Jun
26
A new friend visited my condo for the first time last week and I, of course, gave her an extensive tour of the entire 960 square feet. In the bedroom, she saw a Cathedral Window quilt and said, “That looks like an heirloom.”
Actually, I have four generations of family-made quilts stashed around the place. The one she commented on is the only one I made, and the last one I would have considered an heirloom.
I started making the quilt in 1976, right before Doug and I got married, jumped into a Ford Econoline van and hit the road for a year. In all 48 continental states plus Mexico and Canada, I worked on that quilt. Scraps of fabric from shirts, pajamas, skirts, robes, even a purse – all sewn by my mother, my sister and me — made their way into the quilt.
The quilt was supposed to become a bedspread. But around 1980, the project stalled and the quilt officially became a wall hanging. Quite a comedown from the noble purpose of bedspread.
Shortly after Doug took a position at The Charlotte Observer, the paper announced its annual arts and crafts show for employees and family. On a whim, I entered the quilt. Afterward, I started second-guessing myself. I kept imagining how pathetic that unfinished quilt would look beside all the really cool stuff made by other, talented people. The day they were hanging the show in the lobby, I drove downtown to the Observer to pull it from the show so I wouldn’t embarrass myself.
When I arrived in the Observer lobby, I was too late. The quilt had already been hung. Hanging beside it was the Best of Show ribbon.
I’m not often speechless. In those days I was rarely teary-eyed. That day, I was both.
Decades later, I moved into a townhome. My incredibly talented artist friend Elizabeth Bradford saw the quilt and suggested that I hang it over the 70-year-old four-poster bed that had been my grandmother’s. When I moved again, two years ago, the quilt went into a plastic storage tub and under a new bed with a cheap brushed metal headboard that I liked for its sleek, modern look.
This spring I was away for a week and left my condo in the capable hands of an artist of another type, Christina Lewis with The Redesign Company. When I returned home and made my way through the condo, I was stunned to find that Christina and her crew had draped the well-traveled Cathedral Window quilt over the metal headboard. Once again, the quilt had been give a place of honor.
In the 20 years since the quilt won its award, I’ve become a sentimental sap. Once again, I had tears in my eyes.
No great message here. Just scraps of moments pieced together into a sweet little story about a quilt that I keep trying to dismiss and others keep telling me is more than I imagine.
Jun
23
Vivien Leigh as Blanche DuBois, who "always depended on the kindness of strangers" and might have done better to depend on the kindness of Southerners
I was born without the kindness gene. Ask anyone who knew me before I turned 40.
Kindness has been on my mind since reading Nancy Kraft’s recent blog on the congenital kindness of Southerners as reflected in what I will call Southern speak. Nancy deals with the full range of Southern speak. It’s a great read and you should check it out now to provide context for this blog, but promise me you’ll come back for my random thoughts on the kindness of Southerners.
Nancy — being Not Southern, bless her heart — says straight out that those of us who grew up in these parts have learned to value kindness over honesty. I think that’s insightful, no matter how much we might bristle over having our honesty called into question.
Let’s assume for the moment that she’s right. Being taught congenital kindness from the cradle, with all the graciousness and gentility that may come with it, also might have introduced us to the art of the little white lie. Maybe for some of us gbeing dishonest — and please understand, I’m using that term in a purely hypothetical way — has become preferable to being bluntly honest because we find it easier to deal with a guilty conscience than to deal with conflict.
Maybe dishonesty got entangled with Southern speak when we heard our momma’s say, “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything.” Rather than learning to keep quiet, we learned to say something nice even if it was a stretch.
From a more positive perspective, maybe learning the ”if you can’t say something nice…” thing taught us to zero in on the things that are nice. We don’t necessarily want to tell someone that we loathe her green bean casserole and wish we could ban her for life from ever again bringing it to a single family/church/neighborhood gathering. Instead, we nibble at it and tell her how much her green bean casserole reminds us of the one Aunt Alma used to make and takes us right back to our childhood. If there’s a degree of truth in it, does it really hurt to tell her that instead of answering straight out when she asks if she should bring her casserole again this year?
