Category Archives: memoir

Roads I’ve Known

08 Wednesday May 2013

Posted by in Communities, memoir

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My sister, my girl cousins, and I were all dressed alike in pink seersucker dresses, gifts from one of our aunts. We’d gathered at her home for a summer picnic after which the adults did what the adults typically did. They sat around in lawn chairs in the sweltering summer heat and talked about boring adult things. As the adults sat around being boring, one of the cousins led the rest of us in a procession of pink seersucker to the country road which ran in front of her house. There, she introduced us to the fine art of popping tar bubbles which simmered up to the road’s surface in summer heat.

We never wore those pink dresses again.

The road in front of my cousin’s house was so very different from the ones in my neighborhood. Mine were safe, quiet, and predictable. But for the whimsical elegance of those terminating at Hillcrest Circle where a decorative fountain once flowed, most streets were laid out in a grid crisscrossing the town. On those streets I learned to observe traffic rules while riding my bike and to look both ways before crossing on foot. Fifth and sixth grade safety patrols held out their arms to guard the intersection which led to my elementary school, only dropping their hands when they deemed  the road safe for younger students to cross.

I have been down a few different roads since those days of pink seersucker and safety patrols. Some I have no intention of revisiting.

I remember a number of family trips taken out west when my children were young. Many of the roads we traveled seemed little more than steep switchbacks and hairpin turns carved onto narrow ledges leading over and through mountain passes. Allowing barely enough room for two cars to a clear one another, the ground beyond the roads’ shoulders often dropped off steeply toward oblivion. Or Hades. Or Mordor.

And those who had constructed the roads seemed indifferent to the need for guardrails, as if to communicate, “This is the West. It’s dangerous here. Exercise caution. Drive at your own risk. Or don’t exercise caution; we don’t care.”

Once, after a day of hiking at Dead Horse Point State Park in Utah, my husband discovered a dotted line on a map indicating a road named Pucker Pass. Ever open to adventure, he turned our rental car off-road onto what he thought would be a shortcut back to our hotel. Perhaps the posted warning signs might have clued us in that Pucker Pass was not going to be a real time-saver. Would-be travelers were advised not even to attempt the road without a high-clearance four-wheel drive vehicle. Also, signs indicated that should emergency assistance be required to rescue a car trapped on the road, removal fees would likely exceed $1000.

We made it through the pass, having had to stop at least once for my husband to remove a boulder from the middle of the road. I have no need to make that drive ever again.

My children grew up within the relative safety of a neighborhood on a cul-de-sac. There, they could roller skate and ride their bikes and scooters out on a road which seldom saw traffic. The year my daughter left for college, I followed in my car as she and her father drove north together in her little gray Subaru. Prior to that trip, she’d had very little experience in highway driving. As I watched her signal and change lanes, and saw tractor trailers merging practically on top of her rear bumper, I screamed out prayer, “Lord! Take care of my baby girl! Those trucks are so big and she’s so little!” Every mile down the highway placed distance between her and the safety of the cul-de-sac.

I watch as others who are very dear to my heart travel a winding, unpredictable road. Their way takes unexpected twists and turns, and signposts for navigation seem few. Their paths don’t seem to register on a smart phone or a GPS; there is no dotted line on a map marking the way for them to follow. There seems light enough to see but one step forward at a time; they walk in the company of few faithful companions.

Yet safety calls out from behind, “This is the way, walk in it, when you turn to the right or when you turn to the left.” (Isaiah 30:21)

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Click here for a virtual ride through Pucker Pass.

Linking, for the first time, with Nacole @ Six in the Sticks for #concrete words, and with emily and the imperfect prose community:

Playing With Paperwork

22 Monday Apr 2013

Posted by in Communities, family, memoir

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Saturday was going to be a writing day. But for the baby shower I missed because I wrote the wrong date on my calendar, I had no commitments. A full day of uninterrupted hours stretched before me.

And I wrote not a single syllable.

