Is the past gone? Duh, yes. But does it control you? My honest answer, much more than I’d like. As a memoirist this is both a blessing and a curse. I can remember events as if they happened yesterday. The sensory details still intact. The faces, the personalities, the events and their emotional impact still potent. I want to move on. I know better than to let my mistakes define me. But the past is like spider glue, much stronger than it looks.
You who read my blog regularly know that last Saturday, with some reluctance, I went to my 50th high school reunion on Zoom. I’m here to report that it was actually a treat to see the faces of kids who were in my gym class, who sat next to me in science lab, who went to Methodist youth group with me. It was interesting to hear happy endings for kids who appeared headed for disaster at seventeen. And it was sad to see the photographs of those who’ve already left this earth, among them the first boy who wrote me a love note, my best girlfriend from fourth grade, a boy I’d always thought was cute from afar. All those remaining had aged and matured, just as I have, wrinkles and wisdom a universal duo. Apparently, the high school itself has grown and reconfigured, so my high school past is physically gone in every way. At the end of the Zoom, it was announced that our 50thlive reunion, postponed until next fall, will be the ultimate reunion, this group united by age and education never to be convened again.
The following week, a family member went to the hospital with complications from newly diagnosed cancer. The prognosis lethal. Age and death another inseparable duo that hit me square in the face.
It’s time, far past time, for me to release a past that exists only in my mind.
Peter describes the devil as a roaring lion prowling around for someone to devour and urges us to stay alert to his schemes.
In this instance I think of the enemy of our souls as more like a spider trying to wrap and trap me in the web of who I was at my worst, in order to eat me one shameful bite at a time.
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Therefore, whenever a trigger reminds and rewinds a mental video I regret, from high school or beyond, I need to remember what else Peter said,
“To humble yourselves under the mighty power of God, and at the right time he will lift you up in honor. Give all your worries and cares to God, for he cares about you.” 1Peter 5:6-7 NLT
In the vernacular that means God’s love is far stronger than spider glue.
And the freedom and joy I felt at my reunion is the proof.
This Saturday at four o’clock it will be exactly fifty years since I walked across the stage of The Saratoga Performing Arts center as a high school graduate. And this Saturday at exactly four o’clock, there will be a class reunion on Zoom. Of course, I’ve been invited like all my classmates, but I hesitate to sign up for the link because the love/hate relationship I had with high school still clings to me
Zoom, link, these words didn’t exist fifty years ago. That reminds me of something my mom said when my children were young, “There will be ways for your kids to get in trouble as teenagers that you could never imagine.”
My parents were part of the Greatest Generation who fought the Nazi’s in Europe and the Japanese in far off Asia.
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I was part of the Woodstock Generation who witnessed the corruption of Watergate, the insanity of the Vietnam War, and the riots that erupted when national guards shot protesting students at Kent State University. Was it any wonder we rebelled and came up with slogans like Make Love Not War, and Question authority?
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What was my mom thinking when she made that prediction anyway? Was she remembering the time I came home so drunk from a school dance, my dad asked me if someone had slipped me a Mickey, a term from his era when good girls didn’t drink? Did that make me a bad girl? I’d left the dance with friends and older boys and felt so socially awkward I got drunk for the first time on a coke-size bottle of Ripple.
My dad’s greatest vice was smoking cigars, so how could he imagine I’d ever walk out the back door by the school library to smoke pot at a friend’s house on the other side of the woods.
My mom was valedictorian of her small rural high school and one of the first women admitted to her state college, so how could she imagine I’d rather skip school one sunny June day and ride a tandem bike all the way to Ballston Spa as if my friend and I were the Double Mint twins instead of budding scholars.
My mom was a home economics major and able to make me trendy mini-skirts and maxi coats, so how could she imagine I’d rather wear bell bottom jeans and pea coats from the Army Navy store.
I’m certain neither of my parents ever imagined I’d skip school one bright October morning to try mescaline and witness the forest floor turning into a magnificent, interlocking puzzle.
My parents thought I was happy in high school because I got A’s and B’s. For a season, I was even a cheerleader. I was in a school play. I went on school ski trips. I stayed after school to play field hockey, basketball, and do gymnastics on the trampoline in a harness that made me feel like I was Peter Pan able to flip and fly as if gravity had no hold on me.
