3-25-19 BREAK

Break. The word itself is perfectly suited for life with kids as they fit in a society of school and after-school lessons. It’s says, if it could talk: If life goes on like this very much longer I am going to BREAK!” And then there’s a break. Spring Break.

When I was Primary chorister I could never start teaching a new song at one of the school breaks, because there would be so few kids in Primary. I kind of did a secret cheer for the kids who remained on home base for Spring Break. 

Frankly, for me as a parent, the most wonderful part of Spring Break was the lack of homework. Homework was the bane of my parental existence during the school year. Just give my kids a break from getting up early and staying up late doing homework and my life is changed for the better!

I’ve noticed lately that Spring Break has become kind of weird in that people think something big has to happen over Spring Break or it won’t feel like a break. If we don’t do something big we risk becoming members of the family-fail club. 

Why can’t spring break just plain be a break from school? It’s taking on the personality of “holiday” where there are certain expectations that are, quite frankly, artificial. Once you get started taking a vacation every Spring and Fall Break there is a painful let down if you don’t go somewhere. It’s crazy!

Instead, why can’t we make a simple little plan on a couple of those days, something like, “OK kids, we are going to sleep in until 10 am, then we will make real pancakes on the griddle with hot butter and syrup. We gather in the family room for the reading of one book or chapter of a book. Next, we will set a timer and we will gather up all our winter shoes and have a shoe sorting, separating the winter from summer stuff, and then we will go to the park and we are going to make a short movie on mom’s phone. Then it’s little Caesar's pizza on a park bench. Then we are going to have a little down time and maybe a nap and then two of you kids are going to make dinner, and mom and dad are going to do the dishes and then, ta-da, we are going to watch the movie we made at the park, followed by another movie of one of our kid’s choosing. Why not that? That takes as much planning, is as much of a break, and costs a whole lot less than a trip to the Grand Canyon.

Here, therefore, is a worksheet I prepared for a stay at home Spring Break for a family with kids in school. 

Day 1

Sleep in until it is uncomfortable to try to sleep any more. Let’s say 10 am.

The rest of the day needs to be flexible and not subject to times, unless we use a timer to make a hard task seem easier by making it a game against the clock.

BRUNCH:

Menu by:______________

Prepared by:_____________

Book, chosen by:____________________

Timed task:_________________________

Fun outdoor Activity:____________________________

Recorded by:________________________

DOWN TIME until:____________________

Dinner menu chosen by:_________________

Prepared by:__________________________

Movie:________________________________

Or bowling, or roller skating, or hike

If you let a kid choose the activity each day, and another one select the menu, and another film the activity, and another choose the movie, then everyone owns the day.

I would suggest you do this one day of Spring Break, and see how it goes. You can choose to do it another day, or you can veg out and do nothing, which is another definition of “break”. And here's another idea, grandparents can be a part of Spring Break too! (Use us!)

Break means change of state, and it doesn’t require us to go very far.

All this being said, if you just plain need a break from home, then by all means, go for it!

3-23-19 CARRIER

We are carriers of more than biology.

When two people decide to dive into parenthood there is a new energy that sifts down to earth from heaven, and it meets, as it approaches the people planted here, a similar energy rising up from hell. The process of raising children is like walking through dark, dank, musty caverns with weepy walls and while you are walking these unbelievably beautiful little explosions of light and sweet fragrance pop all around you. They light the way into the next dark chamber. And so it goes until suddenly you find yourself at home one night and you realize you want to sit down and watch a show, or read a book, or actually go to bed and YOU CAN! While you were in that twenty-five-year stupor of utter exhaustion the kids went off and grew up and left home.

There’s this particular spot early on in parenthood where it seems that you are bound to be in this space for a devil’s eternity and those sweet little sparkly explosions have ceased to manifest themselves. At least it was that way for me, and since parenthood is a highly personal thing, I speak only for myself. We had four kids in six years, and I was done bearing children by the time I was 27. When you have them that close you don’t get the added bonus of older kids being able to help with the babies. You’re on your own, with a hula hoop of needy little fingers spinning around you, and their fingernails need to be trimmed and they all need baths and all they’ve had to eat since you all got up at 5 am is graham crackers and water that they got for themselves by dragging a chair up to the overloaded kitchen sink. 

