Serially Lost, Part Three: Friendship
Posted: January 24, 2015 Filed under: Confession, Friendship | Tags: Brooklyn College, Childhood memories, Friendship, Muldavinville 7 CommentsWhen I was taking Writing 101, there were some assignments that were supposed to be part of a series. I finished the first two but never did get to write the third one. The theme for it has been in my head for a while. Though not exactly fulfilling the original assignment, this third part relates to each of the previous two and ties them together because of lessons I learned in both situations. They were lessons I learned because of my own selfishness and insensitivity; in each case, I lost a valuable friend.
In the first blog, I wrote about getting a haircut and losing my trust in my sister. It had happened in a place called Muldavinville, where I spent most of the summers of my childhood. Muldavinville was an idyllic place for children, a safe environment with plenty of room to explore, play, imagine, and just run around. Because many of the families came back year after year, during my 10 summers there I had good friends that I looked forward to being with for July and August. One of my best friends was named Wendy. She had two teen-aged sisters – much older than we – and a baby sister. I loved to eat at her house, because her sisters would cut up our meat for us in tiny bites and call us “Lamb Chop.” It was fun to be there. It was also fun to run wild together outside. My memory has so many gaps, but I do remember playing pioneer in a miniature realistic log cabin belonging to a neighbor. I remember going down to the lake to swim and play in the sand, while our mothers chatted or played Scrabble. When we children realized it was getting late in the afternoon, we would cover ourselves in mud so that we’d have to go back in the lake one more time to wash off.
Wendy was a year or two younger than I was, but we were on the same wavelength…..until I got to be around 10 or 11. That was when I started showing the first inclinations toward growing up. I shouldn’t have been surprised when my two youngest daughters leapt almost overnight from unconcernedly playing with stuffed animals to caring how they looked and dressed; I did the same thing. The difference was that my daughters made the leap together, while I chose to leave my friend Wendy behind.
I remember the catalyst clearly. Wendy and I and some other kids were playing a twirling game; two of us would hold hands and twirl around together and then let go. The problem was that when we let go, Wendy fell and badly broke her arm. It was horrifying, not just because of what had happened – the arm at an odd angle, Wendy crying. all of us looking on in shock – but because I somehow felt responsible. My solution, when Wendy came back the next day with her arm in a cast, was to avoid her and to hang out with the older kids. I didn’t want to play kid games any more. She was hurt and didn’t understand. I remember her father and sisters talking to me about it, but I don’t think it made a difference in my behavior; I had moved on.
In the second blog of the series, I talked about finding my voice in a college class and of a friend who was instrumental in helping me to do so. This friend, Susan, was very independent. She lived in her own apartment, had a job and a boyfriend, and was always supportive of me. One day, however, she sat me down and talked to me about friendship. She told me that friendship had to go both ways, that friends needed to listen to each other and support each other, and that I had always been so wrapped up in myself and my own issues that I’d never asked her about hers. I had assumed that because she seemed so together on the outside that all was well on the inside. I had not gone beyond finding my own voice to learning to listen deeply and caringly to another’s. Susan broke off our friendship because she was tired of being the one who poured herself into it while I just received what she gave and didn’t reciprocate. She moved on.
I am blessed today with many good friends, from all times and places of my journeying through life. I think I have learned to be a good friend as well, and the hard lessons I learned from my failures with Wendy and Susan have helped me. Yet I still wish that somehow, some day, I could communicate with each of them again, ask about their lives and families, reminisce about the good times, and finally say to Wendy and to Susan what I have been wanting to say for these many years: “I am sorry I was not there when you needed me and that I didn’t offer comfort when you were hurting. I am sorry that I failed you as a friend and let you go out of my life, when you had already enriched it so much. I am sorry for the years of friendship that we have missed because of my selfishness. I am really and truly sorry for being such a jerk. Please forgive me.”
When Normal Becomes the Ideal
Posted: November 15, 2014 Filed under: Culture | Tags: Abortion, Education, Intentional living, Suicide 1 CommentThese thoughts are the result of a FaceBook discussion started by a friend of mine. She was disturbed by the public acclaim surrounding a young woman’s decision to commit suicide because of the diagnosis of terminal brain cancer. Not much of a news reader, I hadn’t known about the story until she mentioned it. I can empathize with the anguish, the pain, and the fear that this young woman has experienced since she received her diagnosis, all of which no doubt led to her decision to end her own life. I do not believe she should be ostracized nor condemned, like the suicides of other times who were not accorded burial in holy ground. I am concerned, however, by the publicization of her story, in an attempt, it seems, to make suicide seem to be a laudable and therefore eventually a normal response to the overwhelming difficulties one may face in life.