So maybe Southern speak has led us down the path of little white lies. Or maybe in looking for ways to say it in complimentary terms instead of speaking the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, we’re trying to find a small measure of truth and grace. I’m not sure that’s a bad thing, although I can certainly see how it disrupts intimacy and, perhaps worst of all, leaves us eating a lot of green bean casserole.
Jun
22
On nights when I just want to be a mental slug, I watch a fairly innocuous TV series on Netflix called “Eli Stone.” It’s about an attorney who starts having visions and at first everybody thinks he’s a nutcase or a royal screw-up, take your pick. But by the end of the first season, what has gradually happened is that every person around him has begun to change for the better because this one ordinary guy has become a force for good in the world.
Started me thinking about how we all change the world in small ways every day with the simple choices we make about whether to be a force for good or not-so-good.
And that started me thinking about what I can do today — every day — to change the world. Here goes:
- Look every check-out clerk in the eyes and hold their gaze long enough to smile at them and let them know I’ve really seen them.
- Let one vehicle pull out of a parking lot in front of me just in case it eases somebody’s stress a tiny bit.
- Roll down my car window and give the homeless person at the freeway entrance a $10 bill, looking them in the eyes and smiling to let them know I’ve really seen them.
- Tell the people who are part of my life something I admire or respect about them.
- Ask people questions about their lives, their beliefs, their hopes, their dreams, without giving in to that urge to tell them what I think is wrong with ther lives, their beliefs, their hopes, their dreams.
- For every dollar I spend on something I don’t need (that would be a new pair of shoes to match a new outfit or a bottle of OPI nail polish or a grande whatever at Starbucks, for example), donate a dollar to help somebody else.
- Make a point of speaking more softly and more kindly.
- Tell somebody a truth they don’t want to hear because I love them more than I need them to like me.
- Read to a child.
- Drive like the highway patrol is in the next lane.
- Stop myself the next time I start to disagree with someone and make sure there’s a good reason to disagree (other than the need to be right).
- Allow my face to light up when someone I love enters the room.
- If it’s negative, just don’t say it. Especially if it’s about a person. Any person. Whether it’s true or not. If it’s negative, just don’t say it.
Some of these I try to do on a good day. Some of them I’ve done for a while at various times. Some of them are things I admire or respect in other people. Maybe I’ll start by telling them so.
Jun
18
My favorite father and daughter
Who can say why we fall in love?
A shrink who once helped me become a little less crazy said the attraction that we think of as love starts in a place he called our “lizard brain,” the seat of our most primitive and deeply rooted instincts and responses to life.
The last time I fell in love, here’s what my lizard brain saw and responded to: a devoted father.
Strong, admirable father figures had been in short supply in my life. I didn’t even know it mattered, didn’t know I cared. I see now that the lack stunted my life, starved me emotionally and drove behaviors that ultimately left me even more empty and even more emotionally hungry. There have been times in my life when I even railed against the idea of a Creator who seemed like little more than an absentee father to a hurting and broken world.
Then a father and his daughter came into my life. They shared their life with me and, in doing so, gave me the kind of family that had been my lifelong craving. In doing so, they made me a better person than I ever expected to be.
We are now living out our own quirky version of happily-ever-after that has even transcended our divorce eight years ago. But no matter what else has happened in our lives, he has always, always, been the kind of father I would have ordered for myself if we could build our lives from an a la carte menu. He always loved his daughter unconditionally, even when he could have been excused for wringing her neck. When she was little, he knew how to gently but firmly use the Daddy Voice to let her know beyond a doubt when she was approaching the limits of acceptable behavior. He treated her with respect in all ways, at all times. He understood that she was his to protect and to teach, but not his to control or live through. Time and time again, he tossed out everything he believed about himself in order to become a better man, a man worthy of her respect and love.
When Elisabeth was two years old, the two of them were in the car one day and he fired up one of the cigarettes he then smoked at the rate of three packs a day. She looked at him and, with all the authority a two-year-old can wield, said, “Daddy, throw that out.” He did. He quit cold turkey.
