#5 - Currier & Ives

"I'm so excited!" I e-mailed old friends in Arizona. "Tonight I'm joining Rachel's handbell choir!"

Wayne, Carol, and Rachel are high school friends; friends I've recently reconnected with. Rachel, it turns out, has been living right under my nose in Whatcom County for years. Not only that, she belongs to a handbell choir. Better yet, she invited me to join and, to make it all the more perfect, she goes to an antique church, built in the old days, complete with steeple, belfry and
hopefully bats.

"There's something about bells--Christmas carols come to mind, antiquated churches, and rolling countryside that appeals to me," I told them.

"How very Currier and Ives of you," said Wayne.

Huh?

I had to look it up, google style. Ah, those guys--the guys who perfected the lithograph process. I didn't need to feel quite so stupid. I did recognize much of their work. Yes, how very Currier and Ives of me. Wayne is right. But--google, google--there's more.

Turns out hand bells are an evolution that date back to ancient mythologies. The ringing of bells kept back the demonic forces at death, preventing them from swooping in to claim our souls. They chased back the evil spirits, too, lurking about our thresholds whenever company comes calling. At sea, the chiming of bells hold back the storm.

Very quickly one begins to understand why we have bells in our steeples, at our front doors, and why--in the echo of ancient mariners calling out at the end of night watch, "Eight bells and all is well!"--we use bells to sound our hours, announce our guests, and call us to church. Bong, bong, bong. And I thought I just liked the sound of them. But it's their protection, the sense of peace, tranquility, of, yes, the divine, that has called to me as well.

countryside near Rachel's little church

Indeed, how very Currier and Ives of me.

Ringing off, I'm F, F#, and G.

And sometimes, if Rachel can't pick up fast enough, G#.

#4 - We Get Born

part of my application for the MFA program at UBC (University of British Columbia) involved sending the start of a children's story. yesterday i received notice that i am on the "reserve" list. so i'd like to share chapter 1 of TINSY WINSY--in the hopes that some of you might read and be inclined to knock on wood, say your prayers, and cross your fingers for me. this is a highly competative program that would warrant me a seat in the lime light of Canadian literature. that i should be so lucky. . .

the main character is my childhood red sock monkey, pictured here with Cheeko (part of my life since junior high) and a teddy bear i've had since i was three. the story is siimply called TINSY WINSY, the chapter is We Are Born.Tinsy Winsy opened her eyes. Where am I? she wondered, blinking two times and looking around curiously. “What an interesting room, it isn’t finished!”

She was right of course about the room. The walls were up all right, but they weren’t painted. The windows were in, but they had no glass. The floor was there, but it had no carpet. And in the middle of the floor, goodness, stood two rickety old saw horses with a long skinny tree lying down on them! Yessireebob, a tree! With all its branches sawn off, and most of its bark, too. Now what is a tree doing in a house, Tinsy Winsy wondered, more curious than ever.

Her nose started to itch. It itched some more. The whole room was filled with sawdust! Sawdust on the floor. Sawdust on the window sills. Sawdust on the hearth. Was she going to sneeze? “Ah, ah—” She covered her nose. “Achoo!”

“God bless you.”

Tinsy Winsy whirled around sideways. “Who are you?” she asked a monkey tucked into a sock hanging off the fireplace beside her.

“I’m Bingo.” Bingo had the same shiny black shoe-button eyes that Tinsy Winsy did, but she had freckles all over her nose. “Who are you?” Bingo asked back at her.

“I’m Tinsy Winsy.”

“You’re a monkey.”

Tinsy Winsy looked down at herself. Sure enough, she was a monkey. What was she doing in this sock? Things were getting curiouser and curiouser.

“We were born in the middle of the night,” said someone new and Tinsy Winsy turned all the way around the other way.

“Hello. I’m Suzanne,” said another monkey in another sock.

“Are there more of us?” wondered Tinsy Winsy out loud, looking about.