When I studied Experimental Psychology as an undergraduate and again in graduate school, I became familiar with terms such as “average,” “mean,” “mode,” “median,” “norm.” These are all different ways of assessing frequencies in populations. These measurements impact our lives in many ways. For example, if you are a parent, you may have had your infant’s growth marked on a chart that shows curves of “normal” growth. The general developmental milestones of children are also laid out in terms of what is “normal.” I don’t deny that these tools can be useful in understanding development and in determining causes for concern. However, in reality, there is no such thing as “normal.” “Normal” is just another way of saying “average”; it is a concept, a statistical construct whose purpose is to make it easier to assess and to categorize groups of people or things. I wonder if the concept of a normal human body temperature, for example, is calculated from the average of a variety of inputs or from the most commonly occurring one. Instead of just being used as a relative measuring tool, however, “normal” has come to mean “ideal.” It has become a measuring stick against which many of us find we fall short.
The use of the concept of normal is particularly egregious in the public education system. The whole system – philosophy, methodology, and materials – is geared toward a fictional normal child instead of the actual flesh and blood individuals who populate our schools. It is more than frustrating for teachers, parents, and students to be hampered in the learning process by a bureaucratic system based upon holding up an average as an ideal; it is wrong. It is wrong not only because it is largely inefficient but also because it labels children, categorizes them, and declares some of them to be less than “normal.” The “normal” child does not have autism, Down’s Syndrome, or a learning disability. To be normal, a child may not be gifted intellectually but also be socially awkward; he is not ahead of his peers in one subject and behind in another. The “normal” child, who is on the designated grade level in all areas and fits exactly where he should on the pediatric growth charts, does not exist. In an attempt to gear our pedagogy toward an ideal of normal, we have achieved a norm of mediocrity.
But the educational system is just a piece, albeit a large one, of the effect of the concept of normal on our society. We have allowed the present culture to define what constitutes the normal life to which we are all, by assumption, entitled and therefore encouraged to achieve. If you have read Lois Lowry’s The Giver or Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, you have read descriptions of the logical devolution of societies in which all pain is to be avoided, the lives of children are a commodity, and the desire for security builds a prison of regulations that ensure the normal life will have no surprises. However, what is considered to be normal is not always what is right. When we lose the compass that points us to God, when we have no way of determining what is right or wrong, then actions that are wrong become acceptable and then “normal.” Abortion and suicide are just two examples. The giving and the taking of life is in God’s hands, not ours. Our job as people made in His image is to come alongside those suffering enough to consider either of these actions, to offer help and love, but not to accept the actions themselves as a normal part of life in our time.
Life is full of pain; to avoid pain at all costs is to become like a rat in a Pavlovian experiment. To seek out pain is to be mentally unstable. But to accept pain as it comes and seek the lesson it brings, that is to be fully human.
Life is full of surprises, some good and some not. To regulate one’s life so carefully so as to avoid surprises is to become a robot, an automaton, not a human being.
Life is full of grief, but to try to avoid the sadness that is part of all human relationships would mean closing off the vulnerability that enables those relationships to exist and to have meaning beyond the surface of polite interaction.
Life is full of fear and anxiety. We may fear bad things that we know are going to happen and also those that are even more frightening because they are unknown and unpredictable. Courage is pushing through these fears so that they do not govern our actions.
Life is also full of joy, but that joy is only fully realized in the context of a relationship with God. That is the relationship that enables each of us to walk through the pains, the surprises, the griefs and the fears of life, accepting them with the knowledge that our God, the Giver of all good things, is bringing us through all of that to a life so much more than “normal.”
Exile
Posted: November 9, 2014 Filed under: Introspection, Reminiscences | Tags: Childhood memories, Exile 1 CommentAn exile can be defined as a separation, voluntary or forced, which may or may not be prolonged, from one’s home or country. It is a pretty broad definition, but it can fit most cases of exile, whether they be of individuals, families, or people groups. Some exiles settle down in a new location and make that their home, no longer wandering, but at rest. Others wander from place to place, intending to return home someday; some fulfill that hope, while others do not. Someone told me that I could view my upcoming move to Indiana as an exile, hopefully temporary. This thought prompted the following musings.
