I don’t remember the first thing I put into the drawer. For the longest time, I thought it was just a facade. It was stuck, so I never forced it after trying once. I sat in front of it. One day I think it moved with my knee, so I tried again. Et voila! I laugh when I open it now. It’s completely full — I suppose the saying is true, it goes little by little, then all at once.
I suppose it’s true for everything. Life and love. I don’t remember getting older. I write every day about my “little by little”s, but I don’t recall a time when my heart wasn’t full.
It’s so delightful. When people get into your “all at once.” You can’t remember not loving them. I know you’ve felt it — people with whom you are ever in mid-conversation. No matter the time or distance. No matter the rise and fall of life’s breath. They are ever with you. Ever filling you.
My knee brushes against the drawer that I didn’t know I had, and I smile. Love will always find a way in, and stay.
It wasn’t long after I realized that everyone didn’t have them, these Tech-ers in the basement, that they were gone. It’s clear now that we needed the money more than the space. We went through at least three cycles of young men from the law enforcement class. I only remember one’s name – Terry Eilers. Maybe because he was also our bus driver, but mostly I think because he was nice to me. And wasn’t that everything? —when there was just one unlocked door at the bottom of the stairs that separated them from our laundry.
Before lessons were learned, I race from upstairs to downstairs without a glance. It was one of the men from the first group of three. (Everyone over 17 seems like a man when you are six.) He was building a canoe in the driveway to our basement. Fascinated by anything being built, I was probably annoying. Watchful. Eager to know the bend of wood. And what was that green stuff? What was he putting on the shell? Certainly he must have my best interests at heart, I thought, he lived with us after all. He was going to enforce the law. He told me to touch the canoe. I poked one hesitant finger out of my sleeve and touched it as if it were a hot pan on the stove. No, really get in there, he said. Rub your arm across it. I don’t why I did. Just like the heat from a hot pan, it took a minute for the tiny shards of glass, the insulation, to reach my brain. And it took longer, I suppose, wondering not why the pain, but more, why did he want to inflict it?
I wasn’t going to let him see me cry. I ran up the browning hill of fall grass. Through the garage door. Down the stairs to the laundry room in the basement. Took off the painful sweater and placed it in a basket. It was the first time I noticed there was no lock on that door. It was the first time I needed one.
I stayed upstairs for the rest of their time. The next group came. They called one “Buzz” I think because of his hair, but I remained at a distance.
When Terry Eilers came the next year, slightly overweight in his tan shirt and brown pants, the new uniform of the students, he smiled at me from behind the big bus wheel. I don’t know how many rides it took before I trusted him, but I did.
It’s no longer a technical school, but a college. They have their own housing now, I guess. Call it whatever you want, I hope we’ve all learned along the way. Kindness is memorable.
Some will try to take it away. Innocence. Curiosity. Joy. Others still will pick you up when you need it most. It only takes one Terry.
It’s one of my favorites in Paris, the Musée d’Orsay. Maybe because it feels most like me.
It didn’t start out as a museum. At one point it was a train station,
even a parking lot, long before it housed the most beautiful impressionists in the world. I suppose I’ve always known it — that I would have to become, and keep becoming.
When I was a kid, I thought I would just figure stuff out, you know, and be something, and that would be it…that would be my life. Because didn’t they always ask, “What are you going to be?” And especially at this time of year, as we prepared to dress up and go from door to door asking for our treat behind the question, “What are you supposed to be?”
At first I was a cowboy, (was this my train station?). Then I was a hobo, (my parking lot?) It took a long time to become an artist. This was me. Who I was supposed to be.
I think that I, we, just have to keep becoming. We change and grow. We are molded by love and trips around the sun. It takes a long time to build a soul. We get older, maybe wiser, (even better, we gain a little grace) but we don’t finish – we don’t have to – we begin, and be, and begin again. I think that’s the gift of living…the joy of being alive!
The current book I’m reading, is delightfully entitled, “How to read a book,” by Monica Wood. It is set around a book club in prison. Harriet, the leader, gives the women a mantra, “I am a reader. I am intelligent. I have something worthy to contribute.”
