Sunday, it was snowing, and my husband was recovering from Covid, so I took a shower and dressed in fresh pajamas. My plan for the day, skip church, go nowhere, and couch potato all day long.
Laying around, in my red, velour bathrobe, I looked up at my pajama-twin husband, and was suddenly so grateful that Covid had not captured his body, and that, in light of Ukraine’s frigid horror, we were safe from the storm, in our toasty home doing Wordles together.
That’s when a friend who’d recently lost her beloved husband came to mind. She’d moved since his death, so I sent her a quick text asking for her new address. She responded, and in a brief exchange, told me, in a sea of sorrow, God and her friends were her lifeline. When we were done, I clicked over to my Facebook feed. There on my tiny screen was a YouTube video of a turtle flipped over and drowning in a shallow concrete pond until the rest of the turtles swam underneath her and provided the solid ground she needed to right herself.
Immediately, I texted my friend back. “I think God meant this video for you.”
Afterwards, I shared the video on Facebook. Within moments, another friend who’d tragically lost her husband earlier in the year, saw my post and asked if I had a minute for a phone call. We talked about everything, the way you do with someone you’ve known for fifty years, and among our topics was her dad, a master organist at her childhood church.
When we parted, she said she’d text a video of the Westminster Abbey choir performing for the royal family accompanied by the Abbey’s pipe organ. We hung up, and I went back to watching the snow fall and relaxing with a mystery series on Prime.
Next morning, I opened my friend’s video. Alone, again in my pajamas, I listened as the choir began, “Guide Me, Oh Thou Great Redeemer.” The camera panned from above. The long nave, lined with Romanesque arches ended in a gilded altar. Transepts to either side gave the towering cathedral the shape of a cross. This was the space in which William the Conqueror was crowned king in 1066.
I am not a thee and thou kind of girl, and we don’t worship at my church with old hymns, but oh my, I see why my friend sent it. The thunder of that organ in that ancient space, the chorus of voices, the fanfare of glistening trumpets, figuratively put me on my face before the majesty of an Almighty God who stooped to carry our human frailties and grief.
At one point, the video, focused on the face of Kate Middleton amidst the royal family. Somehow, she seemed unsure, even standing beside her husband, the future king of England. And suddenly, I saw Prince William as the adorable blonde boy who’d lost his mother to palace intrigue and the pitiless paparazzi. And I realized, every Christmas since, he’s spent without his mum.
It may sound cliché to say it’s hard for those who’ve lost loved ones during the holiday season, but with close friends making that a reality not even royalty can escape, the lyrics of that classic hymn hit home. We are pilgrims in a barren land, weak, and desperate for our redeemer’s hand. And as our sorrows strip away the things of earth, we long for nothing but a strong deliverer, healing, and the death of death and hell’s destruction.
Let’s bring all this back to earth. The very next day, I tested positive for Covid, and it was my turn to be the turtle flipped over and flipped out.
Many turtles checked in, and on the third day of my illness, at break of day, my Westminster Abbey turtle sent me a Barry White video that made me laugh out loud.
So, whether it’s through his creation, his music, or a seemingly unrelated trinity of YouTube videos, may the Lord speak his comfort and peace to you this Christmas.
Lord, be our everything!
Whom have I in heaven but you? I desire you more than anything on earth. 26 My health may fail, and my spirit may grow weak, but God remains the strength of my heart; he is mine forever.
This week I put up the creche I made with my mom when I was little.
This post is a kind of rerun, an edited version of a post about that creche that I shared a few years back before I had any idea it would be a chapter in a memoir I’ve almost finished about how I came to Christ.
Read it for the first time or again with a greater understanding of God’s patient sovereignty in our lives.