All to say, I was a girl in an excellent suburban high school, completely unaware of my privilege, and yet my four years there, made me feel like I was never enough. Not pretty enough, strong enough, smart enough, cool enough, and so I pushed every boundary.
Today, I think of myself more as a high school survivor than graduate, my soul swept up in a social whirlpool that almost drowned me. I suppose that’s why I hesitate to zoom back into that time warp, afraid I’ll be sucked under again by who I was back then, a girl I’m not particularly proud of. I wonder how many others shrink from reconnecting for the same reason.
That said, I realize the love/hate relationship I had was not with high school, but with myself.
So, after fifty years, a senior in a whole new way, I realize my parents probably knew more than I could imagine, and could only pray that their insecure, rebellious daughter wouldn’t make the same mistakes they did.
Thankfully our heavenly father, promises not to remember any of us according to the foolishness of our youth, but according to the unfathomable depths of his mercy.
Therefore, I’ve decided to make peace with my past and link back up with fellow survivors of one of the most perilous episodes of my life, high school.
My father always had a sailboat. He knew about hoists and turnbuckles, 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.
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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 oat 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!
For the first time since the pandemic, two of my grandsons came for a weekend overnight. These are the first two grandsons I babysat after I retired. These are my first two baby crushes. All you grandmothers know what I mean, that unbounded love for the vulnerable little ones placed in your arms.
So let me back up. Newly retired, when my daughter-in-law went back to work part-time, I offered my Mary Poppins services immediately. First, it was peek-a-boo. Then chase me. Then hide and seek. Then slow walks to the park noticing: storm drains, fire hydrants, roly poly bugs beneath the rocks, worms beneath the leaves, blue jays on the power lines, until we got to the swings and the sliding boards. Then there were stories and naps, building cities and knocking them down, learning letters and numbers, playing in the wading pool, eating popsicles on the porch, building snowmen in the backyard. No matter what we did, the fun was just being together.
When they moved across the state, oh, how I missed them! We visited as often as possible, but it was never enough.
Then came another grandson to babysit when my local daughter went back to work. And then his younger brother. Three days a week now we play and enjoy each other. The last time he left my house, his mother said he cried, “Grandma,” all the way home.
I have another daughter who lives a four-hour flight away. Of course, I can’t babysit for her little darlings, but as often as possible, I spread my wings and visit for a week or so. The last time I saw them was in April after I was vaccinated, and when their grandpa and I said good-bye, they cried too.
Getting back to this past weekend, our oldest grandsons rediscovered all the toys in the toy closet. They got up every morning at 5:30 and got out the cards to play War. They helped me gather the eggs from the hen house, and we made scrambles for breakfast. Their local younger cousins came over to splash in the wading pool with them and swing on the swings. We ate watermelon together and tried to reconnect what had been disconnected by Covid.
The last morning of the boys visit, we went to a nearby lake. The younger brother built cities in the sand. The oldest can swim now and played crocodile while I defended myself with a squirt gun. When he was cold, he got out, and shivered in his towel. “I don’t want to go home.”
I told him, “I think I know how you feel. When I was a little girl, I visited my grandmother every summer and had tons of cousins to play with. She had chickens too and a river where we went swimming and fishing. I hated to go home because I loved them so. Is that why you’re sad?”
His eyes misty, he nodded his head.
I could have told him even more. How my grandmother’s farm was like heaven to me, surrounded by a tribe of people who loved me unconditionally, who made me feel like I belonged to something bigger than myself that made me feel safe and special and incredibly lucky. But I did tell him that I was sad too because I would miss him until we saw each other again, so I made plans with his mommy to do so.
Reflecting on our weekend, I remember when I was a child, how time turned so slowly while I waited forever for my birthday or Christmas. I wonder if the pandemic decelerated time until my grandson feared he’d never see the people he missed again.
Photo by Sujith Devanagari on Unsplash
As a grandma my time races by with day-blurring velocity. And the pandemic has given me an urgency to spend what time I have left with my dearest. Perhaps we’ve all been stricken with PTSD, Pandemic Time Sense Distortion. Or maybe that’s another name for our own mortality. Surely, no matter how old we are, we long for a perfect world where we can be together forever with those we love.
