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.
The other day, I placed a cat carrier on Facebook Marketplace. Yes, I still have Sunshine, for those who know and love my calico friend, but in my constant minimizing, I found we had two carriers from when we had two cats and moved from Massachusetts to Colorado.
The woman who bought it, was friendly and shared that she too was soon headed West on her own adventure with a new husband, a young child, and a cat. Our conversation expanded when I said something like, “Leaving home and living in Colorado for a decade resulted in tremendous growth, personally, professionally and spiritually.”
She picked up on the spiritual part, so I told her about some great churches she could check out in Denver, then hopped in my car, and with the transmission already in reverse, added a quick invitation to my home church until she left on her quest.
Hold that thought.
This summer I had the privilege of a week’s vacation in Bermuda. One hot day we took the local bus to the Dockyards and explored the cool, dim museum chocked with Bermudian history and artifacts. I learned that although Bermuda was discovered by Juan de Bermudez, a Spanish explorer, in the 1500’s, it wasn’t settled until 1609 by the crew of the Sea Venture, a British ship on the way to resupply Jamestown, the first British enterprise in America established in 1607, then foundering with fevers and starvation.
However, the Sea Venture was driven off course by a hurricane and shipwrecked on the coral reefs surrounding the pink beaches and turquoise waters of Bermuda. The passengers and crew were able to get safely to the island which provided wild pigs, fish, birds, and tropical fruit as well as abundant cedar trees for rebuilding their vessel. In a year’s time, Jamestown was resupplied with Bermuda’s bounty, and the story of the Sea Venture’s wreck and survival made its way back to England.
One more fascinating tidbit I hadn’t known before, Shakespeare’s play, The Tempest, was inspired by the wreck of the Sea Venture.
In fourth grade, I learned about Jamestown and its miserable beginnings. I had to memorize various Spanish explorers and their New World conquests. As a high school English student, I was introduced to William Shakespeare and his literary masterpieces. But I wasn’t aware that any of these Elizabethan figures and events were laced together.
Now, let ‘s get back to the mundane sale of my cat carrier. Two weeks after our seemingly haphazard meeting, the young woman contacted me again on Facebook and said she’d love to come to my church. Surprised and delighted, I met her and her family at the door. They sat with me, and after the sermon, the pastor’s daughter came over to greet her. Turns out they went to high school together.
Whether the young woman comes back to my church again is out of my control. How she responds to the gospel, also out of my realm. What will happen on her adventure out West, unknown to us both.
But of this I am sure, our meeting was what I call a divine appointment, a series of separate connections stitched together by the sovereign hand of God. So,
“If someone asks you about your hope as a believer, always be ready to explain it. But do this in a gentle and respectful way.”
1 Peter 3:15-16 (NLT)
For The Lord is the one who turns all our stories into His masterpiece. As believers, we are the mysterious conduit between the ordinary and the sublime, and you never know when your shipwreck will be the salvation of another.
And what do you do? Isn’t that the question we all dread at class reunions, dinner parties, really any kind of meet and greet where we’re asked to explain ourselves in terms of work? In honor of Labor Day, the day that honors work, I’ll share a vignette from a time when I was still a slave to the notion that my worth was defined by my academic or professional work.
May 1975. After graduation, at the tender age of twenty-something, my college boyfriend, John, and I moved in together. No promises, just co-habitating, the new name for what my dad called living in sin or shacking up.
We rented a third-floor apartment in West Springfield with only a space heater for heat which worried John’s mother, but it had a claw foot tub which I loved. No shower. The kitchen was huge but had a sloping ceiling that made most of the space unusable. That was okay. We only had a card table and two chairs to fill it.
Our landlord lived downstairs. When I handed his wife the rent check, she was friendly, but there was no space to get to know her before one of her pre-school kids yelled, “Mommy.”
The woman on the first floor looked my age, but whenever I said hi, she was too busy watching her little boys ride their Big Wheels to carry on a conversation.