After the first snowfall of second grade, there was a small, corrugated box, a pile of Popsicle sticks, a jar full of sawdust, some huge pinecones, and some bark on the kitchen table when I came home from school. My mom said we were going to make a crèche. My brother, Bruce, and I sat beside her as she set the box on its side and folded the upper flap to make a roof. She pulled apart the pinecone petals and showed me how to glue them on like shingles. She opened the sides, and the box turned into a building with wide open doors. She showed me how to glue Popsicle sticks on the doors and the inside of the box. Now it looked like Granddaddy’s barn. She spread some glue on the floor of the box, and Bruce got to sprinkle it with sawdust. We glued the tree bark on the outside walls.
After we washed our hands, my mom helped Bruce zip up his parka before she pulled on her maroon coat with the fur collar and cuffs. I climbed into the back seat of the black Ford station wagon next to Bruce while my mom reached into her purse and pulled out a shiny tube. Glancing in the mirror, she arched each lip with the color of a candy apple. Her purse snapped shut, and we were off to the ten-cent store.
In the center of the five and dime there was a high counter where a short little old lady sat behind a cash register while her little old man wandered the store. Bruce and I glided along the outside counters fingering the small bins of pink teddy bear erasers, Mickey Mouse pencil cases, blunt-tipped scissors, silver jacks, rubber balls, green dice, leather wallets branded with lariats and rearing horses, balloons, bubbles, balsa wood gliders, and Popeye Pez dispensers, things we could only hope Santa would leave in our stockings. My mom was standing by the plastic folded rain hats, miniature sewing kits, darning needles, and crochet hooks when the little old man said, “May I help you?”
“Yes.” She scanned the shelves above the bins lined with china figurines: German shepherds, angora kittens, and nursery rhyme characters. “Do you carry nativity figures?”
“Right this way.” The little old man led us towards more bins chocked with ten-cent men in beards and red bathrobes, ladies in blue bathrobes and matching head scarves, and babies stuck in cattle troughs like where Granddaddy feeds his white-faced, red bodied Herefords. There were all sorts of animals too. My mom said I could pick out a cow, a donkey, and even a camel with a fancy red saddle. She picked out two of the bearded men. One would be Joseph, the other a shepherd. A blue lady would be Mary. Bruce got to pick out three kings. The purple one carried a golden treasure chest, the green one a basket. The red king a wooden box.
When we got home the sawdust was dry, so I could put my animals in the little barn. My mom put Mary and Joseph in the barn, and I put baby Jesus in the trough between them. She told Bruce to put the shepherd and his sheep on one side of the barn and the kings on the other side along with their camel because they had come across a desert to worship him. She glued a crocheted angel to the roof of the crèche to sing to the shepherd while he watched his little flock and told us this is what Christmas was about. Yet we placed the crèche on the stereo where my dad played Bing Crosby’s White Christmas and hung up our stockings on the mantel.
The night before Christmas, we put out a plate of cookies for Santa and two carrots for his reindeer. Then lying on the carpet, the tinseled Christmas tree the only light in the dark living room, I dreamed up a plan. After mommy and daddy went to sleep, I would sneak out of my bed and hide beside the couch. From there, I was sure to witness Santa coming down the chimney to stuff our stockings.
In the morning, I realized I’d slept through my scheme, yet when I raced down the stairs, there was my stocking, the top bulging with a ballerina’s pink tutu. “Mommy, Daddy, Look! Santa knew just what I wanted.”
They tittered and sipped their Maxwell House coffee as I left the room and returned in the pink leotard and tulle skirt.
My dad set the arm of the record player on the Nutcracker, and I twirled with joy beside the crèche – waiting patiently on the stereo.
Waiting for me to figure out that my mom and dad ate Santa’s cookies, that Santa was a fraud, that shepherds were poor, dirty men nobody usually sang to, and having a baby in a barn was gross, desperate, and extraordinary.
The following is an essay I read last Friday at BraVa, an event sponsored by Marion Roach Smith and the YWCA in Troy, NY. Marion is the author ofThe Memoir Project: A Thoroughly Non-Standardized Text for Writing and Life,which I highly recommend. The YWCA houses many women in crisis or transition, so the purpose of the event was to raise money for the facility and to provide bras of all sizes for women in the community who need them. Therefore, every member of the audience and every writer who performed their piece donated a bra.
