Cranes in the Wide World

The cranes came back today.

I don’t mean the way they used to come back to Albuquerque in the fall, huge gobbling flocks settling in fields along the Rio Grande for the winter. I mean the two cranes who made themselves at home on our lanai last weekend. They came back this afternoon for another visit.

I feel like I’m starting to know them. The smaller one is the more curious of the pair. She pecks at the wicker furniture and plays with the strings on the cushions on the pub chair. When she starts tugging at the fibers in the rug, Fred makes a sharp “Ack” sound. She looks up, more annoyed than startled, but she stops ruining the rug and goes back to tossing the mulch around. Just like that, cross-species communication.

The bigger crane stands still. He strikes and holds one long graceful pose after another while I grab my cell phone and start taking pictures through the sliding glass doors.

Before the cranes came,

I was having the same sort of ordinary, meandering day I’ve had lots of since we set off on this mad adventure. We hung blinds in my office, answered the door to people who were showing up to fix problems that weren’t fixed before we closed on the house, and put up a few final pictures. We were just headed out to shop for curtain rods when the cranes came.

I put my purse down and stopped to watch them. I have the sort of life, for the moment, that lets me stop everything when a couple of giant birds tap on my back door. We watched them until they wandered off toward the neighbor’s yard.

This morning I’m sitting at my desk

writing about the cranes and freezing a little. I know that some of you are up to your necks in snow and I’m in Florida, but it’s 52 degrees here right now, and every window and door in my house is standing wide open.

That’s another story, but because the windows are open, I hear the cranes when they fly over. I imagine this neighborhood was their home long before it became mine.

I’m trying to figure out why the cranes matter.

I’ve reached that all-too-familiar point where I start wondering why you should bother spending your time reading about this one small moment of beauty in far-away Florida.

One thing I’ve learned, though, since I started showing up to write every day, is that an answer to that question will come. It’s sort of an inverse Field of Dreams thing. If I come, they will build it. Only in this case, “they” aren’t a handful of old ball-players with unfinished dreams. In fact, I have no idea who or what they are. Some mysterious force creates moments that rub up against other moments to help me make sense of the world. I can’t explain it, I just know that it’s true.

For a moment, I thought that maybe the point was that recently, people have been cutting down trees and otherwise vandalizing Joshua Tree National Park. It’s a heartbreaking development in a world that already has more than enough sadness to go around. Maybe the cranes are here to offer a tiny counter-weight to the sort of anger or self-loathing that lets a person destroy something beautiful just because they can.

I don’t know. I had just decided that idea didn’t quite capture what I was feeling when I hit “command x.” Somehow instead of deleting a word, I deleted everything but the first few sentences I had written. Maybe, I thought, as I started over, the cranes matter because they teach impermanence, that there is a wide world beyond our control.

I’m not sure that’s the whole point either,

but I think I’m closing in. I did what I usually do when I’m getting close and googled crane poems. Stephen Crane (remember high school and The Red Badge of Courage?) made me laugh by topping the list. I didn’t even know he wrote poems.

Then I found one called “Should the Wide World Roll Away” and, intrigued by the title, had to read the rest of it. At first I thought I’d leave you to follow the link yourself, but I realized I was ruining the poem by trying to paraphrase it, so here’s the whole thing:

Should the wide world roll away

Leaving black terror

Limitless night,

Nor God, nor man, nor place to stand

Would be to me essential

If thou and thy white arms were there

And the fall to doom a long way.

It’s the first and last lines that crack me open. Sometimes lately it does feel as though this “wide world” is rolling wildly away. I’m reminded of the moments that caused me to start writing this blog in the first place, the crazy contradiction that living inescapably leads to dying, and yet, love makes it all matter.

I’m still wrapping my head and heart around those ideas, but in the 27th year of our marriage, Fred and I leapt out of our support systems and stepped out into a wide new world. It matters that the cranes come.

In the poem, Crane doesn’t ask the person he loves to stop the world from rolling away. He just hopes that their inevitable “fall to doom” lasts a good long time.

Love can do that.

I almost forgot to tell you one last thing about the cranes. The picture at the top (shot through the back door) doesn’t do it justice. But not long before the cranes flew off yesterday, the still crane started dancing.

As always, if you found something uplifting or interesting here, please feel free to share this post with your friends. In this new year, I wish you space to enjoy the beautiful moments when they come. Thanks for reading!

January 8, 2019

Word of the Year

About this time last year, I kept reading articles advising me to choose a word of the year. As best I remember, the idea was to reflect on your life and then choose the word that bubbled up for you. That word would then serve as a mantra, or maybe a touchstone, for the year ahead.

As a rule, I don’t take these sorts of suggestions very seriously. I love to read self-help blogs and articles, but I tend to do so with my head slightly cocked to the side, the way my old beagle Ben used to look at things that puzzled him.

The truth is, I’m a snob. I love to read about making resolutions and improving your diet and how to become your best self through alternate-nostril-breathing (google it–that’s really a thing), but I pretend that I’m smarter than everyone else who reads those things. Surely I don’t believe in all those gimmicks–I know that real change comes from living and messing up and trying to get it better next time.

And yet…

something about the word of the year was appealing. When I told my friend Martha about it, she loved the idea. We talked about our words for a little while, probably over a hike in the mountains, and little by little, my word emerged and solidified.

I wrote it down in my planner and thought about it every now and then throughout the year. I didn’t follow the advice of the experts and put it on a notecard on my mirror so I could reflect on it while I was brushing my teeth, but, hey, maybe that would work for you.

When 2018 began,

I was in my seventeenth year of teaching and my thirtieth year of living in Albuquerque. When 2018 ended, I had traded in teaching for writing, and exchanged hiking in the Sandia Mountains for wading in the Atlantic Ocean. I toasted 2019 in the new house Fred and I built in Florida.

Depending on where you are in your life, I suppose this post is either going to be an inspiration or a cautionary tale.