I remember sitting in a church meeting during that time and the ladies in the meeting were discussing motherhood and got onto the topic of teenagers and they shouted in what felt like unison, “If you think babies are hard just wait until they’re teenagers!” I sat in my chair in the back, by fourth baby asleep on my droopy shoulder, my eyes filling with overwhelmedness and hopelessness. After the meeting a friend came up to me and said: “I feel like I need to tell you there is no time that is as exhausting physically and emotionally than when they are all little at once. You will get through this, and those kids are lucky to have you.” This gal had eight kids, and she knew what she was talking about. That little cluster of words she gave me got me through years of parenting.

At one point, when they were all in elementary school and I was PTA president and living at the school myself, we went through a whole season where Kate, Annie and I kept getting strep throat. It got to the point of ridiculousness. Finally, after too many months of antibiotics, I dragged the whole dang crew down to Instacare and asked for strep tests for every one of us, even though half of us were never sick.

Dave went along with it because he was in that young parent daze as well as that young attorney stage and was just as stunned and lost as I was. Turns out that Dave, Sarah and John all had strep, with no symptoms whatsoever. They just carried that germ in their back pockets and handed it over to Kate, Annie and me as soon as we got over the last case. The doctor explained that they must have been carriers.

Who knew? 

He put us all on a course of antibiotics and finally we were able to sleep at night and were back to our regular level of dysfunction during the day.

The concept of carrier, at least in biological terms, has been brewing in the back of my head ever since then. I realize that in many ways I am a carrier, unaware, of all sorts of things; biological, spiritual, emotional. 

Hanging clouds at midnight.

The concept bubbled up to the forefront of my consciousness the other night while Dave and I were down at the Farmington Art Center helping our son John and his daughter Ruby work on sets for the community youth theater play, Pirates of Penzance.  John had volunteered to do the sets. Ruby is a policeman in the play and John saw it as an opportunity to spend one-on-one time with Roo. The director had asked for a black and white set, alluding to the sea , while at the same time making it possible to be on dry land. Anyway, as I stood in the center of the hall, surrounded by my son’s creative efforts, with a silhouette of a church to my left, a large black tree to my right and a cluster of seagulls at my feet, I watched as John and Dave hung clouds from the rafters. I was planted in the audience space to tell them how high or low to hang them. I had a sudden sentimental recollection of one of those magical sparkly explosions that occasionally popped in the caverns of my young parenting. I realized, with joy and delight, that my boy was an artist, and he was letting that artist in him out to play. And while I stood there evaluating the position of that cloud, I realized that each of my children had recently begun to manifest the artist in themselves. Each of our four kids have unusual gifts in visual art. Neither Dave nor I have that gene actively working, and yet these kids who came from us all have it. Dave and I are carriers. Awesome!

John and Ruby.

We are all carriers of something. Good or bad, or both at once, we place in the pockets of our children nuggets of something that we cannot do ourselves. It is part of the magic of parenthood to watch them pull those nuggets out of their pockets and polish them up. 

Carry on.

a photo of John taking a photo of Ruby

John's large portrait of Queen Victoria for the play.

Annie and her kids painted this happiness
on her laundry room wall.

Free hand flowers. She bought the paint in the
Home Depot reject paint bin.

Sarah's large oil painting of Duck Creek.
The walls of our home are blessed by her artwork.
Her undergrad degree is in Fine Art.

Kate wanted to make some Star Wars
gingerbread men, but couldn't find cookie cutters,
so she made her own out of a foil pan.

And then there was that whimsical day I found these on
the kitchen table. Kate decided to make miniature
Santa dinosaurs.

And finally, because tonight was closing night for this girl,
here's Ruby in costume.
(She's the one on the left.)
Brava, Roo.

3-22-19 MARATHON

Predawn in Logan, she rose from her motel room bed and showered, waking herself against the dark with the aroma of Dial soap and deodorant. Then she layered her clothing, thin shorts under sweat pants, a binding sports bra under a snug sweat grabbing sport shirt, under a sweatshirt. Lastly, she stretched clean socks over her calloused feet, slipped on her running shoes, and laced them snugly. Her long dark hair she had tied back in a pony-tail. Out into the chilly indigo air she joined a flock of similarly attired strangers on a bus that drove them through the twisted canyon roadway, up into the snowy places where the race began.

Meanwhile, her mother slept.

We of the lumber legs woke with the sun, then sat in nice leather chairs attached to engines and wheels with nice heaters and air conditioners and drove up to Logan, an hour or so away from home, with poster board signs we had splattered with colorful words of good cheer and encouragement to our daughter, Sarah. 