“No,” said Suzanne. Unlike Tinsy Winsy and Bingo, she wore a smocked dress. Tinsy Winsy and Bingo only had sweaters, but they were very nice sweaters, hand knit and with pockets.

Tinsy Winsy wiggled and wriggled. “Do you know why we’re in socks? Hanging off a fireplace?” she asked Suzanne.

“Because it’s Christmas.”

“What’s Christmas?”

“You don’t know what Christmas is?” asked Suzanne in such a way that suggested Tinsy Winsy might be quite stupid.

“No, I do not know what Christmas is.”

Suzanne laughed. “I think you must have sponge between your ears! I have polyester batting,” she said very importantly.

“I do not have sponge between my ears!”


“She has cotton fluff!” shrieked Bingo, and she giggled so much she very nearly fell out of her sock.

“If you’re so smart,” said Tinsy Winsy to her, “you tell me what Christmas is.”

Bingo stopped laughing. She didn’t know what Christmas was either.

“Christmas,” said Suzanne, “is when Christ was born. Christ-mas. Get it? And on Christmas Eve, the night before Christmas, mothers and fathers everywhere hang up their socks for Santa to fill with candy and children, and in the morning they find us. And they eat turkey and pumpkin pie and they go to church. But sometimes,” she added, “they go to church on Christmas Eve instead.”

“Oh,” said Tinsy Winsy and Bingo.

“Are we in socks because we’re waiting for our mother and father to find us?” Tinsy Winsy asked Suzanne because she seemed to know such things.

Suzanne’s eyes were not made out of shoe-buttons at all, like Bingo and Tinsy Winsy’s. Her eyes were made out of wee green buttons sewn on top of larger white ones, and she rolled her fancy green eyes at Tinsy Winsy. “We’re in socks because our mother and father prayed to the Christ-child for children. And the Christ-child told Santa to put us here.”

“Did we get born?” Bingo asked.

“Yes,” said Suzanne. “But I’m seven, and I’m the biggest.”

So that’s why she knew everything.

Bingo said, “Who says you get to be the biggest?”

“I just am.”

“How old am I?” asked Tinsy Winsy.

“You’re six.”

“Me?” asked Bingo.

“You are only four. But you’ll turn five next month.”

“I’m only four?” asked Bingo. “I want my mother!” And she started to cry.

But Suzanne yawned and stretched. She stretched her two arms up over her head and yawned again. She stretched her toes. “Hey, there’s something at the bottom of our socks!”

Bingo stopped crying.

“You better not look,” said Tinsy Winsy.

“Why not?” asked Suzanne.

“What if we get in trouble?”

“I never heard anyone say we couldn’t open our stockings!” Before Tinsy Winsy could say “Curious George,” Suzanne climbed out of her sock and turned it upside down. “Look!” She held up a peppermint.

Tinsy Winsy and Bingo climbed out in a hurry! Out came an orange from Tinsy Winsy’s sock. Then a peppermint just like Suzanne’s. And a pair of brand new roller skates! “I always wanted a pair of roller skates!” she said, and right away she started strapping them onto her feet. “What did you get?” she asked Bingo.

Bingo held up a stick, with two bumps on the end. “I don’t know.”

Suzanne was trying to pull a bicycle out of her sock, but she stopped and went over and looked at Bingo’s stick. “That’s a pogo stick. It works like this.” She stood on the bumps, but quick as a wink over she toppled—boom, into the sawdust all over the floor.

“I know, I know how to do it now!” cried Bingo, and away she went, binging and bonging all over the great big room.

Tinsy Winsy didn’t care about the pogo stick! She didn’t care about Suzanne’s shiny pink bike! She had roller skates! Around and around she whizzed, around the saw horses with the tree lying down, around another tree standing up in the corner, around and around and all through the sawdust. Wheeee! She was flying! Once she nearly bumped into Bingo bouncing. Once she nearly whammed into Suzanne wobbling on her bike. Suzanne didn’t know how to ride very well yet. Wheeee! What fun!

