Feb
19
By Peg
Categories: Occupy Love, Re-Vision Your Life, Uncategorized
Tags: Apology, Child of the 60s, Civil disobedience, Family, Southern Life
Feb
19
Her name was Rosie. She came several days a week to clean house and take care of my sister and me. She told me if I ate sugar right out of the sugar bowl that worms would grow in my tummy, which I did not believe but still fretted over most of my childhood. She liked my sister better than she liked me, but then, who wouldn’t?
She was, in the language of the day, “the colored help.”
My family was not wealthy. We were barely middle class, living in one of those plain boxes with a chain-link fence on a block of identical plain boxes that went up all over the country in the post-World War II boom. If we were barely middle class, I can only imagine where Rosie fit in the socio-economic hierarchy of the middle 1950s.
A half-dozen years later, Rosie no longer came. Instead, once a week we got in the station wagon about 6 p.m. and took my father’s clean work shirts, rolled into damp, tight balls, to a woman who did the ironing for my mother. She lived in a dingy house at the top of a flight of rickety stairs in a neighborhood we called, using the language of the day, “colored town.” That was polite language, a step up from the language my father used.
Around that time across the South, all hell broke loose. Police used fire hoses to beat back people on the streets of my hometown, people who wanted something called “civil rights.” Little girls died in a church bombing. My friends and I couldn’t ride the bus into downtown for a movie and a fountain soda at the five-and-dime on a summer afternoon any more because of something called “sit-ins.” My father sneered over other language, like “freedom riders” and “outside agitators.”
I was a witness, if a young and confused witness. I know what happened and I was part of it, if reading the news and moving from confusion to outrage can count as some small part of the change that was at long last happening. I tell it now because the blood of racists runs in my veins and because I know what turmoil had to take place to get us to this still imperfect place where we are today.
This afternoon, I read a column by civil rights activist Myrlie Evers-Williams in which she said, “When we speak, if only in a whisper, momentous things can happen.” I would add that when we don’t speak, as loudly and as clearly as we dare, momentous things can be lost.
Maybe it isn’t enough for people to tell the stories of courage and righteousness. Maybe those of us who remember the small minds of injustice and cowardice and hate need to speak, too.
This is part of the legacy I bear: The blood of racists runs in my veins.
Illustration by DigitalArt via www.freedigitalphotos.net
Feb
12
(This blog post is rated PG-Geezer. If you’re under 55, come back next week.)
First, Aunt Nancy sold the big house she and her husband had lived in. Keeping it was too expensive and too much work. So she sold a lot of stuff and gave away a lot of stuff and compressed the essentials of her life — a console TV, a cabinet sewing machine, a sprawling sofa, a mega recliner — into a one-bedroom apartment in a senior citizens community. The apartment bulged at the seams with oversized furnishings.
A decade or so later, Aunt Nancy broke her shoulder and her wrist and everyone realized it was time for her to pare down her life again. Her mind was sharp, but arthritis and diabetes and obesity had taken their toll. She moved into a nursing home.
She told us how to dispose of everything, and we did. She knew the move was permanent.
But even knowing it was permanent, she shielded a part of her soul from the truth that her world had shrunk forevermore to those four green walls, that bed with buttons to raise her head or lower her feet, that tiny built-in closet full of pull-on knit pants (no buttons, no zippers) and pull-over knit tops (no buttons, no zippers).
One day, six months or so after she moved into the nursing home, Aunt Nancy asked me about three pleated skirts that had been in her closet before the move. When I told her they had been donated to a charity, she was so disappointed. They were like new. She might wear them someday. Someday, when she got through this rough patch.
This particular rough patch, of course, was not one she would be getting through. She would never again wear panty hose or dress-up shoes or pleated skirts that made her think of earlier years, better times. This further shrinking of her life was the beginning of the 10-year decline that would eventually end in her death. But for quite a while, no matter how clear her thinking, Aunt Nancy kept a lady-like hold on the notion that she would one day sashay back out into the world in one of those pleated skirts and a pair of two-toned pumps, not too high, just enough to give her calves a little boost.
I look at the ways my life is shrinking and wonder if I have begun the long decline that will end wherever it ends for me.
