For as long as I can remember I’ve known I was adopted, and my birth father’s family came from Ireland. But before this week, the week we celebrate St. Patrick who brought the gospel to my ancestral homeland, there were no more details.
I’ve written before about the time in college when I hitchhiked with a friend from Dublin to Galway and down the southeastern coast of the island. With few cars to pick us up, we tramped across fields and stumbled upon a castle, without fanfare, no guided tour, just a broken tower with a stairway open to the sky. Atop the lookout, I could see the edge of the world, the Cliffs of Mohr which fell over seven hundred feet to the sea. Waves which rolled from a continent away crashed on the rocks below.
Photo by Sylvia Szekely on Unsplash
But here’s the part of the story that matters today. On the road out of the little town of Dingle, we climbed the broad-backed highlands of the Slieve Mish mountains until it narrowed to a single ridge. Just beyond the summit was a white-washed cottage with a thatched roof. Window boxes dripped with geraniums. Roses crawled the fence. A white pony browsed in the dooryard, and a stone path curved to a rounded, red door. In the rising mist, it was a mystical vision as if I were looking through the thin, gauzy space that separates the earth from the sublime. And I wondered, if I pressed my nose against the windowpane, what would I see inside. God himself in a rocking chair beside the fire? Or perhaps a long-lost relative who would claim me as his own.
And on the opposite side of the road, down the green slopes dotted with sheep, I could make out the ragged peninsula south of Dingle. That was in 1973.
To make a long story short, my husband has been digging into my genealogy for some time, and this week located the birthplace of my great grandfather, Michael Joseph Sullivan, born in 1873, who came to America in 1890 from the little town of Cahersiveen.
Photo by Morgan Lane on Unsplash
Drumroll please; Cahersiveen is on the Iveragh peninsula, the peninsula I overlooked at that holy ground moment on the mountain 100 years after his birth.
His wife, Ellen McSweeney was born in the small village of Beaufort that we surely hitched past on our way south to Killarney. Both towns are within the Ring of Kerry in county Kerry.
When I Googled the Ring of Kerry, I found this anonymous quote,
“Any Kerryman will tell you there are only two Kingdoms: the Kingdom of Kerry and the Kingdom of God.”
Photo by K. Mitch Hodge on Unsplash
Perhaps that’s what I felt so many years gone by, and what I discovered again today, amazingly on St. Patrick’s Day.
The slim intersection of the dust I’m made from and the sovereign hand of God who alone guides my destiny.
Cover photo by Aldo De La Paz on Unsplash. Thanks!
The pandemic is taking its toll on me. It’s been about a year of masked isolation and monotony, and I’m feeling bored and antsy at the same time, if that’s even possible. I’m retired. I get to babysit some of my adorable grandchildren. I have free time to write. So, what am I complaining about? Still, I’m not myself.
So, what do you do when you can’t take it anymore, whatever it is? You lie on the couch under a snuggle blanket and click through streaming video options of course. The other night I selected Hello, My Name is Doris starring Sally Fields as a quirky old lady who… I won’t say more not to spoil Sally Field’s wonderful characterization that drives the plot.
What caught my eye is the point in the movie when a friend invites Doris to hear a motivational speaker. The speaker points out the word impossible, reads, I M possible if you simply pull out the first two letters. He then expands it to I am possible as his motivational mantra.
Doris repeats his catch phrase, I am possible, I am possible until it becomes the catalyst that changes the way she thinks about herself and her situation. If I am possible, maybe nothing is impossible This is the fuel for Doris’ transformation, beautifully portrayed by Sally Fields, with the kind of happy, feel-good ending we all need after a year of lockdown and life-threatening, world wide disease.
But here’s the thing, what if I am not possible? What if I am weak, weary, and nothing is really within my control? What if I’m insecure, prone to worry, and my greatest gift is forecasting future doom?
The morning after the movie, I’m again on the couch, wrapped in the same blanket, sipping a cup of tea. But this time I’m streaming the Holy Spirit when the thought enters my mind that God was first known by the Israelites as the Great I Am, a God too big to be contained by any name.