“Help!”

Tinsy Winsy looked up. High in the air, way overhead, hanging onto a rafter for dear life by her tail, was Bingo. What Tinsy Winsy noticed, though, was the rafter. It looked just like the tree lying on the sawhorses. So that’s where the long skinny tree with its branches and bark all sawn off is supposed to go, she thought. It belongs way up there.

“Help, help! I’m going to fall!”

“What are you doing up there?” Tinsy Winsy asked Bingo.

“I bounced. Help me, I really am going to fall!”

Tinsy Winsy hardly had time to duck. First Bingo came crashing down. Then came her tail.

“My tail! I want my mother!” wailed Bingo.

“My, my, what have we here?” someone said.

“I think we have our little Christmas girls.”

The three little monkeys saw two grown up monkeys talking to each other at the end of the room. One had a yellow bow on her head. The other had a black and white polka-dot bow tie.
Bingo stopped crying. “Mother?”

“Oh dear,” said Mother with the yellow bow on her head. “The little one has already lost her tail.”

“She didn’t lose it,” said Suzanne. She got off her bike and went over to pick up the tail. “See, here it is.”

“My tail came off!” whimpered Bingo.

“Don’t you worry, little girl,” said Father with the black and white polka-dot bow tie. He came over and picked up Bingo. “Mother is a good surgeon. She’ll sew it back on.”

“Will it hurt her?” Tinsy Winsy asked, not sure at all this was a good idea.

Mother smiled. “Tonight when she goes to sleep, I will do the operation. She’ll never feel a thing.”

“Oh,” said Tinsy Winsy.

“Are you ready for breakfast?” Mother asked.

They all said, “Yes!”

“Come to the table then.”

What table? Tinsy Winsy didn’t see any table.

“In here,” said Father, shifting Bingo to one arm and reaching down to take Tinsy Winsy’s hand.

This is much better, thought Tinsy Winsy when Father led her into the kitchen. Here the walls had fresh yellow paint, the windows had shiny clean glass, the floor had little tiny checkered tiles, and the table had breakfast! Yum! Pancakes with cheese and hot syrup! Yum, yum, yum!

Father put Bingo in a high yellow chair and pushed her up to the table. He put Tinsy Winsy in another high yellow chair and pushed her up to the table. He put Suzanne in a high yellow chair and pushed her up to the table.

Suzanne said, “I am not going to wear a bib!”

“Only Bingo has to wear a bib,” said Mother, and she snapped a bright red plastic bib under Bingo’s chin.

“I don’t want to wear a bib,” said Bingo.

“When you turn five next month,” Mother said, “you won’t have to wear it anymore. That’s the rule.”

“Oh,” said Bingo, and they all sang, “For health and strength and daily bread, we thank you Lord, amen!”

“Dig in and eat,” said Father.

All day was a wonder to Tinsy Winsy. Mother helped them clear their dishes. Father helped them put on snowsuits. They went to church and sang Christmas carols. They came home and ate turkey and pumpkin pie and opened presents of books and dollies and paper and crayons. Then they had more turkey and pumpkin pie and Father got them ready for bed and tucked them into sleeping bags in their brand new bedroom. It wasn’t much of a room yet, and quite a mess. There were no windows at all, and no ceiling. And part of the floor was still gravel. “I haven’t finished building our house,” said Father.

“That’s okay,” said Tinsy Winsy. “I like our house. I can see the stars through all the holes.”

Father laughed and read them a story. He helped them say their prayers. “When your bedroom is done,” he said, “I will teach how to say your prayers properly.”

“How do you say your prayers properly?” asked Tinsy Winsy.

“You kneel, silly,” said Suzanne from her sleeping bag.

“Is that right, Father?” asked Bingo.

“That’s right,” said Father. “Now you go to sleep, Bingo. Because in the morning you’ll have your tail back.”

He kissed them each goodnight. Mother kissed them each goodnight.

