Touchstone

I think most writers have a theme they keep coming back to, no matter the piece they are working on. Unless I have completely misunderstood myself over the years, I recognize that my theme is one of finding the sacred in the ordinary.  Ordinary things, ordinary conversation, ordinary kindnesses.  This is fiction/non-fiction hybrid. The rings on the sideboard have been polished, but not enough to erase them.

Ice filled glasses dripped right through the small linen squares that were inadequate against the condensation. The linens were not coasters, of course, but when your drink was freshly made and the glass still dry, you might hold the small square in your hand as a layer against the ice, not thinking ahead to when the glass would sweat right into the wood.

Pewter coasters with flying geese etched into them were set out, but after a few Manhattans, aiming to set the glass inside the lip was a challenge.  So the finely woven linens, freshly ironed that afternoon, stood in.

She didn’t want the scratches on the sideboard sanded away and varnished with a fresh coat that smothered the memories.  She dusted and polished it occasionally but not enough to disguise the patina. This sideboard held stories. Iron skeleton keys rested in its locks, linens were still folded in its drawers. When she opened a drawer, the skin of the wood released its breath of lavender, orange and cedar sachets that had long ago been discarded.

She only uses those linens on holidays. Then the ancient lace tablecloth comes out, gracing a newer cloth like a veil. That veil held Uncle Charlie’s stories and his laughter and the click of his bridgework and the saturated sweet red cherry sitting on ice that hadn’t had enough time to melt. The glass would be re-filled, cued with just a sad nod at its emptiness. Not a beat missed. Re-filled while we all laughed and Aunt Loretta sighed, Oh, Charlie.

Those tales are family scripture.  Tradition and history passed down around the table. It was holy like mass, only we didn’t think like that at the time. Later when the voices were faint echoes that lingered in the wood, on the lace tablecloth, worn into the silver pattern and the wedding china, then we knew, or should have known. All of it was sacred.

But when the darkness came, could the walls and floor, table and crystal contain the sacredness when it seemed most threatened? Could those threads and splinters and ancient clinking glasses hold us together when it seemed all would be broken in the violence of words and anger and misunderstanding, of words said and not said?

Communion of saints. Don’t be silent now. Speak up. Contain the overflow. Herd it back to where it, where we, belong.

Choirs of Angels?

Several years ago, when our oldest child was in high school and our youngest in elementary, Gene and I came home from our Small Community of Faith gathering to find Katie directing John as he posed as a shepherd for the Christmas card she was drawing. She had him wrapped in a pastel green tablecloth and was instructing him to "look afraid" at the sight of the Angelic Host. He complained, in that youngest child way, why every year his siblings tried to make a fool of him.  They protested that accusation with a defense that they try to make of fool of him every day.

Mike was waving a shillelagh/shepherd’s staff and Daniel was sitting on the couch reading through a skateboard magazine awaiting the director’s instruction.  When it was Daniel’s turn to sit on the stairs that were doubling as a Bethlehem hillside he brought over the magazine and announced that he was studying the “Noble Word”, a new title for sacred scripture, we supposed.  He had an old blanket on his head and a belt from a Ninja turtle costume as the headband.  A large blue sheet was his garment.  Mike was sitting on a dining room chair, still waving that shillelagh and making up a dialect that was a cross between Mel Brooks and Darby O’Gill reacting to the imagined choir of angels, while he was draped in tablecloths.  Katie’s attempt at directing her three brothers to look serious, contemplative and afraid of the celestial announcers of the birth of the savior was not very successful.  No way were they sitting still and going to look anything but goofy arrayed in our best dining table attire.

Ah, Christmas!

It was rather refreshing to be greeted at the door by the sounds of our children laughing and joking with each other. You can believe it was a wonderful change from the almost usual litany of complaints and the call to separate boys mid-fight over some squabble that would erupt as soon as we stepped out for a little adult conversation. This was a benefit of their ever-growing maturity, along with the large sneakers that littered the house.

I knew this was a 'snapshot' moment.   I almost took a picture of them in their silly outfits, but I didn’t, for two reasons.  One was that there are some moments you cannot pose for.  Another, very practical reason, is that we never develop our pictures (this was before we had digital cameras).  We had rolls of undeveloped moments of our family history in drawers and cabinets and shelves all over the house. Why we bothered to say “Cheese!” is one of our family mysteries.  This was something we would trust to memory and imagination:  the four of them laughing and joking and trying to pose as historical figures from the greatest drama of all time in our suburban living room/ hillside of Judea.

I had been nostalgic for Christmas past when we had a house full of young children anxiously awaiting the arrival of Santa on Christmas Eve.  There is no question that those early years of childhood are precious beyond measure with innocence and hope in the generosity of a jolly old saint adding a special wonder to their eyes. It was one of the few nights that we could actually get the kids to go to bed without too many complaints or stalling maneuvers.  They all camped in the front bedroom with the blinds up so they could spy Santa and his reindeer-led sleigh passing overhead.