As 2018 began, I could tell I was standing in a doorway. In January I wrote in my journal, “What I know about myself is that I’ve always reached a point where I knew I had to go….things would start tugging at me. A general dissatisfaction would set in. A sense that the life I was living was no longer in alignment with the life I was supposed to be living. At some point the tugging would become unsustainable, and I’d know it was time…”

My word of the year

in 2018 was threshold. I felt myself standing in a doorway, and in March, when Fred and I decided to buy a house in Florida (in a town we had spent exactly four days visiting), I committed to stepping through it.

In her poem, “We Look with Uncertainty,” Ann Hillman describes “a softer, more permeable aliveness.” She writes:

We stand at a new doorway,
awaiting that which comes…
daring to be human creatures,
vulnerable to the beauty of existence.

That’s how 2018 went for me.

It’s funny though.

Some people move out of their old house on one day and into their new house a few days later. It didn’t work like that for me. I moved out of my old house in late July and didn’t move into the new one until mid-December.

The soundtrack playing in the last few months of my life has been “the waiting is the hardest part.” I have been living in the doorway, trying to peer through to see what I’d find on the other side.

In other words, I spent a lot of months lingering on the threshold. It was as though my word of the year wasn’t ready to let me off the hook before the year was over. I’m picturing some wizened word guardian shaking her finger at me, saying, “You said threshold, Missy, so threshold it is.”

It’s not that I didn’t already know

that words are powerful things, but really? Did one well-chosen world really have the power to send me ricocheting across the country in search of “a more permeable aliveness”?

I think it did.

It’s 2019, and I’ve finally stepped through the doorway. My boxes are unpacked and I’m remembering some other words that used to haunt me. I heard Michael Ronstadt sing them at a house concert years ago. “It don’t look like a door, but it opens,” he sang. (You can hear them here on his Foolish Fox album.)

I didn’t have a word of the year back then, but I can see now that those words got me started looking for a door. They were powerful, too.

The other day on the phone,

Martha asked me if I had thought of my word of the year for 2019. My first reaction was that it would be way too risky to choose another one.

But it’s a new year, and what are new years for if not for boldness.? The word came to me almost immediately, but I walked around with it for a few days to make sure I could trust it.

My word for 2019 is possibility.

Choose one for yourself if you dare!

Thanks for coming back to read after my long break! Balancing on the threshold lent itself to reflection, but not to saying anything coherent about those thoughts. It’s good to be back. If you choose a word, please share it!

October 25, 2018October 27, 2018

No Lie: Vultures on the Beach

I’m trying to sort out the birds. It’s not like I’ve never been to the ocean before; it’s that this is the first time I’ve ever been here with the intention of starting a long term relationship. I don’t want to start off with a lie.

A few evenings ago when the little white bird with the black legs (who might be a plover?) yanked a ghost crab (I’m fairly sure about that one) from the swash, he ran up the shore into the wrack and tried to find a nice quiet table for dinner.

No such luck. The brown bird with the long legs and the long beak (perhaps a willet?) started chasing him. Up the beach, down the beach, into the water. Every now and then a few other birds that might also be plovers joined in the chase.

The bird that might be a plover with dinner in its mouth kept dropping the crab and trying to take a bite, but every time, the bird that might be a willet would close in. Nothing for it but to grab your ghost crab and run.

I must have watched this dinner dance for ten minutes. Finally the bird that was the best at fishing gave up and tossed the remains of the crab on the sand. I expected the long-beaked bird to run in and grab the crab, but nobody came. Apparently all that drama was just about the chase.

The other brown bird that looks like an overgrown sparrow on orange stilts (that might be a sandpiper?) played no part in this story.

These things happened as I’ve told them. This is a true story. I was there. I watched it happen, and then I wrote it down.

You might be wondering

what this has to do with Daniel Dale, a journalist from the The Toronto Star. Then again, maybe you weren’t wondering that. Maybe that was just me. Either way, a tweet from NPR popped up while I was writing. In it, Dale was explaining why, when the guy we put in the White House just makes something up, Dale uses the word “lie” in his reporting.

It’s a complex argument but I’ll try to simplify it for you. (Actually, that last sentence is a lie. It’s still as simple as it was when your mom explained it to you in kindergarten.) If you make something up and tell people it is true, you are lying.

Call it a “definitional thing,” if we need to pretend it’s complicated. Dale’s bigger point is that if you are a major newspaper (he’s looking at you, New York Times), and you don’t use the word “lie” to describe a lie, you are, well, how can I say this…you are lying.

On a day when pipe bombs are flying around the country, I would have loved to tell you that the little bird that might be a plover caught a crab and the other birds cheered and they all shared the crab and lived happily ever after. That would have been a nice uplifting story, but it wouldn’t have been true.

Likewise, if I had said that the bird that might be a willet had flown across the border from Honduras planning to kill Americans, that would have been a lie, too. (See how easy?)

You might be wondering

what this has to do with vultures on the beach. This afternoon when Fred and I were walking along the beach, I saw three huge blackish-brown birds gathered on the beach above the scarp. Before a passer-by told me they were vultures (with a gently implied “duh” and a nod to their naked heads), I was planning to tell you that I had seen beach turkeys. Actually, I was trying out both “beach turkeys” and “sea turkeys” in my head.

I wasn’t going to tell you that they were actually called sea turkeys, because that would have been lying. I was going to tell you that I called them that in my head to help me remember what they looked like until I could get back to my friend’s condo and look them up in her helpful beach book.

Most of the time, I find it’s not all that hard not to lie.

Anyway, the vultures are on the beach because Red Tide is here in Brevard County. That means there are dead things on the beach, and vultures eat dead things. I watched while a vulture dug in the sand and pulled out a dead fish and ate it calmly while his buddy vulture looked on politely.

No lie.

You might be wondering

where I’m going with this little collection of true stories from the beach, and I can assure you that you are not alone. I snapped a few photos of the vultures to prove they were there, then Fred and I continued on toward the pier.