I turn 60 this year. My finances are unreliable and retirement looms. So I look at my car and I’m grateful its life-expectancy is nearly as long as my own. Other things give me more concern. My computer has been with me for seven years, my Nikes for six, my heavy winter coat that just popped a snap has also been around half-a-decade or more. That’s like 40 in coat years — not really old, but beginning to look a little tired and fashion-challenged.
Sixty may be the new 45, but even so I feel a shrinking of my potential to reinvent or reinvigorate. I wonder if someone has already begun to roll up my sidewalk – the sidewalk that could lead anywhere — leaving me stranded here in my incredible shrinking life, the only one who still believes that the best truly is yet to be.
Jan
16
Who is our prophet today?
Who is leading us out of this wilderness in which we find ourselves today? Who is pointing the way to a promised land that seems at least as far away today as it was 40 years ago?
When I was growing into young adulthood in the 1960s, the world was a frightening and dangerous place. A place of war and violence in the streets and hatred based on fear of the unknown and the different. In other words, it was a lot like today. The biggest difference may have been that we had prophets who were pointing the way out of the wilderness.
We had Bob Dylan, who sang to us about a different way to live in that dangerous world. We had Bobby Kennedy, who vowed to help us build a different kind of world.
And, of course, we had Martin Luther King, Jr., who reminded us that God had a different plan from the plan we were living out.
On this day of celebrating the life and legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr., I scroll down my Facebook news feed, read the messages King left us and I teeter between hope and despair. Hope because he spoke with the authority and the authenticity of one who had inded been to the mountaintop, had seen the promised land. And if it was true then, if there was a promised land then, surely there must still be one today.
And despair, because in these 40-plus years since his death, so much of the progress we had made seems to be eroding. It is eroding at least in part, I believe, because the voices that dominate today’s conversation are the voices of self-interest and antagonism and sarcasm.
Where are the voices of hope and reconciliation? Where are the voices that lift us out of our small lives and onto the mountaintop? Who is urging us to act with courage, to live from that place inside us where we are kinder and braver and more compassionate than our fear or complacency or pettiness? In 50 years, who will we remember as the voice we followed out of this wilderness?
Are we without prophets today? Or do we choose not to listen when they speak?
Dec
23
Musicians use a lovely Italian word for a gradual decrease in loudness: diminuendo. The very sound of the word makes me smile.
Tomorrow afternoon, about 4 p.m. on Christmas Eve, the diminuendo begins. One by one, cars head for home. A parking space empties. Then another and another. A storefront goes dark, a mall, a grocery store. Red kettles are spirited away. A dwindling stream of headlights melt into the dark.
No matter how many gifts I wrap, no matter how many cookies I bake, no matter how burnt out I get listening to Jingle Bell Rock, that moment comes when nothing is left but the hush of the silent night.
That is the moment I wait for, my favorite moment of the season, when I can believe that for this one night, all is truly calm and bright.
Merry Christmas.
Dec
19
Christmas, 1995.
Christmas had not been merry for two or three years. I wanted to do something different. I wanted it to mean something again.
My small family decided to adopt another small family for the holidays through one of the social service agencies in town. They give you names and ages and a wish list from people whose Christmas won’t be merry without a little help. People, hopefully, with little kids who will be fun to buy for and fun to imagine on Christmas morning.
This year, our family was one little old lady.
Her needs were minimal. All she really, really wanted was to cook a nice holiday meal for her extended family. Turkey or ham, some pies, maybe two kinds of potatoes, the mashed ones and the sweet ones. Soft yeast rolls and butter. Real butter maybe. She wanted to set it up on card tables in her little house, which was neat and sparsely furnished. The social service agency mentioned that grocery store gift cards give people the dignity of shopping for themselves. So that’s what we did.
No cute little toddler-sized winter coats, no teddy bears or computer games. No Santa wrapping paper, no big bows, no imagining on Christmas morning that the children in our little adopted family are wide-eyed and squealing over Santa’s visit.
Just one little old lady and a gift card from the grocery store for a couple hundred dollars.
We delivered the gift card about a week before Christmas. We probably gave her a few wrapped presents as well, house slippers maybe, or a soft cardigan. She was a dignified lady and thanked us politely and we left the house with nothing but the satisfaction of knowing that we’d done a good deed.