When I open the Bible app on my phone, the verse of the day is Matthew 19:26.
Jesus: It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.
25 The disciples, hearing this, were stunned.
Disciples: Who then can be saved?
Jesus:26 People cannot save themselves. But with God, all things are possible. (VOICE)
Later in the week, I’m faced with a crisis too personal to name. One a perky, quirky, I-am- possible Sally Field could never solve.
Oddly, I don’t feel panic or dismay. It’s as if I’m shielded by a peace, that doesn’t make sense. As if I’m floating above circumstances that should derail me. Instead, I’m resting in the knowledge that I can do nothing to change things.
Odder still, this is the catalyst that transforms me from being bored and antsy to grateful for a God who sees, a God who provides, a God who cares, a God who is never surprised, so knew ahead of time, to remind me that nothing is impossible with the Great I Am.
Photo by Dennis Mayk on Unsplash
The Great I Am,
a God too big to be contained by a name, yet knows mine.
That’s my motivational mantra for the week, sisters. Keep the faith!
Cover photo by Wolfgang Hasselmann on Unsplash. Thanks!
Where was God when I was conceived out of wedlock?
He was secretly knitting me together in my mother’s womb.
Where was God when I was relinquished at four days old and placed in a foster home?
He was working in the heart of my foster mom to love me as her own.
Where was God nine months later when I was taken from the only mother I’d ever known and given to strangers?
He was preparing my barren parents to treasure me all the more. Adoption records note I went into their arms without a care.
Where was God when my new mom was in a car crash that almost killed her?
He was completely healing the broken bones and internal injuries that kept her in the hospital for five weeks and caused me to treasure her all the more.
Where was God when I was overwhelmed with being a parent myself, desperate for affirmation, and ready to divorce my faithful husband for another man who paid me a passing fancy?
He was preparing my heart to receive the gospel that revealed only the love of Christ could satisfy my deepest needs and save me from myself.
And where was God when my wonderful husband was laid off as an engineer?
He was providing temporary work with a friend as a roofer.
And where was God when we needed more money?
He was leading me to teach night classes at a community college where I first met immigrant students from around the world.
And where was God when my husband accepted a job offer halfway across the continent?
He was leading me towards a scholarship at the University of Colorado, so I could better serve the immigrant students I’d grown to love.
Where was God when we moved back East to care for elderly parents in failing health?
He was leading me to teach in a failing school that made me feel like a failure.
And where was God when I just couldn’t teach anymore?
He was freeing me from idolizing my profession and turning me into a storyteller who understood that
my core identity and worth had nothing to do with
where I came from,
what I had,
or what I achieved.
My worth and identity are in his love alone, the love that has carried me my whole life and carries me still.
Photo by Danylo Suprun
In the midst of a pandemic, close again to destruction, I recall the calmest place in any storm, is its eye, the place where it began. And so I nestle ever closer to my creator, savior, and friend.
“I have cared for you since you were born. Yes, I carried you before you were born. 4 I will be your God throughout your lifetime— until your hair is white with age. I made you, and I will care for you. I will carry you along and save you.”
Isaiah 46:3-4 NLT
Thanks to Romain Paget for the cover photo on Unsplash
In Mrs. Sherwood’s second grade class, I sit next to Peter Beaumont in the corner in the back where we can whisper and giggle and not get caught. My desk is next to the window sill where we planted beans in Dixie cups. Peter’s desk is partnered with mine directly in front of the incubator where we’re waiting to hatch eggs for Easter.
My favorite part of second grade is when we get out our blue American Singer books, and Mrs. Sherwood plays the piano that sits kitty corner to the blackboard. So far we’ve learned “Oh, Susanna,” “America the Beautiful,” and “Frère Jacque.”
I’d say Peter is my best friend except he’s a boy, so on the playground I usually go hand over hand across the horizontal ladder or swing way high with Connie Withers while he plays basketball with Donny Sanborn.
Connie and I are both Brownies and my mom and her mom are the troop leaders. Connie is adopted like me, so she doesn’t look anything like her mom or dad who has grey hair like a grandpa.