When I was a child, I sometimes felt that I must have come from another planet or, more often, that I had been born into the wrong century. I had a close-knit loving family and good friends, I generally did well in school, I spent summers in the mountains running wild, I read profusely, but I always felt somehow – apart. I never seemed to quite fit in anywhere.
Part of one line from the William Wordsworth poem, Ode: Intimations of Immortality, has always stuck in my head: “trailing clouds of glory do we come.” In the broadest sense, my whole life on earth is an exile; my true home is not here, but with God in Heaven, and the intuitive recognition of that is probably the reason why I have never felt completely at home anywhere that I’ve lived. Yet even without that completeness, each place I’ve lived has become a home, and leaving that place of security and familiarity to start over somewhere else becomes another, smaller exile.
Sometimes I envy people who have lived all their lives, if not in one town or city, in one geographical area. Certainly that is true for many of my friends here in Stedman. Their lives are rooted, not so much like trees, but more like bushes, which not only grow roots down but also grow branches outward, which entwine with each other so much that it is hard to tell where one begins and another ends. These entwined bushes become a hedge, a place of safety and security, and sometimes of insulation. The TV shows I watched growing up, which still draw me and fill me with longing for the kind of life they portrayed, were shows about families deeply rooted in their neighborhoods, towns, or lands: Lassie, Father Knows Best, Little House on the Prairie, The Waltons. Though many of my aunts and uncles lived in their own homes, and my cousins grew up in neighborhoods in Long Island, that was not my life. We moved from apartment to apartment, each one in a little “better” neighborhood as my parents’ income increased. Each place we lived, for however many years, had its own defining markers: schools attended, friends made, milestones of growing up experienced, family memories made. But there was not that solidity and stability, that my cousins and friends had, of having my own home. We were more like the Israelites, striking our tents and moving on, each time with a combination of anticipation and trepidation.
We lived in four different apartments in four different neighborhoods in Brooklyn from my birth through my college years. I was extremely shy, up through college, when a concerted effort by a professor and some classmates encouraged me to break out of my fearful position as an observer of everyone else’s life to becoming an active participant in the world around me. The life rope that sustained me through ten of those years, from age four to age fourteen, was made of strands woven from our summers in the Catskill Mountains, in a small bungalow colony (that’s what we called them back then) named Muldavinville. I hid myself during the school years, but I ran wild and free with my friends during the summer, and perhaps that is why I’ve always considered myself a country girl. I believe that was the hardest exile of my young years – not going back to the place that held many of my happiest memories…
The next big leap, not long after college, when I’d been working for a while at a job in the city, was to move out of my parents’ home into my own tiny apartment in the Village. It was a statement of my independence, but it was a hard one, not only for my parents, who couldn’t imagine why I would want to leave home, but also for me, because I was terrified to live alone. There were other apartments, houses, temporary dwellings – the details of which I will fill in when I finally start writing the longer story of my life – in which I lived alone or with others, in New York, in Brooklyn, in Woodstock, and finally in Cincinnati, Ohio, where my first husband and I moved to go to graduate school.
It wasn’t until I married my husband Paul that we actually bought a house, in Dayton, Ohio, where we lived for about thirty-five years. We had four living children (two more lost in miscarriage) born there, all but one of them born at home. We had church families, good neighbors, great homeschooling friends. We had station wagons, dogs, and a fenced in yard. We definitely had a home, a home in which we had many wonderful times with our friends and even with people we didn’t know. Yet, somehow, to me, and to my four children, Dayton was not a place we wanted to stay forever. We could still be there, and our kids would have some place to come home to and visit, but, to me, that was inconceivable; I always had the feeling that Dayton was only temporary, a longer exile from the place I eventually would be able to call home.
Our next move was to North Carolina, to a tiny town in the Piedmont called Salemburg, where my husband and I took a position, for a year, as houseparents in a maternity home. We fully intended to return to Dayton after that year, but towards the end of that time, we realized that our work there was not yet finished, so we decided to move to North Carolina, selling our home in Dayton. We only stayed another year at the home, and the story of our time there will be the subject of another blog, but we moved from there to a single-wide trailer we rent in Stedman. Lacking the mountains, it is country living that reminds me of my childhoods in upstate New York. In eight years there, we have become pretty well grafted in to the community.