“It won’t hurt?” Bingo asked Mother. “Suzanne said it would hurt.”

“It won’t hurt.”

When Mother and Father blew out the candles and tiptoed from the room, Tinsy Winsy lay still and looked all around. Stars twinkled through the big holes everywhere. She could see the shadowy lumps that were Suzanne and Bingo, going to sleep on their army cots. “Suzanne?” she whispered. “How did a bike, a pogo stick, and a pair of skates all fit into our socks?”

“That’s just the way Christmas is,” whispered Suzanne with a sleepy sigh.

Tinsy Winsy wanted to ask more questions but remembered Suzanne thought she had sponge between her ears. She said instead, “I like Christmas. I’m glad we got born. Yessireebob, I’m glad we got born,” and she snuggled down into her bag and stuck her thumb in her mouth.

“Me, too,” said Bingo with a sleepy yawn.

“Me, three,” said Suzanne.

Outside their bedroom door stood Mother with her yellow bow on her head and Father with his black and white polka-dot bow tie. They liked Christmas, too. The Christ-child had answered their prayers and Santa had brought them not one, not two, but three little Christmas girls.

#3 - We Write Not To Be Understood But in Order To Understand: The Integration of my Faith and Development as a Writer

My application process to Seattle Pacific University for their MFA program in Creative Writing required that I write an essay about my development as a writer and my faith. I thought some of you might be interested.

“I never remember a time when I did not love God.” So said Louisa Boren Denny, the main character of my Seattle novels and woman who laid the city’s very first foundation. I stumbled across her remark in a battered 1909 publication of her daughter’s book, Blazing the Way, and smiled. Growing up all shades of Baptist, I’d always felt left out at testimony time because there was never a “moment” of conversion for me. I was thirty-eight, Louisa dead sixty-five years, when we connected; and I have yet to find a better expression of my own faith.

But if I never remember a time when I did not love God, I do remember a time when I did not write. I drew in lieu. Boxes of crayoned pictures
give evidence to my earliest struggles to understand the world around me. I didn’t realize I was doing this, of course—until we drove over the Pitt Meadows Bridge on a Sunday afternoon drive. Four years old, I twirled over the front seat to try and articulate whatever it was that distressed me. Mum interrupted. “When we get home, draw us a picture. Then we’ll all understand.” I reared back, amazed at her. At me. By the time I was six and ready for school, though, I knew that my drawing could take me only so far: there were things color and shape couldn’t be made to say. I started to get anxious. How would my teacher teach me to read and write?

By Halloween I was suffering my grandfather through Dick and Jane. By Christmas, my father had taken me to the library, checking out stories. The day I realized I was actually reading on my own is mirror clear. There I was, a skinny little kid in a pixie cut, wearing Jean Dickson’s hand-me-down dress with the embroidered JD, an embarrassment because the initials were not my own and screamed for explanation, but there I was lollygagged on Dad’s old chair, an overstuffed thing all flowery, bouncy-trouncy. Suddenly, I’m reading! I sat up and looked around. How did this happen? It didn’t matter. By Valentine’s Day I was reading Wind in the Willows, by Easter my first Bobsey Twin book, by May Day a children’s version of Pilgrim’s Progress. On Memorial Day, my birthday, someone gave me Yertle the Turtle. I was disgusted. And out of my head, down through my fingers, pencil instead of crayon—I wrote.

I sent my outrage to my great Auntie Vi. She wrote back: “Of course you’re not a baby. Of course you are much smarter than that.” She ended, “And someday you will grow up to be a great Christian writer.”Six months later my little sister, Heather, arrived with large hole in her heart and God walked out of the cotton balls glued to my Sunday School projects and right into my life.

Tresa, Me, Heather, Linda
taken a few months before Heather died

She spent the first eighteen months of her own life at Vancouver General, with brief forays home. I was seven the night I awoke from a deep sleep. Something was wrong. I crept into the hall. There, down the long hallway, at the far end, was a sliver of light slipping through the crack at the bottom of my parents’ door. An eerie glow washed over Mum’s well-polished tile floor. “Daddy?”