I sat down at my desk, logged onto my computer to take care of some online banking, and quickly became distracted by the pile of file folders next to me and on the floor. As one who wears the label organized with no small measure of pride, I find piles of clutter mess with my psyche in profoundly disturbing ways. I blame the piles for the shower date mix-up.

In order to make space for my folders, I had to weed through many which had resided in the deep file drawer since my daughter had used the desk as a high school student. I unearthed homeschool records, transcripts, and letters of recommendation; copies of applications for colleges and scholarships, and several years’ worth of support letters from short-term mission projects in which both of my children had participated. I pitched catalogs from which I had ordered school uniforms for my son. I shredded outdated copies of FAFSA forms

As I sorted piles of paperwork representing years of my children’s histories, I was completely unprepared for the effect my little archaeological dig would have on my heart.

I found a copy of the speech my daughter had written in her seventeen-year old voice, one she had intended to deliver at her graduation party though she never did. She had composed words of appreciation for teachers and mentors, and pastors and friends, who had walked with her throughout her childhood and taught her about music and life and faith.

I uncovered the letter she had received from the admissions office of the college she attended, the one notifying her of her acceptance. I had forgotten how personalized the letter was, the admissions officer having taken care to quote excerpts from recommendations written on her behalf. I pictured myself holding the envelope while sitting in the parking lot of a bus station as I waited in her little silver Subaru for her to return from a weekend trip. I recalled the mix of emotions I felt as she opened the letter— both pride in her acceptance and disappointment that my first choice of colleges was not also hers. Her decisions about college and life were beginning to diverge from mine, yet they turned out to be okay and they turned out to be good.

Programs from Baccalaureate services from both high school and college were tucked away in files next to one another. Graduation announcements, napkins, confetti, and other memorabilia tumbled out of another folder. I found a picture of my daughter, dressed in her high school cap and gown, posing in front of the Snow Fountain Weeping Cherry tree in my front yard.

As each folder and every paper passed through my fingers, I remembered how important each had seemed at the time. Each signified major turning points; each represented years of doubts, fears, questions, and prayer. Everything which had once seemed monumental had, over time, eased into its place of proper proportion. I held onto a few of the treasures I unearthed, choosing several to pass along to my kids, but not many.

As I look out the window from where I sit here at my writing desk, I can see the Snow Fountain tree about to reach full flower. Each year I look forward to the beauty of its blossoms; each year its blooming is bittersweet. No sooner do its flowers fully extend than they begin to fade away and fall to the ground. Six seasons of blooms have passed since my daughter posed in front of this tree in her cap and gown.

Time goes by and seasons pass. I filter once important papers through my hands. Former milestones yield their way to greater glories. And all men are like grass, and all their glory is like the flowers of the field; the grass withers and the flowers fall, but the word of the Lord stands forever.*

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*From yesterday’s call to worship. Joining Michelle, Laura, and Jen and the sisterhood.


Garrison and Me

25 Monday Mar 2013

Posted by in Communities, family, memoir, quirkiness

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“Did I ever tell you about the time I met Garrison Keillor at a writing conference?” I wrote on a friend’s Facebook wall.

She had linked to a blog post which had linked to an article written by the iconic humorist and storyteller himself. In his article, Keillor recalled the bygone days of writing when authors typed manuscripts on paper and sent them away in fat manila envelopes to a publisher for acceptance or rejection. Mr. Keillor lamented the current practice in which anyone can sit on the other side of a computer screen, type words, and declare one’s self a writer.

You know, people like me.

I first met Garrison Keillor as a young newlywed. Back in the day when our household income consisted of bimonthly checks just north of five hundred dollars, one of which was committed to the mortgage on our converted summer cottage, Saturday nights spent listening to A Prairie Home Companion provided a cheap date night for the beloved Swede and me. On occasion we listened together with our friends Steve and Nancy, another newlywed couple who, like us, sometimes scrounged through the change in their car’s ashtray just to buy milk. If we’d budgeted carefully we were able to splurge on a $9.99 bottle of Charter Oak Red wine, one produced by a local Connecticut winery and which we considered to be not half bad. As our only prior exposure to the fruit-of-the-vine had come from bottles labeled Riunite, we began to fancy ourselves connoisseurs of the good stuff.