Photo by Leslie Joseph on Unsplash
That reminds me of an old hymn from my childhood:
“Blest be the tie that binds our hearts in Christian love.
The fellowship of kindred minds is like to that above.
We share our mutual woes, our mutual burdens bear; and often for each other flows the sympathizing tear.
When we asunder part it gives us inward pain; but we shall still be joined in heart and hope to meet again.”
When we asunder part it gives us inward pain, but we shall still be joined in heart and hope to meet again.
Now that pandemic restrictions are lifting, I was able to attend the memorial for one of my husband’s aunts. For privacy’s sake I’ll call her Nelly. Early in our marriage, Nelly’s home was where we joined innumerable relatives to celebrate every Thanksgiving. My children called it going to the White House as if we were visiting the president because it was an impressive Victorian set on a wide lawn populated by mature shade trees. In the center of the foyer was a magnificent, curved staircase Scarlett O’Hara would have been proud to descend. Although the architecture was elegant and the home richly appointed with family antiques and foreign curiosities, it was comfortably lived in, and my children and myriad cousins played hide and seek from bedrooms to basement. Aunt Nelly was at the center of it all, the consummate hostess, warm, welcoming, and always glad to see you.
We moved out West. Moved back East. Our children grew up, and Nelly, at more than ninety was nearly the last of her generation to pass away. All to say, it was a long time since I’d last been to the big white house. But as we drove up the drive, the cousins waved and grinned from the expansive front porch as if it hadn’t been almost thirty years since we’d been to their childhood home.
After giving the first hugs I’ve given since Covid, I asked if I could go inside and look around. In the foyer was the small leather elephant my toddlers had tried to ride. To the left was the dining room readied to serve the others who would be coming after the memorial. To the right was the sunroom with the couch upholstered in salmon velvet, and above it the oriental painting that had always hung there. Perpendicular to the couch was the piano my children and their cousins banged on. Or was it the same piano? I’d never noticed the intricate fretwork on the upper panel. Maybe it was always hidden behind sheet music. And I’d never noticed it’s golden, burled finish. But the bench that held three cousins at a time wasn’t made from the same wood.
I circled the rest of the house, strolling through the living room furnished with two of the longest sofas I’ve ever seen, but then Aunt Nelly raised eight children. Through the cozy breakfast room, the tiny kitchen, the pantry, back through the dining room, and onto the porch. But my mind circled too, back to the piano.
When I stepped onto the porch, I asked the cousins, “Is that the same piano in the sunroom?”
The oldest sister answered, “No, that’s Janis Joplin’s piano.”
My heart did a flip, and my jaw dropped. “How did you get Janis Joplin’s piano?”
“Someone gave it to my brother.”
We were given a ride to the cemetery by the brother gifted the piano and heard the rest of the story. It concluded with the fact that the sound board was broken, so you couldn’t actually play it.
I wondered if that was because of all the blues Janis pounded out of the keyboard, or because it was just old. After all I was a freshman in high school when I first heard her sing, “Piece of my Heart” on the Cheap Thrills album. Could that be over fifty years ago?
At the graveside, people told stories of how Aunt Nelly was someone who listened, really listened, who invited you into the family even if you weren’t officially related. A man I didn’t recognize said Nelly helped him get into Yale simply by encouraging him to say what he really wanted. He was part of the other side of the family I learned she hosted every Christmas. The funeral director, also counted her a friend, saying she was a woman who knew how to get things done for the community. And someone recalled Nelly as always saying, “Isn’t that wonderful!”
Me and middle C on Janis Joplin’s piano
When we got back from the cemetery, I asked my husband to take a picture of me in front of Janis Joplin’s piano. It was still incredible that I was in the same room with an instrument that had been played by a Woodstock icon. And yet I don’t know if young people today even know who Janis was. In the big picture, I suppose it was a cheap thrill to stand beside her piano that can no longer make music.