When I was in sixth grade, a bra was still called a brassiere, named I assumed after its inventor, some Frenchman with a first name like René or François. Its cups were made of cotton and shaped like rocket cones aimed for the stars. Entering junior high for the first time, however, I wore a JC Penney undershirt and Hush Puppies with ankle socks. All to say, in an era when Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield were literally pushing the lingerie envelope, I was a Skipper Doll in a Barbie world.
Within the first week of school, my gym teacher, Mrs. Fraser, herded all the sixth-grade girls into the auditorium for a movie sponsored by Kotex called: The story of Menstruation. As I sat in the dark, the screen filled with animated flowers blooming and girls becoming women. Internal organs were overlaid with diagrams and calendars that left me with a vague sense of embarrassment and no practical idea of what having a period entailed. When we girls got back to class, the boys sniggered. When Debbie Caldwell, who sat beside me, whispered what you actually did with a sanitary belt and pad, I wanted to scream, that’s disgusting! But she assured me you got used to it. The film said every girl developed at her own speed. That explained why Darla DiCaprio, who had bouffant hair, Cleopatra eyeliner, and frosted pink lipstick, had raced into a D cup ahead of me.
Darla didn’t matter because she wasn’t a close friend, but when my best friend, Marie, invited me and my other two besties, Linda and Laura, to sleep over, boy did it matter. It was a sultry summer evening, and we laid our sleeping bags on the dewy grass behind her dilapidated garage where no one could see us. Once it was pitch black, Marie, Linda, and Laura took off their blouses to reveal, ta-da, brand new white training bras that seemed to glow in the moonless dark. When I took off my blouse, there I was in my JC Penney special. Was my mom the only one who didn’t get the memo? Or were my bosoms, that’s what we called boobs back in the day, still so puny they weren’t worth training? The angst of becoming a woman in a man’s world hurtled towards me at the speed of adolescence.
Of course, my mom eventually bought me a bra, but honestly, I don’t remember exactly when. My memory is simply that I didn’t have one when compared to my peers. That was just the beginning of feeling ashamed and confused about my body.
It was a confusing time. 1964, was also when the U.S. first bombed North Vietnam. 1969 was the summer of Woodstock, the legendary concert where psychedelic Grace Slick, singer of the Jefferson Airplane, invited an entire generation down the rabbit hole. Hippies and war protesters spawned mantras like make love not war, do your own thing, and question authority. So, what was a girl to do? I slept with my boyfriend, threw away my electric curlers, and cast aside all my bras as symbols of oppression.
That was a long time ago, and so much water has gushed under the bridge. By God’s grace, I’m finally at peace with the shape of my body and all the excruciating coming-of-age events that shaped my soul. But then coming of age is always excruciating. Every generation has their own form of cultural cataclysm. And getting a bra represents a female rite of passage.
So, I’ve chosen to donate a small soft cup bra, not unlike the one my mom bought me in our local department store, somewhere, if I recall correctly, near the Girl Scout uniforms. I do this in hopes that whoever receives this comfy little brassiere (which by the way, was invented by a French woman) will appreciate one thing I’ve learned over a lifetime: size doesn’t matter except as it concerns the heart.
Almost ten years ago, a friend helped me set up a blog after I’d published my first book, Teacher Dropoutabout discovering God’s grace while I worked in a poverty school. He explained, a blog is like the lady at Costco who gives you a sample of her product, so that you’ll buy the whole box. A simple marketing concept, but at the time, I didn’t realize my blog would also become the path to my next memoir.
Every week I found myself blogging stories from my childhood I hadn’t thought about in years: my first-grade trouble learning how to read, my first playground fight, my first best friend. Vignettes buried in shame, pain, and confusion also rose to the surface along with incidents displaying the kindness and forbearance of others. The stories kept coming until I realized I had the pieces of another book. But how did they fit together? What was this book about? Sometimes the author is the last to know, especially when what you’re writing is in story form and not a twelve-chapter how-to book.