I found him seated on the edge of the bed holding Heather in one arm, the oxygen mask in the palm of his free hand. She’d always been afraid of the mask; she’d thrash in panic if you set it too close to her face. Years later, I understood why. The smell of the rubber is so noxious it suffocates. Mindful, Dad held the mask an inch or two from her mouth, precious oxygen escaping. At the sound of my voice he looked up, then gravely nodded to let me know I could come in and sit down beside them. The bed sank a little under my weight. Heather startled, she struggled to see me. I reached over and curled her all but lifeless blue fingers around my own. At the end of the bed, Mum paced. In front of me was the oxygen tank.

In the odd silence of tension and the quiet gasps of my sister dying, I became fascinated by the gauge needle slipping closer to the red empty mark. I gave Dad a running commentary. Finally, in uncharacteristic abruptness, he said, “Brenda, it would be better to pray than chatter.”

I instantly let go of Heather’s hand, shoved both of mine down between my legs, and bowed my head in agony. I’d been caught pretending she wasn’t dying. But she was. I did know this. And I knew that if she didn’t regain her breath within minutes, before the oxygen was gone, the sun would rise without my sister in its light. Frantically I prayed. I begged. I pleaded in panic as I watched the needle sink into the red zone, like the spinner in Shoots and Ladders settling on the line between six and one even as I, at last, sensed my sister relax. The hiss of the oxygen tank suddenly sputtered out. I jerked toward Heather. She’d fallen asleep.

“Daddy?”

He looked at me.

“She didn’t die, Daddy.”

She died two years later, while I slept.

I spend time on Heather because she informs both my writing and my faith. People used to criticize my parents for allowing my sisters and me front row seats to the drama of her short life and lonely death. Did they fear God’s impotence? True, my childish guilt over her ultimate death haunted me for years, but when a child sees God’s face in the mirror of pain, she knows God’s love. She knows he tempers the wind for the shorn lamb. And she knows she can trust Him. Even if she doesn’t understand Him.

And so I wrote, trying to understand. Not just in this first difficulty but in the many to follow: numerous moves; medical errors; poor health; a near-death experience from asthma; sexual molestation; my little brother’s broken neck, his paralysis; a bankrupt marriage. . .

Marriage was the darkest hour. Job’s friends rallied and drove me to despair. My doctors told me I would die and now God was the enemy, but my loyalty to Him tolled the bell. Though He slay, yet I will trust Him. . .

I actually began publishing in high school, a lonely girl who watched the world and wondered. I wrote from a troubled heart, my emotions raw and real. Then one day I married and emotion was silenced. I retreated deeply into myself. Denied expression and question, I held fast to a fading memory of God’s love reflected in my little sister’s pain.

And then one day, in the fullness of time I suppose and sick of Job’s friends no doubt, I turned to Job himself. “Behold, He will slay me; I have no hope,” he told his friends. Wait…he isn’t done. “But yet I will defend my ways to his face. And this will be my salvation.” How could I forget that I can shove my hands between my legs and bow my head in agony of mind and soul before the very throne of God and pray in a panic for life?

Shoreline Community College was offering a class called “Writing for Pleasure and Profit.” I picked up my pen and met God head on. In between, I wrote for my teacher and sold all six assignments. My father sent me four months pregnant with my third child to Billy Graham’s School of Christian Writing in St. Paul where Roger Palms began the conference by saying his prayer was not that any of us would learn how to publish but that we’d learn if God wanted us to write. An hour later, in Lois Walfrid Johnson’s nonfiction class, I found myself skewered to my chair by the sensation of a heated rod that went from the top of my head, down through my body, and into the seat. I could not move. Futilely I squirmed in the terrible discomfort as Lois read:

“Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you; I appointed you a prophet to the nations.”

Then I said, “Ah, Lord God! Behold, I do not know how to speak, for I am only a youth.”