I’ve been over to play at Connie’s house a bunch of times and crawled down the ravine behind her house to the rocky brook at the bottom. We like to find wild cucumbers, blackberries, and teeny tiny hemlock cones, then bring them back to her porch to smush into stew.
Once it got cold, we played in front of her huge fireplace in the living room because her house is freezing. The walls are crooked and there are old beams that run across the low ceiling. On the other side of a steep staircase, is the dining room with a table big enough for all the girls in Mrs. Sherwood’s class to come to Connie’s birthday party. After she blew out her candles, we ate angel food cake with strawberry/van/choc ice cream, trying not to spill on our poufy dresses. Then we played Pin the Tail on the Donkey and had a treasure hunt around the rest of the house. At the end was a pint-sized bag for each of us holding peanut M&M’s, and a metal clicker that sounds like a cricket when you squeeze it.
On Brownie days Connie and I wear our light brown uniforms with big buttons down the front to school. My mom braids my hair in pigtails because the felt beanie doesn’t fit over a ponytail. Mommy and Mrs. Wither’s uniforms are the color of a green bean. They meet our troop in the cafetorium after school.
Last fall we hiked the nature trail behind the school, and learned to identity oak, maple, and ash trees from their leaves then pressed them between pieces of wax paper. We get badges for stuff like that to wear on our dark brown sashes. We went camping once and made s’mores by the campfire. Lying in my sleeping bag, I don’t know why, but I thought it would be cool to have Peter in a sleeping bag next to mine.
We’ve also learned the Girl Scout motto, to be clean in thought, word, and deed.
Which reminds me, when Mrs. Sherwood noticed the incubator was unplugged and asked who did it, I didn’t say it was Peter. Or that he did it as a joke, and we both laughed.
Photo by Roble de Invierno
At the time, I didn’t understand that unplugging the incubator meant there would be no chicks for Easter.
I just remember our bean plants escaped their cups and overtook the window sill like a squiggly patch of weeds.
Thanks to Gregory Hayes for the cover photo on Unsplash.
Some Sundays after church we drive forty-five minutes to have dinner with the Swensons at their farm in Sharon Springs. Arne is one of Daddy’s oldest friends. He’s a tall, ropey dairyman. Marta, Mrs. Swenson, is his round, smiling wife. Arne always sits at the head of the oval table in the middle of the dining room. His table is covered with a pink tablecloth, set with rosebud china, and adorned with his three daughters: beautiful Cindy, the eldest, sturdy Karen, my age, and Trina, a blonde baby. Mrs. Swenson sets a roast chicken before her husband and returns with steaming bowls of mashed potatoes and a slurpy gravy boat. We all dig in.
After dinner, the adults go through open French doors into the living room with two maroon armchairs and a squishy maroon sofa facing a roaring fire. Karen grabs a pink and black afghan off the back of the sofa, and we wrap up together on the piano bench in the dining room. She opens the red cover of John Thompson’s Teaching Little Fingers to Play and shows me how the black ants on the page match the white keys on the piano. With Karen’s help, I tap out “Row, row, row your boat. . . life is but a dream.”
This Sunday, Mommy has packed my round, red suitcase with the white poodle on the front and the white loop handle because I am spending a few nights with Karen during my mid- winter vacation. After a quiet afternoon, I kiss Mommy, Daddy and brother Bruce, good-bye in the front hall amidst dripping boots, scarves and mittens hung over the radiator. Through the open door, I watch the taillights of the black Ford station wagon fade into the frigid night.
Behind me is a huge stairway. “Is your room up there?”
Karen shakes her head. “No.”
“How come?”
“I’ll show you.” She leads me up the creaking steps to two empty bedrooms with peeling wallpaper and windows that rattle with the wind. “Daddy hasn’t had time to fix the upstairs yet, so we all sleep downstairs.”
Karen’s room has two twin beds and a crib that line the wall opposite the frosty window. Mrs. Swenson positions an old mattress in between the twins made up with pink and blue bunny sheets. A tall bureau stands on one side of the ruffled curtains. On the other side is a dressing table, its bubbled veneer topped with little girl bottles of pink lotion and violet eau de toilette.