One night, John and I walked to a neighborhood bar to play pool. It was nothing like the college bar where we met. The downstairs was dimly lit and almost empty save a few disheveled gents on barstools. John and I stepped up a level to a small table under florescent lights. I was no match for his skill, and there was nobody else to challenge him. I couldn’t wait to walk the few blocks home. The place reeked of cigarettes, stale beer, and loneliness.
It was New Year’s Eve by the time we were invited to our first party. The invitation was technically for John to a kind of neighborhood reunion with childhood friends. We took the Peter Pan bus to Northampton and walked past Smith College. The sky was star studded, no moon. A thin layer of snow scrunched under our boots. Our warm breath clouded the silence.
I followed John up icy steps. “Whose apartment is this again?”
John rang the bell. “Davey O’Shea’s.” We could hear music from the porch. “He’s in a band.” The door opened. A guy with long brown curls put his acoustic guitar aside and grabbed John in a bear hug.
“Johnny, long time no see. Glad you could make it, man.” He reached to pump my hand. “Welcome.” Then back to John. “The whole crowd is here. Mingle, mingle. There’s food in the dining room and beer in the fridge.”
The house was crowded and smelled like pot. Every surface was sat on, windowsills, coffee tables, sofas, chairs, stairs, the floor. We wound through the kitchen, and I grabbed my first Molson’s.
“Great to see you, Johnny!” was the chorus as we made our way through the crush of long-lost friends and acquaintances, and everyone offered a personal update.
Evie, a tall, brunette in black polyester pantsuit told us she’d graduated Brown and was currently at Harvard Medical School. John whispered as we passed, “Showed me her underpants in third grade.”
Rob, a stocky guy in chinos and a blue button-down shirt, told us he graduated University of Penn and was currently in the psychology PHD program at Ohio Wesleyan. John whispered, “Not allowed to ride his bike to elementary school or sled down Clarke’s hill.”
Griswold, a tall redhead told us he was at Western New England law school. John whispered, “Hucked a chunk of ice at me from the top of the playground snowbank and broke my nose. His dad, also a lawyer, sent lots of presents.”
Everyone I met that evening gave a kind of curriculum vitae without being asked. I guess it made an impression because thank God, no one was interested in me. What would I have said if someone asked, and what do you do? What were the euphemisms for I’m a dime-a-dozen English major shacking up with John in an attic tenement, paid minimum wage at a bookstore, and friendless? And what would John’s whisper have been? Picked her up in a college bar?
After midnight, and more Molsons, I lost track of John and sat on a love seat in the foyer next to a girl with long blonde hair and tortoise shell glasses. She offered no preemptive CV. Instead, she listened as I confessed what it was to be out of college with no clue, no plans, no peers. She patted my shoulder and said, “You sound so lonesome.”
Did I carry the same stench as those disheveled gents on the barstools? Were they as desperate as I was for someone, anyone, to listen, to care? Why did I need a girl with a college degree to tell me I was simply lonely? Suddenly I was wiping sloppy tears from my cheeks, flooded by the shame of exposing my weakness to a stranger. Or was it the ridiculous hope that without any impressive credentials, I was worth a bosom friend who understood?.
John appeared and took my hand as we walked back into the freezing darkness. His whispered comment. “That blonde girl, Margaret, is a pastor’s daughter.” It had been a long time since I’d been to church, but his quiet comment called to mind a hymn from when I was a little girl, “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.”
Looking back, it was a hard transition coming out of a collegiate bubble where my academic success or failure was constantly graded. It was a hard thing not to transfer some kind of marking system to my professional status. An easy thing to equate my professional and financial accomplishment to my personal worth.
So, whether you’re a young woman heading to college for the first time, a new graduate thrust into the world of work, or coming off a summer vacation weary of going back to a stressful or unrewarding job, here’s what I didn’t know way back when.
Jesus is the bosom friend of every disheveled soul who yearns to be
seen and clean,
with a worth that
cannot be earned or burned.
And friends of Jesus, are the friends I need.
Labor Day is a day of rest from work. So, let’s remember that Jesus’ earthly resume wasn’t impressive to most, a carpenter turned itinerant preacher.
But let’s rest on Jesus’ heavenly credentials: the miracle-working son of God, crucified to pay for all our whispered humiliations and regrets,
who invites us to his victory party.