But here’s the thing, this isn’t really a story about Aunt Nelly or Janis Joplin’s mute piano. It’s a story of the life-long resolution of my own insecurities. I confess, when I first came to Aunt Nelly’s home, I perched on one of those long couches as a young stay-at-home mom, surrounded by people whose professional accomplishments and exotic lives made my ordinary existence feel inferior. But in mortality’s clarity, it’s obvious, what really matters is to love and be loved. That sounds cliché. But clichés are true.
Photo by Debby Hudson on Unsplash
At the end of the memorial, Aunt Nelly’s ashes were placed in a grave next to her husband’s, and as I turned to leave, I saw one of the Christmas relatives, scattering rose petals on top of all that remained of dear Aunt Nelly who I imagine would have said, “Isn’t that wonderful!”
“We have a special role in his (God’s) plan. He calls us to life by the message of truth so that we will show the rest of his creatures his goodness and love.”
“The Love and peace generation of the sixties wasn’t wrong in trying to imagine something better than a world filled with hate and war – it was wrong in not finding a better Messiah than the Beatles.”
I’m part of the generation that grew up with the Beatles from the time they were a teeny bopper boy band to transcendental gurus, so this quote by Brian Zahnd brings up all sorts of memories.
I was in fifth grade sitting on a pink chenille bedspread when I first heard, “I Wanna Hold Your Hand.” My best friend and I were looking at her older sister’s very first Beatles album, the one with John, Paul, George, and Ringo wearing black turtlenecks and unprecedented shaggy hair. Who was the cutest? My vote, Paul with his dark arched eyebrows and down sloped eyes. I think my best friend picked George, and her older sister said Ringo was ugly, which made me feel sorry for him.
Then the day after Christmas 1963, The Beatles entered my living room via the Ed Sullivan Show. Sitting on our gray carpet, I stared at a boxy TV set and felt slightly embarrassed as Paul sang, “All my loving I will give to you,” while my parents looked on from the sofa.
My next Beatle memory was taking the bus downtown to Proctor’s Theatre with my friends to see A Hard Day’s Night, a feature length music video/ documentary before there were such things. On a hot summer afternoon, high in the balcony, beneath a gilded ceiling, we watched four zany boys chased by screaming, swooning girls they couldn’t escape.
By the time I was in high school, the Beatles had produced: Rubber Soul, Sargent Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, The White Album, and Abbey Road, and as vanguards of globalization, brought home pot, LSD, eastern religions, Transcendental Meditation, batik fabric, Nehru jackets, and sitar music after befriending Ravi Shankar, and the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi
My sophomore summer was the Summer of Love, when teenagers ran away to San Francisco, put flowers in their hair, and John Lennon’s song “Give Peace a Chance” became a counterculture anthem.
Photo by Vasilios Muselimis
The following spring, my best friend’s mother died of cancer, and as rain speckled my bedroom windows, I listened to Paul’s haunting “In my Life.”
The next summer was Woodstock, the legendary concert that created mantras like Do Your Own Thing, Free Love, and Question Authority. It was as if the Beatles had opened Pandora’s box containing death, shame, and an anxious freedom.
I graduated high school as the Beatles fell apart, yet the year before I graduated college, I studied in London, and one night, my roommate and I, stumbled upon their recording studio on Abbey Road. In the dark, leaning over a waist high wall, we lifted the lid of a garbage can on the other side, and grabbed fists full of trash as if we were back to being fangirls from A Hard Day’s Night. Amongst our finds was an envelope addressed to Paul McCartney. I don’t remember what happened to it. It hardly seems real I ever held it in my hand.
What I remember for sure is that a few months after my first child was born, John Lennon was shot and killed. Sitting on my living room carpet, alone with an infant sleeping upstairs, the same eyes that watched John’s meteoric rise on the Ed Sullivan show, spilled hot tears. Tears for John, for Yoko, for their own baby, who would grow up without a father. For all John Lennon had imagined that never came true. For Peace and love to have a chance in a world everyone was desperately trying to escape. I mourned him as someone, maybe something, I grew up with that died too young, my innocence.
Photo by Neil Martin on Unsplash
Brian Zahn was right. John, Paul, George, and Ringo made lousy Messiahs. But they were seekers like me, young and effervescent, looking for love, looking for the transcendent mysteries of life that music endeavors to express.