In the morning, Karen and I walk down the road to the barn. A concrete runway separates two aisles of cattle. Arne and his hired man are moving among the cows hooking up stainless steel milking machines that fill the barn with the sound of their squish and squirt. Karen and I pet the big-eyed Holsteins looking out the barn windows full of cobwebs.
“This one is Maybelle. She’s going to have a calf in the spring.” Karen scratches the cow’s nose.
After a lunch of alphabet soup, Mrs. Swenson says, “You girls want to go sledding?”
Karen and I look at each other and squeal.
Mrs. Swenson helps us squirm into our snow pants and zip up our parkas. We pull on our knit caps and flip up our hoods. She bends down and ties red scarves around our necks and clips our wool mittens to our jacket sleeves. All bunched up, we’re ready for the arctic.
Two Flexible Flyers are waiting on the front porch. We grab their ropes, waddle down the front walk, and trudge single file along the country road towards the pasture.
Karen climbs over the fence, and I pass her our sleds. Our breath forms alternating clouds as we huff and puff up the steep rise. The snow is covered with a glistening crust, so our boots break through with every step, leaving jagged holes in the slippery slope. Finally, at the crest, we plant our bundled bottoms on our sleds and place our red rubber boots on the wooden cross pieces used to steer. We hold the ropes and push off.
“Yee-haw!” We’re riding bucking broncos across the snowy plain.
Down, down we slide, streaking shadows in the low winter sun. The thrill is but a heartbeat. Without a word, we climb the hill over and over. With each slide, we grow wilder. We go down headfirst. Headfirst holding hands.
From cowboys to circus stars, for my next trick, I stand on my sled, the rope taut in my snow-pilled mittens.
The thin metal runners hit a footprint in the crust and lodge in the soft powder beneath. The rope yanks out of my grip. My chin cracks the ice. My slick nylon snowsuit accelerates my descent. Lips, nose, cheekbones rub and rip against every icy opening in my path.
When Karen slides to my side, the snow beneath my face is the bright red of a bloody snow cone. We’re both too terrified to cry. Silently we toss our sleds over the fence and hurry for home. Up the country road, past the barn, down the walk.
Karen pushes the front door open. “Mommy!”
Mrs. Swenson carries me into the kitchen and sets me on a stool beside the white enamel-topped table. She flies to the bathroom and returns with a box of Band-Aids and two clean blue washcloths. With eyes as big as Maybelle’s, Karen watches her mother fill a bowl with warm water. Mrs. Swenson wets the terrycloth and gently wipes my abrasions. Blood clouds the water as she rinses again and again.
Karen winces as a deep gash above my upper lip is revealed. Mrs. Swenson pinches the skin back together and secures it with two tiny blue Band-Aids covered in silver airplanes. She opens the freezer, pulls out an ice tray, and fills the dry washcloth with a handful of cubes. Gently placing the cold pack in my palm, she tells me to hold it over my mouth. After gently peeling off my boots and snowsuit, Mrs. Swenson leads me to the squishy maroon couch, and Karen tucks me in with the black and pink afghan.
I don’t know how long I lay there beside the fire before Mrs. Swenson and Karen are back at my side. Pretty Cindy is holding the blonde baby. Mrs. Swenson exchanges my bloody washcloth for what looks like an empty hamburger bun spread with butter. I sit up and take a timid bite. It’s the best thing I’ve ever tasted. An empty hamburger bun?
When you’ve been served only foil-wrapped sticks of Blue Bonnet margarine in your seven short years of life, how can you imagine the glory of fresh, sweet butter, sun-kissed blades of summer grass transformed by the herd, churned and spread with the kindness of a farmer’s wife?
Photo by Screenroad on Unsplash
The scar above my mouth is still visible, a constant reminder of the taste of my own blood, exchanged for something infinitely better.
Thanks to Ciprian Pardau for the featured photo of a snowy barn on Unsplash
Last February I joined an online writers group called Hope*writers. Immediately, I began listening to their interviews with publishing professionals and reading through their library on the craft of writing, and the business of publishing and marketing. Drinking from this firehose, reminded me of the day King Josiah discovered the Book of the Law and realized he and his people had been doing everything wrong.