As much as I’ve benefited from Christian Living books, my favorite genre is still memoir because the author shares her whole story, not just the neat takeaways she’s distilled from her struggle. I relish a complete vicarious experience that in some mysterious way resonates with my own. As Alison Wearing said, “We know when we’re in the presence of truth.”
Years ago, I read The Cure in which author John Lynch said, “God never tells me to get over something and just get past it. Never. Instead, he asks me to trust him with every circumstance. That involves communicating with Him honestly, in detail, until I’m sure I’ve left nothing out…I must sigh, cry, shriek, or howl, until He’s certain I’m done, that I’ve gotten it all out.”
So, here’s the thing, drafting this new memoir has been the process of getting it all out, first on the messy page, and then placing it at the foot of the cross. By trusting God as my merciful judge, I’m released from my past and set free to move on.
Practically, how does this relate to writing memoir? It shows you when your story is done. It’s done when you’re tired of telling it. When you’ve gotten it all out. When you’ve spent the ammunition you fired at yourself and others on the page, and you see yourself not as victim, but as victor through the love of Christ. When you can forgive yourself and others, and share healing truth with your readers.
Years ago, I helped my mom move out of the house she’d lived in for forty some years. One of my daughters took my dad’s old gun cabinet where he locked away his hunting rifles and a few family relics like an antique sword, and a lady’s pistol. Before my daughter took the cabinet into her own home, all the weaponry was sold, the gun rack was removed and refurbished with shelving that held flower vases, her best serving dishes, and champagne glasses.
By unlocking my past with my pen, and handing it over to the Lord, I’ve emptied the enemy’s weaponry that shouted over and over again, you should be ashamed of yourself, you were never enough, who do you think you are?
And I’m ready to serve my reader not only samples of my writing, but a full meal of thanksgiving about how I came of age and found freedom for my soul.
“Banish bitterness, rage and anger, shouting and slander, and any and all malicious thoughts—these are poison. Instead, be kind and compassionate. Graciously forgive one another just as God has forgiven you through the Anointed, our Liberating King.”
As a writer, I recently listened to an interview with Shayla Raquel on Marion Roach Smith’s podcast, Qwerty. It was so good, I bought her book, The 10 Commandments of Author Branding.In it, Shayla, a self-publishing mentor and branding coach, advises authors to document their journey towards publication in order to discover their readers and build their tribe, that’s you guys who read my blog. So, this week, I’m sharing the preface of a memoir I’ve been working on for a long time. If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you may have seen early versions of some other chapters. It’s had a million titles: Back to the Garden, Looking for God in all the Wrong Places, A String of Lights, and lastly Stardust and Golden, but always the same subtitle: Coming of Age and Coming to God with the Woodstock Generation because that’s what it’s about.
So, please let me know in the comments which title you like best or suggest another, and please let me know if this preface whets your appetite as a reader. If you’re a writer, I hope the info above also gives you ideas for branding and marketing your own work. All our God stories matter!
As an adopted daughter, I always wondered who I really was and where I belonged. And as I came of age, what I was worth. I couldn’t have told you that at age five, or fifteen, or even twenty-five, but looking back, those were the questions flying constant reconnaissance just below my radar. And high above, a soaring fear of exposure and rejection.
As an adult these issues seem obvious and inevitable for a child born out of wedlock in the conservative 50’s, removed like a social cancer at the hospital, taken to a foster home, and adopted at nine months. Of course, I remember none of that, except as a bright blank I wish I could fill in. But here’s the thing, children file emotions and events before they’re old enough to name them. Impressions and conclusions come fast and hard and carve deep grooves in an immature brain that guide patterns of thought and action for a lifetime. Invisible patterns we can’t make out with our own eyes.