Steve and Nancy had descended from strong Nordic stock and, together with my Swedish husband and me, we reveled in Keillor’s tales of Norwegian bachelor farmers and Lutheran covered hot-dish suppers. Raised on classic rock from the seventies, we grew to appreciate the music of his weekly bluegrass and folk artists. And we learned that Powder Milk Biscuits, heavens they were tasty.

We tuned in each week on the refurbished stereo receiver the Swede had purchased with earnings from his summer job in a sewage treatment plant the year before we were married. If it weren’t such a cliché, I’d say something about us being poor but happy.

Ten years later when we had a few more nickels to rub together, I gave the Swede a collection of Keillor’s tapes as an anniversary gift. I thought it a fitting way to commemorate our early years together. Sadly, the vineyard which had produced Charter Oak Red was no longer in business.

Our increased fortunes at that time allowed us to purchase a used Volvo station wagon—a sturdy, reliable vehicle designed by Swedish engineers—in which to haul our kids and their belongings to things like school, soccer practice, and the public library. Or so we thought. Although I had descended from the house and lineage of Donaldson, evidently the car viewed my dark brown hair with suspicion and questioned the authenticity of my Swedish roots. It conspired against me, rising up in mutiny and forcing me to replace nearly every highly expensive part manufactured in Sweden, but for its windshield wiper blades.

Unable to appease the Volvo’s evil spirits, or exorcise its demons, we finally traded it in or sold it for scrap, I can’t quite recall which. Some months later, I realized I must have left one of the Swede’s Lake Wobegon tapes in the car’s player, the one which contained a favorite story of ours of Pete Peterson’s Memorial Duck Blind and the building of giant decoys.

Several years ago I noticed The Hartford Courant, the nation’s oldest-continually published newspaper and paper of record here in Connecticut, was hosting a writing conference. Garrison Keillor was scheduled as keynote speaker.  I signed up thinking I might possibly, someday, maybe be going to write something. And though stalk may be too powerful a verb to describe my desire to meet the minstrel of Lake Wobegon, I wasn’t about to pass up the opportunity.

Keillor arrived on stage, dressed in a dark, conservative suit and tie, having taken the train from New York City. But for the shiny red sneakers on his feet, he could have passed for a Republican. After Keillor spoke I waited in line to meet him, asking him to sign the CD I had purchased to replace the tape left behind in my car. Trembling as I stood before him in the entirety of my five-feet, eleven inches plus heels, I relayed the tale of my missing Lake Wobegon tape carried off by the evil Volvo. And I’ll never forget his words to me:

“My, my, my, you’re one long, cool drink-of-water,” he said.

It is precisely this astute power of perception which, I believe, contributes to Mr. Keillor’s success as a storyteller.

At one time I had pictures of me standing next to Mr. Keillor, evidence of our meeting, but those disappeared a couple of hard drive crashes ago. I do, however, have his autograph on the inside cover of the replacement Lake Wobegon CD:

For Swede, have mercy.
Garrison Keillor
American Federation of Ducks

I’ve been thinking I’d like to return to those sweet days of listening to Prairie Home on the radio. A girl can learn a thing or two about storytelling from listening to Mr. Keillor. Perhaps I’ll splurge and treat myself to a $9.99 bottle of wine.

I’m not sure my ancient stereo receiver still picks up any stations which carry A Prairie Home Companion, but that’s alright. I’ve discovered I can listen to archived stories and stream the show online. Despite its reputation for bullying the written word off the printed page, there remain a few things worth reading and listening to on the internet.

And that’s the news from this side of the computer screen.

If you would like to receive future posts via email, click here. And would you consider “liking” my Facebook writer page? If so, click here. Thanks–I appreciate you!