Where: our heavenly father’s home,
When: now and forever
Attire: Come as you are
No gifts necessary. Gifts provided.
Bring a friend if you like
Photo by Antonio Visalli on Unsplash
“For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith-and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God-not by works, so that no one can boast.”
I always knew I was adopted although I can’t remember ever being told. My adoptive mom and dad were wonderful parents, and however they informed me I wasn’t their natural child, it registered of little import, a simple fact which sat quietly wrapped on the shelf.
That is, until my adoptive mom died, and a friend gave me the book, The Girls Who Went Away by Ann Fessler. It captured the scenarios of many women’s unplanned pregnancies, and what it was like to hide your child’s gestation and surrender him or her for adoption during the 50’s when I was born. Reading these traumatic accounts, I was able to imagine what my birth mom must have gone through while pregnant with me, and I wondered if, as a fetus, I could feel the storm of her emotions. Before birth, did I record, or react to the turbulence of her inner sea?
According to Fessler’s book, I was probably four days old when surrendered to a foster home. Adoption records show my foster mom was visibly upset when she had to let me go after nurturing me for nine months. In fact, I learned much later, she was the one who bought the little pink dress I wore when I met my adoptive parents. I always thought that dress, which they kept in a cedar chest, was the one tangible link between me and my birth mom. Rather, the adoption agency suggested my foster mom buy me a new outfit, to help her release me to my permanent parents.
I was an only child until I was six when my parents were able to adopt my brother, so I was never exposed to a tiny baby close-up until I became a mother myself. I never witnessed the intimate affection between a mother and her baby, nor the endearing qualities of a vulnerable little one.
I recall a single incident with my infant cousin at my grandmother’s farm when I was five. An aunt handed me her brand-new baby who promptly squirted a poop right through his diaper and covered me in a seedy, orange guck that resembled what I clawed out of a Halloween pumpkin, except it STUNK! That’s all I knew or wanted to know about babies for years.
All to say, I had little experience with which to imagine myself as a babe during my exile in a kind of foster purgatory while my destiny was decided outside my control. That earliest era is a bright blank in my brain, a mystery I never thought to solve.
Then one day, holding my own nine-month-old daughter on my lap, I realized she was the same age I was when transferred to my new home. I’d always imagined myself a pooping larval blob like my infant cousin, but no. If I was anything like my daughter, I was a lively, cognizant human being babbling my first language. If I lost her in the grocery store, she’d cry her heart out until I reappeared. No one else would be able to comfort her. No one else would do but her true parent.
I assume the mid-century adoption model of immediately separating the baby and the birth mom was to nip that kind of imprint in the bud. Obviously to prevent heartbreak. But how could the fact of me sit quietly on my birth mother’s shelf? At the time, I was prompted to find her. To tell her it’s all right. I’m fine—as far as I know.
My brother, adopted at age four and placed in two separate foster homes before adoption, searched for his birth parents, and found nothing but tragedy which put a damper on my thoughts of finding my bio. mom. Besides who would she be if I found her? A stranger? And who would I be to her? A living scar? And where would I fit in her life? She probably had another family by then. What would happen if I were to burst out of my wrapping paper into her life?
Spoiler, I finally found my birth mom and my birth dad, but that’s another whole story.
Insight, perhaps the circumstances of my birth and adoption had a far greater impact than I realized. Perhaps it imprinted me with insecurity. Perhaps that’s what launched my longing to belong. Perhaps that’s what led me to look for affirmation and worth in illegitimate ways.
Then again, you can’t blame everything on your parents. These tendencies are common to man. Perhaps that’s why separation and adoption are central metaphors for all that’s lost and found in becoming a child of God.
Because you are now part of God’s family, He sent the spirit of His son into our hearts; and the Spirit calls out, “Abba, Father.”
Galatians 4: 6-7 (VOICE)
Abba means daddy. The kind of daddy who will come back if you’re lost and crying in the grocery store. The daddy God who revealed himself when I was lost in the world and crying my heart out.