We planted ourselves on the corner of a gentle intersection, not too busy, but right along the race route. We pulled our nice compact nylon red, white and blue cheer chairs out of their carrying bags and plopped ourselves into them. The dew had already burned itself back to heaven by then, and when runners began to appear we could see that the outer layers they had worn in the morning were tied around their waists. We clapped and cheered for each individual runner, and each little cluster. It amazed me how fresh some of them looked, after 20 miles of running. It amazed me that anyone could still be running after 20 miles of running! And the thought of over six more miles to go; well, that was beyond my understanding. In the first place, why would anyone want to do that? Just, why?

But then you’d see someone with long legs and a lean torso and broad shoulders that held steady in the up and down rhythm of the motion, and you’d say that maybe they were made to do this and it’s awesome that they get to. It’s such a foreign concept to me. But just as many of these runners, in this race, were the most unlikely looking. Like, if I was in an elevator with them and we had one minute to analyze each other, I would never in a million years guess that they would participate in a marathon.

Yet here they were, doing it. It kind of blew me away.

We strained our eyes and stretched our necks looking for our girl. Then, sure enough, one of us spotted her down the road, working her legs like oars on a row boat, her arms dutifully pumping beside her like pedals on a bike. We stood from our lazy chairs and waved our signs in the air, screaming, whistling, and rearranging ourselves to get closer to her when she passed. 

She smiled, grunted her love through her heaving chest, threw us her extra clothing and set her eyes forward, never breaking her stride.

I’m not sure what I was expecting. I probably wasn’t expecting – and hadn’t thought it through. Usually, in the past, when we have waited for our kids in an attitude of celebration it was at the conclusion of an event. Flowers after a performance, ice cream after recitals, the kind of thing where you all give hugs and talk about how wonderful they were. But this, this was not the end. This was the cheer in the hardest lap, the CPR after the drop to the floor. OK, maybe that’s a bit dramatic. But I realized, at this first of multiple marathons for this daughter, that she was smack in the heart of a hard thing when I was ready for her to be done. And with that realization came a profound appreciation for her gifts. My Sarah is multi-faceted and uber-talented. For her, since she has had this body at least, if she determined to achieve something over which she had objective power, then by golly she did it. Her dogged determination is a blurse, a blessing and curse in one, because most things are not purely objective. Other people and situations have some of the power and bring in subjectivity. She is still in the process of learning, like the rest of us, that we cannot control other people. And, thankfully, because she loves God, she is also learning to let Him mold her as much as she molds herself. That’s not an easy thing for people who are by nature super capable and used to achieving big things.

After Sarah whisked past us there on the road outside of Logan, we gathered up our lawn chairs and her outer layer of clothing and our little bag of starchy goodies and our posters and loaded them back in the car. We shifted all of it, including ourselves, to the park where the finish line and portable bleachers were arranged. A giant digital clock clicked away, the crowd ebbed and flowed, cheers rose and fell in audible swails as the racers crossed the line. One by one they ran past the finish line, stopping for only a few seconds, their fingers stretched over their knee caps, their heads lowered as their chests pumped down and up, then off they went again, jogging or walking to cool down their overtaxed muscles.

There were tables with juice and water and cookies and fruit. There was a large tent with massage tables lined up like hospital gurneys. And there were photo booths and first aid stations. But mostly there was love and pride and grace, all covered in massive amounts of sweat.

Our Sarah was not born a runner. She was not, by godly design, built that way. She has the short Connors legs and the Parrish hips and petite shoulders and arms. I'm by no stretch of the imagination athletic. And though her dad did letter in track in high school and college, his events did not involve distance. They involved strength, and I suppose she inherited that. The fact that this girl has achieved this thing, worthy of remark, still inspires me. No one can ever take from her the fact that she has achieved this, more than once. 

When she was four years old I had told Sarah she would have until she turned five to figure out how to not suck her thumb. I didn’t hang it over her very often, though I occasionally reminded her in nonthreatening moments that she could do this hard thing since she was getting to be a big girl now. On her 5^thbirthday, when I tucked her in bed, I asked her if she knew what else this day meant. She looked at me with her liquid brown eyes, her thumb happily planted between her little-girl lips. She looked me right in my weepy eyes and pulled her thumb out, causing an audible pop as her lips closed against themselves. She kept her eyes focused on me as she pulled her little soft legs up toward her chest, there in her big girl bed, and tucked her hand between her knees. I don’t remember ever again seeing her suck her thumb.