The door had barely closed behind us. We were barely off the front stoop when we heard it. Behind that closed door, an unrestrained shout from the dignified little old lady. “Praise the Lord!”
I cried all the way home. I cry everytime I think of it. And that, for the friend who asked earlier today, was the very best Christmas present I ever had.
Dec
18
"Cheers" regulars Cliff and Norm
Sometimes you want to go
Where everybody knows your name,
and they’re always glad you came.
The theme song for the 1980s TV series Cheers pops into my head a lot. It was a show about a neighborhood bar, the kind of place where regulars walk in and their usual drink shows up at their favorite barstool before they can even get seated.
Bars like that are still out there, I’m sure. It’s the kind of place my parents hung out when I was a kid. I spent a lot of Saturday nights playing dominoes while they drank beer and I really don’t much care to be a regular there any more.
In fact, I’ve spent a good bit of my adult life resisting being a regular anywhere.
But there I was, this morning, sitting in my regular spot in a most unlikely place, surrounded by a lot of most unlikely people, many of whom do, in fact, know my name.
You wanna be where you can see,
our troubles are all the same
You wanna be where everybody knows
Your name.
A year ago today, I had never set foot in the place. But a week before Christmas, I slipped in at the last possible minute, grabbed an end seat in the back, easy for a quick getaway. After the small gospel choir with the big sound got everyone’s heart pumping — even mine — someone up front asked first and second time visitors to stand and give their names so they could be properly greeted. I did not stand up.
The details that got me from that moment in time to this don’t matter much. What does matter is that this morning, one year later, there I sat in my regular spot. Even before the small gospel choir marched its big sound down the aisle, I had talked with at least a dozen people about our lives and all the ways and places our humanity intersects.
What does matter is that something in the spirit of the people who gather in that place made it impossible for me to stay away. It’s a spirit that welcomes all of us, with our baggage and our doubts and our differences and our ways that haven’t always been a natural fit with stained glass and hymnals.
You wanna go where people know,
people are all the same,
You wanna go where everybody knows
your name.
Here in the South, some folks call churches the poor man’s country club. Still, comparing mine to a neighborhood bar may seem a little extreme. But I believe a lot of folks at Caldwell Presbyterian would like the idea that somebody thinks their church is the kind of place where people might just shout “Cheers!” when you come in the door.
Right after they call you by name, of course.
Dec
7
Here we are, nearly the middle of December, and a million miles from Christmas.
The ways we relate to this holiday are anything but holy. It is a retail orgy. It is precious videos and music over-exposed into meaninglessness and a distinct lack of comfort or joy.
As for the birth that launched us into this Celebration Gone Wild, we are separated from it not only by centuries, but by beliefs so tattered and divisive that those of us who claim to remember the reason for the season face off. We are the battleground and the birth itself has become the victim of the stiff-necked certainty that divides us.
So what is there left to say about this holy day that we have stripped of meaning and left at the entrance to the mall, battered and unrecognizable?
Last year, I attended The Birth, a play based on the writings of theologian Frederick Buechner, one of the deepest and most profound writers on Christianity from the last half-century. Buechner likes to challenge us to shift perspective, to step into the story of our tired old beliefs and imagine being touched by the workings of a God too mysterious and magnificent for us to fully comprehend. A God who sends his message of hope and love in the form of a baby – a helpless baby born poor and homeless, already rejected by people just like us.
Sitting in the darkened theater that was as Spartan as any manger, I fell into the mystery and the mysticism of that birth, that simple birth whose echo should have long since faded. And somehow, has not.
Nov
26
Living in the moment with ginger cookies
I work with my brain. As Adrian Monk says, it’s a gift and a curse. It makes the perceived world in my mind seem fascinating, while the real world comes at me diluted, a gray blur.
Yesterday, I baked three batches of Christmas cookies. It’s a ritual I love. Creaming butter and sugar in the mixer, watching it become pale and smooth. Adding egg and vanilla extract, maybe orange zest, inhaling the aroma of something coming to life in a deep metal bowl. Then the blend of flour and spices that make each batch unique — ginger, nutmeg, cardamom, maybe finely chopped hazelnuts to change both the flavor and the feel on my tongue.