Here in Cocoa Beach, sea turtles nest in the dunes. If you live along the beach, during turtle nesting season you have to turn off your lights or close your blinds at night so the turtles don’t think your light is the moon. The moonlight on the water draws the turtles into to the sea.

I find that fact to be both beautiful and true.

So this afternoon, while pipe bombs were flying around the country, an algae bloom was poisoning fish and gumming up the seafoam, and vultures with good table manners were digging in the sand, Fred and I kept walking toward the pier.

We hadn’t gone far before we saw the turtle, lugging her heavy body toward the sea. She lumbered through wet sand, a small crowd of beachcombers snapping photos and quietly cheering her on.

The “duh” woman appeared at my side. “There’s so much life here!” she marveled. She was right. That was a true statement.

You might be wondering

how I’m going to tie these true stories from the beach together and draw this essay to a close. Again, let me assure you that you are not alone.

It’s just that I think it matters to learn the names of the birds, to be diligent in calling things what they are.

Yesterday I saw a news clip where the guy who lives in the White House claimed that Democrats are trying to get rid of coverage for pre-existing conditions (one of which I have) and Republicans are trying to protect that coverage.

That is a lie.

It’s driving me crazy. A vulture isn’t a willet isn’t a sea turtle. Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying.

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October 17, 2018October 17, 2018

Albuquerque’s North Valley

Picture a little kid’s drawing of a house: at its simplest, a triangle perches on top of a square. Then imagine the kid with the crayon getting restless. She stretches the square into a long skinny rectangle and topples the triangle over the edge. The triangle lands in the rocks next to the rectangle and turns the little house into an arrow.

You can’t get comfortable in an arrow. We sold that house and decided to head off in the direction the the arrow was pointing. We moved in temporarily with my friend Ken in the North Valley and gave our granddaughter one of our cars. That’s why I’m walking down Guadalupe Trail this morning, past some cows and a singing pyracantha hedge full of invisible birds.

I’m looking for the little half-sized road that will take me to the ditch bank. Among the many gifts of spending the last six week’s as guests in my friend’s house has been the chance to fall in love with this little stretch of Albuquerque’s North Valley.

Things happen here

that never happened on the West Side. A few days ago a woman wandered into the yard with her beagle. She wanted to know if I had lost a turtle. When I said no, she left and came back a few minutes later with the turtle she had found wandering in the road. “I’ll just leave him here anyway,” she said.

Ok. It’s a nice yard for a turtle. It had a neon pink Z painted on its shell. I watched him lug his prehistoric body around the garden until I lost sight of him between the flagstone path and the chamisa.

It’s not just that strangers bring you turtles in the North Valley. The other night Rusty wasn’t feeling well, and I found myself curled in a blanket, sitting in a rocker on the front porch at 2:30 in the morning. It was peaceful in the cool dark, and I felt almost lucky that I’d been drawn out of bed. Rusty, instantly calmer in the fresh air, went to sleep at my feet while I rocked and daydreamed.

We might have stayed there all night if I hadn’t heard something breathing. It was a deep, grunting, wild noise, followed by some serious rustling in the garden. For no reason that holds up to daylight, I imagined a wild boar, its giant tusks angling for the kill. I woke Rusty and hustled him inside, wondering what feral beast was sniffing for us in the night.

To the best of my knowledge, there’s never been a wild boar sighting in the North Valley. In the rational light of morning, I see the holes in the grass, each one the size and shape of a skunk’s nose.

In the North Valley

I’m remembering how much I enjoy walking. Not just to walk, but to get somewhere. This morning the cows are out as I head South on Guadalupe Trail. I count four of them, with the biggest leaning against a cottonwood just beside the road. He looks at me without much curiosity and swishes flies with his tail.

When I get to the ditch, I hang a right and then another one at the no trespassing sign and suddenly I’ve left streets behind. I’m walking beside an arroyo, flush with flowing water. Old land rights still dictate when farmers may open simple wooden gates to flood their fields. Sunlight dapples my arms as it sifts through cottonwood branches and lands in shards on the dry ground.

I bend to pass through the first stile, alarming a lizard that skitters up the fence post. A coyote appears about ten yards up the trail. He looks at me and prances ahead, then turns back, keeping a constant distance between us. Somewhere to the east on the other side of the ditch a rooster crows.

I step through the second stile. It’s morning in the North Valley, and I’m walking in an older version of the world. I was going to say I’m not at work, but I don’t think that’s true. My new work life is a little bit like a jigsaw puzzle before you get the edge pieces done–I’m still figuring out what will go inside. “Whose woods these are I think I know,” is running through my head. Who’s to say walking through the bosque on a sunny morning doesn’t count as work, if you’re trying to make a life as a writer?

When I turn left to head toward the coffee shop, the coyote runs ahead toward the Rio Grande. I’m thinking about a few lines from the Navajo Blessingway Prayer: “With beauty before me may I walk, with beauty behind me may I walk.”

Just before the coffee shop,

the dirt turns back into pavement. The house on the corner marks the transition. Long skinny garden beds separate the house from the road. Signs are painted on water drums and fence posts and compost bins. “Be joyful,” “Be You,” “Sit here and enjoy the new.” A few weeks ago, the sunflowers were blooming and the vines were heavy with tomatoes.

I turn toward Rio Grande and have coffee with my friend. On my way home, I pass the yard with the painted bench again. I’ve been trying to decide if it says enjoy the new or enjoy the now. A young man is working among the plants this morning, and I think about asking him. I say hello and thanks and tell him how much I enjoy walking by his garden.

“You’re welcome,” he says, “Would you like a zucchini?” And just like that, he pulls a knife from his pocket, cuts the long, thick fruit from the vine, and hands me a zucchini. I decide I don’t want to know if he wants me to enjoy the new or the now.

I walk home with my zucchini. It’s just another morning in the North Valley.