Update: Can’t believe I forgot to mention this! If you’re a fan of good storytelling and the spoken word, might I suggest checking out my friend Sam Van Eman’s project, A Beautiful Trench it Was? Sam is a gifted storyteller, and he’s got some powerful, redemptive stories to tell.

Sharing long-ago playdates with Laura @ The Wellspring:

 

Not-So-Great Expectations

15 Tuesday Jan 2013

Posted by in books, Communities, family, memoir

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Nineteen years ago this month, my husband and I landed in a blizzard at Logan Airport in Boston, having just returned from the Philippines with our new son.  His first taste of American life consisted of being stuffed into a snowsuit and strapped into a car seat, neither of which had he ever experienced during his first eleven months of life. Born where snow exists only as a theoretical concept, into the kind of rural poverty in which the safety of a car seat remains a luxury beyond the imagination of most, my son entered the US and immediately began encountering drastic changes from life as he had known it. While I’m not sure it’s even developmentally appropriate to suggest an eleven-month old could form expectations about the way life ought to be, I’m certain nothing in his prior experience had prepared him for what awaited him on the ground in Boston.

I have been reading Booked: Literature in the Soul of Me, by Karen Swallow Prior at the same time I have been reflecting on my son’s arrival in the US. Booked is a delightful book about books, a personal memoir about ways in which God has used works of literature to nurture Prior’s faith. As I’ve been reading this book I keep finding myself smiling at several of the titles Prior mentions, as though she has reminded me of some very old and dear friends.

Booked is the topic of the book club discussion over at The High Calling this month, and this week’s conversation included Prior’s chapter on Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. As I was reading this chapter and thinking about my son, I was reminded that so very few things about being his mother or about marriage or life in general, seem to have matched the expectations I had developed for them. My beliefs about what family life should look like were shaped by the interactions within my  own childhood home, by books filled with conventional parenting wisdom and, more than likely, by many a Friday night spent watching Mike and Carol Brady resolve family conflict within the space of a half hour sitcom. As the Type-A mother of a musician son, I found my reality rarely matched up to the expectations I had developed.

But I also look back over the past nineteen years and see where I have been surprised by grace. I have seen the grace which brought this young man into my home and my heart. Grace has permitted us both to dissolve into anger and tears and also to find our way back to one another in forgiveness and restoration. Grace has opened my eyes to the beauty of his music and the way God uses it to bless others.

In reflecting on the theme of grace in Dickens’ Great Expectations, Prior wrote:

The human impulse to create and find meaning is a gift of grace. Grace is the opposite of “expectations” because it is so, well, unexpected. And, interestingly enough, grace is at the center of Great Expectations.

During this past Advent season, my pastor preached through Isaiah’s prophecies about the coming consolation of Israel. At the same time, the school shootings in Sandy Hook, Connecticut, weighed heavy upon my heart. I’m sure I was not alone in my wrestling to make sense of the ways of a good and powerful God in the midst of this dark and ugly world.  In his sermon, my pastor asked the unspoken question which was at the heart of my conflict:

Did the coming of Christ really change anything?

Did his coming make any real difference to his followers who endured persecution? Has his coming offered any hope to that small grieving community in Connecticut? Didn’t his own followers, while walking along the road to Emmaus, give voice to their disappointment, saying:

We had hoped he was the one who was going to redeem Israel.

Jesus so rarely meets the expectations of his followers, but not because he isn’t good and not because he isn’t powerful.  When I find myself either puzzled or disappointed by God, I often need to look no further than my own expectations which I have placed upon him. I am so limited in my thinking about how he ought to act or what he should do. I sometimes find myself angry or disappointed with God, and I wrestle against my circumstances as though he has stuffed me into a snowsuit and strapped me into a car seat against my will. My expectations of a mighty Savior would certainly never have sent him to the cross.

I often remain at a complete loss as to how God is at work at my life and in the world. But I know he is, and I know he is good, because he continues to surprise me with his grace. And, as Prior and Dickens have so beautifully reminded me, that grace is indeed the opposite of my expectations.