My first-born daughter teaches me still the beauty of the human mind when it marries the human heart. She has survived things, trust me, that pretty much every other person I know would never have withstood, including medical school, residency, four pregnancies and other major stressers. They have taken their toll on her. But they have also made her shine. It’s the agitation of fibers against metal that makes it shine, like the sweet little collection of marathon medals that hang on a hook full of ribbons in some quiet corner of her closet.

3-21-19 FORGE

Remember yesterday when I wrote about spirit beads, the mistakes we make on the road to perfection? Remember how I said if I were a piece of bead work I would be full of spirit beads?

Case in point: Even though I have what I call schizophrenic handwriting, the kind that changes angle and size and direction all in one sentence, by the time I was in eighth grade I became fairly expert at forging two signatures. First was my mother’s. I was never tempted to forge it in serious fiduciary documents. It was purely used to write excuses for missing school. I might add that I had my mother’s permission to forge her name. More often than not we just plain forgot that we had to turn in an excuse after an absence until I had arrived at school the next morning. That’s when I pulled out a little piece of paper and scribbled:

“Please excuse Corinne from school yesterday. She was sick.”, followed by what I thought was a perfect impersonation of my mother’s beautifully fluid handwriting.

Sadly, I have lost my touch with my mom's signature.

I wonder if anyone ever in the whole wide world ever believed it was actually her signature. Here’s hoping they didn’t really look very hard.

Mrs. Tucci was a tiny powerhouse.

Anyway, the second name I learned to forge was Mrs. Tucci, our middle school choir director. It was Mrs. Tucci, all four feet eleven of her, that gave me my voice. At least she held up the auditory mirror and helped me find it. The first week of school in eighth grade I mustered the courage to audition for the Mini-Singers. The Mini-Singers were the cool hip cats of the middle school, at least in my circle. For two whole years, in sixth and seventh grade, I looked at the kids who were Mini-Singers and stared secretly, trying to analyze what it took to be so cool, hoping against all odds that one day I could be…that. So I scribbled my schizophrenic signature on the audition sheet, trying on purpose to make it somewhat illegible, cuz if people knew I tried out and didn’t make it, then the not cool factor would increase considerably. The big bass drum planted in my chest pumped away as I stood beside the blond upright piano sitting on wheels in the center of the choir room. I stood on the back side of the piano, Mrs. Tucci’s black short cropped head of hair barely peeking over the top of the piano box. She raised one hand to indicate it was time to sing, and in spite of the drum corps in my chest I let the song rise out of me.

Two days later, waiting for a moment when the hallway was clear of all humans, I slipped over to the posting outside the choir room. Twenty names typed in small pale typewriter print, not in alphabetical order, but assigned by musical sections. There in the soprano section I found it: Cori Hansen. That old drummer inside started a rolling snare and I turned and walked away, my books pressed against my thumping chest, my footsteps increasing their pace as I moved to homeroom. Later, in the hall between classes, someone called out to me: “Cori Hansen, Mini-Singers!” I tell ya, I’m many decades old now, and have had some pretty magical things happen, but the recalled feeling of that moment rises right up to the top. I wonder if my angels knew what was ahead for me.

That's me, 4th from the left.

So eighth grade turned into a pretty magical year for me, school-wise. I’m not talking grade-wise, if you catch my drift. But that year I started learning guitar in the guitar club after school, and Mr. Cameron, who volunteered to teach us guitar, spent many mornings in his small office teaching Betsy Gerson and me  how to finger pick Blackbird and Vincent and Dust in the Wind. 

Mrs. T in the middle, Mr. Cameron far right.

My new found coolness gave me the sense of self that allowed me to sit against the lockers with Betsy and work through Gordon Lightfoot songs. Mrs. Tucci became Mrs. T. Her office became home base for us Mini-Singers. (Yes, indeed, we girls wore mini-skirts in performances.) We wove in and out, like friends in a coffee shop. Mrs. T taught Betsy and me how to forge her signature so we could mass produce late excuses for her choir kids. We were a machine. To this day I can close my eyes and scratch out the signature of Ida Tucci.

I forged I. Tucci a lot more than Afton Hansen.
I've still got the touch, if I say so myself.

I still can’t believe Mrs. T brought us into her inner circle, teaching us how to forge, giving us free reign of her office. That was our last year of Middle School. We were off to TJ High after that and, I’m sorry to say, it was generally downhill from there.