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September 17, 2018

Moving to Florida

When people say, “Why are you moving to Florida?” I don’t have an easy answer. A job? Not really. Retirement? Not that either. An ocean, I want to say, and the color green outside my windows. The weight of the air at sea level. Tall birds.

A few facts and figures:

Albuquerque, New Mexico sits 35.0844 degrees North of the equator; Vero Beach, Florida: 27.6386. I’m moving closer to the fat middle of the planet, a more direct view of the sun.

I’m also moving closer to Greenwich, England (Albuquerque latitude: 106.6504 West, Vero Beach: 80.3873 W). From oldest to youngest, my siblings live at 79.9959, 70.8606, and 82.5863. In other words, we’ll all be in the same time zone now.

I’m also moving a little further from the sky. Depending on where you measure, Albuquerque, NM sits at an altitude of 5,312 feet. My new town clocks in at 13. Maybe I’m moving to Florida because it has a little more oxygen in the air.

I’m moving to Florida

because living in Albuquerque for thirty years was an accident. I moved here when I was twenty-four because I thought it would be fun to see the Southwest. The woman sitting next to me on the plane said, “If you wear out a pair of shoes, you’ll never leave.”

For thirty years she was right. I don’t have any of those Chicago shoes left in my closet. (Technically speaking, right now I don’t actually have a closet at all, but let’s not get hung up on that.)

When I say spending thirty years in Albuquerque was an accident, you shouldn’t think about a house fire or a car crash. You should think of a wrong turn that leads to the best strawberry shortcake you’ve ever had, or heavy traffic heading west on Montano that puts you in the right place to see the cranes fly in. You should think of a flat tire that strands you by the side of the road so you could see a murmuration of birds at play in thin air. Or the kind of accident where you fall in love and find a family and a new job and a great church and great friends and mountains and roadrunners and green chile and tumbleweed.

Living in Albuquerque for thirty years has been that kind of accident.

I’m moving to Florida

because goatheads.

Kidding/Not kidding.

I’m moving to Florida

because when we were driving around looking at houses, I kept chanting in my head, “Rivers, Lake, Mountains, Ocean.” I was writing my autobiography, mapping the geography of my life. From Pittsburgh through Chicago to Albuquerque to Vero Beach. From the place the Allegheny and the Monongahela Rivers flow into the Ohio, to the icy rocks along Lake Michigan, to the high desert slopes of the Sandias, to this long stretch of sand flanking the Atlantic.

It’s as though I need to make sure I have all of the words. “Ask what I want, and I will sing: I want everything, everything”–some old Barbra Streisand song that’s been stuck in my head since high school.

There are other reasons.

Some ties had to loosen enough to let me go. Some ties had to grow so strong that I could leave without fear of them ever breaking. Some pieces of this landscape had to lodge themselves so deeply in me that I will always be able to see them, the way I can still see the sunset spreading through the cherry branches from the back window of the house on Marvle Valley.

Only then, it seems to me, when you’ve loved a place and its people so deeply that it hurts like a goathead to say goodbye, only then are you allowed to put on some brand new shoes and walk away.

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September 9, 2018

The Syro-Phoenician Woman

[What follows is the text of the sermon I delivered this morning at St. Michael and All Angels on the text of Mark 7. I’ll be back next week with a more typical blog.]

Good morning.

To be fair to Fr. Joe, every time I have preached he has asked me if I’d like to look at the scriptures for the upcoming weeks and choose a date. Every time, I have told him no, that I would be happy to speak on whatever date was convenient. Which is true. The opportunity to stand here and share my words with all of you is an incredible gift. But that’s not the only reason I have refrained from choosing: I have found it to be a powerful spiritual practice to grapple with the gospel of the day, however hard that sometimes is.

Which brings me smack into today. You heard what Jesus said. The Syro-Phoenician woman begs Jesus for help, and he says to her, “Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.”

Come again?

The first time I read this gospel having, remember, already agreed to preach on it, I slammed my laptop shut and said, “Are you kidding me?” There was one other word in that sentence, but I don’t think I should tell you what it was.

The second time I read the gospel, I decided I would just avoid that part. After all, there’s a lovely healing of a deaf man in the second paragraph. Jesus puts his fingers in the man’s ears and says Ephphatha, or “be opened”—surely there is enough metaphorical content in those two words to hang a sermon on.

The third time I read the gospel, I knew I couldn’t preach on anything if I couldn’t preach on Jesus’s reaction to this desperate woman who begs him to cast a demon from her daughter.

We are not living in times when we have the luxury to hear a man call another human being a dog and pretend we didn’t hear it.

My next step

was to start re-reading the gospel of Mark from the beginning. Surely, I thought, I’ll find something there that helps me understand. In the first six chapters of Mark, I counted seven specific healing stories: Jesus cures a paralytic, a man with a withered hand, Simon’s mother-in-law who has a simple fever (there the text seems to suggest that they were hungry, and they needed her to be well so she could feed them), a demoniac, a leper, a woman who touches his cloak, and the daughter of Jairus.

And those are just the people who are named. In Mark 1, the “whole city” comes and gets cured; in chapter 3, we hear that he had “cured many,” and even in Nazareth, his home town where they don’t believe, he “lays his hands on a few sick people and cures them.” By the end of chapter six, even the disciples have started healing people.

Do you see what I’m getting at? In Mark’s gospel, Jesus is a veritable Oprah of healing. You get a cure, and you get a cure, and you get a cure!

And then, the Syro-Phoenician woman

comes to him because her “little daughter”—Mark calls her that—her “little daughter” needs to be healed. And Jesus, seeming to refuse, says to her, “it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.”

I did some research to see what other people have said about this gospel. One writer suggested that the Greek word was closer to “puppy,” than dog, and somehow (I don’t remember the details of the argument) that was supposed to make it all better. Another emphasizes the fact that Jesus did, after all, come specifically for the Jews. Still others focus on the woman’s faith, and suggest that Jesus was simply testing her and had planned to help her all along.

