15. CACTUS

The dust settled onto the big silver bumper of our winged station wagon, a sandy powdered dust made from the interchange between thick black rubber tires and desert sand, mixed with dry Idaho farm soil. This is the territory where Indians once roamed and where Russet potatoes grow best. Out on the highway, running through the center of town, where roads were paved, there was a big sign shouting “WELCOME TO BLACKFOOT – FREE TATERS FOR OUT OF STATERS” If you stopped at the Potato Museum Expo, I understand you got a free potato, though we never stopped.  No one would consider us out-of-staters anyway, cuz our mom was one of the Parrish sisters who grew up in Blackfoot.

The Parrish Sisters early 1940's
Back: Edna, Ruby, Ruth, Mary
Front: Mae, Rebecca, Afton

Besides there were always plenty of spuds in every house in Blackfoot, Idaho. After a couple thousand miles of non-air-conditioned driving, eight people smashed into that hot, heavy moving machine, we finally pulled up to the front of Aunt Ruth’s little white farm house on the outskirts of town. After lunch, while the grown-ups sat in deep conversation at the kitchen table, we kids stretched our bones and ran out into the sunshine: out under the laundry flapping in the Idaho wind, into the coolness of the old barn, where we braided rope like it was Rapunzel’s hair, dangling it from the loft. George headed immediately into the dunes that rippled across the foothills, in search of Indian treasure, flint chipping stones and ancient arrowheads. There was a remarkable treasure trove out there. It must have been some battle ground, or village place many generations back, before white men came in and built their permanent structures. George has quite a collection of arrowheads from right there by Aunt Ruth and Uncle Wayne’s farm, some of them dated back thousands of years. When we got bored in the barn, and had pretended to drive the old shell of a truck sitting like a skeleton out there in the barnyard, we made our way to the sand dunes to search with George.
Libby had left her shoes on the back porch. The warm soft sand felt good on the feet. She searched for glints of light, little black evidences of buried arrowheads, and her focus as she walked drew her attention away from the cactus that hid beneath the drifted sand, it’s piny rays almost invisible as it sat in wait. She planted her five-year-old foot right on top that old dry cactus. It responded like a porcupine, and poor Lib squealed in horror, falling to her little square knees. Her hand caught another cactus as it came down. I ran to her, my feet still protected by my tenni-runners, feeling like I was flailing in slow motion as my feet sank into the sand.

If Libby or Ann Marie were in trouble I felt like it was me experiencing it myself. At that moment I thought I was stuck in quicksand trying to get to her as she screamed in pain. George and Ann Marie got there before I could. Libby tried, only once, to step down on her foot, but the stepping pressed the cactus spikes deeper into her flesh. George and Ann Marie planted themselves on either side of our little sister, pulling her arms over their shoulders. Lib hobbled on her one good foot, tears streaking her dusty face. Really, she sort of floated between them as we headed back to Aunt Ruth’s, me running ahead frantically to forewarn the adults that there was incoming wounded. Libby sat on a chair in Aunt Ruth’s kitchen with a washcloth in her mouth to muffle her pain as Mom sat before her, her youngest daughter’s foot in her lap and a pair of Revlon half jaw tweezers in her hand.

It felt like hours. I sat vigil as they worked, sorrowing for my best friend, imagining those evil little needles in my own foot, still tender from a summer of shoes worn on Pennsylvania sidewalks. It takes a good couple weeks in Idaho to get one’s feet used to going barefoot. By then the skin is tougher, almost like a Bannock Shoshone tribesman’s. Those kind of feet can resist an old cactus. But hers were young and innocent and pale in this most tender part of summer vacation. It would be days before she could jump rope or play hop scotch or walk barefoot over to Jack and Hannah’s to spend a nickel on penny candy.

Poor Libby always did have bad luck with her feet. I think she has shorter toes than God originally intended for her because she always stubbed them when we walked up Carole Drive in Pleasant Hills. There’s a lot of Libby DNA embedded in the asphalt there. And on the night of Jr Prom she stepped on a needle that got lost in her foot. She almost convinced herself she had imagined it, until two years later when a doctor pulled half a broken needle out of her foot a full three inches from where it had gone in.

A few weeks ago our Aunt Becky and cousins Gina and Gail stopped for a visit on their way from Idaho to Salt Lake City. We got to talking about our toes. We compared our old Parrish feet, gathering them in a circle and comparing them, the way average women show each other their newly painted acrylic gel nails. There, to our quirky delight, was unaltered God-given proof we are related. We all carry some wacky gene that gives us each, to some degree or another, webbed toes. Like human ducks.

Yup, we’re cool like that.

Those sandy dunes are covered over now, I believe, out there behind Aunt Ruth’s place. There are houses with cool green grass covering imported topsoil. But we know, we who are of the older generation; we with crusty old feet and webbed toes…we know that down there, deep under those pristine green lawns, there is proof of ages past, when leather skinned feet padded across desert places, and little white girls stepped, once upon a long time ago, on thirsty little cactus buried in the sand.

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.