I’d forgotten I’d started this blog, and I’m finishing it after being in Indiana for six months with another six months to go. Leaving my life in North Carolina, even temporarily, was hard. What drew me here, caring for my grandchildren and helping my daughter and son-in-law, was a stronger pull than the regrets. I have a nice apartment here in a small town called Chandler, a few minutes’ walk from their home. I treasure the time spent with them and the enjoy the luxury of the time I have alone. I know that leaving them to return to North Carolina will be hard, as all these partings have been hard, but I look forward to returning home from this exile.
I do feel, however, that this will not be the last trip I will make. Whenever I think of actually settling somewhere, as in our buying a house and planting ourselves more permanently, something holds me back and I sense that my wandering days are not yet over. Perhaps there is a place on this earth that I can settle in and feel that I’ve really come home, and I have not yet found it. Perhaps I never will, and I will continue to be in exile until God finally calls me Home.
Not Mine to Keep | A Poem of Love and Loss
Posted: October 26, 2014 Filed under: Uncategorized 2 CommentsI love this poem! I find it so true of my experience as a mother of boys and girls. Check out her site; everything on it is well worth reading.
Family Photo
For my girls:
Bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh is this child
this woman
who now walks away from me
Always she is walking away…always, she is going
I wish she had come with a note,
like a present with a ribbon tied ’round her wrist
and a card attached
with the words:
“Just passing through.
I will come to you,
into your body, into your home,
into your wallet, your schedule, your dreams
and most of all
into your heart.
But I will not stay.
I’m just passing through.”
She passes through
and in her wake, creates a wind
sometimes a soft spring breeze
that rustles free the seeds of tomorrow
sometimes a tempest that picks up, moves and
rearranges the scenery
into something new, unrecognizable
There is no place through which she passes that goes
untouched, unchanged, unaltered
She goes, but leaves her…
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Gone?
Posted: October 26, 2014 Filed under: Uncategorized 2 CommentsI feel like Lucy must have felt when she returned after her first trip to Narnia. She asked her brothers and sister if they’d missed her, but they hadn’t even noticed she had gone. That was, of course, because she had been gone quite a while in Narnian time, but only for a moment in the time of our world. To her siblings she had not gone anywhere; she was just still playing hide and seek.
With all my good intentions of sticking with Blogging 101 and Writing 101, so much has intervened, due both to unavoidable circumstances and lack of discipline, that I have been gone for quite some time. Sometimes I wonder if anyone has noticed.
Mostly, though, I keep the ideas for blogs simmering in the back of my mind or scrawled in notes piled on my desk, because I haven’t given up on blogging or writing; I just have to find my own timetable. Somewhere between a sense of duty to complete a task, a lethargy brought on by being too busy, and a propensity to let myself get distracted exists that space where I find fulfillment and joy in writing, where I am driven to express myself and desire to communicate and be responded to. The more I am centered in that space, the more it draws me back and becomes a necessity in my life, not just a hobby.
Writing 101: Serially Found, Part Two
Posted: October 2, 2014 Filed under: Reminiscences | Tags: College, Community, Serial, Writing 101 3 CommentsMy hair wasn’t the only thing I whined about when I was young; at home in the safety of my family, I whined about everything. In public, on the other hand, I rarely spoke and was painfully shy. I was the baby of four children, with thirteen years between my older sister and myself. My sister was beautiful and, having married at eighteen, had a family and just seemed to have it all together. My two older brothers were handsome and fun-loving and had lots of friends. Although intelligent and possessing a sense of humor, I was small, skinny, flat-chested and afraid to speak out in front of my peers in class. During the summers, I ran free and was a different person, but at school, from the Monday after Labor Day until the last Friday of June, I was pretty much a nonentity.
Oh, I had friends, but they were very similar to me. When we lined up in size places, as we did back then in elementary school, we were all in the first quarter of the line. In high school my social groups expanded somewhat, since I was involved in so many activities of the 60’s: civil rights marches, peace protests, folk music. I could talk with my friends, but in the classroom, I still had difficulty speaking up. One of my teachers referred to me as Cordelia in King Lear, because, when I did answer a question, my voice was so soft and low that I was hard to hear.