But the Lord said to me, “Do not say, ‘I am only a youth;’ for to all to whom I send you you shall go, and whatever I command you you shall speak. Be not afraid of them, for I am with you to deliver you, says the Lord.”

Then the Lord put forth his hand and touched my mouth, and the Lord said to me. “Behold, I have put my words in your mouth…”

I went home in a daze. A week later Sherwood Wirt, editor emeritus of Billy Graham’s magazine, called me. He’d found one of my manuscripts and wanted to know if I could send something to Decision. And thus I began writing my way back to God; not the god of my marriage but the God of my childhood; a God of love, of joy. A God of mercy and grace. I sold everything I wrote. A year after my inevitable divorce, I sold my first book.Divorce thrust my three children and me into a world of poverty, abuse, oppression, disease, and despair--not so much ours but others. Divorce opened my eyes to what goes on outside the safety of white middle-class America; and I began to chafe at the restrictions imposed by the religious publishing world. I had things to say, that needed to be said, but I was to keep my notions to myself and deliver only what the “marketplace” warranted. So my writing, rather than helping me understand the tragic world around me instead cut me off from meaningful exploration of truth and honest emotion. I had three mouths to feed, and so buckled down. I churned out novels, articles, short stories, radio scripts, and supplemented our meager income, as Alice Walker put it, by selling apples on the street corner. I did this for years. Finally, frustration drove me back to school, where I could again have the freedom to delve and discover, and begin again to find my diminishing faith and voice.

I had identified a pattern. Denied honest expression in my writing, my faith would wither. I recovered both my voice and faith at Fairhaven College in 1988. The environment was ironically cynical, at times hostile, to western religion; yet I found it intoxicating, exhilarating, for I had an open road and unfettered feet. Professors plied me with books to read, reports to write, ideologies to dissect and rebuild. I worked them hard as I plowed through Jungian Psychology, Women’s Psychology, Women in History; as I explored patriarchal science through a feminist paradigm; as I studied the goddess before god; as I learned new words for old truths and struggled to articulate new faith. One that centered on Jesus, whose first mission after resurrection was to visit women who cried. A heady, exhilarating task in the tumbler of cynicism and agnosticism that ever honed and shaped me and, truth to tell, awarded me the first professional respect I’d ever known. I emerged with a contract from HarperCollins to write Taming the Dragons and entered graduate school with another contract to write the third novel in my Seattle Sweetbriar series, by now the bread-and-butter of my family’s existence.

Taming the Dragons came out two years after I received my MA. But just weeks before the pub date my editor at Harper left. Taming was released an orphan. A bitter disappointment. The book remains in my mind as the greatest piece of literature and analysis I have ever written. Conceived in the years of my silence, born in the hallowed halls of academia (an alchemy of magic that drove me to my best), there was no one to nourish my project and so the book floundered. I’ve not found another publisher to reprint it. Wizards and fairy tales and stories of Ashtar? More “Christian fiction,” please.

I tried. But three more books and I was burned out. I turned to teaching at the community college, only to discover that 500 essays a quarter from students who couldn’t care less about words was cancer to what little was left of my creativity.Years ago I studied under Charles Johnson at the University of Washington, where I wrote a rough draft of my family’s experience at a Christian camp following Heather’s death. Last winter I pulled it out and rewrote the first chapter. I gave it to my youngest son. “You have to write this.” I tried it out on a friend. “This is your masterpiece.” I sent it back to my professor. “You are a wizardly writer. Your professionalism and skill,” Chuck e-mailed, “come singing off every page.” Perhaps this is the writing for which God skewered me to the chair?

I don’t know.

Frederick Buechner says truth can’t be stated; truth is the silence before the word. Truth can only be experienced. Poetry and art, he says, frame the silent truth. I am therefore applying to SPU so I can again delve and discover in the hallowed halls of academia; be nurtured in my writing and faith; and find a way to frame the silence of my life so that others experience the truth that I know. Truth I learned from the front row seat to the drama of short life and lonely death with all its answered and unanswered prayer. For whenever I pick up my pen I meet God in the silence of everything I cannot understand, I see him reflected in the mirror of pain I cannot explain. He tempers the wind and this I have come to understand is true.