For example, I reread a book proposal I’d just sent to an agent and found a typo within the first paragraph. I was no longer sure the proposal was accurate or compelling because I learned I still needed to refine my message, my reader, and the book’s benefit.
I discovered I needed a lead magnet, whatever that was, so readers of my blog would subscribe. I needed an email list of subscribers, so I could prove to publishers or agents that I already had a following chomping at the bit to read my upcoming work. I had none of this nor the technical expertise to put it in place.
Measuring myself by those who’d already accomplished all this and more, I became overwhelmed and paralyzed.
But then I engaged with smaller circles within the larger group, and found I was not the only one drowning in information or dropping off the steep learning curve. In fact, I knew some stuff others were happy for me to share. So, I trudged on, learning how to use Facebook Live and how to Zoom. I learned how to create a free offering to thank my subscribers. My husband helped me figure out Mailchimp, and I networked with fellow bloggers to grow my subscriber list. Slowly but surely I moved forward.
I can’t believe a year has passed since I joined this online group of writers, a crazy, creepy year in the world at large, but incredibly fruitful for me creatively.
I’ve edited another memoir about coming of age and coming to Christ during the cultural earthquake that occurred when Leave it to Beaver collided with Woodstock.
Just recently, I engaged with still another network of writers working on their book proposals, so it feels as if I’ve come full circle to where I was with my writing one year ago.
When I think of King Josiah now, it’s not only as a King who literally tore his clothes in grief at how he and his people didn’t measure up to God’s commandments.
But rather, as a King who threw out, burned up and ground to powder anything that competed with his God for glory.
Thanks to Indivar Kaushik for this photo on Unsplash
Comparison, I’ve come to realize, is a kind of idolatry, a way of gauging myself by other’s accomplishments instead of by the grace of God.
Instead, I need to trust I’m created with a unique body of experiences, and talents all my own to use for his purposes.
This truth sets me free me to take one step at a time, patient with my own pace, knowing that we are on earth, not to compete with each other, but to complement each other. Complement, as in the word complete.
Therefore, in this new year, whenever thoughts of comparison cross my mind, instead of being paralyzed, I will grind them to powder and look for those I can help and those who can help me complete our various missions from the Lord.
Thanks to Christian Kaindl for the photo of a measuring stick on Unsplash
In a world full of disease and corruption, some people shine like stars. You just know you can count on them, and what they say is the truth, THE TRUTH.
I’d like to introduce you to Gloria. To see us back in the early 80’s, you’d never guess we’d be friends. Gloria still wore her hair in the short, curly style of the 1940’s and carried the kind of handbag that snaps shut and is heavy enough to be used as a weapon. I was a child of the 60’s, with straight long hair, cutoff jeans and a T-shirt from Smith College that read, “A century of women on top.”
I met Gloria when I moved to the small town of Greenfield, Massachusetts, and my husband and I bought a fixer-upper across the street from her immaculate home and manicured lawn which her husband, Bob, mowed every Saturday morning to keep it as short as his crewcut.
Up until my first child was born, I’d worked at a local publisher and knew none of my neighbors. But late one morning, postpartum, still in my husband’s plaid bathrobe, Gloria appears at my back door with some kind of goodie, I don’t remember, maybe snickerdoodles, and invites herself in for tea. I put on the kettle, and we sit at the small table that looks out on my back porch.
While we wait for the water to boil, she tells me how she met her husband in Germany while he was a serviceman and she a teacher on the base. She shares tales of their adventures and eventual marriage, interspersing the conversation with lots of praise the Lords which hit me like notes off key. I wasn’t used to including God in my conversations even though I went to Sunday School my whole childhood. But by the time we’ve eaten all the cookies, I decide I like Gloria even if she’s not my usual, pardon the pun, cup of tea.
Gloria’s husband, Bob, is president of the Madison Circle neighborhood association Every year he organizes a caroling party for all who want to participate. The first Christmas I wrap my three-month-old daughter in a Snugli and sing with the group, songs like: “The First Noel,” “Silent Night,” and “Angels We Have Heard on High.” All are about the baby born far away, placed in a manger, and referred to as Emmanuel, which Gloria explains means God with us, something I didn’t know or believe at the time.