Almost fifty years ago, I stumbled upon the true Messiah, Jesus, who alone paid the price for us to be back in harmony with God and mankind.
And fifty years ago, last week, The Beatles’ final album, Let it Be was released.
Looking back, maybe, Paul was my favorite not just because he was my teenage heart throb, but because his songs express something true: the struggles of this world although global are as local as the human heart.
None of our yesterdays can be altered by looking back. We have to let it be with the Lord and be happy.
“Oh-bla-di Oh-bla-da life goes on bra! La-la how the life goes on.” Paul McCartney
How many of you would like to rewrite certain chapters of your life? Probably the ones you regret, the ones you’re ashamed of. Probably the ones that portray the most hideous things done to you and the most damaging things done by you of your own free will. I know what my chapters are. I’m sure you have your own. This is the assumption behind the title of Sharon Jaynes new book, When You Don’t Like Your Story. Her subtitle, What if Your Worst Chapters Could Become Your Greatest Victories, shows how God, the master author of all our stories, can use our most difficult chapters to redeem what was lost, destroyed, or broken, not only to showcase his glory, but to rewrite the lives of others.
Her chapter titles pave the way for this process, starting with: “Why Me? Why This? Why Now?,” “When Forgetting isn’t enough,” “The Scab You Won’t Stop Picking,” and “Leaving the Shame Place.”
But Sharon doesn’t leave us with just forgiving ourselves and others by claiming our holy, chosen, and beloved identity in Christ. She makes a compelling case through numerous anecdotes and Biblical examples that demonstrate how our shame-filled stories and the specifics of God’s healing in our lives are exactly what others need to hear in order to trust him and be healed as well. She touches on issues of divorce, abortion, sexual abuse, prostitution, domestic violence, alcoholism, suicide, depression, and more.
And here’s where the rubber meets the road for me, and perhaps for those of you who are also writers, she says,
“You may feel that you wasted part of your life because of failure, but the greater waste would be not telling what you learned from that failure. How God picked you up after you fell down. How God turned you around when you were headed in the wrong direction. How God drew you in when you had pushed him away…”
All this to say, I struggle with telling the unflattering truth about myself even when I feel led to do so by the Lord, so Sharon Jaynes’ book was exactly what I needed to hear as I’m promoting my first book, Teacher Dropout: Finding Grace in an Unjust School, and sending out proposals for my next memoir, feeling vulnerable, unsure and unqualified.
But “Listen,” she goes on to say, “the devil does not want you to tell your story of what God has done in your life. He wants you to keep it bottled up and hidden away in the back of the pantry where no one can find it. He doesn’t want you to tell how you traded in your angst and resentment for God’s grace and forgiveness. How you traded in your feelings of condemnation and self-loathing for freedom and a new beginning.”
This doesn’t mean we all have to be authors, but we all can tell our stories to those who trust us and need to hear living proof that they too can overcome what feels irreparable by the immeasurable power of a God who loves them to the moon.
Photo by Kourosh Quaffri on Unsplash
Finally, Sharon reminds us of Rev. 12:11 “By the blood of the Lamb and the word of their witnesses, they have become victorious over him.” (VOICE) Meaning, sharing our painful chapters is right up there with the very blood of Jesus in defeating the devil’s schemes.
So do it afraid, sisters.
Tell the tale of your defeat and God’s triumph. And if you’re not brave enough to do so yet, check out Sharon’s Jaynes’ book, When You Don’t Like Your Story: What if Your Worst Chapters Could Become Your Greatest Victories. It’s a great read aimed at a more meaningful life, so turn the page and let God rewrite a beautiful new ending that demonstrates what his amazing grace looks like in an ordinary life.
Halfway through April, and it’s snowing again. The forsythia bush outside my window is in full bloom despite an icy veil. Writer to writer, the weather reflects how I feel. After months of perfecting a proposal for a new memoir, I finally got up the courage to send a query to my dream agent and within twenty-four hours received a rejection. Perhaps I shouldn’t use the word rejection. She was timely, candid, and kind in telling me she loved my topic, and it was certainly important, BUT it’s almost impossible to sell a memoir by an unknown author. So how does one become known? The proverbial question asked by us unknown authors, in full bloom beneath obscurity’s veil.