Last week I was on vacation in Bermuda. Yesterday my half-niece set sail at seventeen with an all-girl crew in the Newport to Bermuda Race. Tomorrow is Father’s Day and my heart still bursts with affection for the man I called Daddy who was also a sailor. This essay is a rerun from last year, but I hope it demonstrates afresh how an earthly father can help navigate a child’s heart towards a trustworthy God.
My father always had a sailboat. He knew about hoists and turn buckles, jib sheets, and rudders. He knew how to come about, how to go before the wind, and how to tack on a close haul. He knew how to jibe without knocking anyone out of the boat. He understood buoys and lighthouses, channel markers and currents, and how to read charts. He taught me starboard was on the right and port was on the left because, “We just left port.”
He put me on the bow in shallow water to call out rocks, and he measured the depths in fathoms. He knew how to dock and moor a boat. He knew how to scull in a dinghy so small, you had to sit back-to-back if there were two of you. He taught me how to row and how to paddle. He let me hold the tiller with his hand close by. He taught me how to hoist the mainsail when it was time to embark and how to lower the boom when it was time to go home. He could navigate between rocky islands and beach a boat on the sand.
He took us through Woods Hole in a pea soup fog and all the way to Martha’s Vineyard. Our little vessel surfed wing on wing up and down gigantic ocean swells that heaved like mountains breathing.
He could read the water like a map. When the waves rippled with ridges as tight as corduroy, he knew to head straight into the wind because it spelled a gust so strong it could slap the sail to the water in an instant. He was a steady captain, and when he was at the helm, I knew no harm would befall me.
When he died, I felt at sea. We sold his sailboat and emptied out his workshop in the basement. He was born during the depression, so everything was saved. He went to work as an engineer during WWII, so everything was raw material for fixing what was broken. There were peanut butter jars full of flat head screws, and jelly jars of roofing nails. All labeled and sorted from every other kind of nail, screw, grommet, or fastener in pickle jars soup cans, and Sucrets tins. There were jib saws, table saws, and bow saws. There were batteries and jumper cables, oil cans and oil pans, grease guns and tubes of grease. There were ropes, chains, pulleys, drills, chisels, screw drivers and hammers, pinchers, pliers, wrenches and axe handles, just in case your axe handle broke, and your axe head could still be sharpened.
Photo by Ricky Kharawala on Unsplash
I went to college in the 1970’s with a revamped toaster from the 1940’s. When I got straight A’s he bought me new tires for the bicycle he’d bought me in fourth grade, my first 26 inch turquoise Schwinn with balloon tires, coaster brakes, and one speed. He babied his 1970 Oldsmobile Toronado into the mid 90’s, its engine still throaty as a cabin cruiser. When all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Humpty together again, they could always call my father.
At his funeral I realized that the most important people in his life were not important people. The congregation held no Nobel laureates, but couples my father had served sauerbraten or hush puppies from the head of our dining room table, couples who’d played bridge at card tables crowded into our skinny living room, a cut glass bowl of peanuts on their right elbow, a matching ashtray on their left, both wedding presents.
Mr. Beck worked with my father. He was 6’5”. My father was 5’6”. Mrs. Beck was close to six feet. My mother barely five. Munching canapés and crackers in the kitchen, where people always end up before dinner parties, they reminded me of the giants and the midgets I’d seen chatting behind the tent at the Altamont fair.
Mr. Wanty was our neighbor. He’d sit opposite his wife Clara, holding his cards in his left hand, picking at them with his right, nothing more than a shrunken pincher, a congenital birth defect. Sometimes my parents were invited to parties, and my brother and I would beg for the Wanty’s mischievous son, Doug, to be our babysitter. We played Hide and Seek amongst the boxes of sewing scraps, suitcases, sleeping bags, window fans, summer suits, winter coats, and family photos all piled in closets where Doug could never find us.
Mr. Kittle also worked with my dad. His wife had polio as a child and hung her cane on the side of the card table. The Palmers were second generation Italians. I marveled from across the dinner table that their skin was always tan. The first time my dad said the Pospisel’s were going sailing with us, I thought he said Mr. and Mrs. Popsicle.