First up yesterday: ginger cookies. After the mixing, I sat at the table scooping out heaping teaspoons of chilled molasses-dark dough, rolling it into perfect balls, dipping each one in sugar and lining them up on shiny cookie sheets. As I did, I had one of those moments that my brain usually keeps me too preoccupied to notice: a moment of being perfectly present with what was before me. I was hyper aware of my hands, slightly sticky with dough and gritty with sugar, the evocative theme from To Kill a Mockingbird playing on WDAV, late-morning sunshine soft on the walls and table-top.
Everything was perfect and I was there for it.
The first few times that kind of hyper awareness happened to me, the experience was so intense I was actually terrified. I wasn’t sure I could stand life lived so vividly. Because most of the time, my brain is filtering the world, pushing my senses out of the way so I can think. About what I just said to somebody, what somebody said back to me, what time I have to be somewhere, how long it’s going to take me to revise the last thing I wrote.
None of that’s bad. I’m grateful my gifts lean in a direction that allows me to work with my mind. love being a writer.
But living through my brain instead of my senses can dim the colors and the smells and the textures and the sounds of life. Too much of the time, I live life through a glass, darkly, forgetting that as valuable as my mind is, the world waits for me to engage, even when it’s so intense that it is terrifying.
Nov
24
Being grateful for what I have is easy. Pecan pie and Miss Bailey and sunshine out the windows and my favorite shoes that are not only comfortable but look good, too.
What can be hard is being grateful for what I don’t have. Not the stuff I don’t have like sickness and hunger and homelessness – it’s pretty to be grateful that I’m missing those things.
What’s hard is being grateful for what I don’t have when I think it’s something I should have, something I think I need to make life perfect, something I expected would come my way.
I spoke with a friend yesterday who had surgery about a month ago. She worried, before surgery, about how she would cope. She wouldn’t be able to go up and down the stairs to her bedroom. She wouldn’t be able to get her own breakfast or dress herself. And this was all going to happen over Thanksgiving, which would mean she wouldn’t be with her daughters in other states or her granddaughter or her brother.
What she has had, in the midst of this ocean of need, is the humility to accept the help of dozens of friends, the kind of friends who are willing to help you when you’re helpless. What she has had is an awareness of how much she is loved and what really matters and that each person who has helped her has been the hands of God, providing everything she needs in life. What she has been given is a hard circumstance that became not something to endure, but a time of spiritual growth.
So on this day of giving thanks, and every single day if I am paying attention to the way God works, I will be grateful for what I don’t have and think I want. Because I can be sure that there are more gifts in my lack than I will ever find in my abundance.
Nov
1
As seen on Facebook
Wow.
I saw this posted on Facebook. Its original source was a fan page that posts a lot of stick-it-to-the-liberals funny stuff. So I presume from its source — and from the 1000-plus responses — that this is intended to be a humorous put-down of Democrats.
I’m not going to get into the politics of this because at this moment in time I have very little respect for politicians of any stripe and next to no confidence in the folks we’ve elected to run our country, whether they’re red or blue.
What I want to talk about is a world in which we ridicule the idea of saying, “Share your candy.”
I know, I know. I understand the political ideology behind this. But, hey, there are so many ways to make liberals look foolish that I am astounded conservatives would pounce on this particular idea. They might just as well ridicule the notion, “Feed the hungry. Clothe the poor.”
My inclination was to add, “Love your neighbor. Bhahahah!” But I think the point is made.
Oct
23
His eyes were beautiful – blue and clear, set in a sun-browned face so lined and leathered that it spoke to the state of his life – homeless – and the length of time it had been so.
But his eyes were luminous.
I know because I looked him directly in those eyes when I rolled down my window and gave him a few dollars. When I did, he gave me the gift of a smile that rose up from some sweet spot inside him and came to rest in his eyes. I’m reading a lot into those few seconds, I know. It was that kind of moment.
As I drove away, I had a pious thought that tries to pass itself off as gratitude but is actually more about keeping myself feeling secure within the confines of my safely-mortgaged lives.
“There but for the grace…”
The thought turned sour before I finished the phrase.
