A Less Urgent Blogger

I'm somewhat ashamed to be using this immediate, vivid, fast format to process things that happened several years ago. I'm jealous of the urgency of some bloggers who tell the truth about their daily lives each day, and get feedback on what to do. People who make real friends around them in fake space. Women with book contracts and Moms with ad revenues.

I'm almost certain my "new normal" life is going to be boring, and I hope it will be so for a long, long time. I plan to improve myself and raise my child, and remind my inner child it's safe outside.

This life is no story, compared with the horrible medical mishaps and misaligned relationships while my husband was dying -- or the tales of virtual sexual dysfunction spawned by my brief, thrilling foray into the world of 40-something single men.

Now, THOSE are stories. And they will come. I will write out the buried wounds, I swear, as time passes. In the meantime, be patient with me (since I'm not patient with anyone) and come back another time.

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Three Girls, and You Can See They Tummy

SS asked me, "Play that song, I was dancing to it with Nellie."

What song is it?

"You know, it go, '(unintelligible) girls, (unintelligible) girls' like that. A girl singing."

I look back and the last played is "I love the nightlife" and then "Call me." At least they are girls singing.

"That not it. Let me see the picture."

That's the other iPod, this one doesn't show the picture.

"YOU KNOW IT! It three girls and you can see they tummy." I was sure it was some teeny-bopper thing, but there is so much stuff on there, and her temper was short, so I gave up.

When Nellie next showed up, we had the answer -- "Typical Girls" from:






















I should have known. It was my favorite when I was 16, Nellie's age.



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Why Wednesday, and Why in your Kitchen?

Because we're getting married soon, for tax reasons, and that day, at the minister's convenience, and in our kitchen, so we don't have to call it a "rental" and pay a fee.

Today's sermon was a funny, snarky one on marriage whence this quote from Kahlil Gibran:

Love one another, but make not a bond of love:
Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.
Fill each other's cup but drink not from one cup.
Give one another of your bread but eat not from the same loaf.
Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you be alone,
Even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music.

Give your hearts, but not into each other's keeping.
For only the hand of Life can contain your hearts.
And stand together yet not too near together:
For the pillars of the temple stand apart,
And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other's shadow.

I like that it mentions the temple, so it sounds a little bit Jewish!

ADDENDUM: Turns out that quote was posed, in the sermon, as one of the BAD attitudes about marriage. I was too moved, busy writing, to listen to the commentary! And yes, that is my beloved minister performed the wedding, with that wording and all.

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Native Americans from Mars

Our small friend Hamish is learning so much in preschool. At the holidays, especially. He came home one day last week and told his Moms that the Native Americans did not live on the Earth. Yes, he insisted, they were not on this planet!

Where did this information come from? School! The teacher! A book. He was very sure of it. When it's one of these things, you know that your kid always ends up "right." But whether it's your kid's fertile imagination or small vocabulary or something another kid said that sends them off after a strange idiom, can be a mystery.

Day after day Hamish's Moms tried to discover the source of this problem. They twisted their heads this way and that.

At last, the game of "telephone" was made clear: He had been told that the Native Americans lived "off the land."

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Thankful, if not in unison

As often happens, I found myself a little "off" from my fellow congregants last Sunday.

We were reading one of those "responsorials" from the hymnal and I loved the service but was not digging the reading in particular. I am just not good at following, waiting in line, being in time. Yet how I feed off of groups and listen to many things as once.

As I spoke along with everyone, hollowly and a half second off, I was reading this one, just next to it, which fit me at the moment. It seemed perfect, even though it's so much of the spring and I feel so full of fall this year. My birthday is in September, often the first day of school; so I've always felt that fall was really the time when things grow, even though they are not green.

This prayer, #510, reminded me of my gratitude last fall as I started to date, and my happiness now with all the good things in my life, and it resonated with the grieving I feel I have almost left behind:

O spirit of life and renewal.

We have wintered enough, mourned enough, oppressed ourselves enough.

Our souls are too long cold and buried, our dreams all but forgotten, our hopes unheard.

We are waiting to rise from the dead.

In this, the season of steady rebirth, we awaken to the power so abundant, so holy, that returns each year through earth and sky.

We will find our hearts again, and our good spirits. We will love, and believe, and give and wonder, and feel again the eternal powers.

The flow of life moves ever onward through one faithful spring, and another, and now another.

May we be forever grateful.

Alleluia.

Amen.

(Jane Rzepka)

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Typical

Seems like everyone has a supercold, persistent pneumonia, or is hacking like a wacko.

So,
Q. How will the Avian flu spread itself?
A. Viral marketing.

Leading to the phrase I've heard most often in my life: "I get it, it's just not funny."
And what HF said yesterday, that I realized no one had ever said to me: "I still can't hear you."

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What Wd Miss Emily Litella Say?

What's all this I hear about preposition 8? Eight is a number, not a preposition. If someone wants to put a "until" or "to" next to it, I'm not one to object!