In another era, I might have bought one of those explanations. Today, though, living right here in this particular time and place, that rationalization feels irresponsible. It is too easy to say, “Well, what Jesus meant when he said x was y.” or “By suggesting that healing her daughter would be throwing crumbs to a dog he wasn’t actually calling her a dog….” But I can’t do that. In these times, it feels particularly important to hold people to account for the words they actually say.

I found myself at that now-familiar moment, wishing I had opted to read ahead and choose a different Sunday.

I went back to the story.

The gospel tells us that Jesus “entered a house and did not want anyone to know he was there.” As I said before, Jesus had been very busy curing people. For this one moment, he wants to be alone. He’s longing for solitude. He wants to recharge, to rest, perhaps to pray. We’ve all had that moment.

And then one more hurting person barges in, demanding that he help.

In my idealized version of Jesus, he has infinite energy and infinite patience, and he leaps at the chance to give up an evening on the couch with his feet up to help this woman.

But we tell ourselves we believe that Jesus is truly human and truly god.

I think Jesus just snaps.

I think he has a “truly human” moment. He says something awful that he clearly doesn’t mean and quickly makes right.

I don’t know why the gospel writer chose to tell this story, but I think it shows how hard it is–for anyone–to love relentlessly in a broken world. I think it shows that even the best of us inhale the stereotypes and slurs and the fears of “the other” that swirl around us every day.

A few Thursday nights ago,

four of us were walking out of choir practice together when a woman popped out of the bushes at the East end of the parking lot.

“Hello?” She called. “Hello? Can you help me?”

I can’t speak for my fellow travelers, but my initial reaction was to hope that one of them would answer her. She had sprained her ankle, she said, walking to the gas station to get a coke. She needed a ride home. She had one of those voices that suggested a hard life, a life quite different than my own.

I am nothing if not well-trained in distrusting “the other.” I didn’t believe for a second that she had sprained her ankle. I looked at this small, old-ish, utterly non-threatening woman with her large bag and wondered if she had a knife in it, or maybe a gun. Don’t get me wrong. I am all for helping people within the friendly confines of the church or in a time and place neatly designated for “serving the poor,” but this was a voice in the bushes in the night, and, almost as a rule, I fear those voices.

I think Jesus was tired,

and he snapped at the woman in words that came straight out of the world he lived in. If I’m honest, perhaps it is at precisely this moment when I can see myself most clearly in Jesus.

But, of course, that’s not the end of the story. The woman doesn’t go away, leaving Jesus alone for a long night of wishing he had treated her better. She has heard the stories. She knows who Jesus is. The gospel says she “bowed down at his feet” (you might even say she took a knee) and demanded better treatment. She said, “Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.”

As one of my grandkids might say, “BAM.” She demanded that Jesus behave as the best version of himself. She demanded that he live up to his own teachings. She held a mirror up to his words and gave him the chance to do better. The Syro-Phoenician woman, it turns out, is the person who taught me not to run away from this hard story.

Like Jesus,

my choir friends and I got it right in the end. We gave the woman who popped out of the bushes a ride home, and it turned out that her house was right on our way, and she didn’t have a knife or a gun in that big purse, or if she did, she decided not to pull them out to use them on us. “God bless you,” she must have said half a dozen times as she got out of the car. The irony was not lost on me.

So. I began by saying that grappling with hard scripture was a valuable spiritual practice, so it’s fair to ask where all of this grappling has gotten us.

Today’s gospel, I think, teaches us that it is hard, even for Jesus, to live in this world as a child of God. Every day we inhale air polluted by racism, misogyny, and the fear of the other. Not even Jesus, truly man and truly God, could remain entirely free from its influence.

I find that comforting.

We come together today, arm in arm with Jesus, as a people in need of healing. The Syro-Phoenician woman teaches us how to live as people of faith in a world that gets it wrong. She reminds us to speak the truth, to demand that our leaders and our institutions and even our God live up to the best versions of themselves.

On this healing Sunday, she reminds us to ask God boldly for what we need. She reminds us that the love of even a weary God is abundant, that even the crumbs have the power to heal.

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August 27, 2018

Lunch with Emily, Dinner with Marge

I should have said, “It’s all journey.”

It’s Wednesday afternoon. I’m pulling out of the Standard Diner parking lot after having lunch with Emily, one of my favorite millennials. I’m replaying our conversation in my head, hoping I didn’t say anything stupid that she might mistake as wise. (It’s a job hazard. All these years of teaching and blogging lend me a confident tone that tricks people into thinking I know what I’m talking about. Sometimes I even trick myself.)

We’re eating Parmesan truffle fries while Emily fills me in on what she’s been up to. At twenty-two, she has graduated from college and is killing it at her job in a local law firm. Not surprisingly, they love her and want to mentor her into their world. Emily would be a great lawyer; she has a solid core, an expansive heart, and a discerning intellect.

Emily is thinking about law school,

but she’s not sure. Because she’s Emily, having a full time job after college isn’t quite enough; she has also been studying to get a real estate license. And who knows? Maybe someday she’ll pursue a different dream and run her own kindergarten. I can imagine her succeeding in any (all!) of these worlds.

“Nobody tells you your twenties will be hard,” Emily says, as our meals come.

I think she’s right about that, and I’m wondering why we keep teaching young people that there’s only one path, and that it’s their job to leap onto it and make all the right turns, as if life is a series of subway stops leading to a career, instead of a stream, singing through a mysterious forest.

Someone told me that Ray Bradbury said one should “Jump off the cliff and build your wings on the way down.” I could have told Emily that, too.

Or, I could have just said

“It’s all journey.” If I were actually wise, I might have told Emily about the time I couldn’t decide if I should quit Quodlibet, an acapella choir I sang in for a while. It was during that hard time when I used to drive across the bridge to see Sr. Therapist on Monday afternoons.