Oh, really? Like God’s grace doesn’t extend to that man with the smile in his eyes? Or to the frazzled woman standing at the bus stop wearing a pair of worn-to-the-pavement shoes? Or the 24 children who will die of hunger around the world in the two minutes it takes to read what I’ve written? What about the bright young people who should have brilliant futures ahead of them but will nevertheless die of cancer or addiction or suicide or texting-while-driving? God doesn’t provide grace for those people?
The God I believe in provides grace for everyone. And when I can drive away from a homeless man on the street and think somehow that God’s grace protects me from a fate like his, I wonder if I am living not in a state of grace but in a state of arrogance.
I do not believe God showers grace only on those of us who pray fervently enough or worship in the right church or read the right holy literature. I don’t know why some of us seem blessed and some of us have lives that look like a train wreck from hell. But I believe grace rains down on all of us.
Maybe some of us turn our backs on that grace.
Maybe some of us take the grace that’s available to us and use it to build walls that separate us from them.
Maybe some of us do the best we can to grow into that grace, knowing that it’s okay if we never quite get it right.
Maybe for some people, grace shows up as having the humility to ask for handouts on the street. And to do so with clear blue eyes that smile a blessing on someone with plenty, who might then be lifted out of her self-absorption long enough to remember that she does not have a corner on God’s grace.
Oct
11
When hopelessness turns to hopefulness
Is it really possible that some people don’t understand why other people are gathering to voice their dissatisfaction in cities across the U.S.?
Agree or not with the people who are gathering under the Occupy Wall Street banner, the reasons are so simple. The reasons are economic and political. The reasons are related to social justice. The reasons are the anger and fear and hopelessness growing like a cancer where there is hunger or joblessness or empty pockets. Others have said what needs to be said about those reasons better than I can. But I see another reason, a reason beyond the economics and the anger.
When I look at people taking to the streets, I see so much more than fear and hopelessness. I also see a hopefulness born of a collective belief that sooner or later in our nation something righteous always wins.
We often seem to wade through ugliness to get there. We are a nation built on bloodshed and hatred, among other things. But our story is also the story of a people who always believe something greater waits on the other side of the ugliness. And we are always hopeful about that righteous prize. We believe in it beyond reason, even when ugliness stares us straight in the eyes.
Claiming not to understand why people are discontented in today’s economic and social climate smacks of contempt, and contempt so easily leads to actions far worse than simply standing up to be heard. Worse has happened, other places and other times, and if we think it cannot happen here again — as it did in Birmingham or at Kent State or in a 1920s mill village right down the road from where I sit today – we are not paying attention.
When I see people gathering and I see the gatherings growing, I am hopeful. Because wherever people care enough to believe they can make a difference, sooner or later, something righteous always wins.
(Photo courtesy of Canadian film maker Velcrow Ripper, from his site http://occupylove.org/ )
Sep
28
Just try it. That’s all I ask.
The next time someone irritates the very devil out of you, pause for a moment and look for the ways that person is like you instead of focusing on all those differences that make you want to scream.
The next time someone looks like the root of all your problems — or society’s problems, because goodness knows society has a lot of problems and we sure do want to pin the blame somewhere — imagine for a moment that this person feels the same fear or anger or uncertainty you feel, just packaged differently.
The next time you want to look down on someone who clearly oughta know better or do better or be better, just for a moment remember your own worst moment, a moment you wish you could take back, a time when you should’ve known better or done better or been better. Maybe there’ll be an instant when it’s like looking in the mirror.
Just try it. Once today. Then once more tomorrow. Try it because it sounds sappy and simplistic but it is surprisingly hard and we all need to stretch ourselves at least once a day. Then try it once more. Who knows? Maybe it gets easier.
Changing how I think about other people may not sound like much, but it is the beginning of change. A change in my perceptions. A change in my own level of frustration with daily life. A change in how I interact with that one irritating-as-hell person. Sometimes, one thing changes everything.
Humor me. Just try it. Promise?
Photo courtesy of Mantos Ruzveltas
Sep
26
I’m angry. Mad-as-hell, not-gonna-take-it-any-longer angry.