One summer we went camping with the Bollingers. Mr. Bollinger drove his motor boat and my father sailed his sailboat to a small island in the middle of Lake George. It rained all night, and with the morning light, the Bollinger’s boat was almost sunk at the dock. But my father tinkered, bailed, and got the boat up and running. On our way home, I wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d walked on water.
I was not my father’s natural child. At age thirty-five he and my mother sought me through adoption. I was the cherub he pulled through the snow in a bright red sled. I was the little monkey he teased at the breakfast table, telling me if I drank all my milk, I would see another monkey at the bottom of the glass.
I played the straight man, curled up on his lap, as he read me the paper. “Mr. Schultz of 1632 Union St. reports his schnauzer, Fritz, has been missing since last Tuesday. Anyone with information as to the dog’s whereabouts should call Dickens 6-8045. Mr. Schultz fears little Fritzy has been eaten by a monster he noticed in his backyard. It had four purple horns and smelled like a dead rattle snake…”
The story got more and more preposterous until I realized he was making it all up.
At age six we played flying angel. My father stretched out on the living room carpet on his back. With my hands in his and his feet on my belly, I flew until giggles toppled me from the sky. At sixteen I practiced cheerleading jumps in front of our picture window. At night, with the curtains opened, it became a huge mirror against the darkness. My father sat on the couch, watching my acrobatics along with re-runs of Bonanza.
When the Vietnam War appeared on our television set, my father and I argued at the dinner table. When I went off to college and started living with my boyfriend, he called it shacking up. But by the time I married that boyfriend and brought home three grandchildren, it was smooth sailing again, my father’s hand on the tiller while my toddler daughter put pink barrettes in his balding comb over.
Finally, there came the day when my mother called, “There’s nothing more they can do for your dad in the hospital. I’d like to bring him home. Will you help me?”
We set up a hospital bed in the same dining room where my father had served his friends and neighbors pork chops and apple sauce. Now they were coming to say good-bye as he struggled for breath.
Looking at him, pale and diminished, I remembered the day he pulled the halyard, the rope that raises the mainsail, before he’d clipped it to the sail, and the end got stuck at the tippity top of the mast.
“Annie Girl,” he used my pet name, “Do you think you could shinny up and bring down the halyard?”
My little biceps bulged as I climbed the million miles of aluminum towards the heavens. Looking down, my father seemed small. I couldn’t believe he’d made a mistake and was asking me for help. When we docked the sailboat in a bay beside an old Adirondak farmhouse, there was a Free Kittens sign over a basket in the front yard. “Go on,” he said. “You can bring one home.”
The day before he died was an ordinary day, as ordinary as any day before death comes to call. I was vacuuming the living room. My mother was washing dishes. My father called from the dining room. “Annie, who’s behind my chair?” We’d moved his ten-ton recliner from the living room next to his hospital bed, so he could sit up and look out the window.
I walked into the room. “There’s no one behind you Dad.”
“Where’s your mom?”
“In the kitchen.”
I went back to the living room to vacuum.
Again, he called, “Annie Girl who’s behind me?”
I returned and proclaimed the space still vacant.
The next afternoon his spirit slipped away, and my soul went as white and numb as the lifeless shell remaining in the same naugahide chair he’d sat in since I was four.
The morning of his memorial, I rose from my seat on cue and walked to the pulpit. It was the lonely public moment to speak a few words of eulogy. As I looked out at the ocean of grieving companions, I spotted the Becks, towering above the rest. There was Mr. Wanty, his thumb and forefinger holding the program of my father’s farewell. Mrs. Kittle rested her cane on the cushioned pew. I saw the brave Bollingers who’d shared our small island in a storm. There were the Palmers, the Pospisels, the Lordis, the Rockwells, the Mac Laurens, all fellow sailors. I don’t remember what I said that day, but as I opened my mouth to pay my father homage, I realized he’d trained me all his life for this moment. This moment when his hand would leave the tiller forever, and I would navigate solo the rest of my life.