Photo by Sergey Lapunin on Unsplash
Last weekend it was pushing seventy degrees, the grass was greening, the daffodils were lifting their heads to the sun, and I was basking in two encouraging speaking engagements involving my first memoir, Teacher Dropout: Finding Grace in an Unjust School. One was a virtual women’s group at my church, Grace United in Northampton, MA. The other a virtual open mic through Straw Dogs Writers’ Guild, a local writers organization. One of the participants at the Straw Dogs event, also a self-published author, Stephanie Shafran told me I could sell my books on consignment at my local bookstore, Broadside Bookshop. So Monday morning, I called the bookstore and they graciously accepted three copies for sale. Later in the day, I emailed another participant at the Straw Dogs event, Terrianne Falcone, an online writing teacher, and she bought the very first copy I ever sold through a bookstore. Yeah!
It’s a scary thing to put yourself out there. To tell the stories that haunt until God heals. Scarier still to place your book for sale as if the truth and freedom you’ve found can be defined by a sales figure. And most frightening to keep trying with failure your most predictable outcome.
But what else can we do, we writers who have to write because it’s part of the way God made us? What else can we do but unfurl our joyful yellow standards in a frozen world? And who knows, along the way we might meet some new friends and fans to cheer us on, and even some truth tellers to course correct. By the way, there’s a saying about the weather in New England. If you don’t like it, wait a minute, and it will change. But God Almighty never changes. And with him nothing is impossible.
Photo by Lauris Rosentals on Unsplash
That said, outside the snow has turned to rain, and sunshine is predicted for tomorrow. Thanks for listening, sisters. My mood, like the weather, is already brighter. Hope yours is too.
After the crucifixion, the disciples scattered and hid, crushed and disillusioned. Big, strong Peter disowned Jesus afraid of a little servant girl. But after Mary Magdalene and a few female followers saw the empty tomb, and encountered an angel, and the resurrected Jesus, everything he had foretold added up differently.
One of the things Jesus had taught them was the Lord’s Prayer, a pattern for how to talk to God. As a little girl, I learned the same prayer by rote. It was just a string of words I said in unison with the congregation during the boring parts of church which honestly, as a child, were all boring. But after the reality of the resurrection struck me as an adult, I see that prayer in a different light.
Our father, creator, and spiritual daddy who birthed us body and soul out of nothingness in his own eternal image,
Who art in heaven, in another dimension where we can’t see you, but somehow we know you exist,
Hallowed by thy name, for you are holy, meaning complete and good in every way,
Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done, because you are the perfect ruler of the universe, we want what you want,
On earth as it is in heaven, because this world is a disaster already happened, and we need relief from its hideous chaos,
Give us this day our daily bread, as we don’t even know what we actually need. Make us dependent on you day by day and free us from our foolish self-sufficiency,
And forgive us our trespasses, the selfish, hurtful stuff we do, even when we don’t want to, that crosses the boundaries of other’s lives and damages us all,
As we forgive those who trespass against us, help us trust you with what others owe us, especially when we carry the heavy baggage of revenge. Help us remember you are the God who sees and your sovereign justice goes above and beyond any resolution we can ask or imagine,
Lead us not into temptation, trusting that your ways are better than our ways,
But deliver us from evil, by breaking the chains of all our destructive behaviors and empowering us with your bottomless love to live free, exhilarating lives.
For thine is the kingdom, you are in charge of everything seen and unseen,
Photo by Ussama Aza on Unsplash
And the power, you alone are imbued with energy supreme,
And the glory, all the earth reflects your magnanimous, unmatched reputation,
Forever and ever, our souls mirror your eternity and will be resurrected like Jesus to a world sublime with beauty where death has lost its sting, and we will see you face to face,
Photo by Fionna Smallwood on Unsplash
In Jesus name, the name of your Messiah, who ransomed us with the payment of his blood.
This is the aftermath of Easter, sisters, how our human zero meets God’s infinity, and alters everything. The laws of higher mathematics never change. When infinity is defined, zero plus infinity always adds up to infinity.
Amen, let it be done.