My early childhood was set in a Leave-it-to Beaver suburb. My adoptive mom, like every mom in the neighborhood, a version of June Cleaver who wore a shirtwaist dress and heels, yes heels, while cooking meals inspired by Betty Crocker. As a Pippi-Longstocking tomboy, this female role model was not appealing. I’d rather ride my bike, play in the woods, or hunt tadpoles in the golf course pond while pretending adventures with my friends. And yet the TV icon of the virgin-bride, stay-at-home mom powerfully defined what made a woman proper and therefore lovable before I was old enough to consider or challenge alternatives.
Then came Woodstock. I was sixteen the summer of the legendary concert where sexy, psychedelic Grace Slick, singer of the Jefferson Airplane, invited an entire generation down the rabbit hole. The hippie movement interwoven with Vietnam war protest, spawned mantras like make love not war, do your own thing, and question authority. At the time, I couldn’t see the irony of a society that condemned my birth mother’s pre-marital sex, then changed its mind and promoted the very act that created her problem—me. That said, I was as curious as anyone else and quickly found my own shame.
As a course correction, perhaps, I eagerly married my prince, and became a version of Mrs. Cleaver myself—inconveniently—just as Gloria Steinem founded Ms. Magazine. As a stay-at-home mom, the rise of feminism only lowered my self-esteem which plowed the ground for infidelity as a young wife.
Later in life, I discovered I was the illegitimate third great granddaughter of Nathaniel Hawthorne, author of The Scarlet Letter, a classic about adultery, shame, and the grace of God or lack thereof. You’d think this is a spoiler. End of story. At long last I know who I am and understand the curse and cure of my life-long self-devaluation. But there is more, always more when it involves the soul of a sentient human being.
I sometimes wonder, what would have happened had I known this secret about my human lineage earlier in life. Would it have inoculated me from wobbly self-worth? Separated my self-image from achievement or failure? Would it have provided a clearer sense of direction? Quelled my desperation for a faithful friend, husband, lover? I think not, for these issues have plagued the family of man since Adam and Eve were expelled from Eden. And it is our flaws and confusion that compel us to find our way back.
These are the dry bones of my tale, but what I really want to share is the heart, the emotional oxygen of one woman’s coming of age and coming to God during a cultural earthquake.
Then again, every generation has its own form of cultural cataclysm, and coming to God is always a breakthrough. C. S Lewis said, “We read to know we are not alone,” so, I invite you, dear reader, to buckle up and ride shot gun as we travel back in time to mid-century America. Put your head out the window if you like to feel the breeze and inhale a portion of my life without a pane of glass between us as we hurtle towards the tear in the veil that separated an imperfect woman from her true identity and infinite worth.
I share all this to portray how God’s grace carried me as a child, allowed me as an adolescent to discover my own flaws, and convicted me as an adult that I needed a savior whose love had always been there for the taking.
For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— 9 not by works, so that no one can boast. 10 For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.
As a child, how I loved October, the chill on my cheeks and the early dark that foretold the coming of Halloween, that hallowed eve when I could become anyone I wanted. And, by merely pressing a doorbell, I received a mother lode of Almond Joys, Pay Days, Milky Ways, Tootsie Rolls, Fireballs, and Sugar Daddies—until the bewitching hour when the last lady of the house said, “It’s getting a late,” and turned off her porch light.
As a child, back in school the next morning, how I grieved the return of the ordinary—plaid dresses, saddle shoes and cafeteria ravioli.
As an older adult, October became the month my mother died. My wonderful mother who made all my Halloween identities come true with her magic sewing machine.
Last October my younger brother died. The same brother with whom I traded Halloween treats, dead at an early age, an alcoholic.
October is the month I married my husband. As a surprise, he took me to honeymoon at the Hanover Inn without a reservation. His hopes were dashed, however, by New England’s renowned fall foliage. The boutique hotel is a mecca for leaf peepers, and there was no room at the inn for our wedding night.
October is the month one of my darling grandsons was born. He’s the one we almost lost when his infant lungs were infected by a virus.
Some of my close friends have recently become widows, and I realize it’s getting late. The porch light could turn off at any moment.