I’m sure cranes were grazing in the fields and geese were hurrying each other along overhead. The Rio Grande was low, and I probably said a quick prayer as I passed the overlook where we tossed the flowers into the water.

“I can’t decide what to do,” I told Sr. Therapist that day. “And I feel stupid talking about it, because it’s such a mundane decision.” Quodlibet met for a few hours every Sunday evening, and I found the music challenging. My days were stretching at the seams and I knew something had to give.

At some point, Sr. Therapist looked at me and said, “By saying yes to continuing with this group, what are you saying no to?”

Bam. It’s a question that has served me well ever since. Every yes comes with a rich bouquet of implied nos. Tease those out, I learned, and decisions become much simpler. I should have told Emily to ask herself what she would be saying no to.

Better yet,

I should have quoted Wendell Berry. In “Poetry and Marriage: The Use of Old Forms,” Berry writes, “It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work and when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey.”

A few days after my lunch with Emily I was still packing up my house and thinking about my own crazy journey when Fred and I took our favorite ninety-five year-old out to dinner. We’re eating manicotti at Caruso’s on Menaul when Marge informs me that I am now her daughter-in-law because she has decided to claim Fred as her fourth son.

Marge’s journey began in 1923 on a ranch in Wyoming. She married an oil prospector who died too soon to see his own success, raised three sons, and became a successful artist.

At 95, Marge is wise enough not to go around trying to give people advice. At 54, I’m not. Here’s the advice Marge’s life is giving me.

You are never too old to buy a big new house and throw a party. When Fred and I decided to sell our house, Marge decided she wanted to buy it. At fifty-four, I’m downsizing; Marge is upsizing at ninety-five. The party is in early September.

2. Stay in touch with your friends. When we picked Marge up for dinner she was playing cards with a friend. As we left Caruso’s, she stopped to talk to another old friend. A few weeks ago when we took her to the credit union, she ran into someone else she knew. Don’t believe what you hear about your circle shrinking as you get older.

3. Ask for what you need. On the way home, Marge lets us know she needs to stop at the vet. She tells the vet that Wendy (her dachshund) is afraid of storms. The vet gives her some pills and tells her to give the dog a half a pill when she sees a storm coming.

4. Drug the dog if you have to. When we get to Marge’s house, she looks at the clear blue sky and winks at me. “Looks like a storm is coming,” she says. Fred slips Wendy’s pill into a piece of hotdog so Marge can finally get a good night’s sleep.

I think I’m trying to say

that it’s not about the destination. There’s no there there, as Gertrude Stein said. People keep asking me why I’m moving “to Florida,” as though that little prepositional phrase is the important part of the question. I have trouble answering that question. But ask me why I’m moving, and I can tell you that I grew tired of standing still; that it’s more tiring to tread water than to swim.

It’s all journey. Wendell Berry said, “The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.”

These days I’m celebrating Marge and Emily and that singing stream. I’m grateful for the cliff edge as it falls fast away behind us. These wild things we call our lives are streaming out all around us and not one of us is alone. You can hear it in the whistle of the wind–the voices of so many friends, helping us build our wings on the way down.

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August 5, 2018

Swimming With the Grandkids

Photo of striped beach towel and swim goggles

It’s any Tuesday afternoon in June and I’m at the pool at the gym with the grandkids. “How do you do that?” Cali asks after I swim a few strokes, and I’m confused. All of their other grandparents have pools in their backyards; these kids have been swimming forever.

“Go under water without holding your nose,” Cali explains, in answer to the confused look on my face. The oldest, she’ll be a sophomore this year. The other two, a rising freshman and rising seventh grader, move in, curious to hear the answer.

It’s like that moment

in the classroom when a student asks a basic question about something you’ve “just known” forever; I have no idea why I don’t get water up my nose while I’m swimming. I go under water and take a few more strokes, trying to notice what I’m doing.

“I blow bubbles,” I tell them, and we head to the edge of the pool. Some buried childhood memory of holding onto the edge and bobbing is surfacing, and I try to explain how it works. I’m doing a bad job, and they aren’t buying it.

And then, in exactly the way my life has been going since this past March, a swimming teacher appears by the side of the pool. She suggests they hum. That does it, and after a little more coaching from the generous swim teacher, they are blowing bubbles and experimenting. Their hands, newly freed from nostril-pinching duty, are free to wave about in moves that resemble swimming.

Let me step back

for a moment to make sure I’ve made this clear. I was trying to teach the kids to swim, and a swim teacher appeared at the side of the pool.

Moments exactly like this one have been flooding my life for the past four months. I don’t mean to suggest that my life wasn’t already blessed before we decided to yank ourselves up by the roots and drive across two time zones; it’s just that, lately, the blessings have been remarkably specific, obvious, and well-timed.

It has been wondrous and just a little bit scary.

And of course, my gift of near daily small miracles stands in stark contrast to how life has been going for so many other people. When I started this essay, twelve little boys were stuck in a watery cave and immigrant children were being separated from their parents. While my essay languished, neglected as I focused on packing, a duck boat capsized in Branson, record high temperatures and flooding ravaged Japan, and fire tornados raced across California.

All over the world people are suffering, and if I so much as need a swim teacher, one appears.

I’m not sure

what to make of that phenomenon yet, so I’ll just let you know what else has been happening. On Friday, the movers came and whisked our furniture off to a warehouse in Austin, where it will live for the next few months while we gradually wend our way east. They were gentle with our things and left us feeling fairly confident that we’ll see them again.

On Saturday, we took the grandkids back-to-school shopping. Big mistake. School starts a week from tomorrow, it was tax-free weekend, and everyone who lives in Albuquerque plus most of the people in Grants and Roswell and Tucumcari were at Coronado Mall. Lines for fitting rooms and check-out counters snaked around end-caps overloaded with backpacks, t-shirts, and pencil cases.

I should admit that I made that last one up. I didn’t see a single pencil case, but I feel like I should have. There’s nothing like a new pencil case full of freshly sharpened #2 Ticonderoga pencils to get the school year off to a good start.