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Day of the Dead mini-sermon and afternote

I spoke at church today, as part of a "remembrance service."

When we had been together about a year the man I was dating, DH, had a heart valve replaced. Complications brought him a few near-death experiences. We felt that we had been confronted by a huge force and it hadn’t defeated us. In the face of eternity, love mattered. I proposed to him in a hospital bed.

For our honeymoon, we took a “hipsters’ holiday” to Mexico for the Day of the Dead. In Oaxaca, we visited ancient hillside graveyards, where families were spending the night, picnicking, playing music. Kids ran among the humble stones, joyous with sugar and chocolate. Color and crafts and flowers were everywhere.

The Mexican tradition treats death as an extension of life and something that is neither negative nor final. On the Day of the Dead, the veil between the worlds grows thin and spirits come back to visit their families.

This pagan/Catholic tradition is celebrated on Nov. 2, known around the world as “All Souls Day.” So today is perfect timing for this service of remembrance – your loved ones are listening.

Years after my honeymoon, in this home, I hosted a memorial service for LH. This church was a help to me in a thousand ways, great and small, in the two years preceding his death and in the more than two years since.

Two ways stand out, elements of the structure our church provides for mourners, two ways that helped me tremendously.

First, the quilt. After about a year I embroidered LH’s name on the “Summer” quilt at my young widow’s and widower’s grieving group. The next morning I brought the quilt in to daycare with our 4-year-old daughter.

Her friends were dazzled. “Wow! That’s your Daddy’s name?! Cool!” They were pretty blown away. Their tiny fingers explored LH’s name. They couldn’t meet SS’s Dad, but they could see evidence that he was loved and that he was something special.

I had had doubts about showing the kids, but it was right, so listen: Your children will show you the way.

I had more surprises over the year when I responded to the invitation to stand during the moment of silence.

At first it was so, so hard to stand. I was broken and broken up and I felt I was being stared at. There was something okay about being public with this injury. I stood as an emblem but was thankful most of you couldn’t see my face. My lips were clenched tight. Often I cried.

After a time it seemed self-indulgent to stand – there was so much going on outside this peaceful place. I cared for my mother-in-law and my young daughter. I had a financial emergency plan, but no bridge to a normal life. I got really low a couple of times.

One evening in grieving group, a Jewish friend spoke about the one-year unveiling at her husband’s grave. After the guests had left, she cried and went to bed… but the next morning when she woke up she started to work out. She said she felt a new chapter had begun. I was jealous…. but I DID have a religion with a meaningful ritual.

I hardly missed a service that year when I stood. I think every single time it was different. Always the relief and release of singing “When I breathe in…” afterwards.

As time went on I started to feel I was playing a social role as I stood – I was the church’s “official widow.” I considered creating cool black armbands and I was a little proud of my loss. My face relaxed gradually. Sometimes I looked forward to standing. Sometimes I did it to pay tribute to LH or to acknowledge to myself all the challenges we were surviving at the time.

And then it arrived -- one year -- the first Sunday when I didn’t have to stand up. I took it lightly at the time, but slowly or suddenly, things changed. Standing up marked that time in a way I couldn’t deny. The anniversary became a positive step instead of a negative one.

And it was through these simple things that I realized I had found not just a home but a whole family, with creative solutions, and rituals, traditions and a future. A family in which I could choose and play different roles.

Thank you, every one of you.

Afternote:
It was inevitable that watching others speaking of loss, and crying, together in that place reminded me of LH's memorial service. How big an impression Rev. L made when she said it would be perfectly okay for me to give the eulogy, and people would be fine seeing me cry. But I couldn’t do it; I didn’t know what to say, couldn’t have generalized to all his different audiences. It was an invitation to be part of the mourning at the service, not apart from it; but I did not want to be a mourner at all. I didn’t want to expose my injury; I didn’t want to have one.

Plus, some special words I wanted Rev. L to include in the service, I couldn’t find.

Almost a year and a half after LH died, on the Day of the Dead 2007, I hosted a big crazy artsy party and ritual to invoke and remember him. I wanted to make something and give something. In his studio, scrambling my ideas, I found the words.

Suddenly everything fit together. Over LH's 30 year art career he had drawn many lamps, but the paper was the source of the light in his artwork, that soft light which struck people so quietly. So I cut up the last piece of Arches, which he had hung and ready, and gave it out to all the guests, with an essay, and these words from the Buddha which I’d wanted to include in the service:

Therefore, be ye lamps unto yourselves, be a refuge to yourselves. Hold fast to Truth as a lamp; hold fast to the truth as a refuge. Look not for a refuge in anyone beside yourselves. And those, who shall be a lamp unto themselves, shall betake themselves to no external refuge, but holding fast to the Truth as their lamp, and holding fast to the Truth as their refuge, they shall reach the topmost height.

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