I’m angry about the widening gap between rich and poor, a gap the American middle-class is falling into. I’m angry about the way people use our country’s very real problems as political weapons. I’m angry that so many seem so determined to do anything except come together for the common good.
So.
If my response to all those circumstances is anger, then I am handing one small battle – my small battle — to whatever it is in us that is driven to divide humanity into “us” and “them”.
But how do I channel my anger? What do I do with a rage that won’t be ignored and wants so much to be thrown out as fuel to the fire?
I don’t know. If I knew, I suppose I wouldn’t feel so helpless and would not feel so angry. As I say that, I wonder this: How many others who seem to be responding to desperate need with dismissive rhetoric and political posturing are simply doing their best to mask their own fears of helplessness? They are not responding from a place of love, but neither am I.
That makes us the same, doesn’t it? All of us, just walking around in the vulnerable skin of humanity and wishing we weren’t, somehow, so vulnerable.
Years ago, I read about a man who decided that each time he judged or criticized someone else, he would say to himself, “And I am that, too.”
My anger isn’t gone. And these 300 words won’t change anyone’s political views or deeply-held beliefs. People will remain far apart in those ways, no matter what I say. But for the 45 minutes it took me to write this, I have remembered how much better it feels to channel my anger into love and to live, even for a few minutes, in the awareness of how under-the-skin close we really are. That’s a very tiny battle won.
Aug
31
It's hard not to be joyful with ice cream on your nose
A few years ago I was going through one of those troubled times when I couldn’t decide who to blame for my misery but knew damn well somebody was to blame and somebody should pay. I was chock full of self-pity and self-loathing and lots of other self-defeating beliefs and behaviors.
One afternoon, mid-summer, I had one of those brief, shining moments that I like to call a God Shot — for no discernable reason, I was filled with joy. In that instant, I understood that I was free to choose joy. I also understood that I would forget joy was always there for the choosing but that, in odd moments here and there, joy would choose me and I would remember.
I decided to make the most of that moment. It will not surprise you to know that “making the most of it” for me involved ice cream. But not just scoop-it-into-a-bowl, eat-it-with-a-spoon ice cream. I would go in search of those little cones we used to have when I was a child. I would cram one of those cones full of ice cream and let it run down my fingers and stick to my nose. It’s hard not to be joyful with ice cream on your nose.
I went to the grocery store and picked out mint chocolate chip ice cream because nothing says summer like mint chocolate chip. I’d never bought cones before, but I thought I’d seen them there before, at the end of the freezer case beside Hershey’s syrup and caramel sauce. I turned the corner and sure enough, there they were, boxes of old-fashioned cones. The brand name, it big, kid-attracting letters: JOY.
Tonight is the final night of August, surely the perfect night to celebrate the end of summer. In the kitchen, I have an old-fashioned cone and a single-serving container of mint chocolate chip ice cream. Some of which will stick to my nose.
Aug
7
Miss Bailey, up close & personal
Woke up this morning clinging to the edge of my pillow, having been nudged off dead center sometime in the wee hours by the 6.5-pound cat, Miss Bailey, who shares my bed.
Miss Bailey is about the size of a relatively small newborn child. I was just over six pounds myself when I was born. So it’s hard to understand how she can dominate the bed. But she does.
It starts because she wants to sleep on my face. She climbs up, drapes herself across my cheek, mouth and nose, then settles in with a sound of contentment halfway between a robust purr and a delicate snore. I, myself halfway between sleep and wake, adjust to avoid a mouthful of fur. Miss Bailey snuggles closer, sometimes reaching for my cheek with a soft paw. The push-pull continues and soon it’s 6 a.m. and I wake up to find Miss Bailey enthroned on the center of the pillow, body curled around the top of my head.
This is not, I think, an isolated event in my life.
I invite people into my life. They want to get closer. I want to avoid the messiness of fur up my nose and down my throat. So I try to edge imperceptibly away, without sending them flying off to some other room, some other soft spot. They sense my distance and reach for me. I resist, withdraw. We are beyond negotiating a healthy give-and-take, caught as we are in that dreamy state of near-sleep where all we want is what we want. I wake up resentful. Miss Bailey, like so many others, wakes up alone and feeling rejected.