Thanks to Thanti Nguyen for the cover photo on Unsplash
I recently joined a storyteller’s circle, which as a writer, I thought would be a piece of cake. A lot of the same rules apply whether you are writing a story or telling it orally. The end has to kiss the beginning. The middle has plenty of wiggle room, and you need a takeaway which is best if embedded and not didactic.
What’s different is how you rehearse. As a writer, I start with a rough draft, spilling all my thoughts on paper. Then I edit and add until I find the kernel of truth I have to share and weed out everything else.
This week I tried to orally rehearse the story of why I wrote my book, Teacher Dropout: Finding Grace in an Unjust School for my next story circle. While speaking into a voice recorder, I took a long walk up and down the hills surrounding my house. The result was eleven attempts, each one with a slightly different emphasis, breathy with pauses, and too many words like so,um, and then.
Even now writing this, what freedom I feel to take back words that have escaped onto the page and replace them with something better. A more perfect, phrase. A more powerful verb. More precise vocabulary.
But every word that leaves my lips as a storyteller is free for all eternity, never to be retrieved or reformed in anyway. Every thought loosed into the outside world floats into the listener’s ear never to be pulled back out. All my sentences must build on each other no matter how sloppily they exit my brain. There is no chance to clarify logic or crystallize an image except more words which runs completely counter to my writer’s instinct to cut, trim, and refine.
Oral storytelling’s vulnerability is both exhilarating and full of stage fright. Even on a country road, with no one listening, I was tongue tied when I couldn’t remember or connect my next thought. It reminds me of a recurring dream I have where I am in a play I didn’t know I was supposed to be in and can’t find my script. No one else can find it. No one knows my lines, yet I’m semi-confident that if I could just figure out where I’m supposed to come in, I could improvise.
But I don’t want to tell a story half-baked. I want to nail it like I can on the page.
So how to tell the story of an almost two-hundred-page book in ten minutes of improvised sentences? What kernel of truth can I confidently grow in such a short season?
Teacher Dropout was my attempt to articulate the freedom God granted by letting me fail.
I went to an “under-performing” school at the top of my game, hoping to be a hero like teachers in the movies faced with challenging students and unsupportive administrators. One of my students saw her mother bleed to death from a bullet meant for her gang-banger brother. Another saw a bullet fly across his kitchen from his father’s pistol into his mother’s arm causing a wound like a meteor crater. These kids had bigger fish to fry than improving their test scores, and I could not save them academically or otherwise. When one student sexually harassed me and called me a puta, Spanish for whore, I resigned at the end of the year, far less than a hero, broken in a way I couldn’t explain even to myself.
Even after I’d physically left the building, my experiences there continued to torture me. And where was God? Why didn’t he help me? Help the students? Why didn’t he protect me from horrible administrators who seemed to hate me and my students?
Looking back, God let me go to the dead end of my own efforts.
In a world where the wages of sin is death, and sin is anything toxic or damaging, I was trying to earn my worth in an abusive school. Perhaps I was a puta—for approval.
That’s when I accepted, deep in my bones, the crucifixion as physical proof that God loved me even when I screwed up like any other under-performer. Even when I prostituted my gifts to gain acclaim instead of trusting him for my worth.
God didn’t change my circumstances, but he changed the way I saw my circumstances. Jesus was the door out of a prison I’d created myself, a prison I’ll call professional co-dependence, trying to prove I was worth loving by my professional achievements and success.
So, I was free from competition, free to be myself, free to relax in a perfect love that would never fade. Nothing left to prove.
That’s the didactic end of my story.
But a full-throated narrative where you see and feel what I went through is so much more. That’s what’s embedded in Teacher Dropoutand what I hope to portray in the story I’ll tell my new story circle friends.
Still, I confess, whenever I try something new or take a risk, I’m afraid I’ll flub up, and behind my fear, leers the zombie lie that raises its head from the grave over and over again, who are you if you fail?
Now I know why they always hold up a cross to keep away vampires
that try to suck the life out of you.
Photo by Kenny Orr on Unsplash
Trusting that Jesus took death’s bullet meant for me, meant for you, is the only antidote to keep the lie that we’re worthless nailed in its coffin where it belongs. We as believers are the holy, chosen, and beloved of God even when we fail.
Thanks to Yohann Libot for the cover photo on Unsplash