Thinking back on it, I never did feel pangs of guilt for forging signatures for either of those women. It’s probably because they knew I was not likely to abuse the gifted power. I wasn’t one to skip school or skip class. 

But late, I was. And I still am.

Nonetheless, I forge ahead!

For thirteen seconds I was a cool hip cat.

3-20-19 BEADED

When Capitol Records recording artist Chris LeDoux recorded my song Get Back On that Pony I wanted to do something to thank him. He had given me the publishing on the song, which is sort of unheard of in the business when a song has not previously been signed, and that meant I still have 100% ownership in the song. It also meant I received all the writer’s royalties from the album Under This Old Hat and the American Cowboy box set. It’s a music business thing, and suffice it to say he was an anomaly in Nashville.

Anyway, I decided to make him a guitar strap as a token of thanks. My brother knew a Native American woman up in Heber Valley who did lovely bead work, so I hired her to make two strips of tidy Indian seed bead artistry. We walked into her tiny shop and I was instantly returned to the Reservation of my childhood, out in the sandy soil of Fort Hall near Blackfoot Idaho. I inhaled the aroma of smoke tanned deer hide and sage. From her impressive colorful collection of tiny seed beads I chose hues and patterns. She was to make a three-foot by four inch piece, incorporating seven roses into each strip, representing the name of my publishing company, Seven Roses Music. She completed the task beautifully.

That summer, while visiting our family cottage in Michigan, I carefully hand stitched those wide strips of beadwork onto fabric and leather guitar straps. They turned out great. I sent one to Chris and kept one for myself. I still use that strap nearly every day. 

The beautiful handiwork of that skilled Native American artist includes, by design, what she calls a “spirit bead”. The spirit bead is a purposeful mistake. It is a bead in the wrong place, put there by design to allow any unwelcome spirits to rise from the piece of art. I am not an expert on this, but I think the theory is that no human is to create a thing of perfection. Only the great God can do that.

In that vein, I am full of spirit beads. 

We who claim to be disciples of Christ and who adhere to the tenets of His restored gospel have all sorts of issues with the tidy rows of our spiritual beadwork. At least I do (I should only speak for myself).

There’s a scripture that we believers sometimes get stuck on:

“Be ye therefore perfect, 

even as your Father in Heaven is perfect.”

(No pressure there!)

I understand, or at least I want to understand, that the translator from King James’ court had perhaps chosen the less perfect word. The adjective “perfect” was used instead of the verb “perfected”. Since we are beings in process I like to think that a verb is better suited in this sentence, though I do not profess to put words into the Savior’s mouth. Some people say the word could also have been translated as “complete.” Either way, the “perfect” is not a hard-fast-final word that fits us in absolute categories. 

I personally like to think of it, in grammatical terms, as a passive verb, like I am “acted upon” by someone other than me, like God is doing the perfecting. Goodness knows I am not the one to know what perfect is. But He does. And while we string those little seed beads of life experience on the story of my life, I suppose He allows me to participate, but the truth is, I think more often than not I need to get out of the way and let Him perfect me. 

Some of us, a lot of us, either disassociate ourselves from thinking about an end product, or we swing the other way and fixate obsessively on it, banging ourselves on the head for not being perfect. I’d like to set myself somewhere in the healthy middle of that: aware that I am a work in process and I must be aware as I participate in that process, but not obsessed with how far I am from the final product and therefore overwhelmed by how far I have to go.

Each moment of each day is a little seed bead in my personal  hand drawn pattern, and if once in a while the wrong bead gets set in place, I suppose that makes me uniquely mine…or better yet… uniquely His.

3-19-19 DOZEN

Kathryn came over Thursday morning, her guitar in one hand and a carton of eggs in the other. She joined the three dozen women who gather Thursday mornings in my family room to learn how to play guitar. She set down her instrument and handed me the recycled cardboard carton. “You won’t get them any fresher than this,” she said as I lifted the lid, revealing a dozen newly laid eggs in an earthy array of colors: pale blue, olive green, creamy yellow, chocolate milk brown and one solitary typical white. The Yerman’s have four boys, one sweet girl and anywhere from 6 to 15 chickens, depending on whether or not Tage forgets to lock them in at night and how active the raccoons have been.  The eggs were so lovely, like Mother Nature had painted them herself with her very best watercolors. “Oh man, thank you! They’re so beautiful I don’t think I could crack them,” I said, lifting each one to examine it. “Oh,” Kathryn said, “No worries there, we’ll have plenty more tomorrow.”