And so it goes. Unless, as I did this morning, I take Miss Bailey in my arms, lie back on my pillow and pull Miss Bailey to my chest so we can finish our sleep, heart to heart.
Aug
3
Compromise: a settlement of differences by mutual adjustment or modification of opposing claims, principles, demands, etc.
That’s what Webster’s says about compromise. Here’s what I say: Once the compromise has been reached, the goal should be to support the compromise and to work together to create success from that compromise. To do anything less is childish and petty and self-serving to the extreme.
Nobody is happy about the economy. Nobody likes everything about the debt ceiling deal that was reached in recent days. The only way one person or group or party gets all of what it wants is in a dictatorship. We the people have not granted 100 percent control to any one person or party. So we compromise. Sometimes the people who do the compromising even do so in the spirit of finding the best solution from among a smorgasbord of conflicting ideas.
Here’s what needs to come after the compromise: unity in the service of success.
Not continued bickering or bellyaching. Not fingerpointing or namecalling, which belong on the playground. And not, even in this era when news coverage has been replaced by yammerers, ceaseless rehash.
Unity and hard work to make it work.
I can’t make that happen in Washington or at Fox or at CNN or in the vitriolic comments added to blogs all over the internet. All I can do is support the spirit of compromise by refusing to be part of the attack mentality that has replaced rational discussion. I’d like the work of our political leaders to be successful in restoring our economy and our good name around the globe, even if I don’t agree 100% with how they get there? Wouldn’t you?
A compromise has been reached. It’s time to set aside differences and pull the plow together.
Jul
8
How do you define love?
A blog about love could become complicated. It could also go on forever. I think I’ll keep it short and sweet.
Back when I wasn’t sure I believed in God but was sure I didn’t like God if there was a God, love gave me a peek through the door at God. At the time, I was writing romance novels and when journalists interviewed me with that smirk on their faces that said they were grateful they didn’t have to sink as low as I did to make a living, they usually asked why I wrote romance novels. I always said, ”Because love has the power to heal our lives.” I don’t know that I believed it any more than they did, but they always quoted me and it gave an aura of profundity to writing that some people viewed as just a short step up from soft-core porn.
I guess I said the words enough that I started to believe them. One day, as I searched for something to believe in, I realized that maybe love was powerful enough to become my Higher Power until something better came along.
My concept of God has changed and grown and so has my concept of love.
Here’s how I define love: Love is not how we feel about someone; love is deciding to be a force for good in someone’s life.
That covers a lot of territory; it makes my choices, my actions, my words pretty clear. It means I don’t even have to like a person in order to love that person. It gets pretty simple. Not easy, but simple.
Illustration by Salvatore Vuono
Jul
1
(Caution: This is a rant.)
I love music. All kinds of music. I love bluegrass and classical and the blues. I love Dylan and Willie and Frank and Hank. I love Billie Holiday and Patsy Cline and Eva Cassidy. I don’t love all musi
c, but my tastes run across a broad spectrum.
But I’m tired of other people deciding what I listen to and how loud it’s going to be, then forcing it on me everywhere I go.
Once upon a time, piped-in music was only in elevators. So mostly I could avoid it and I was only exposed to it in small doses. It’s hard to overdose on a ride from the lower level parking deck to the fourth floor.
Now, music is everywhere and most of it is too loud. It’s at the mall when I walk, sometimes with competing music coming from inside the stores as I pass their open doors. It’s at grocery stores and at restaurants when I’m trying to eat and enjoy conversation. I’ve even heard it blasted into parking lots before I walk into the stores. It’s at home improvement stores, discount stores, the auto repair waiting room, doctor’s offices…everywhere.
Am I really the only person left who likes to talk to the person I’m walking with, shopping with, dining with? I especially like doing so without having to raise my voice. And when I’m alone, I enjoy the silence. I don’t even mind being alone with my own thoughts.
And that, I think, is the problem. Too many of us are terrified of being alone with our own thoughts.
The irony is that I’m possibly the only person left in the universe without earbuds and an electronic device loaded with a personal soundtrack. Maybe I’m the only one still listening to all this unavoidable racket. So, please, could we just turn off the music?
Rant over.
(Illustration by Danilo Rizzuti.)
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.