I carried this shyness with me into college and attracted other girls who were also relatively shy. My lunch partners were Mamie, Idelisse, and Monica, and we had great fun with each other, chattering about everything and anything, until lunch was over and I went back to my classes.
I did have another friend in college, though, who was instrumental in helping me to change myself. It is a sad testimony to old age that I can’t remember her name, though I remember her boyfriend’s name (he thought he was the reincarnation of Thomas Wolfe, but I didn’t think he wrote that well…). She was so totally different from me that it was amazing she became my friend at all. She lived on her own, not with her family like the rest of us. I think she was legally emancipated. She was friendly and caring, outspoken and sure of herself. We were both taking a seminar class for Psychology majors with Professor Austin Wood, one of the best teachers I have ever had. We read novels and short stories, wrote papers examining the characters’ personalities and motivations using our psychological glasses, and then shared our thoughts in class discussions. The class was small and informal, with twelve students. One day I had an unpleasant surprise. Professor Wood had written on my paper “see Elliott,” and had apparently written on Elliott’s paper “see Emily.” Of course I knew who Elliott was; in a class that size we all knew each other, or so I thought. What embarrassment and chagrin I felt when Elliott looked up and said, “Who’s Emily?” I realized that I had effaced myself so completely that I didn’t even exist for some of my classmates.
My friend and my professor together came up with a plan and presented it to me. Professor Wood would ask the other students to help me be comfortable speaking in class. He would propose that they wait a few minutes before answering a question, or first look at me to see if I had an answer, to give me the time to get what was in my mind out of my mouth. My part was to be willing to let them help me and to force myself to speak, despite my fears.
I did it. I took the hand that was offered to me, held on to it, and took the first steps toward building my self-confidence. People who have known me as an adult cannot believe I was ever quiet and shy because I tend now to be loud and outspoken. I don’t know whether they would agree with all that comes out of my mouth these days, but I doubt if my friend and my professor would regret their decision to help me, because, in that class, I found my voice.
Writing 101: Happy Pesach!
Posted: September 28, 2014 Filed under: Culture, Family, Reminiscences | Tags: Childhood memories, Family, Holidays, Passover, Writing 101 3 CommentsI’m not a picky eater anymore, but I still love the twice-yearly Passover Seder more than any other meal. The Seder is an experience, not just a meal, celebrated for two consecutive nights in March or April by Jews all over the world. It is both a remembrance of what God did for us as a people years ago when He freed us from slavery in Egypt and a celebration of what He continues to do for us up to the present. My memories of childhood Seders are so rich and so entwined with who I am that it will be hard to consolidate them into one post.
My mother came from Austria and my father from Russia, both as children with their families. Some of their siblings did well and others not so well; those who were successful lived in nice homes in Long Island. We were on the lower economic end of their families during most of my childhood, and I grew up in a succession of apartments in Brooklyn. Going to my aunt’s house for the Seder was also a treat because I got to spend time with my cousins whom I saw only at holidays and special occasions.
When I walked in the door, the smell of frying latkes enveloped me. Crisp, greasy, hot – we would nosh on them, plain or with applesauce, while waiting for the Seder to start. When everything was ready, we all sat at tables arranged in a T, with a short horizontal part at one end and a very long vertical piece going down. The men sat up at the front, next the older boys, then the older girls, then the children and the women. The table was always decorated with fresh yellow daffodils, and their sweet smell brought Spring into the room. Small cut-glass bowls of salt water were placed along the table, along with plates of celery and carrot sticks. Everyone had a goblet of water and a cup for the dark, sweet Manischewitz wine we had to drink at four different points during the recounting of the Passover story. At the head of the table was the Seder plate, with various elements significant in telling the story, and at an empty seat was the large wine cup of Elijah.
Seder means “order,” and there is a definite structure to the progression of the Seder, a lot to go through before you get to the actual meal. My father and uncles were experts at verbal Hebrew speed-reading, so things usually progressed fairly quickly. The actual Seder meal came about two-thirds of the way through the Seder, so there was a good reason why the men chanted at such lightning speed. At different points there would be general participation, like when we all dipped 10 drops of wine from our fingers to represent the 10 plagues God visited on the Egyptians, or tasted the horseradish root, the parsley, the charoses (a delicious mixture of apples, walnuts, and wine), and the matzo. The salt water on the table was for dipping: parsley, boiled potatoes, and boiled eggs. I traded my yolks with my cousin for her egg whites. There was lots of music – traditional songs, blessings, and the Four Questions chanted by the youngest child and answered by all the men.