For a while now I have been a little curious about the fact that we arrange things in dozens. Eggs come in cartons of a dozen. Wooden school rulers, at least in America, have 12 inches. Every spring our kids purchase boxes of golf balls for their dad for his birthday and Father’s Day. The balls are sold in boxes of 12.  Don’t you think it odd that we measure by 12’s instead of 10’s? Tens are so much more round, so much easier to multiply.

Before there were such things as super markets, and long before super stores like Costco and Sam’s Club, humans who spent their waking hours doing jobs that took them away from the home-fires visited bakeries to buy their daily bread. For centuries, the staple of the civilized table was a loaf of bread. Over 1000 years ago laws were passed in England that demanded bread be sold in proportion to the wheat used to make it, and if a baker provided less than was paid for, he would be jailed or flogged, or have their arm amputated. That would make kneading difficult. Since bread carries the factor of yeast, and yeast makes for variety in bread sizes, bakers began giving one extra loaf to insure they were legal. This became known as a baker’s dozen, which basically means 13 instead of 12. 

When I was a kid, and we went to the bakery to get some rolls, or donuts, or cookies, you always received one extra when you bought a dozen. Aside from law and punishment, I think it’s just plain good business, because it encourages customers to buy twelve instead of six or eight or ten, knowing they are getting something for nothing. 

Now days, as far as I can see, businesses have let go of the extra measure. When you buy twelve, you get twelve. Except at Day’s Farm, where every late summer/early fall I aim my van west on Gentile Street in Layton at least once a week. Out west, toward the Great Salt Lake, where the Day family has held their ground, quite literally. Rows of houses have popped up in all the fields surrounding theirs, but they have preserved what their grandfathers had nurtured; a good old traditional American farm, with a variety of crops that rotate regularly. Their corn is always clean and crisp, the pale yellow and white kernels stacked in neat godly rows under luminous green husks and fair haired silk. Not only is it dependably good, they let you choose your own from a large waxy cardboard bin that holds a sign: 

“Fresh Corn $4/13 ear”

I know I am a bargain lover, and I have an unusually prominent bell somewhere between my head and my heart that starts to ring when I see a deal, but when I see someone indicate to me that they value me as a customer, and they really want me to be happy with my purchases, and just to be safe they are going to throw in an extra in case one of those ear I have chosen is deformed or has hosted a little party of worms under that pretty green casing; well, that makes me feel like we are friends. And I like to do business with friends.

The concept of a baker’s dozen is a good one. It fits with my Christian values. It says, without words, that I am aware that things are not always perfect, that I don’t have complete control over everything, even when I really try. If I grew corn, I know every ear of corn is not created the same. That’s part of the beauty of it. But if I am a merchant I will do all I can to represent the best of what I offer, and I will throw in some extra just to be safe, so you feel like you’ve been treated fairly.

I learned from the master  of over-doing herself, my mother. If you are going fishing for the day, you’d better take some crackers and some string cheese, and, here… you’d better take twelve string cheeses instead of two. And here’ take some apples, too. And you’ll need some chocolate, and better throw in a gallon of water, because any time you are going out into the Arco desert you’d better have a gallon of water. Too much is better than too little.

Here’s a challenge to someone out there who controls the merchandise in any of those big box stores we have turned our attention to these days; bring back the baker’s dozen. Then, when you eat a donut in the car on the way home, no one will be the wiser. 

(Heck, if you buy a dozen of my CD’s, I’ll throw in two extra.)

3-18-19 TAP

I sat on a cushioned pew with my sisters in the alto section of our little ward choir after church yesterday. As Ellen tapped away on the piano, her fingers dancing up and down the keyboard, I peeked over by black choir notebook and watched eleven-year-old Heidi keep the beat with her foot. I should have been paying attention to our choir director, and I usually am because although I write music I am sort of illiterate reading it. But young Heidi, of the angel voice, always draws me to her. She’s sort of magnetic that way, with her stunningly beautiful face and her pure spirit and that voice in her. She inherited it from her mother, along with her three sisters… all of it… the beauty, the radiance, and the voice. I suppose I did not need to follow Sally’s conductor’s baton because I had Heidi’s foot. Her soft black shoe tapped up and down, ever so slightly, exactly on the beat, like it could not help itself.

Park plays drums and french horn.