That was about the time they came into my life.
Who can say why we fall in love, except perhaps in retrospect.
Jun
17
Jim and Peg, about 1970
Jimmy is my brother. My half-brother, really. Eight years older than I am, my father’s son from his first marriage. I adored him. He is the first male I trusted and the last one I worshipped.
He taught me to make a monkey face for family photos. He told me slightly twisted fairy tales at bedtime. And I can say with confidence that Jimmy would have done anything for me – I once had the photograph to prove it: a black-and-white snapshot of 14-year-old Jimmy sitting on a coin-operated rocking horse outside a tourist stop in the Smoky Mountains. The humiliation is clear on his face. He endured it only because six-year-old Peggy begged him to do it. In the photo I’m standing on tip-toe beside him, a goofy grin on my face.
My brother didn’t live with us. When we took him back to his mother’s house on Sunday evenings, I would stare through the back window of our ‘58 Ford Fairlane until the house where he lived disappeared, stifling sobs.
Jimmy became Jim. He joined the Alabama National Guard. He became a husband and father. Somewhere along the line he became a man of faith, a man who refused to be the kind of father our father had been. Today, Jim is also a stepfather and a grandfather and, not the least, an honorable, kind and loving husband.
My brother is still my hero, the finest man I know. He turns 67 in September and one day, I suppose, he will be gone for good. When that happens, even though I’ll know he is safely home at his Father’s house, I will be as inconsolable as that little girl watching him disappear through the rear window of the car.
Jun
16
My Aunt Arlene buried two husbands. In her mid-40s, she found number three.
Let me be honest: From the beginning, none of us liked John.
John and Arlene
John might have been one of the most irritating men on God’s green earth — family members who were far more gracious than I am would tell you the same thing. John was ingratiating in a way that grates. He was self-righteous. He used heavy doses of false humility to get the continuous ego strokes he needed. He was unemployed and closing in on 60 and some of us had a strong suspicion that the idea of a financially comfortable widow appealed to him.
But there was Arlene, determined to marry him anyway and God knows she’d seen her share of sorrow and if John made her happy, well, we cared more about her happiness than John’s irritating ways.
So they married and we all set about learning how to love Uncle John.
Although Arlene was more than a decade younger than Uncle John, she was the one who lived in seriously failing health for more than a decade. A diabetic, she lost one leg, then another. She had a heart attack. She had breast cancer. She became an invalid and she needed taking care of and John was the most patient and faithful caregiver I’ve ever been privileged to witness. His most consistent prayer was that God would let him live long enough and have the strength to take care of Arlene until she died.
That’s exactly what happened.
John was closing in on 90, and had his own heart condition, when a stroke finally took Arlene 30-plus years after they married. In all that time, Uncle John had never wavered in his loyalty and devotion to Arlene. He never failed her and he stretched himself to his physical and emotional limits to make her life comfortable long past the point at which a lesser man might have given up and said, “I’m too old for this.”
Arlene was my second mother, so I guess that made John my second father. And in spite of all the traits I judged him for in the beginning, Uncle John proved that a man doesn’t have to be perfect to have the emotional backbone to be a strong, reliable protector.
Jun
14
Clyde
I was over 40 when I met Clyde; he was pushing 80. He tried hard to father me in later years when I was still pushing father figures away.
Over the years, Clyde taught me the secrets of growing roses, including how to mix the perfect soil for growing them and how to prune them and when the fragrance is strongest. When my sister died, he helped plant a rose garden in her honor at the bank where she had worked. He also taught me the most important secret of all: The more you give them away, the more abundantly they grow.
Clyde also gave me bushels of homegrown tomatoes every summer and a cutting rooted from a sweet shrub bush that had been in his family for more than a hundred years. He told me his World War II stories. He modeled consistency and love in action and the humility of contentment with being a work in progress.
And when I was still a hostile spiritual novice, declaring in defeat one Sunday morning that I didn’t know a thing about God, Clyde is the one who looked across the room at me and said, ”Now you’re getting somewhere.”