I’m not yet finished, but already I’ve learned, or perhaps relearned this important lesson. (I don’t suppose we can ever stop learning this).
To those who think it silly to have a mantra, I say good for you — good for you because you probably had someone who told you of your worth. Good for you that those words must be so engrained inside of you, that you don’t need to bounce them off the mirror. I am one of the lucky ones. I had a mother who served as that mantra. That voice. That reassurance, no matter what the situation, win or loss, I was still worthy. Never to be mixed with entitled, that is not what her worthy meant. Not what our mirrors revealed. No, worthy was never about receiving, but about having something to give.
What would your world, our world, look like with this in mind? We are imprisoned by hate. By judgement. By fear. Which is really so ridiculous to be shouting from behind bars, while holding the key. So when I tell you, tell myself, that I, we, have something to contribute, something worthy, I mean it not only as a mantra, an incentive, but also a responsibility. We owe our mothers this. Ourselves. All.
It’s no spoiler to tell you that men are different from women. I’ve been exposing Dominique to that beautiful truth for many years now.
When she sat at our kitchen table yesterday, an ordinary Tuesday, she began to cry. “I’m just so tired,” she said. For me, completely understandable. Now, men will often look at us like we’re on fire, and something must done. And it makes me laugh, because maybe they’re not so far from the truth after all, it’s just that we are built to put out our own fires, with the gentle flow of tears. Oh, those beautiful drops are always at the ready. With no need for alarms or sirens, they know when it’s time. I can hear them, mid eye-lid, “Are we going? Is it time? I’m ready, let’s go. Here we go.” And down the tears come.
My mother always called them tears of tenderness. Because they weren’t there out of anger or sadness, only comfort. The ebb and flow of life’s tide.
So often the things we fear turn out to be gifts. I like thinking that my brain tells my heart, daily, go ahead, set the world on fire, we’ve got you covered.
We learned early on at Washington Elementary that so many of our problems could be solved by sitting quietly. If we were too hot, “Sit quietly,” the teacher would say. Trying to memorize our times tables, it was important to “tune everything else out.” Even in our excitement of knowing the solution to the problem on the chalkboard, she never called on the ones that “Ooooh, Oooooh, Ooohed,” — no, she smiled and pointed to the steady hand raised silently in the air.
It followed me through high school and even college. I could never do my homework in front of the television, nor with the music blaring. The answers, for me, always came in a whisper. The same has held true for everything, I suppose. Recovery, hope, dreams, even love, has never arrived as the Tabernacle Choir, but more of a hum, a bird song in my heart, that to be heard requires the silencing of all the doubt, fear, and chaos that surrounds us.
There will always be the chatter of those who are so eager to shout, “you can’t,” “you shouldn’t,” “you won’t.” To them (and mostly to myself) I say in a gentle hush, “Oh, but I am.”
Although she only sat down for one, Days of Our Lives, the soap operas played all afternoon on my grandma’s television set in the living room of their farm house. Of course we could hear them as we ran in and out of the screen door, up to the corner kitchen cupboard with the Lazy Susan that held all of the candy. We’d spin ourselves almost dizzy trying to decide between the blur of Black Cows, Sugar Daddies, Sugar Babies, and all things sweet.
Deep into our sugared highs, we acted out the parts we heard from the other room. Using words we didn’t know, but kept repeating them, whispering them into our sweaty hands covered in sticky giggles, after our Aunt Lillian warned us that to say them aloud was to risk living them.
In no way do I believe that my summer antics, nor my cousins’, brought to life all of those whispered words we seem to be living within. We say them out loud now. Words like divorce and affair and death and cancer. The only real difference, what they consolidated in less than an hour on the television, has taken a lifetime for most of us, but certainly we have all been touched.
And I think it’s ok to say them out loud. To not hide from them. Not give them the power. To voice our struggles and our fears, whatever they may be. Maybe we knew something as children. We weren’t afraid of any of it. Not the words, nor the warnings. Nothing could stop us. Not screen, nor cupboard, or door of any kind. We raced through it all together.