I sat back down then rose again as the congregation sang my Dad’s favorite hymns: “Onward Christian Soldiers,” and “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.” Silent tears streamed my cheeks as I recalled how my dad had chosen me like a kitten in a basket and treasured me as his own. Words can lie, but actions speak the truth. He’d chosen friends of every size and shape, the crippled, the lame, the outsider. In his basement, in his closets, there was no such thing as junk, only raw materials. Everything saved to meet whatever collapse or calamity appeared on the horizon.
Just follow the chart no matter the weather, no matter the waves, and never give up.
Photo by Jarrett Fifield on Unsplash
That day he called me, called me three times, perhaps there was someone behind my father’s chair, an angel, come to ferry him to his final harbor, my father, my captain!
I recently reread Mary Karr’s Liar’s Club, and a few nights ago, finished Annie Dillard’s An American Childhood. Both are memoirs. Both are masterpieces, yet so different in so many ways.
Karr’s story is set in the stuffocating heat of east Texas, in a mosquito-infested neighborhood near the oil refinery where her dad worked. Dillard’s takes place in the privileged echelons of Pittsburg, PA in a neighborhood full of large homes with large lawns shaded by Buckeye trees.
Both memoirs focus on the authors’ childhoods through the time they left home as young adults. Karr is dealing with a hard drinking dad and a mom who is mentally unstable. Dillard’s parents are well-to-do members of Pittsburg society who frequent the country club.
Karr’s problem is navigating a mother she can’t trust because of her unpredictable highs and lows. Dillard is trying to navigate steady parenting headed for a predictable lifestyle she’s not eager to join.
Both authors narrate their stories with a unique voice. Mary Karr uses the earthy, barroom diction of her dad, with descriptions like, “A butt like two bulldogs in a bag.” Dillard uses the ethereal language of the intellect. “Consciousness converges with the child as a landing tern touches the outspread feet of its shadow on the sand; precisely, toe hits toe.”
These authors clearly understand their stories and are able to express them in a manner that helps readers better understand their own.
Dan. B. Allender, author of To Be Told, puts it this way,” Your life and mine not only reveal who we are, but they also help reveal who God is.” The idea being we are God’s messages sent into the world to proclaim his truth and mercy with our very lives.
At a recent conference, songwriter, author, and speaker, Linda Story, asked what engineer in his right mind would design a piece of equipment without knowing ahead of time what he wanted it to do? God as our creator, makes us with his purposes in mind.
“For we are God’s masterpiece. He created us anew in Christ Jesus, so we can do good things he planned for us long ago.”
Ephesians 2:10 (NLT)
In other words, your life in Christ is no less a masterpiece than Mary Karr’s or Annie Dillard’s even if it isn’t written down in eloquent prose. Whether you’re a writer or built with completely different talents, your life, your story, is one of God’s messages to the world.
Perhaps Mary Karr and Annie Dillard’s stories could agree on this, that God alone is the heavenly parent we all long for, and His way is the only way to live a satisfying life. My own story points to God’s protection of the vulnerable, the redemption of the shamed, and the freedom of being adopted as His chosen, beloved child with a fresh new identity.
Your life may be more heart-wrenching than Mary Karr’s, more privileged than Annie Dillard’s, or as ordinary as mine. The truth is, the Lord doesn’t bake cookie cutter people. So, don’t compare yourself. Love yourself. And love your family and friends with all their quirks and flaws with the lavish love of Christ. Every believer, no matter her place in the universe or her personal plight, is a voice in the chorus designed to sing the grandeur and grace of God.
Michael Angelo wasn’t a writer, but one of his masterpieces is painted on the ceiling of the Sistine chapel. And what does it depict? Adam’s finger reaching across the heavens to point to his maker.
Photo by Alexei Scutari on Unsplash
What is God’s message through you? Think about it. You’re a masterpiece too with good work designed especially for you.
A whiff of lilacs and I’m back in the arbor atop Thorndon Park, awash in college-girl angst, looking for love and my place in the universe. One beat of Stevie Wonder’s wah-wah pedal in “Superstition”, and I’m back in the college bar where I first met my husband as a young stud.
Why do the 5 senses have the ability to transport us to a specific time and place and all the emotions that go with it? Google this phenomenon and neuroscientists will give you the physiological answer.