October has become as bittersweet as summer’s leaves that blaze like flame before they drift to earth and return to the soil they came from.
Robert Frost said it best in “Nothing Gold Can Stay,” his poem I probably should have read in high school but came across instead in my autumn years when I could comprehend its pathos.
Frost’s famous poem is true of this life. How often joy is escorted by grief. Life is fleeting, and nothing gold can stay. And yet, what a relief to trust Jesus’ words are true of eternity.
“For God so loved the world (that’s you and me) that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”
John 3:16 (NIV)
Many Christians forsake Halloween as a pagan holiday, but I still love it even as a grown up because, ironically, I see it rich with Christian symbolism and hope.
Children walking in darkness
Surrounded by ghosts and goblins
For one night are gifted sweets beyond measure
All through putting on someone else’s identity
For me, Halloween showcases our childlike longing for something more, and how, as believers, we take off our old identities forever to put on Christ’s marvelous light!
October is a reminder that this world is fallen and nothing gold can stay–except Jesus.
When I was almost a believer, I started praying prove-it prayers to see if God was real. Could he see me? Could he hear me? Did he care about my circumstances? And did he have the power to intervene?
I recently shared the whole story as a guest blog on Marnie Hammer’s series Hear Him Louder. Click the link below to read it. I hope it encourages you that the answer to all the questions above is an unbounded YES!
This is a guest post I wrote for another blog called The Soft Never. It’s about the weird way God guides us to our destinies despite our fears and failures. Maybe even because of them.
“My thoughts are nothing like your thoughts,” says the Lord.
“And my ways are far beyond anything you could imagine.
Each time he (God) said, “My grace is all you need. My power works best in weakness.” So now I am glad to boast about my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ can work through me. 10
While I was an ELL (English Language Learners) teacher, I signed up for a summer Spanish immersion program in Mexico sponsored by my school district. Not all my students spoke Spanish, but the point of my two-week field trip, which entailed living with a host family and going to formal language classes during the day, was to show me and my fellow educators what it felt like to be one of our students—navigating a foreign land and learning a foreign language at the same time. Yes, I was up for the academic challenge, but at forty-something with teenagers and a long-time hubby at home, I was also up for an adventure!
We landed in Cuernavaca on a Saturday, and our first Friday night, Nancy, one of my twenty-something roommates, said, “Hey, wanna go to Zumbales? It’s a dance club where I’m meeting some other teachers from our program.”
“Sure.” I put on a tiered skirt, some lipstick, and we hailed a green and white Volkswagen taxi at the end of our street.
When we got to the club, I handed the dark, barrel-chested taxi driver a veinte peso bill, so I wouldn’t have to figure out change with all those pesky centavos in the dark.
“Gracias,” I tried out my beginner Spanish.
He reached behind. “Por nada.”
Even without my limited Spanish, I stuck out like a potato in a pot full of chili peppers with my fair complexion and red hair, and I wondered if I was considered attractive in Mexico or pale, and undercooked. On the downside of the proverbial hill, coasting towards menopause, I questioned my sex appeal more and more, even in my own country, even though I was happily married to a great guy.
As I got out of the cramped back seat, I pulled up my long skirt to avoid the rush of water flooding the street after a sudden cloudburst drenched our ride to the club, and noticed men clustered around the door like crumbs around a mouth. I could feel their eyes on my leg, and wondered what am I doing here?
Nancy and I entered the cavernous club, and went down, down, down the stairs feeling the pulse of the congas as if we were getting closer to the throbbing heat at the center of the earth. The clang of cowbells, the shout of trumpets, the scratch of maracas, syncopated the beat as we walked beside the dimly lit dance floor, and I frantically looked for our friends from the university. Finally, there they were, three of them, perched like condors on a balcony with hanging ferns and glowing candles. I ascended the stairs past more men, more eyes, as the Latin rhythm seeped into my skin.
“Que quieres,” a waiter asked as we joined our friends at the table. Nancy ordered a Dos XX.