My daughter grows to be a toddler, and Gloria’s son and daughter sometimes babysit. I select them above other sitters because they seem like nice kids, and I know if anything happens, Gloria and Bob, Mr. and Mrs. Rock Solid, are right across the street. Gloria is becoming a kind of local mother and friend rolled into one.
I say, mother because she’s always ready to offer her guidance whether I want to be guided or not. If what I’m doing is wrong, she’ll call a spade a spade. If it’s right, then more praise the Lords. She doesn’t scold, but in her gentle, elementary-school-teacher way, there’s no question her compass points towards True North.
Gloria comes over another morning when I am still in my husband’s bathrobe and pregnant enough that it’s barely big enough to wrap around my baby bump. Over bagels and tea, I let slip that I’m considering divorcing my husband.
Interesting to note here, I don’t remember anything she said except, a seeming non-sequitur, “Would you like to come to adult Sunday school with me this week?”
I didn’t know adult Sunday school was even a thing, but because it’s Gloria who asks, I say, “Yes.”
And because it’s me, the skeptic, who answers, I add, “But I’ll drive myself.”
Long story short, Gloria in a way, saved my second child from being separated from his father before his first breath.
Gloria also hosted a lavish baby shower for my third child who received a stuffed lamb with a Jesus-Loves-Me music box inside that two of my grandsons now play with.
Yesterday morning, Gloria’s daughter called to say her mom had gone home to heaven. Forthright like her mother, she didn’t use euphemisms like passed away, or no longer with us. Yet, the word dead had no place in our conversation because we’ve both come to understand that souls are eternal, and that God is like our infinitely good heavenly father who can’t stand to be separated from his children. Not from before our first breath or after our last. No matter the many evils in our hearts and deeds.
That’s why God sent the babe named Emmanuel, I sang about so many years ago with my own first born strapped close to my heart, to pay the universal retribution a just god must demand.
Towards the end of our conversation, Gloria’s daughter shares, even though her mom, at 90, had become a bit senile, she still knew all the words to the old hymns they sang together at the piano.
Surely one of those songs was, “What a Friend we have in Jesus.”
I write this to say, what a friend I had in Gloria, whose name means something like praise the Lord.
Photo thanks to Eberhard Grossgasteiger on Unsplash
I hope to see her again whenever I move to her new neighborhood.
For now [in this time of imperfection] we see in a mirror dimly [a blurred reflection, a riddle, an enigma], but then [when the time of perfection comes we will see reality] face to face. Now I know in part [just in fragments], but then I will know fully, just as I have been fully known [by God]. (1Corinthians 13:12 AMP)
This week I’ve been consumed with writing my first guest post, so I figured I wouldn’t have time to write anything new here.
But during my composition, my mind settled on Proverbs 13:12, “Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a longing fulfilled is a tree of life.”
I couldn’t get this bit of Biblical wisdom out of my head, and all week I’ve been trying to figure out how it fits in with what I’m trying to express in my guest post.
Because I’m writing for someone else’s site, I want to get it right. I’m worried my words will be judged not good enough, and it makes me shrink back and hesitate to finish. What if I somehow get it wrong and screw up.
Then I stumbled across a writer with a brand-new blog who quoted the same verse, Proverbs 13:12 and capped her piece with this,
You say, “But what if I fall?” as Erin Hanson stated, “Oh, but my darling, what if you fly?”
This made me realize I’m still struggling with the same issue of comparison that I wrote about in last week’s flash memoir from my childhood. I guess this proves comparison is a head game I will play all my life.
And my only weapon is the helmet of salvation that says I am enough because of the blood Jesus shed for all my inadequacies and failures.
The truth is we are all unique with important gifts and experiences God wants to use to build his kingdom.
So, there is no need to compare, but to share the gifts God has given others for the benefit of all.
How appropriate then, that the week I’m preparing my first guest post, I’m also sharing my first guest post on my own blog.