As a writer, I mention this connection because the five senses are the power tools in your writer’s toolbox. If you want to put your reader in the room with you as you create a scene, tell them not only what you see, but what you’re tasting, touching, smelling, and hearing. The more vicarious their experience, the more likely they’ll resonate with your narrator and her discoveries. And that’s what stories, fact or fiction offer isn’t it? A chance to learn about yourself through the lessons learned by others.
Here’s an emotional flash memoir to show you what I mean.
Joe Dempsey, the bartender at the Orange, died the week before I graduated from Syracuse University. I’m pretty sure he was a senior, and would have graduated with me. Joe was the 6’3” fixture behind the downstairs bar, his beefy hands passing out drinks and receiving payment every night that I worked upstairs as a busgirl.
Every night that is, until a closing-time altercation with customers who weren’t ready for the party to be over. I heard there was a car chase through Thorndon Park, and somewhere on that lilac-scented hill, in the dewy hours of a May morning, Joe’s curly blonde head slammed against the inside of his tin can van as it hurtled off the curve. His heart stopped mid-beat.
I suppose you’d call Joe an acquaintance, not a friend. I didn’t go to his proper funeral, but I did go to the end-of-the year luncheon at the Orange for all staff.
My boyfriend, John, said, “I don’t want to go. Too sad. It’ll be like a wake.”
So, alone, I walked into the upstairs of the Orange and filled a submarine roll with cold meat from a platter set on a table in the middle of the dance floor. The juke box was mute. Jeff, the manager, was sitting on one side of a red vinyl booth. Harry, the old fellow who owned the place, was spread out on the other side of the table.
He narrowed his toady eyes and sucked on a Carlton. His smoke highlighted dust motes floating in the stale air. “Ya done good kid.”
Good? What was good? I’d mastered how to put ten bottles on my fingertips at once and release them into a chute that led directly to the basement.
“Thanks,” I managed, between bites of my humongous sandwich and slurps of free beer.
I stood in the center of the small dance floor, usually so crowded, vast in its emptiness, noticing things I’d never noticed before. The whole room stank of bathroom cleanser. The windows were made of glass brick. The linoleum was so worn it was hard to say for sure if it was supposed to be green. A space so thrilling in the dark, pathetic in the light of day.
Bret, the upstairs bartender, walked in with a girlfriend I didn’t know. Maybe John was right. I had nothing in common with the people in that room except drinking and Joe, and no one dared speak his name.
I made my farewells and grabbed a cup of free beer to go.
I headed back to M Street and walked up the steep hill to Thorndon Park to my favorite spot, the lilac bower, then in full bloom. As my lungs inflated with the intoxicating purple fragrance, I closed my eyes. Was I drawn to this idyllic garden or magnetized to the site where Joe’s soul was kidnapped? Underneath the canopy of blossoms, death seemed surreal, an unnatural intrusion.
I continued to the top of the egg-shaped drumlin and sat cross-legged on the cool grass. Glancing down at my smooth thighs glistening in the sunshine with fine golden hairs, my own death seemed an impossible inevitability, and yet the hulking grandson of a legendary prizefighter was no match for the silent, sulking force lurking just below the surface of existence. I surveyed the campus below where I’d prepared for a future which could, in an instant, be erased.
Death pointed a boney finger at my life and whispered, are you making a difference? What will you do between now and nothingness? Who will care when you’re gone? Are you on course? Who knew? I was a small boat without a rudder. Swamped by waves of emotion I couldn’t name. Taken to a depth I couldn’t fathom.
A week later I walked across the stage of the Carrier Dome to receive my diploma. Was it only seven days? In light of eternity, time blurs. The end of an era speeds up as it winds down. John watched with my parents as I marched by in a white robe with others whose last name began with the letter C. Joe’s ghost floated somewhere behind me in the D section. D for Dempsey, and death.
My daughter in Texas recently told me jasmine smells like joy. My backyard is currently fragrant with lilac, for me, forever, the potent decoction of life focused by death.