There is always a little thrill that bubbles up from my heart when I see young people unknowingly tapping their feet. Parker does it as he’s talking to me or we are singing as I drive him to his drum lessons. I catch myself doing it when I am trying to learn a new piece of music. It’s an automatic mechanism that probably came with us when we entered the womb and was nurtured all that time in there, keeping pace with our mothers’ heart beats. 

The first time I went to a band concert, when Timo was in seventh grade, I was mesmerized by the dance of forty feet on the stage floor. One per musician. I remember thinking it was interesting how one foot on each musician kept the beat, as if there were invisible strings attached to music angels hovering above. You could sort of tell, or at least guess, if a person was right footed or left footed by which foot they tapped. I noticed yesterday during Sacrament Meeting that I was tapping alternating feet as we sang. Left, right, left, right. It caught me off guard. I don’t even know why I noticed it, but I thought it strange. Maybe my brain was extra balanced yesterday. I got to thinking, as we sat there in our sweet congregation of believers, how blessed I am to be able to tap my feet. First, how blessed I am that these feet work and I can move them if I want. And secondly, that music sits comfortably enough in my soul that it has to squeeze out of my feet as well as my mouth. 

Timo on the timpani in All-State band.

Last month we went to the beautiful Symphony Hall in Salt Lake City to watch Timo play percussion in the All State Junior High Band. The music was so awesome that I lifted my eyes to the heavens, then closed them in order to inhale the beauty. When I opened them again they were angled right there at the feet of those musicians, a sea of black dress shoes rising and falling in unison, as if Heaven’s choreographers could not resist getting in on the show. 

Marching band is serious toe tapping.

The rhythm of life does the same. We tap our figurative toes to it down here on earth, breathing in and out at the very same time as every single other human, in syncopated time. We all keep the beat, whether we know it or not, while above us the silent angels sing. 

3-16-19 FREE

There is a section in the KSL online Classifieds app with the category label: FREE. Its the only category where they have used all capital letters. There’s something magical about FREE. The other day Dave and I were in a furniture store and someone said they were serving free hot dogs and Coke, so of course we found the escalator and made a bee line to the aroma of steamed hot dogs and mustard. There were something like 100 people there eating standard average hot dogs on short little buns. You’d never have guessed the store ever had 100 people in it at one time. We Americans do like FREE.

Because I carry an extra “bargain” chromosome in my DNA I know my weakness for free stuff. I literally do not allow myself to move the mouse on my computer over the word FREE in the online classifieds. I know what will happen if I click on it. It would be like an alcoholic walking into a bar. 

FREE is actually a misnomer, if you take a look at it with philosophical eyes. Going back to the very basics of human existence, at least in my belief wheelhouse, we were all made to be stewards over our stuff. Our stuff, and our people, and our time – pretty much everything. So, when I decide to bring that plastic cooler shaped like a giant football into our house, I have taken responsibility for it as it fits in our family community. If it takes up space on the basement shelf, and is never used, and the case of powdered sugar that should actually be on that shelf has to go on the floor instead, and then the laundry goes on top of that, well then what kind of steward am I over that cooler or the other stuff around it, over my space, and ultimately over my time? And that’s not even talking about the emotional weight of things. Anyway, as they say in the song; Freedom isn’t FREE.

And then there’s the viewpoint that when something is free we value it less. For instance, I charge for my guitar classes, including the women’s groups I teach on Thursday mornings that feel more like book clubs than lessons. We really do have a good time together. I don’t need to feed my family with the money I make teaching. It’s not wholly essential to our existence. And there was a time when I did not charge for these classes. But here’s what happened when it was FREE: My students stopped coming regularly, at least stopped making it a priority. And they practiced less. I found, early on, that we give credit to that which costs us. If I have actual money in something I feel like I need to commit. Funny how money has that power over us. It’s not evil, it’s just how it works for us at this time in our eternal existence. 

I sometimes think they should charge $1000 for a Book of Mormon. Right now anyone anywhere can get one absolutely free. It’s our answer to the call to flood the world with the Gospel of Christ. But when things are free we tend, at least we spiritual weaklings, to be complacent about them. If the book that carries more pure scripture than any other should cost us a pretty penny, and we had to sincerely sacrifice to give it a place in our homes, then might we treasure it more? I don’t know, I’m just wondering.

So now I have to force myself to finish up today’s Lent Writing and move my body out to the garage where there are roughly twenty boxes of random stuff waiting for me to sort through them. Really, I should just tell Dave to take it all to DI. Or, as another option, to list them on the KSL Classifieds FREE section. Ugh! 