Linda Leary is my new best friend in third-grade. She has a dark chocolate ponytail. Mine is the same color as Sampson, my orange tabby. We share the same bus stop and every morning ride to school in the same seat.
Every afternoon when the bus drops me off, she asks, “Wanna come over?”
My answer always, “Sure.”
After changing into play clothes, I walk down a block, cross the street, then cut through the Jensen’s backyard on the corner, through the Paisano’s and the Mendelson’s until I get to her house with red salvia planted in the triangle between the front porch and the diagonal front walk. I ring her doorbell, and she ushers me into the front hall beside the telephone table. We bypass her perfect living room with matching furniture and a maple spinet piano, and head straight for the basement.
There’s a laundry area to the right of the stairs. Shirtwaist dresses and blouses hang on an exposed pipe, above an ironing board. Against the perpendicular wall is a turquoise washer and drier. The other half of the basement contains shelves stocked with canned goods above and toys beneath. Linda digs out a doll made of coconuts that her parents brought back from Florida. I reach for a can of Dole pineapple rings. We crouch inside an empty TV console and make up a commercial. Linda shakes the doll into a hula while I hold up my can, urging homemakers to use only Dole pineapple rings for all their upside-down cakes and ambrosia salads. Our sales pitch dissolves into giggles, and we lurch out of the set, in search of more products and props.
After spring vacation, Linda comes back from her grandmother’s house in Florida with a tan. She has the same pretty face. She wears the same school dresses buttoned down the back with a bow tied above the poufy skirt, but her skin seems to glow. Her teeth and white ankle socks appear even whiter.
She invites me to sleep over on a night her parents are going out to a dinner dance at their country club. A babysitter answers the door. Holding a pillowcase stuffed with my pajamas and a toothbrush, I stand entranced as Mrs. Leary applies coral lipstick in front of the mirror above the telephone table. She looks like a movie star in her slim indigo evening gown, a thread of stardust around her bronzed neck. Mr. Leary clumps downstairs wearing black pants with a black satin stripe on each leg, a white dinner jacket, and a black bowtie.
After they kiss Linda and her older sister, Laura, good-bye, Mr. Leary winks at me and says, “Be good.”
When the door shuts, the babysitter slumps into the seat beside the phone and dials her boyfriend. Linda, Laura, and I race upstairs and bounce on Linda’s bed until our foreheads gleam with sweat. We boing off the mattress and Laura leads the way into her parents’ bedroom. No clothes hang on chairs. No slippers litter the floor. Ceramic lamps with barrel-shaped shades stand on twin bedside tables. Teal throw pillows accent a golden spread. A sleek modern dresser is topped with a golden tray filled with lotions, powders, and a perfume bottle attached to a puff ball sprayer. Laura squeezes the puff ball and mists me with the fragrance Linda says is her mother’s favorite, Madame Rochas. She slides open her mother’s closet to display even more evening gowns in tangerine, turquoise, and black lace. The long dresses brush a shoe rack lined with Cinderella heels.
I ask Linda how to get tan like her and her movie star mom. She explains you just put on your bathing suit and swim in your grandmother’s pool. Somehow the sunshine gets into your skin, and it changes color. She finds an album and shows me a snapshot of her grandparents’ mansion, made of brown stucco with wrought iron curlicue balconies.
During summer vacation, my family visits my Memaw and Granddaddy on their farm in Virginia. They don’t have a pool, so I leave my right arm out the car window for the eight-hour drive and wait for it to change color. The next day my skin is so red and sore, my mom sprays it with Unguentin.
Upon our return, I notice a National Geographic on the coffee table. The cover shows a Mexican girl in an embroidered blouse. Her face is even tanner than Linda’s. Her lips are brown and full. I open the medicine cabinet and accent my own lips with my mom’s Maybelline eyebrow pencil. I look nothing like Linda or the girl on the magazine.
Linda and I decide our parents should be best friends like us. I beg my mom to invite Linda’s mom and dad over for dinner. Our two families share hamburgers, homemade French fries, and toss salad at a metal picnic table in our mosquitoey backyard.