“Yo también,” I said hoping I’d said what I meant, me too.
I tried to have a conversation with my friends in English, but it was impossible. The music was everywhere, having its way with everyone below us. I watched to see how their bodies responded to salsas, cumbias, merengues, dances so alien to someone who grew up with the jerk, the twist, the just groov’in to The Grateful Dead while stoned. How had I become this prim and proper old lady too shy to respond to the music?
I took a swig of my cerveza for courage as Gerald, from our group, asked me to dance. I could already feel the sweat dripping under my arms as I descended the stairs past more men, more eyes, and onto the dance floor. The spotlight seemed directly over us, and I wanted to try this out in a darker corner.
I told Gerald, “I don’t know how to dance like this.”
He took my hand. “Don’t worry. I’m originally from Texas,” as if that was key.
This was a man I’d only recently conjugated verbs with. Nervously, I let him spin and twirl me. It wasn’t so hard. I heard the rhythm. I closed my eyes and let go. There was no doubt what my feet wanted to do. My hips came out from hiding and swayed beneath my airy cotton skirt. I didn’t want the music to stop, but when it did, a winded Gerald led me back up the stairs to our aerie.
Back at the table, I took another sip from my cerveza, and a handsome man in a black shirt, and black pants, extended his hand over Nancy towards me. Was Zorro asking me to dance?
I pointed at myself, and he said “Si.”
I took his hand as we descended to the dance floor.
“Como se llama,” I asked, trying out more Spanish.
“Augustino,” he replied, “Y tu?”
“Ana,” I used my Spanish name as if I was changing my identity. His arm slipped around my waist, and I felt under his power. He led me to a dark corner in front of the band. I was one with the beat. I mirrored his footwork. He spun me, twirled me, dipped me, wrapped his arms around me.
“Baila bien!” he said, and I relaxed at his compliment.
He raised my right hand. “Pero,Mas suave.”
I relaxed my death grip. He was a good instructor, and I understood everything he said.
He drew me closer. His hands caressed me in rhythm to the music, around my waist, behind my back, across my shoulders, down my arms, holding my hands.
He motioned with a finger to spin, and whispered in my ear, “Lentamente.” Slowly we promenaded another circle to the beat. He put me in front of him.
“Abajo,” I went down.
“Arriba,” I came back up to the intoxicating rhythm. The music was the master. I was his puppet.
And then, the song was over.
I stood still uncertain. Spanish verb tenses sloshed in my head like socks in a washing machine until the only word that matched was another, “Gracias.”
I started to walk away, but he pulled me back. Un otro?” I knew he meant another dance.
Why not? It was fun! “Si, muy divertito.”
The beat recommenced, and we were once again strangers dancing in the darkness even though his touch was as intimate as a lover’s. The music saved me from having to explain myself in Spanish—I was just a middle-aged schoolteacher with bills piled on my desk, dishes piled in my sink, worries crowding my brain as I ground through my routine day after day. I didn’t want to know he was probably a work-a-day dad, perhaps on his night off, hoping to prove himself a stud as much as I needed to be a beauty.
Then, I felt his breath on my neck. “Very sexy,” he whispered in English.
At first, I thought it was another dance cue, but he pinned me against the bandstand with his pelvis obviously at attention. Should I have been flattered? Annoyed? I really didn’t want to deal with this. I wanted to stay in a world where nothing mattered but the music. Where he was Antonio Banderas and I was Selma Hayek.
Suddenly I saw Gerald, standing on the edge of the dance floor, motioning that the group was leaving. I snapped back to reality like a brittle rubber band, conceding the clock had struck midnight, my dance partner was not Prince Charming, and I definitely didn’t want to lose my slipper.
I gently pushed Augustino away, and said a quick, “Gracias.”
I grabbed my purse, and ascended from the grotto to the street. The mini flash flood had ebbed. There was Nancy waiting for me.
I tucked my skirt back into the taxicab, and she said, “No one asked me to dance all night. Tomorrow let’s try a techno club.” Yikes!