3-15-19 BOYFRIEND

I can’t recall exactly when it started, probably back around the time my sisters and I got our new midi-coats in middle school. That was probably the sparky moment, like the instant the tip of a match leaps into a flame. Before that there were whisperings, urges and such. But it was in middle school that I started dreaming about having a boyfriend. The teenage homing device tucked inside my ear caught conversations in the halls, or at the lunch table; so-and-so was going with so-and-so. They were boyfriend and girlfriend, at that point, even if they had never ever even been alone with each other. Then, as the grade numbers advanced, the going-together included holding hands in the halls, and kissing in shadowed corners at ball games, and one might imagine what else. The thought of having someone, especially someone kinda cute, want to have anything to do with me was the stuff of my private longings and not my reality. I don’t think I ever did have a boyfriend, not even the kind where you said you were a couple but you were really just wannabe’s. I had plenty of what I called, “friend boys”, and I certainly had my share of crushes, their identities tucked safely on the pages of my little diary, locked away with my tiny gold key. I liked boys, and in general I felt like they were friendly toward me, but never did a single boy in my school ask me out, except one who will go unnamed – who sat in the back of my homeroom in eleventh grade and belched. Even when I was class president my junior year, and had planned the prom in every detail, I was not asked. Prom time for most of us girls was just the worst! You wait, and wonder, and as time passes the wish becomes lead-heavy and disappears like daffodils in June. I ended up asking my brother’s best friend, who had already graduated from another school, to take me so I wouldn’t have to miss the party I had planned. My senior year  my sister Libby and I snipped the agony of unfulfilled anticipation in the bud and asked friends from Annapolis to take us; twin brothers who were like actual brothers to us. I remember one time there was a church girl’s choice dance and I got up the courage to ask one of my friend-boys to go with me. I specifically chose someone I was pretty sure would say yes. He said no. I don’t know for sure that being a Mormon girl in Pittsburgh had much to do with it, but in this one instance, looking back on it, I suspect it did.

All those teenage years I never did get to have a boyfriend. When I went to college at BYU, Dave Connors stole a kiss so unexpectedly while we were hiking up Mount Timpanogos, it took my breath away. That was my first week of college.  One kiss, and then another, and before I even had the chance to consider him a boyfriend we were engaged and he was my fiancé.

I still wonder how it would have felt to have someone like me, kind of, and want to be with me, sort of. I don’t give Dave enough credit for actually choosing me. I guess I think he must have been possessed or something, and was out of his mind, and that by the time he got his wits about him we were married and he was stuck.

I always wondered how it would be to go out with a steady, to go parking, and all that semi-naughty stuff that good girls allowed themselves to do just a little. One night, after we were married and we were in Pittsburgh for the summer, we were driving through South Park on the way to Dave’s parents, where we were living for the summer while Dave clerked for a law firm. I had this sudden urge to turn into the dark parking lot at a place called China Wall and join the other cars with passion bound teenagers in them. I was, after all, still a teenager, and by golly I wanted to know how it felt to go parking, to feel those passionate explosions tickling my fancy, to steam up the windshield, all while listening to Barry White or Jim Croce set the mood on the tinny speakers of our tiny Toyota Corolla.

So, Dave, who I might add had some level of experience in these matters, obliged, turning the steering wheel and pulling up against the rock wall in a dark corner of South Park. He turned out the lights, and leaned over, planting a kiss on my neck. I leaned in toward him, but the gear shift jabbed my rib and I jerked back. He laughed, and we repositioned, shifting ourselves to reach over the center console, but my hip was feeling the pain. We kissed, and kissed again, and I am sorry to say it just wasn’t doing it for me. Probably wasn’t doing it for him either.

We looked at each other and laughed, then stared out the non-steamy windshield for a minute, listening to the Bee Gees repeating the question "How deep is your love?"

Finally, I said, “OK, let’s go home.” 

I love having Dave for my husband. He is good and kind, and still makes my heart flutter. But I still wonder what it might have been like to have a boyfriend for a minute or two. A temporary love. Someone who felt like a new purse for a while, all exciting and new, then comfortable and well used. Actually, I have no idea how it feels to have a boyfriend, I’m just guessing. It’s not really fair to compare a relationship to a purse. But I think a boyfriend has that kind of temporary feel, comfortable, but temporary. There’s something enticing about that.

On the other hand, I know I got the best deal. The card I gave to Dave for Valentines Day this year said this: Lets be us forever.