Linda invites me to swim at the country club. Mrs. Leary watches our underwater handstands from a chaise in a stiff, black bathing suit that zips up the back and shows off her coppered skin. I notice her toenails painted the same coral as her lips.
My mom is now Linda’s Girl Scout leader too. She takes our troop camping and teaches us how to build a small fire and fry an egg on top of a Hi-C grape juice can.
I have a photo of Linda and I from the summer after third grade, sitting next to each other cross-legged, and smiling in my front yard. I don’t recall who took the picture. Must have been my mom. But I do remember what I gave my mother that year for her August birthday, a bottle of Madame Rochas.
Photo by Eduardo Gorghetta on Unsplash
I have another picture of Linda, as an adult, still tan and as glamorous as her mother, she’s standing on our front stoop hugging my mom, her old Girl Scout leader.
They say a good photograph captures the heart of a thing in a single image. Comparing those two shots, I see all the moments I wasted wishing I was chocolate instead of strawberry, not understanding it’s God’s love that gets under your skin, making you glow against a dark world eager to sell counterfeits that never satisfy.
I just reread Mary Karr’s book, The Art of Memoir. As a memoirist myself, excavating the past for the page, it was a godsend the first time around, giving me permission to write the truth, the complicated, tricky, embarrassing truth about one of the most difficult seasons of my life, scenes that haunted me. Karr’s book counseled me to write them down anyway, even if I wasn’t emotionally ready to share them because it’s the writing process that untangles the truth, revealing the inner conflict that propels any story, and I might add, begins the healing of any soul.
It’s the writing process that untangles the truth.
So, write I did, scribbling the unflinching truth, my internal editor turned off, recording raw facts and reactions, sensory details, and cultural artifacts, without concern for the order in which they manifested. Without concern for any reader. My own discovery and wholeness my only purpose. I took solace when Karr said, “The need to rout out my own inner demons is why I always start off fumbling through my own recollections.”
As actors in our own lives, we are seldom aware of an event’s meaning or impact at the time it occurs. Karr points out that the writer is often the last to know what his or her story is about. It may be a friend, a critique group member, or a beta reader who tells the writer what themes rear their head in almost every episode.
The writer is often the last to know what his or her story is about.
But as we churn out scene after scene Mary says we will find our inner enemy, which acts as the spine of the story. “However random or episodic a book seems, a blazing psychic struggle holds it together either thematically or in the way a plot would keep a novel rolling.”
But as we churn out scene after scene Mary says we will find our inner enemy, which acts as the spine of the story.
The very memories we “gnawed on,” “the ones eating us up” are those that Karr says help us find our book’s shape.
At first this might seem too personal to be interesting to a reader outside our circle of suffering, but Karr claims telling the truth about our “inner agonies” always produces a work that reads deeper than ones based on “external whammies.”
During the writing process, Karr cautions the writer to be ready for reversals. By pinning our episodes to the page, we gain broader perspective on the whole puzzle, and we may find that what we thought was true about an event, a relationship, a person, even ourselves, may not be true at all or at least nuanced. So above all, love the people you’re writing about. “If you want revenge,” Karr quips, “hire a lawyer.”
Photo by Rioji Iwata on Unsplash
Telling the most transparent truth we can, Karr affirms, is our contract with the reader. What they want is our story unvarnished, character flaws, misconceptions, and misadventures intimately portrayed, so they can share in our discoveries and revelations and apply them to the through line of their own lives.
Telling the most transparent truth we can is our contract with the reader.
For until we understand our own healing, we have no insight to offer others.
It’s been six years since I first read The Art of Memoir. I’ve written and published one memoir, Teacher Dropout, and have almost completed another. And although the journey and setting of the two books are vastly different their “spines” ask similar questions. Who am I, and what am I worth? Finding the answers has been my healing. And what I have to benefit my readers.
So, who are you dear reader, and where do you find your worth?
No matter if you write a yearly Christmas letter, keep a private journal, or if you’re a memoirist of great renown, like Mary Karr, may your written words be healing for yourself and others.
“None of us can ever know the value of our lives, or how our separate silent scribbling may add to the amenity of the world, if only by how radically it changes us, one and by one.”