Back at our Mexican host’s house I lied down on my bed and listened to the barking dogs, the laughter and the music, the Latin music, wafting from the barrio through my open window, and I thought, in Mexico I am not old after all. I am, “Very sexy.”
That was years ago, and looking back, my trip to Cuernavaca wasn’t only about learning a foreign language or understanding how to better teach my students English. It was about understanding myself. I wasn’t really looking for adventure. I was looking for an identity that could stand the test of time. Wondering, if as I aged, I was still worth loving.
Now that my youth has fled, I can assure you, I’ve found what I was looking for, a pursuing God who proves his love lentamente through all life’s dips and twirls. A love that holds on muy suave till the end of the dance. And when the music finally stops, I pray he’ll whisper in my ear, “Baila bien, good and faithful servant.”
His master said to him, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant. You have been faithful over a little; I will set you over much. Enter into the joy of your master.
This is the season when children go back to school with all its challenges, academic and social. And I’m reminded of someone I’ll remember forever for her kindness. Someone who sheltered me when I was small and vulnerable. But this is for all, who since then, have modeled the grace of God when I needed it most.
Sept. 1959. In first grade, the first thing I learned was that reading meant groups. The first group gathered around the front table with Miss Fontaine. Their hard cover book, The Little White House, displayed a boy in a cowboy suit riding a pony as if reading was galloping fun.
Elaine Bellacroix raised her hand, “May I read first?”
Miss Fontaine beamed as she cantered through the first paragraph.
Betsy Biermann waved her hand, “Me next,” and read at a steady trot.
The following group brought up their blue paperback primers. Maria Romano raised her hand and read, “Oh, Tom. Oh, Susan. See Flip in the wagon.” There were no more volunteers to read the rest of the fascinating story.
My group was last. My primer, the color of a stop sign. As I lifted the lid of my desk, the smell of its scarlet cover brought up a sour burp. My hands sweat.
Miss Fontaine selected Ralphie La Brie to begin, but her weak, “Good job,” couldn’t convince Ralphie or anyone else that his halting syllables were really reading.
Before it was my turn to read, I raised my hand, “Can I go to the nurse?”
Miss Fontaine sighed, narrowed her eyes, and said, “Again?” then walked to the wall phone and called Mrs. Lundgren.
In no time a woman wearing a starched white cap, appeared at my classroom door and led me along the trail to her office. I laid down on a green vinyl cot behind a privacy curtain. Underneath its canvas, I could see her white-stockinged ankles beside her steel desk. My stomach threatened to heave as the clock tick-tocked. When would reading group be over? I couldn’t tell time yet, and I didn’t want anyone to know I couldn’t sound out words.
Mrs. Lundgren peeked inside the curtain. “Want a Saltine?”
I climbed onto her crisp, white lap and laid my damp forehead on her cool, pearlescent buttons.
After a few nibbles, she said, “Feel better?”
I nodded in resignation.
She extended her hand, “Ready to go back?”
Reluctantly, I slid off her comfort zone, and she brushed crumbs from my green plaid dress. Together we walked down the dark hall, her white nurse shoes silent, my Buster Brown saddle shoes slapping each gray tile.
That wasn’t the first time we’d done this, Mrs. Lundgren and I, but always, before she left me at my classroom door, she bent to my stature, placed her wide palm on my little back, and whispered, “I’m here if you need me.”
Looking through the long pane besides the doorknob, I hesitated. Elaine and Betsy hunched over penmanship worksheets meaning reading group was over. Ralphie’s head swiveled around the room. When he spied me outside the door, he broadcast, “Miss Fontaine, she’s back!”
I gazed down the hall, but my angel of mercy was gone. I had no choice but to open the door and get back in the saddle again.
I assume both my first-grade teacher and my school nurse are long gone, but the attitudes of their hearts are eternally etched in my own. I have been especially impatient and judgmental this week while others have been especially kind and invested in me. This is an old story, but I share it because I’ve realized anew how much kindness matters.