Finally, it was time for the feast, and a feast it certainly was. First there was gefilte fish with horseradish – I passed on that. Then bowls of clear chicken soup with one or two matzo balls; my father fondly called them “sinkers.” Meats – roasted chicken, beef brisket – and vegetables – carrot tzimmes and potato kugel – appeared next. We ate until we were stuffed, and then went off to play until the adults finished their eating and conversation and it was time to resume the Seder service. When we had finished the stories, the songs, and the last cups of wine, we had desserts, all made without traditional leavening. There were sponge cakes light and fluffy because made with so many eggs, nuts, coconut macaroons, chocolates, pies. After the desserts, when our eyes were heavy-lidded and our bodies lethargic, the last excitement of the evening roused us to pay close attention.
Part of the Seder involves hiding half of a matzo, called the Afikomen, in a napkin. The Afikomen must be eaten at the very end of the Seder, the last morsel in our mouths. The procedure was that one of the men would have the napkin on his knee, one or more of the kids would steal it and hide it, and then a committee of children would bring it forth and bargain with the men for a price to give it back. Depending upon the condition of the Afikomen – it must be as close to a whole piece as possible – and the bargaining skills of the committee, we could end that evening with quite a bit of cash in our pockets. After we prayed and ate the Afikomen, we always sang Hatikvah and God Bless America.
Our family has always been close-knit and the cousins kept up the Seder tradition each year for a long time after my aunts were unable to do it any longer. We have had a few Seders at our home, done larger group Seders in our churches, and have been guests at others’ Seders. All of them have been immensely enjoyable, yet none of them has quite captured for me the overall experience of the Seders of my childhood, when I was full of delight and anticipation, filled with good things to eat, and enveloped in an atmosphere of family, faith, and tradition.
Blogging 101: Be Inspired by the Community: Hospitality
Posted: September 28, 2014 Filed under: Culture, Diet, Family, Neighbors | Tags: Blogging 101, Community, Hospitality, Judgment 4 CommentsI enjoyed reading the post “The Hardest of Christian Dispensations” on the blog Tantoverde, which discussed judging others. Although I could have shared my own experiences of being judged and found wanting, I commented instead on one of the things we did in our family to encourage our children to love and respect people; we practiced the Christian virtue of hospitality. I believe that hospitality is a gift that can be nurtured. In my childhood and earlier adulthood, I did not have this gift. I witnessed it in action with my first mother-in-law, Mamita Edith, who would welcome any one we showed up with at her house, with no prior notice, and feed us all. Her motto was: “Donde comen tres, comen cuatro,” literally, “Where three can eat, four can eat.” Pots of rice and beans were extended to make food for all.
While I admired this philosophy, I did not, in the early years of my second marriage, have the aplomb to carry it out myself. I remember the first time we invited a pastor and his wife to dinner. I was so nervous that, when I leaned in to take the chicken out of the oven, I singed the hair off my forearm; the smell of scorched hair added nothing good to our meal.
Somehow, though, as our four younger children were growing up, our family started reaching out to other people with food. First it was bread. I had learned to bake bread with my ex-husband, when we had a bread baking business first on the Lower East Side and then in Woodstock, NY. I scaled down some of the recipes so that I made six loaves at a time instead of twelve, and my children eagerly got involved in the baking process. One loaf disappeared as soon as it had cooled enough to eat, and we kept another one or two, but the rest we gave away. We evaluated the loaves together, giving away the best looking ones and choosing on whom we would bestow them. Sometimes we would take bread with us when visiting a friend, or pick someone from the list of our bread fans; occasionally we realized that a person totally unexpected needed a loaf of freshly homemade bread. I remember only three times in about 30 years when the offer of fresh bread was refused.
Our son Matt was attending community college when he heard of a church just beginning, comprised mostly of young singles and led by a young pastor whose messages were good. We went as a family to check it out – my husband and I the only people of our age there, and our three young girls some of the few children. We ended up becoming part of that church community and found that we could invite young people from church over to our home for dinner on a moment’s notice and they would gladly come, eat a lot, and take home leftovers. It warmed my Jewish mother’s heart and was so casual that it never made me nervous.
