going to end up, unless we were lost at sea or caught in some other catastrophic demise. Libby and I even tried-out our spots once, laying our bodies on the warm summer grass. Our friend Cindy Gardner was with us, and she tried out hers up above us. Our neighbors the Baileys have plots next to the Gardners. The Hefners are just west of us, and the Barlows and Palmers up east of us. Each of those families, come to think of it, has already planted one of their treasures in one of their plots. Ah, me.

Death, from the underbelly, is such a mysterious unknown. Really, so much guesswork for us that remain. Faith is comforting. But faith, by definition, is not knowledge. We have somehow trained ourselves as humans to trust knowledge more than we do faith, which from the perspective of a thousand years from now, will seem pretty juvenile I think. But even that is a guess.

All I’m saying, because my head hurts and I don’t want to think that deep tonight, is that one day we will all be dead. And when we are all dead, and God says, “OK Folks, time for the next phase.” Then we will get to have bodies that do not get strep A or lung cancer or congestive heart failure and there won’t be car accidents or planes flying into buildings and there won’t be death.

On the other hand, I also have this strange thought that repeatedly visits me, where we are all sitting around in heaven and someone starts a conversation like this: 

“Well, and how did you die?” 

Then we will all get to tell our stories, exciting or boring as they may be, and the rest of us will shake our heads, or put our arms around each other, or gasp with shock and awe or even laugh at what adventures we had in our bodies, with their varied entrances and exits.  

On days when the evening news sputters the tragic information of massive killings or tsunami-like tragedies, I imagine the wafting of spirits floating upward. I picture the gates being flung open and hosts of loved ones running out to meet the crowd - the jubilation on the other side creating a perfect counterbalance for the sorrow that is here.