14. GRIP

Each week I teach guitar to roughly 50 individuals between the ages of 10 and 60. For many of them this is a new adventure, and after a few weeks I can really tell who is playing regularly and who is winging it once a week in my presence. I know they are playing because their fingers always hurt. I see them occasionally take their left hands from the neck of their instruments and shake them out, like they are trying to flick away the tension. They ask me when the pain will dissipate.

The very first lesson I teach all my students is to understand their instrument, how to tune it, and how to use it properly and respectfully. Basically, we use our left hands to grip the neck of the guitar and press those thin strings against the fretboard with our fingertips, shortening the length of the string, which creates certain notes when we pluck or strum. I won’t go much deeper into the physics of it, except to say that it is the grip on this instrument that makes the music.

“First, make sure your instrument has integrity, that it is made correctly to do what it’s supposed to do.
Second, make sure the strings are in tune.
Third, follow the chord pattern with your fingertips, do you have your fingers on the right string and the right fret?
Now PUSH! Your hand is a clamp. Act like you mean it! (It’s going to hurt.)
Play each individual string in your chord, and if the note is dull, or buzzes, or sounds like the wrong note, check your finger positioning then check your grip. Push harder, and cleaner, and stay away from strings you are not supposed to be hitting.”
 

For over ten years I have taught this on a weekly basis.

It was true ten years ago, and it remains true today.

I broke my left arm when I was seven. And, when I was nine. And again, when I was ten. To this day my left wrist is thinner than my right, because it spent so much time in a cast. (I should have casted my waist.) Because my broken elbow was set wrong as a seven-year-old, I have a distorted joint through which ligaments must pass. Through the years, cartilage has broken off now and then, freezing up my arm. My left hand, because of the distorted growth, is naturally weakened. One doctor told me that I should not even be able to use that arm, according to my x-ray. But I play guitar nearly every day. Truth is, I think I can use that arm because I play guitar nearly every day. The daily exercise of gripping the neck of my instrument, and sustaining that grip, has strengthened me where I had not supposed I would need strength.

That same girl who broke her arm three times tries other things, and ends up broken. I am as human as they come. I get in trouble when I forget that. I mix things up in my head and end up in trouble. I ponder too deeply on some matters, and forget to consider other more important things, so that portions of my spirit have grown distorted, like my elbow, though no one can tell cuz they can’t see under my skin. Even I can’t see under my skin, and it took a physician to help me understand myself.

I confuse faith and knowledge, for instance. I suppose that faith should be as absolute as knowledge, and right now, for me it isn’t. Actually, if I understand it correctly, faith is not to have a sure knowledge of something. Otherwise it would be… well, knowledge. But for a Mormon girl who grew up listening to people claiming from the pulpit that they “know this church is true”, there is naturally a bit of confusion on the matter. If I want to belong, then I need to know. But the truth is, we are not supposed to know. We are supposed to have faith, to believe in something which is unseen, but which is true. That part- “which is true” - is really important.

I can say, for instance, that I have faith that I am supposed to be a goat. I can act like a goat, eat like a goat, speak like a goat, even wear goat skins. But because it is not true, it’s just not gonna fly.

ALMA 32:21 And now as I said concerning faith—faith is not to have a perfect knowledge of things; therefore if ye have faith ye hope for things which are not seen, which are true.

I am thinking lately that I’ve not given enough emotional weight to the potential of human beings to receive revelation for themselves. I mean, the truth is that God Himself assigned one of the three most important leaders of the eternities, a member of the Godhead, to work with each one of us on a daily basis. Like our own personal spiritual tutor, available 24/7 if we want. That is serious stuff!

He’s the keeper of my Faith-O-Meter, the one who knows all and can tell all, on some level, if it is important for me to know. Only problem is, I think it’s important for me to know certain things, and He thinks maybe it’s not time for me to know certain things. I forget to trust that He knows the me that is a million years older than I am now. I don’t remember that “me”. I get impatient, and want to know right this very minute why it is that some people have sexual desires for their own gender, why it is that people think it is righteous to kill other people in the name of God, why some spirits are born to bodies that are profoundly impaired, why some spirits come to bodies in war torn Syria, and others are born to starving mothers in hot desert places, and others are born to thick warm loving arms in the land of the free and the home of the brave. I can get so confused by all of this that I forget to hold my grip, and my hands become weak, and I am prone to let go, instead of asking for help holding on.

Jesus went along being quiet when he knew, deep in his perfect heart, that he held the whole truth and nothing but the truth. That must have driven him crazy, knowing so much and having to hold it in. So, when it finally came time to let the truth out, it must have been a great joy and sorrow. The release of that truth would lead to his own death.

It started with his calling himself the bread of life. Feeble minds, like mine, interpreted that to mean crazy stuff, thinking that he was cannibalistic. People took things rather literally in those days. Disciples, aka. his followers, started pulling away; loosening their grip, and eventually leaving him. Christ turned to his apostles and said:

“Will ye also leave me?”

Peter responded:

“To whom would we go?”