#1: Self: River and Rock

Self: River and Rock

Last week I reconnected with the man I deeply cherished in high school. We were 17, enjoying our last year; and though we were not romantically involved, Wayne and I shared a unique bond. We were both pseudo orphans.

Wayne and his younger sister Carol had absorbed some of the responsibility for their other siblings, particularly Carol. For health reasons, I had to leave home in Iowa to live with friends in Arizona. I left behind a traumatic health history and the kind of social stresses that would leave any girl feeling lost and unsure. So there we were, orphans of sorts, with secrets and shame, struggling to find our way in the world. Wayne became my sanctuary in a conflicting, critical stage of my development. And while we eventually went on with our own lives, he remained part of my heart.

I tracked Wayne down once when we were 30: I was in crisis and needed his input. I tracked him down a second time when my youngest son turned 17. I was simply nostalgic for my friend. This Christmas, though, I found myself really missing him. I tracked him down again and sent a Christmas card. He replied--and delighted me by sending me his sister's e-mail.I wasted no time but shot off an e-mail to a woman I hadn't seen or spoken to in some 35 years. Two days later we were on the phone, talking two and a half hours. What struck me most was that Carol hadn't changed; she'd simply become more of herself. When Wayne called later that same day, we talked another four or five hours. I had the same impression. Wayne is simply more of the man he had been. The core of his being, where everything lives that counts, is the same: honor, truth, passion, humor, insight... And while I'm sure they're both vastly different in many of their beliefs, ideologies, and views of life--after all, middle age is vastly different than being seventeen--life's ups and downs have not diminished them at all but brought them into a measure of wholeness. My head has been reeling ever since. Have I evolved into more of who I was? Or have I allowed myself to be altered by life's ups and downs, and been diminished rather than brought into a measure of wholeness?It's a hard question to answer.

Wayne sent me a CD of some of his published photographs; several of the Grand Canyon. I've been there. I've walked down to the Indian Gardens, seven miles down, seven miles up. My sons have walked to the river itself, twenty-one miles to where water laps rock. It's easy to be overwhelmed by the canyon, with its strata of rock and stone a mile high. It's easy to focus on the color and texture and enormity of something immobile and so solidly fixed. But look, way down there, way way down, runs the river. There it is, bubbling, rushing, catapulting, pooling, crooning, thundering, lapping, slapping, splashing, a steady swathe of water that keeps on going and going--and plunging over and around--year after year cutting down through the walls that surround.Maybe the question is hard to answer because I've fallen into a habit of defining myself by the walls. There they are, all that granite and quartz and fragmented marble, all that basalt and limestone and Jurassic slate. All that towering "hard stuff" hard to ignore. Yet there is the river, too: dogged, persistent, unrelenting, cutting down through all that "stuff" and running on. Amazing.

To truly appreciate the Grand Canyon, you have to see it from bottom up. From the Indian Gardens, the canyon is astonishing. From the river's edge? I can only imagine. But it's dead, all dead. What's alive is the river, where everything that counts lives. Fish and bacteria and moss and frogs and flies and water-skippers and the DNA of the world.

Have I evolved into more of who I was? Or have I allowed myself to be altered by life's ups and downs, and been diminished rather than brought into a measure of wholeness? Looking into the river of everything that counts, I can answer my own question. If Wayne still holds in his soul honor, humor, and insight... if Carol still is rooted in faith, loyalty, commitment.... then here am I, grounded in the essential elements that have always defined me: unstoppable, unwavering, persistent, dogged. An old boyfriend once gave me an "eel of the year" award because I refused to give up in face of high odds. Okay, so I throw up my arms in that splash of despair over there; I fall into this side place of despondency; I eddy in hopeless circles of confusion and futility. But I get the job done, and behind me stands the impressive walls of life's ups and downs that don't define me at all. Monuments, if you will, of life lived well.