Luke, who does not love shopping with his big sisters, found a bunch of things in the first few minutes. The rest of us decided to skip the crowds and try again later in the week.

So, that’s the latest installment

in How I Spent My Summer Vacation. After that whole month of not writing, you might think I’d come back with essays that are less prosaic, more moving, and brimming with pent-up wisdom, but I’m going to have to disappoint you. This whole cross country move seems to be grounding me in the literal.

There’s just this one thing. When we picked the grandkids up on Saturday morning, Aurora’s hair was purple and Cali was wearing a t-shirt I’ve never seen before. “Everything is grace,” the shirt said.

Indeed.

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July 30, 2018August 5, 2018

Packing: Five Things I’ve Learned

Shredder, lamp bases, frogs. That’s my favorite of the 151 labels I’ve written on boxes since I started packing back in June. For the last two months, I’ve been running up and down the stairs, lifting, sorting, tossing, carrying, wrapping, weighing, taping, and stacking every single thing my husband and I own.

Rusty has been watching me with his head tilted to the side. He is worried that I might pick him up, wrap him in newspaper, and throw him in a box labeled winter coats, wine chiller, dog. (And if you want to know why a person moving to Florida would have a box labeled winter coats in the first place, you are already beginning to understand what this process has been like for me.)

Rusty’s distress aside, I’m now happy to report that the movers will be here in a few days, and we are ready. I hadn’t planned to stop posting essays while I packed, but once packing was underway, I couldn’t sit still long enough to complete anything that wasn’t going to end up swaddled in cardboard.

I like to think I was just listening to my old friend Rilke. He says, “You ought to wait and gather sense and sweetness for a whole lifetime, and a long one if possible, and then, at the very end, you might perhaps be able to write ten good lines.”

I don’t know if I’ll pull off ten good lines here, but I do feel like I have been packing for a whole lifetime. Perhaps I’ve even gained a little sense and sweetness. Here is what I’ve learned while my blog was dark.

ONE: I can only be single-minded about one thing at a time.

What’s that thing that’s the opposite of an oxymoron called again? Oh, right, a tautology. That heading I just wrote fits perfectly, because the term single-minded already means one thing. But believe me, it takes more than a tight tautology to convince me that I can’t finish a paid writing project, prepare two Sunday’s worth of music to play in public, write a guest post for another blog, and keep posting on my own blog while I single-mindedly stuff 3,500 hundred square feet of house into 151 cardboard containers.

Nope, what it takes is exhaustion, sore feet, sore hands, a few tears, and a few dozen eye-rolls from Fred. Things got better when I realized I could just stop doing everything else for a while. (I offer this as a cautionary tale–if you are like me, you will conclude that unlike me, you have what it takes to pull off doing everything at once. To you I say, “Hello, kindred spirit.” We can talk again when you reach the other side.)

Two: I should have been great at Tetris.

Remember Tetris? All those little Ls and Ts and squares fall from the sky, and your job is to stack them into a perfectly filled-in wall. My step-daughter is great at it. No amount of practice could make me good at that game. I just played for free online and confirmed that I’m still terrible at it.

And yet, if I do say so myself, I am a ninja when it comes to packing. That tiny empty space at the top of the box of kitchen bowls? It would be the perfect size for my mother’s old music box. That square wooden Cathy’s Kitchen sign (my mother’s again)? That will fit perfectly to reinforce the bottom of the box with the pots and pans. In perhaps my finest ninja moment, I emptied the third roll of packing tape and realized that the cardboard ring inside would perfectly protect the little glass globe my parents brought from Italy.

Don’t even get me started on tearing off the perfect size piece of bubble wrap for every picture. I’m telling you, if this writing gig doesn’t pan out, I’ve got options.

To be fair, I should mention that Fred has a ninja packing skill of his own. He can smell an empty cardboard box from three streets away, and charm grocery stockers, gutter shop owners, and my favorite winery into passing them along. Of those 151 boxes, I think we paid for three.

Three: The gap between what I have and what I need is immense.

I probably should say obscene, but being that honest might compel me to take more action than I’m ready to take. Ever since I packed up the kitchen, we’ve been living just fine with one skillet, one 2-quart pot for boiling water, and one French press coffee pot. If you look in the boxes you’ll find something like twenty-two pots and skillets. (I didn’t count them, but I’m not exaggerating and I’m a little afraid that I might be undercounting.)

And for the record, I found that barely used French press tucked deep in a cabinet behind some dried out bandaids as I fretted about packing my real coffee pot, the one that grinds the beans and has my coffee ready for me when I wake up in the morning.

I could go on and on: clothes, shoes, books, vases, tools, even underwear. I have too much of all of them. It’s sobering to pile up all the evidence of your excess in boxes in the living room. One night I was talking to my sister and Clare told me that she came to this same realization when she was packing for her own recent move. She said she found herself crying at the size of the job, until she realized that it was ridiculous to be crying because she had too much.

While I haven’t gotten rid of anywhere near as much as I should have, Clare’s words have helped me keep this work in perspective.

Four: One thing empties another.

I started packing the same way I start every big task. I made a giant list of every area in the house I’d need to pack. It included things like “upstairs hall closet, loft, upstairs master bedroom, closet under the stairs, china cabinet, bookshelves…” and so on.

I love lists. I’m one of those people who adds things to my to-do list after I’ve completed them just so I can enjoy the satisfaction of crossing them off. This list, though, wasn’t working. For weeks and weeks, I couldn’t cross anything off. I’d start emptying the hall closet, and before I knew it, I was running to my bedroom for a sweatshirt to wrap around a tennis racket. I’d find myself needing some stuffing to keep the mugs from rattling around, so I’d head to my sock drawer. Towels dribbled out of linen closets; shoes and plastic hangers filled gaps in boxes of lamp bases and tools.