When morning came too quickly for parents who were up all night helping a red-suited elf display the fruits of the Magi’s legacy, it was impossible to resist the excitement of little round-bellied tots in footy pajamas as they ripped open the mysteries left overnight while visions of sugarplums, or whatever the current new toy was, danced through their heads. Yes, I do miss that.  But, over the years, we have deposited quite a bit in the “remember when” reservoir that adds depth to our definition of what Christmas means to us.

After all that posing and pretend complaining, when Katie produced her initial sketches for what that year’s card would look like, her three shepherds on the hillside all have their backs to us.  There is a flash of angel in the distant sky awakening the sleepy trio to announce the good news, but their faces are hidden.  But I know what they look like.

We managed to get Katie's drawing turned into Christmas cards. If  I had it handy I would post it along with these words.  I'm sure it is somewhere safe in a folder  in the back of my closet. Someday I'll find it and show it to the grand-kids. There's always room for new family traditions.

NaNo

We are coming to the end of NaNoWriMo.  I'd surprise myself immensely if I manage the full 50,000 words by Monday midnight. The experience, though, has been fruitful if not completely successful.  I've gotten a few story starts, anecdotes, character filling out and understanding of what it is I am trying to say in my novel.  There are decisions to be made. Directions have to be chosen, because when you are writing about three generations there are too many distractions and side roads to wander and take you far away from the point, the point, that is, that you think you are trying to make. Since I usually write works that are shorter than a novel, much shorter, my learning curve has been steep. Here is one  fictional scene of what developed during my exercise of NaNo:

The side board in the dining room has rings. Concentric circles from sweated glasses left there, bare bottomed or through flimsy coasters that couldn’t do the job.

The rings have been polished over, but the lighter stain shows through years of benign neglect.

I kinda like them.

They conjure episodes of when life was simpler, for me, at least. On any given Saturday night in those days people would ‘drop over’. The men wore jackets and ties. The women wore dresses and spiky heels. The women all wore hose, of course, even in summer, except for the women who were ‘sporty’, the ones who smoked and dyed their hair and wore the kind of lipstick that left smudges on everything they came in contact with: napkins, glasses, cigarettes, cheeks. My mother wore stockings.

My parents always had a supply of rye, scotch, gin and beer on hand. And that awful Tom Collins mix.  The small bottles of ginger ale and the pretty maraschino cherries were forbidden to us. I really liked ginger ale, but we could only have it from the big bottles we got when we had bologna and Virginia ham and Wise potato chips for supper.

We’d sit at the top of the stairs, in our pajamas. The grownups would come in, loudly, laughing already, strong perfumes floating up the stairs, along with the smell of hairspray and cigarettes.  Dad had set up bar on the dining room table ready with pitchers of Manhattans, the makings of highballs and gin and tonics. Mom had cheese and crackers (I helped arrange them on the crystal dish before we had to scoot upstairs) and some cheesey puffs fresh from the oven that she made from directions on the side of the biscuit tube.  The maraschino cherries were in an etched dish with a tiny fork. There were green olives with pimentos in a divided dish, next to some pickle spears with little colored swords piercing them.

We’d hear the glasses clink with ice cubes and every so often a loud rise of laughter would follow one of the men who told a joke, I guess, that earned a lot of sloppy sshh’s from some of the women.  My sister would fall asleep right there on the landing on the pillow she brought from our room.  After she fell asleep I would wander down, wearing my best innocent I just woke up face, pretending to seek a glass of milk.

I was intercepted, as I had hoped, at the bottom of the stairs, by a woman with Lucy hair and an outline of poppy red lipstick on her mouth.  The cigarette she was balancing and the lip of the glass had stolen the rest of the color. She managed a long ash creeping almost to the cotton filter in the same hand in which she held a tumbler nearly empty of amber liquor. The cherry was still there, marinating in the watered down Manhattan.

When she bent down to give me a hug, calling me sweetie, and oh what a doll, she swept the fallen ash off the shoulder of my pink flannels. I was momentarily smothered in her ample cleavage popping over the v-neck of her tight dress.  Her perfume and cigarette made my eyes water.  It was not the perfume my mother used.  She speared the object of my real quest with a tiny green sword and presented it to me.  I slipped away with the rye soaked delight before she could hug me again.

For My Father

Since today is the anniversary of the JFK assassination, I am sharing an excerpt from my essay Mystique, which was published in Ten Spurs, Literary Journal of the Mayborn Conference Standing in the living room on a bright crisp Saturday in October 1960, my father asks me if I would like to come with him to get neighbors to vote.  Eagerly, I say yes and my mother buttons up my sweater and brushes back my hair.  Dad and I go about Rosedale ringing doorbells.  We climb the brick stoops of the houses around St. Clare's.  Dad has an impressive list of all the registered voters in the area, or maybe he just has the registered Democrats. The list would be virtually the same for our neighborhood on the outskirts of Queens where nearly everyone is a member of St. Clare's Roman Catholic Church, and if they aren’t, they belong to Beth Israel on the other side of Sunrise Highway. Oh, there are a few Protestants, someone has to go to St. Peter’s Episcopal near the Long Island Rail Road station.  Maybe they are on the Republican voter list.