And if I really want to get all philosophical about this, I suspect behind us all stands astonishing monuments of mute testimony to our collective survival and triumphs.
Thank you to Wayne and Carol for letting me talk about them; and thanks to Wayne for allowing the use of his photographs.

Spirit of Washington Dinner Train


This year for Christmas I gave the oldest pair of my Bobsey Twin grandsons a ride on the Spirit of Washington Dinner Train. Their excitement knew no bounds and they managed to capture everyone's attention as they hurtled thither and yon in yip-yelping glee.

"Wow, Nathan, look at the wheels! They're humongous!"

"Yeah!" Nathan wrinkles his nose, he angles his head. "What's this, Rome what's this?"

Rome hunkers down, checks out the wheel thingy-ma-jings. "I don't know! But wow!"

"Hey, over here, come quick! Look!"

And off they'd go. And off I'd go. Everyone around us laughing.

Once on board, they were fascinated by the lamps, the windows, the tables, then out came the muffins and bread rolls and a plate of cheeses!

The train, however, didn't give a whistle warning before starting up, and so the two of them very nearly pitched into their plates nose first. But they came up giggling and laughing and whirling to see out the window. Who wanted those muffins anyway?

After a bit, dinner arrived. Rome and I traded places so they could each have a spot by the window and you should have seen the window by the time they were finished eating. Noses breathing fog onto the window pane--while chewing Tony's pizza and chicken strips--left a distinct pattern to the glass that I'm quite certain was not there before.

Next thing we knew, we were at the vineyard. Out they clambered on the run--Nathan had to go "poop!" The line to the ladies' restroom was long--but Nathan's jumping up and down got us moved up the ladder rather quickly. Once he got himself behind a swinging stall door, the ladies in que got a running commentary on the whole big hairy deal.

"Oh, my, did you ever!" one little old lady exclaimed, fanning her heart.

The boys, of course, were not interested in the winery or sampling the wine. They wanted to go back on the train. So back on we went. This time they raced from one car to another. They got down to the last car. Locked! Now why would they do that? Very good question, but Rome was quickly distracted by the drop-off to his left. Before I could blink, he'd gone sailing off the stoop, Nathan right after him. I was just getting ready to yoo-hoo them in when, this time, the train did whistle. My word, you never saw such panicked youngsters in your life.

Rome, I think, leaped straight up and was going straight back down when I snagged his wrist and hauled him in. Nathan, at this point, was in sheer terror, straining and struggling, jumping, clawing, trying to get up. I grabbed him under the arms and gave a heave.

"Granny! If you weren't here we'd be left behind!" cried Rome in glorious safety and taking another gawk from our perch.

"You guys are just darn lucky I like you."

"Can we do it again, Granny?" Nathan asked.

Desert on the way back was, for them, apple strudel. Chocolate mouse for me. They took one look at my desert, though, and dived right in. Half way through it, Rome looked like he was going to be sick.

"You all right, Rome?"

"Huh, huh, I'm fine," he said, going sheet white, but shoveling in another mouthful.

Nonetheless, I quick grabbed a cup and just managed to get it shoved under his chin before he upchucked. He sort of shook himself out and then smiled, and all the color came flooding back into his cheeks and the sparkle came back to his eyes. I don't think I've even seen a transformation so fast. High spirits sliding into I'm-going-to-puke and then bouncing right back again to high spirits. But he didn't take another bite, I noticed, of my desert.

I taught them how to play dot-to-dot. Rome wouldn't quit, demanding game after game. "I love this game! It's the best game ever! Don't you love this game, Nathan?"

"I want my mama."

But by this time we'd pulled back into the station. The boys insisted on being the last ones off. Headed for the car, they spotted something fun. I let them play and thought, this was their gift, but I think it turned out to be mine.