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Source cited: Prior, Karen Swallow (2012-10-26). Booked: Literature in the Soul of Me (p. 65). T. S. Poetry Press. Kindle Edition.

To read more reflections on Booked, by Karen Swallow Prior, click over to The High Calling.

Joining Michelle DeRusha for Hear It, Use It:

Having Myself a Merry Little Advent

04 Tuesday Dec 2012

Posted by in Communities, family, memoir

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There were times, during my years as a homeschooling mom, when I made my children cry during Bible lessons. And, no, I’m not tremendously proud of this fact.

I had taken vows together with my husband, standing before God and a church full of people, promising to instruct my children in the doctrines of our holy religion. And I took those vows seriously. So when it came time to wade through the books of Chronicles and Kings, I felt a sense of urgency in making sure my children were paying attention, knew these lessons were important, and could tell the difference between Jeroboam and Rehoboam, and between Abijah and Ahijah. And sometimes urgency crossed a line and wandered headlong into the territory of scolding and yelling.

As if by adopting a more earnest and solemn tone I could lead my children into deeper love for God and his word. As if the Holy Spirit needed my help in awakening the hearts of my children.

I listen to discussions among friends, and eavesdrop on those in the blogosphere, about making Christmas celebrations meaningful, and sometimes I recognize a similar sense of urgency in these conversations. As followers of Christ, we know this Advent season matters. The Incarnation is a pivotal event in redemptive history, and we long for our family members to focus their attention more on Bethlehem than on the North Pole. And so we discuss books and programs and tools for retelling stories about shepherds and angels and wise men, hoping to find just the right one to breathe life into the familiar narrative.

For years, I used a felt tree on which my children could place symbols representing elements of the Christmas story. They typically stared at the ceiling during the obligatory readings then argued over whose turn it was to hang an ornament on the tree. When I think about those years of trying to make Bible lessons meaningful, I recognize how often my efforts fell short. Because the thing about teaching kids is this:

You can’t sell them on something you’re not convinced of yourself.

A mother who hides a stash of Twizzlers in the laundry room cupboard is going to have a hard time persuading her children of the importance of a healthy diet. A child probably isn’t going to see the value of getting outside for fresh air and exercise if he has a mother who can’t even remember which pair of sneakers in the garage is hers. And children probably are not going to fall in love with the Bible if their own mother hasn’t sensed God’s heartbeat within the pages of the history of his people.

I have heard of mothers like this. And the things is, kids seem able to sniff out hypocrisy as well as they can a stash of Twizzlers in the laundry room.

This year as I prepare to celebrate Christmas, I’m tempted to insist my husband and adult son join me in my Advent journey. But as I think back to my years of homeschooling, I realize the only heart in which I can make room for Jesus is my own.

I’ve set up the Advent wreath, and I’m lighting the candles. I’ve chosen readings and prayers, and I’m making room to listen for God’s heartbeat as I read, once again, about the light shining in the darkness. I’m not keeping my Advent journey a secret, but neither am I insisting my husband and son join me in it. They’re welcome to participate or not. I’ve come to realize that I can’t make anyone else have a meaningful encounter with Jesus, and I can’t force anyone else to have a happy holiday. But I can offer the gift of a merrier Christmas to those I love by finding, for myself, real hope in the familiar tidings of comfort and joy. And by allowing that hope to transform me.

Last year my daughter, newly married, asked if she could have the old felt Christmas tree Advent calendar we had used when she was a child. I guess that means I didn’t scar her too deeply with my earnest and solemn attempts at making Christmases meaningful. She is expecting her firstborn child this Advent season, so she is experiencing her own journey of anticipation. I hope and pray that in years to come, as her family hangs ornaments on that old felt tree, they will recognize the Father’s heartbeat through that of their wife and mother.

Joining Jen and the Sisterhood, and with Emily @ imperfect prose:



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