This new stuff, this more difficult “doctrine” that was coming out, was hard. No wonder former believers left. But when one has given his heart to something, it is not easily removed. So it was with the apostles, who had covenanted to remain with Jesus.

I too, covenanted to remain. And deep down, where the basics of my being lie, I must ask deeper questions that require me to dig deeper than my knee jerk responses want me to go. I mean, really, I understand people leaving the church because they simply cannot reconcile the doctrine of love with the doctrine of procreation and the doctrine that disallows same sex marriage. It is so confusing, and it makes my head hurt, and more so, it makes my heart hurt.

I keep returning to Love. And there I keep my heart, even when my head is swirling.

I am in the boat with Jesus, and there is surely a storm brewing all around us. I say to the others; “Someone go wake Jesus, cuz we’re going to sink!” I think to myself “I wonder if it’s better to jump ship now, before the storm gets any bigger?” And yet, something in me, probably that guy assigned to help me 24/7, whispers, “Find the mast and hold your grip. He is with us, and we will not sink. But hold on, because it’s going to be a rocky ride.”

Sometimes my spirit hurts from the gripping, like the fingers of my beginner guitar students. I tell them that it will get better. Don't give up! Be sure your instrument has integrity, that it is true and has good straight and trustworthy neck. Be sure it is in tune. Follow the patterns designed to create good chords. Lay your hands in the right place and then clamp down like your life depends on it! Hold your grip, then go ahead and pull those strings. That’s where the music is hidden. And it’s glorious!

13. TEMPERATURE

I was my mother’s sixth child. The oldest, my sister Sherry, tells me she had a different mother than I had. There is some truth in that. By the time I came to her, life had knocked her around a bit, and she had kicked life around a little bit, too. She was in her mid-thirties when she incubated us three little girls, one right after the other, and by then she had learned stuff. 

You can’t not learn. 

She left the familiar potato fields of south eastern Idaho and ended up in the underbelly of Pittsburgh’s strip-mined suburbs where the evening sky glowed with the molten residue of cooked coal dumped out on the horizon in a mound we called Mount Ugly. The air stunk of steel mill belches, trapped down at the surface of the earth by Pennsylvania humidity, creating what we called smog. Sometimes the smog was so thick you could not see to drive and if you let yourself think about it you might suffocate under the denseness of it. That was back in the old days, before they closed down the steel mills and cleaned up downtown. Now the three rivers converge in a sparkling renaissance city.

Back then, when I was small and my world went no further than the school yard, I became aware of the beauty of my mother’s hands. One day I watched her sketching a portrait for an art class she was taking at Carnegie Museum. She pushed and pulled a charcoal pencil against the paper in a Bristol board sketch pad. The pencil hummed, a low resonant hum as the lead was drawn like a bow across the textured paper, sometimes in slow steady measures and other times in short staccato strokes. I remember vividly noting one blue vein that flowed across her forehand and up through her long slender finger. The tips of her fingers tapered gracefully. I recall the sound of her filing her nails with her long pointy tipped metal fingernail file. I was mesmerized by her hands.

There was wisdom in my mother’s hands, by the time I got her for my mother. Wisdom and magic, and a righteous blend of faith and voo-doo.

Something in my mother’s hands made her able to read my temperature without a thermometer. She would lay the back of her fingers against my forehead, stare into space for a minute as they rested there, and then tell me whether or not I was sick. Always, there was a tenderness when she checked my temperature. I’m not sure we even had a thermometer. Just mom’s hand. I could have monthly cramps, or an ingrown toenail, and she could press her fingers against my forehead and around to my lower cheeks and the back of my neck, and by the time she was done checking the “temperature” I swear I felt better.

I understand it now. It was something I think her spirit knew, some ancient knowledge from eons ago, that when we touch each other there is an energy exchange. When that touch is motivated by the concern of one human for another, the energy exchange is especially powerful and very sweet. I remember lying on my lumpy old twin mattress on the top bunk at BYU my freshman year of college. I was sick with something, which may have been altitude or exhaustion or just a common cold, but was more likely homesickness. I lay there curled into myself, tears dampening my pillowcase, yearning for the touch of my mother’s hand. It was all I wanted, and probably all I needed to feel peace. Kind of like when I came home from kindergarten and called her name. As long as I could hear her voice, I was OK.

My mother’s hands are cold and still now, down there in the ground under that hovering sycamore tree. I yearn to feel their softness on my forehead. I ache to see them dabbing a paper towel into hot melted cheddar, collecting excess fat as she made a batch of crispy cheese. I get a giggle-chill thinking about her fingers curled around her frosty nose of cold winter nights.

I imagine her spirit, once in a while, diverting her attention from her heavenly tasks long enough to peek down at me. She raises her invisible hand to the square, then lets it fall down through the proverbial clouds; lets it sweep across my brow. Just checking in, taking my spiritual, emotional and physical temperature; the temperature of my soul. If I make myself be still and think about it, I can feel her goodness touch me. Then, always, I feel peace.

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.