That was a life-changing moment for me, a moment when God used a kind old man to nudge me gently in the direction of grace and truth.
Clyde has been gone a couple of years now. But, like all good fathers, his legacy lives on in generations of people who continue to walk his walk of patience and compassion and geniality and unconditional love. I hope sometimes I’m one of them.
Jun
12
I see them clearly, sitting on porches in rockers or straight-back chairs, straw hats pushed back from their foreheads in the summer, making small talk, sometimes ambling out to somebody’s car to fill half-empty co-cola bottles with whiskey hidden under the front seat. They were largely silent and ineffectual and they were the father figures in my young life.
While they sat and rocked and sipped, mothers, aunts, grandmothers and great-grandmother bustled around in hot kitchens, getting food on the table and talking non-stop about family problems and family news and family decisions. The women were lively. They laughed, they knew what was right and they knew what mattered — each other, us kids, people long dead, good food, home. The women in my life I loved and respected.
The father figures I loved, for the most part. But I didn’t respect them. They were irrelevant to the emotional fabric of our lives. Beside the women who ran the world as I knew it, they seemed colorless and weak. So it is little wonder that I’ve been unable to sustain a healthy relationship with men. I learned early to discount men as relationship equals.
In this week leading up to Father’s Day, I’ll try to re-vision the role of men in my life by looking at the ones who broke through my resistance and became the father figures I’ve needed. Whatever my childhood perspective on the men who influenced me early in life, I was too young to understand the whole story of my family. So this week, I’m going to celebrate Father’s Week by paying my respects to the men in my life.
Jun
6
I don’t date. I don’t want to date. Apparently that’s odd. A few weeks ago a friend speculated on the reason. ”I thought maybe you switched teams.”
I think I laughed. It’s not easy to articulate my choice not to pursue — or at least hope for – a relationship. Not easy mostly because there are layers of reasons. We could peel back one only to find another, then another, then another.
Let’s start with a couple of facts. I find men attractive (but I’m not naming names). I like men and find conversation with them stimulating.
So what’s the deal with the ban on relationships?
Do the math. I’m 58 years old. I’ve been single for seven years. Before that, I spent 37 continuous years in one relationship or another. Think about it. I was in relationships from the age of 14 through 51. Enough, already.
Investing in me. I relish time to myself, time to grow into just me. I treasure my freedom, after all those years of being part of a couple. Investing in being a happy, healthy couple requires energy and time and dedication. I don’t regret the effort and I consider some of those relationships successful. I’m just ready to spend that effort differently, at long last. I want a relationship with myself before I die.
God is calling. I want a stronger relationship with God before I die. In some faith traditions, people are called to solitude, to contemplation, even to celibacy. I want as much of all three as is reasonable at this life stage. I may not always want those things to this degree, but today I do.
If nothing changes, nothing changes. Dysfunctional patterns are repeated in every key relationship I’ve ever been in. I’ve received help from people wiser and smarter and better trained than I am. I’ve come to understand relationship dynamics well enough to know that I’ll keep attracting the same dysfunctions in different packages. When I ventured out, briefly, into the world of over-50 dating, I realized that I was doing no better than I’d ever done — except that I was getting smart enough to walk away without spending years trying to heal something that wasn’t headed for healing. Today, I choose to work out my issues in relationships that aren’t sexual. It’s just as challenging but a lot less painful — not only for me, but for everyone.
Collateral damage. The available, age-appropriate men I run into tend to want commitment. I’ve learned that most don’t believe me when I tell them up front that I do not. In my wayward youth I toyed with men’s affections. Not today.
I get to keep my clothes on. Trust me. It’s better this way.
Or maybe the answer is simpler than I’m willing to admit. Maybe I’m saving myself for John Cusack.
(For more about age-appropriate men, see my poem “I’m saving myself for John Cusack” on the page Sex, Lies and Simple Truths on this blog.)
(Illustration courtesy of AkaraKingdoms)