I suppose I write the words each day in order to release them from the living room set. To fling open the doors and tell you it’s ok. To show you. To run with you. Play with you, amidst it all. We’ve never had the power to rid the world of all the difficulties. The pain and the struggles. But we’ve always had the power to find, still, the dizzying joy, the sweaty laughter.
There is a real difference between paper, canvas and panel. Each one takes the paint in its own way. Likes a different brush stroke, even a different brush. And I don’t like one more or less for it. I’m trying to do the same with people.
I’m not saying it’s easy. But I think just being aware, it helps me fight it less. Sure I still come with all of my seemingly best skills, but they don’t work for everyone. And sometimes I get through my whole wheelhouse — are you paper, canvas, panel? Now what? Then you look at me with all of that leather or lace, that ceramic or stone, and I know I have to try again. I used to think, well, why do I have to change? And the answer is I don’t. None of us do. But if we want to include the people in our lives that provide a challenge, (and I say provide here, because they are giving us an opportunity to grow), if we do want to include them, we may have to thin out the paint a little, and try again. Not giving up on our skills, but enhancing them. Because most likely, they are doing the same, and with any luck, we find a colorful way to be together.
Someone said yesterday, it sounds like a prayer. And maybe it is. I write, not because I have the answers, but because I’m trying to learn them. Day by day. Bit by bit. I have always believed, even when I, we, fail, there is love in the attempt. And if we can see that, we can do anything.
Ernest Hemingway said, “If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you…
Now we were not men, nor living in Paris, but my mother never shied us away from a little editing.
Our “Paris” changed from week to week depending on the books we read. We were lucky enough to have library cards, but mostly we were lucky to have each other, and that was always more than enough.
I suppose it was beside her in my twin size bed that I first heard her say, “Isn’t it so me?” I looked at her, her eyes twinkling in some distant light. I knew she was no longer on Van Dyke Road. She was in the book. She was not reading the words, but among them. As one who never wanted to be left behind, I knew I better grab hold of her, a hand, a skirt, anything near her, a participle dangling…as she danced among the paragraphs.
Oh, how we traveled. In clothes we didn’t own. In cities we never walked. In feelings that we knew as sure as the front of our hands. Hands that held the words that carried us, luckless as some may have seen — only viewing the backs, but even tucked under blankets, dreaming before dreams, we stood as tall as any tale could be.
You might think I am lucky to visit Paris now.. And I will agree. But it’s not new, it’s only because, just as Hemingway said, the luck stayed with me all these years. I was taught to keep dreaming, to keep editing, when everyone else said no, when some said only maybe, when other didn’t even bother to respond, my home grown mothered luck said, “Oh, yes, baby girl, you ARE lucky enough! This IS your Paris!”
He was always doing the “walk back” from the field. In need of a certain tool. Not because he forgot, but because of a new situation. And selfishly, I must say, I loved those times. I didn’t wish him any problems — and I knew that’s why he had to walk back from the field to the shed, to the barn, to the house, but selfishly, I also knew he would be a captive audience.
It’s no surprise I still feel the same. It’s why I fall in love with a pencil. It is my wrench in an open field of pages. It can start my day, or finish it. When not in my hand, I know exactly where it is. In any situation, any walk back of the day, I can get to it. Hold it. Let it help me to become again.
There were no cell phones. Nothing but wide open spaces and my two steps to his one. It’s possible he was merely thinking about the task at hand, but he seemed like such a good listener, which made me want to talk all the more. Jumping over cow pies, I told him everything I knew for sure, and asked him everything I didn’t. The latter outweighed the former.
I was certain my grandpa knew everything. And this was confirmed by how he never looked for a tool, but walked directly to it. He wasn’t the kind to say it, (not that he could get a word in) but I knew he loved those tools. He took care of them. Respected them. In my head, this is why they always worked for him.
Is it a lot to say about a pencil? Maybe. But at this moment, it’s what I know for sure, and it’s enough, to run along beside you, to tell you, we have everything we need.