Dear readers what memories are brought to your mind by a scent? A song? The feel of sand beneath your toes? Your grandmother’s cooking? The odor of a locker on the last day of school? There’s a story there. Your story. And our stories are one of the powerful ways God portrays our fallen nature and his saving grace. Make it come to life for your listeners with your 5 God-given senses.
“They triumphed over him (meaning the devil) by the blood of the Lamb and the word of their testimony.”
Just being real here. Much is made of motherhood in Christian culture. Greeting card companies make a fortune on this holiday. But what if becoming a mother was far from a Hallmark experience? What if being a mother feels like an overwhelming task whether you’re raising toddlers or letting go of young adults?
For example, I was born out of wedlock, the result of an unwanted pregnancy. What was Mother’s Day to my biological mom all those years my existence had to remain a secret?
What was Mother’s Day to my adoptive mom all those years her infertility was a hopeless disappointment?
Although I was married when blessed with three little ones, how best to mother remains a puzzle, I’m still sorting out. But now I know why Titus 2:3-4 encourages older women to teach younger women how to love their children and their husbands because as a grandmother God has revealed a thing or two.
Let me explain. I became a mother and a believer at almost the same time and was able to stay home with my little ones. Delighted as I was with my darlings, honestly, part of me grieved the affirmation and satisfaction I lost when I let go of my career. Newborns are exhausting, and who can keep a toddler from putting a plastic Tupperware lid in the toaster to see what happens, or whacking off tulip buds with a plastic baseball bat because it’s so much fun! An experienced mom once told me, “Motherhood is unacknowledged work.” Amen sister. The hardest work I’ve ever done at home or elsewhere.
Photo by Lubomirkin on Unsplash
For me, even harder because I saw being a mom as my new job, which made my children my products. Therefore, I was responsible for their performance. If my kid threw a tantrum, or bit another kid on a playdate, that meant I wasn’t doing a good job. If my kid did poorly on a spelling test, I was equally inadequate. As a brand-new believer, I also felt personally responsible for their salvation. Therefore, until they were “saved” their eternal damnation was all my fault. This was mistaken thinking which caused much angst and frustration. Looking back, I had little grace for myself or my children. What a burden to put my identity and self-worth on their tender shoulders.
Then grandchildren landed in my lap like shooting stars ablaze with joy.
Every grandmother I’ve met since, has shared some version of why are grandkids so much easier than your own children?
Here’s how God revealed this to my own heart. With the birth of each grandchild, I felt not only a groundswell of love for them, but a greater awareness of God’s immense love for me.
Because I was no longer directly responsible for my grandkids’ care or behavior, I discovered that love without judgement is love without limit. And this I realized is the love of Christ, God’s love absent all judgement for sin. All judgement paid on the cross. Nothing left to separate me from God’s overflowing, never ending, delight in me, simply me.
Not me the teacher, not me the writer, not even me the mom, just plain me without any adornment or achievement. I experienced God’s love as if I was naked, just emerged from the womb like my adorable grandchildren. The Christianese expression born again made fresh sense, and being liberated from mom shame, allowed me to love my whole family with a lightness I’d never known before.
So, the week after Mother’s Day, here are truths I learned the hard way to counter any regrets, disappointments, or confusion you may feel.
Your child has a sin nature just like you do this side of heaven.
God is not surprised by failure or misbehavior.
God’s love is not affected by poor performance.
Motherhood is a relationship, not a job.
Your child is not your product and doesn’t equate with your worth
Your child’s salvation is in God’s hands not yours
Let mistakes bring you to your knees not despair
God will use your worst and your children’s worst for his best
Nothing is irredeemable
Jesus is the end of judgement
Love without judgement is eternal
Motherhood is not your core identity. You are the holy, chosen and beloved child of God.
Dear readers, no matter how your journey as a mother began, or how it’s been so far, remember to love yourself first with the flood of love that spills from the heart of a Good God, and watch his grace shower your family for generations to come. This is just the beginning of becoming a grand mother and wife at any age.
Now sin and death no longer define us, but grace does: God’s favor has been given freely to us through His Son, Jesus, who liberates us from sin’s power.