At some point we decided as a family to institute a monthly Saturday evening open house. We made a big batch of bread and a big pot of soup, usually black bean, minestrone, or chili, and sometimes had dessert or salad. Then we put the word out, and people started coming, perhaps bringing more food, perhaps not, but all welcome. The most fun part was that often people would show up whom at least some of didn’t know….some of these people became very much a part of our family. My son Matt and daughter Cathy were both in college at the time. When they came home for a weekend visit while we were having an open house, they remarked with some irritation that they’d been greeted at the door by people they didn’t know, welcomed into their own home which was crammed full of people, and asked how they knew our family! Matt also said that he was getting really tired of that ever-present minestrone soup….
We have had many other opportunities to open our home to welcome guests wherever we live. Each opportunity enriched our lives and taught our children to minister to other people, to share what we had, and to learn from and respect our differences. One Thanksgiving we invited some Chinese international students and friends who had triplets, among others. The Chinese students had not known it was a meal and had eaten before they came. Our friends were worried about their kids eating too much, so they’d fed them first. We’d never had so many leftovers from a Thanksgiving meal before, but the meal became not the focus of the visit but the excuse to bring us all together to enjoy each others’ company
When we moved to the South, we thought we would find that Southern hospitality would take the form of ours, and that we would be invited to eat and to fellowship frequently. That was not the case, and we realized that, if we wanted to experience the kind of hospitality and fellowship we’d left behind, we would have to initiate it. We started inviting people to drop in and got a pleased yet surprised response. The idea of the open house seemed strange to people, yet they enjoyed it once they participated. Picture this: tables laden with fresh loaves of bread and butter; a huge pot of soup on the stove; desserts, salads, and snacks set wherever there was room; water, juice, coffee and tea up high where the little ones couldn’t reach. Rooms full of people, sitting, standing, conversing, eating, in a shifting kaleidoscope of relationships. Children everywhere, playing with each other, with adults, being held, being fed. Age no barrier to interactions, as children might get involved in a conversation with adults, and adults would get into playing games with the kids. People of all ages, colors, backgrounds, beliefs coming together in a shared experience of food for the body, the soul, the mind, and the heart. That is the community that hospitality fosters, where cold judgment stays outside and warm fellowship reigns.
Writing 101: Death to Adverbs
Posted: September 24, 2014 Filed under: Descriptive Writing, Parts of Speech | Tags: Adverbs, Writing 101 1 CommentSitting cross-legged in my old brown armchair in early Fall, I glance out the glass storm door, which, facing west, admits the evening light. The setting sun strews wisps of gold across the cobalt sky, behind tall trees that stretch green leafy branches toward the dying light. Tiny brown birds, chirping and chittering, flit from branch to branch, zoom toward the grass to pick up worms and crumbs, spiral back upwards.
Inside my living room a house fly circulates, buzzing and banging into walls, seeking an escape route. The fan whirrs and the water heater cycles on with a chuffing sound.
The sky darkens, visibility decreases. The leaves of the trees show black against the indigo sky. No late pedestrians meander by and fewer cars shoot past. The homing birds nestle in the tree branches.
I close the front door, switch on lights, eat my black bean soup and rice. A comfortable silence settles in…….until my hard-of-hearing neighbor blasts his stereo. Bereft of the silence, I wash the dishes, pondering on the insipidness of a world without adverbs, lacking the descriptive how’s, where’s, and when’s of existence.
Writing 101: Be Brief: A Love Story
Posted: September 23, 2014 Filed under: Family | Tags: Brevity, Writing 101 2 CommentsWe found the packet of letters after my mother died. During my childhood, the differences between them stood out, there were arguments, and I wondered about divorce. Then I read their letters to each other. The letters revealed their desire to marry and the love growing between the quiet, educated, curly redhead who wouldn’t risk her father’s disapproval and the darkly handsome, mustachioed rebel who had gambled away the money saved for college. My parents, and I never knew that about them until they were both gone.
They had come full circle, though. During the ten years before my father’s cancer slowed him down, they traveled together in the summers, leaving us behind. The romance was rekindled, and the letters are a legacy to their love.
Mama Emme Reflects 