So Dad rings the bell and someone answers the door, saying something pleasant to the little kid in corduroys who has come to help.  Dad always has a friendly line while conveying the importance of getting out to vote on Election Day.  Hello, Joe, I’m here with my young friend Juli-kazool to ask you and Evelyn to vote on Tuesday November 8.  As you know we are supporting the Kennedy-Johnson ticket and every vote counts. I turn three the day before John Kennedy is elected President of the United States.  He is one of us; Irish, Catholic and his daughter and I were born the same month of the same year.

In September of 1963 I finally get to go to first grade.  I put on my new wool jumper, black and white oxfords and beret for the opening day of school.  The church is filled with uniformed boys and girls, nuns in yards of black organza and starched white wimples.  I am now initiated with my older brothers and sister into this long awaited ritual.  Several priests assist Fr. Dunnigan at the communion rail for the hundreds of communicants.  We first graders kneel in place, back straight, singing the hymns, waiting for our turn next spring.  We are in touch with something here, something ancient and deep and true.  Communion of saints bridging the past to present to future; our souls, just for a moment, glimpse the ineffable.  Dominus vobiscum. Et cum Spiritu tuo.

Sr. Mary Norbert stands in front of the seventy-five first graders under her care, a long, large Rosary with a crucifix bigger than my hand hanging from her waistband, her young face pinched in the white wimple.  The principal breaks in over the loudspeaker this grey afternoon before Thanksgiving, interrupting our lesson.  Her voice cracks.  Our President has been shot. Sr. Mary Norbert steps out into the hallway to confer with the other teachers.  In stunned movement she returns and we all pull out our Rosaries and recite, the whole school, with the principal over the loudspeaker, five decades, praying for our President, for our country.  Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee, blessed art thou amongst women…. This is something like those air raid shelter drills where half the class lines up in the hallway, half huddle under our desk, Rosary marking the time until the bell rings all clear. But no, this is different.  This time something has actually happened and it isn’t a Russian bomb.  After the Rosary we pack our school bags and go home where Walter Cronkite in shades of grey moves into our living rooms and images that will repeat for the rest of our lives make their mark.  My mother is in the rocking chair with Gerry on her lap, watching history, making no comment.  I know not to question the silence.  She sends me out to play.  It is cold and grey in our backyard. The apple tree is barren and the brown leaves crunch under my feet.

...there is restlessness.  We need some fresh air.  Vatican II brought Hootenanny Masses, in English, where we really did sing Kumbaya and Blowin’ in the Wind as Fr. Dunnigan grimaced and Fr. Beliveau smiled.  The world rocked with student revolts and a fury barely contained.  The Kennedy and King assassinations played over and over until we felt like we were there, blood warm on our hands.  Kent State and the despair and grief of that young woman with the wild hair, arms upraised in ancient keening why, why, why and we can nearly hear her through the grainy image on the front page of the Long Island Press.

Crossing the Line

Somebody had to do it. So we volunteered.  With four Slimming World© comrades I proudly and cheerfully brought up the rear of the 5K “Dorothy’s Dash” for MS on Saturday.  Thank you, thank you.  No need for applause.

I had never been in a 5K.  Long, long time ago, I twice signed up for a twenty mile Walkathon.  The first year it poured so my friend and I found our way to the Statue of Liberty where we met up with a group of kids from the neighborhood and climbed to the top of Lady Liberty.  In soggy shoes and blue jeans heavy with rain, we climbed round and round the steep and narrow stairs just to pass by the windows in her crown and look out, very briefly, at a gray and soggy harbor.  You do that kind of thing when you’re 15.

The next year was clear and hot.  We made it to about mile 13 before our blisters persuaded us to stop.  So what did we do?  We walked around Battery Park, of course.  The blisters didn’t seem to mind a ramble as much as finish line.

I didn’t sign up a third year.

Saturday morning in Flower Mound, Texas was cold.  The afternoon before, the temperature hit 79.  So when they said it would be cooler in the morning, I was very glad.  I should have paid attention to how much cooler it was to be.

The wind was blowing.  I should have had a hat and gloves and a winter coat.  Nope.  A velvety zip up jacket, with a hood and pockets, thank God, had to do the job.  I was tempted to slither off back to the car and head home. But those other ladies reminded me to go and register and get my chip.  Once you’ve got a chip, you are committed.  So we walked.

The real athletes lined up first, the people with obvious muscles in shorts and tank tops (didn’t they know it was cold?)  An awful lot of professional looking runners were taking this 5K seriously. We fell in with the people pushing baby carriages.  There was a good size group of us in our red Slimming World© T-shirts.  We were women who have been defying the lure of cookies and creamy desserts for months putting one foot in front of another for a good cause.  Not a bad way to spend a Saturday morning. It wasn't long, though, before the rest of the group moved on ahead of us.  Way ahead of us.

The five of us passed the finish line at 58 minutes and change.  Yeah!!  A nice ramble in cool November weather where five women did what women do best.  We talked.

And that is the genius of Slimming World©.  Not only is the plan remarkable and do-able and full of common sense, it is social.  It is therapeutic.  It is fun.  We are in this together

Because we want to bring up the rear. (Pun intended)