I kept complaining to friends and family that everything was in process and nothing was getting done.

Then one day, Fred and I walked around the house opening closets and tugging on drawers, and there wasn’t anything in them. Somehow we’d packed up the house without ever crossing anything off the list.

One thing empties another. I feel like there’s a lesson in there somewhere.

Five: Packing tricks you into thinking you can take it with you.

One gentle Tuesday a few weeks ago, my packing had a sound track. Aurora, the violin-playing-gymnast grandchild, is learning to play guitar. She doesn’t learn a new instrument the way I would, by buying books and obsessing over understanding every little detail.

“What are the notes for each string?” I ask her. “I don’t know,” she shrugs. She’s just learning to play one song, gently, beautifully, confidently. This morning she plays the first eight bars of “Here Comes the Sun” over and over again while I pull plates and bowls out of kitchen cabinets, wrap them in newspapers, and seal them into cardboard boxes.

It’s a gentle morning, and Aurora’s playing is light and lovely. She and I have been playing music together since she was a tiny kid who wouldn’t talk and wanted violin lessons. In a few minutes we’ll both stop and slice some strawberries for lunch. In a few weeks, she’ll start high school. She is on a mission to finish in three years. In a few months, I’ll move.

Right now, though, I’m savoring this moment standing in the kitchen. I’m not thinking about where either of us is headed tomorrow. “Here comes the sun,” the music sings again and again.

I keep wrapping plates, surprised by how easy it is to believe.

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June 4, 2018June 4, 2018

Learning to Drive

My oldest granddaughter is learning to drive. She fiddles with the levers under the seat to adjust it just so and backs out of the driveway. Her shoulders are up around her ears, and I have to coax her to relax a little.

Her eyes are glued to the pavement right in front of her. I encourage her to sweep the road with her eyes, to glance in the rearview mirror. It’s as though she is somehow paralyzed and in motion at the same time.

When I was learning to drive

someone told me to “Aim High in Steering.” It must have been a heading in the Pennsylvania Drivers’ Manual, because it’s been running through my head like a chapter heading ever since Cali first got behind the wheel of my Subaru a few weeks ago.

Today she wants a bigger challenge, so we head down Golf Course and hang a right on Montano. We’re heading for Unser, where the road cuts through the petroglyphs and intersects the far west stretch of Paseo del Norte.

The road opens out as we cruise past the volcanoes and the Double Eagle airport. The city falls away to the east, and if you aim high in steering, all you see is desert road unravelling before you. Cali takes the curves gently and doesn’t panic as impatient drivers zoom by on her left.

I’m usually a nervous passenger,

but for some reason, I channel utter zen cool when someone is learning to drive. My step-daughter still jokes that when I taught her, I would say, in a matter-of-fact tone, things like, “You might want to tap the brakes now before that semi flattens us.”

I can’t explain it, but nothing Cali does really throws me. She’s doing fine, other than the fact that she doesn’t quite get the idea of stopping gradually as you come to an intersection. (“You might want to brake sometime soon,” I say a few times.) I don’t even flinch when we hang a left and she turns into the oncoming traffic instead of the right lane. “Go to the right,” I say a few times, and she does. We don’t even have to hop the median.

My point is that while she’s cruising the desert, I have time to think about aiming high in steering. If I remember my Drivers’ Ed right, I think the idea is to pay attention to what’s happening up ahead, to lift your gaze beyond what’s right in front of you so you can anticipate problems before they happen.

It might be the advice Cali needs as she stares straight ahead, but for some reason I haven’t passed on this particular nugget yet. (“Ease off the gas when you see brake lights,” and “If there’s a ball rolling into the road, there will be a child”–these are the ones I’ve told her.)

It’s June,

so lizards are skittering up the back wall and the roses need a good dead-heading. Cali pulled uneventfully into the driveway after chalking up another hour and a half in her driving log, and I’m still chewing on”Aim High in Steering.”

Is it the opposite of living in the moment? Usually when I hear kids planning out their whole future, I cringe a little. I know teachers are supposed to be in favor of setting goals, but so much of what teenagers are planning comes from other people’s goals and expectations for them.

Most of them haven’t found that thing that makes them vibrate yet; or, if they have, too often they have to set it aside to jump through all the other hoops we put in front of them and call school.

Live now, I tell them. You’ll figure it out. Life will ask you questions and you’ll build a life by answering them.

And yet,

come October I won’t live here anymore. I yanked my gaze out of the present, and now I’m learning to drive into a different life. When I first made this decision, a friend told me that “the universe rewards boldness.”

It sounded encouraging, but I didn’t know what she meant until it started happening. Barriers, stress points, uncertainties–all those things are just evaporating. I’m aiming high in steering, and friends keep running out into the road ahead to clear the way.

This afternoon when I was trying to figure out where this post was going, I pulled The Art of Possibility off my shelf. In Chapter 8, “Giving Way to Passion,” the Zanders quote Martha Graham. She says, “There is a vitality, a life force…that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it…it will be lost.”

There’s a lesson there,

I think. Once upon a time, a Buddhist nun asked me to wash some special glasses. They had belonged to her parents, she told me. I washed them carefully, dipping them in the soapy water one at a time. As I placed the last one in the drying rack on the counter, I missed the peg, and it shattered on the tile floor.

I felt terrible, knowing that the glass was important to her. When I told her what had happened, though, she said, “It is the nature of glass to break.”

Back in January before I threw my whole life up into the air, I wrote, “It’s madness not to be who you are.” What I didn’t know then is that when you step deeply into who you are, into your unique nature, you step into energy, into Graham’s “life force.” It turns out, that force has (is?) a momentum all its own.

So that’s what I know as June warms up the lizards on the back wall. Cali is about eight hours into her life as a driver. Next time we go out, I think I’ll tell her to aim high in steering.

Right now, though, the rose bush is shouting for attention, so I’ll stop here. I’ve got to get out the clippers and make way for some new things to bloom.

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