A Previous Chapter

In September, 2007, driving to Cape Cod in my first Mini Cooper, I planned to write while enjoying a house-swap right in the middle of the Cape.  The trip was all about the freedom of backroads. 

Even driving off the beaten track, I move to the highways late in the day if motels are scarce. Usually, it's Interstate 10. But in 2007,  I decided to travel I-20--a decision that would lead to a most improbable romance. 

The soundtrack to this trip, in retrospect, is "Those were the days, my friends, I thought they'd never end." I had an Obama sticker on my bumper, Hope and Change. I felt fearless, buoyant, hopeful, and free.  Anything seemed possible.

In Hope, I visited Bill Clinton's home place and bought a souvenir bumper sticker: "A woman's place is in the House--and the Senate." Then I went next door to the visitor's center housed in a former train depot.

Mike and I--the only visitors in the depot-- left there at the same time.  He was attracted to my Cooper and my bumper stickers. (If I had had a wish list for a romance, which I didn't, I could check off "Not- A-Republican.")

I wasn't looking for a man.  I was singing along to Kebmo: "She ain't looking for a lover, she ain't looking for romance, she just wants to dance." But things can change pretty fast on Road Trip Time. 

He gave me his cell number in case I needed any help along the road.  Since we were both heading toward Little Rock, I said something I'd never have said in Ordinary Time: "I'll just follow you." We got next door rooms.  We had barbecue for dinner, danced in a parking lot. 

We were so hopeful and innocent that day, so sky's the limit!  We spent a few days together, dancing on Beale Street in Memphis, exploring The Great Smokeys on his Harley.  I was smitten with this biker  from Georgia. 

What I'd give for a few days like those again!

I'm starting to wish for another road trip adventure.

Some wonderful love stories do not end with Happily Ever Afterwards  Ours had a few bumpy roads.  But for as long as it lasted, we both still recall a magical and unforgettable chapter. 

In 2016, Mike and I returned to Cape Cod and visited Linda and Steve.   Linda recently sent me this picture, reminding me of the weeks we spent in New England--even though we both knew it was probably going to be our last shared road trip. It's bittersweet.  But the story was mostly sweet. 

Things

I woke up this morning to thunder and lightning the likes of which are rare in our little patch of South Texas.  Our dry ground got much-needed rain and the light show at five in the morning was impressive.  

This is one of the busiest Fiesta weekends, but if this storm holds out, parties, parades, and concerts will be canceled. Next Saturday is the Pooch Parade in our neighborhood, the only Fiesta event I'll be doing.  

Yesterday was sunny.  Thanks to some great suggestions from Janet--my decorating muse--I spent the day organizing the casita and giving away and selling a few things.  The casita is now transformed,  more spacious.   It's good to have a second pair of eyes in editing a space, and Janet's eyes are spot-on. 

Things.  Some we love and won't part with.  But in a house the size of mine, it is fun to lighten up, let things we're done loving go their own way. 

Carlene and I spent the first hour today talking.  Her sister Dot, six years younger, has decided to move into a senior living facility.  "She's gotten rid of EVERY thing," Carlene said, "Even her car."  Dot finds it liberating to lighten all the way.  She's in great health, like her sister, but she's tired of taking care of a large house. (Her husband of twenty years, not in good health, is moving into assisted living.)  To each her own, we agreed, though it's a little hard to imagine Dot without the backdrop of all the things she's made and collected.  

Selling rugs and lamps on Facebook last night, I ran into former high school classmates. I was shocked to read their sentiments.

For example: 

After all the horrific shootings, one former classmate defended the NRA and guns, putting the blame on the fact that we no longer have "prayer in schools."  She wrote about the aftermath of the Uvalde shootings, portraying the victims as "favorites" of God, happily entering the Kingdom of Heaven. 

It's hard to find a place to put this in the house of my mind. 

A different kind of travel

I've spent a few months in the Land of Infirmity, meeting a grumpier limpier  version of myself.  It's not pretty. 

Carlene always says, "Everything is tuition"--and I can vouch for it.  Chronic pain teaches patience on good days and accepting emotional outbursts on other days.  

On Friday, I got two steroid shots in each foot.  Because I'm a chicken and because friends told me the horrors of needles in the feet, I opted to sleep during the procedure.  The outcome is iffy.  

On Saturday morning, I walked Luci, cleaned the pollen-encrusted porch,  and rearranged a bit of furniture.

On Sunday, I had a meltdown.  I cried and considered moving to another country, the Land of Infirmity enough already! 

Monday was a respite from ups and downs--an easy day in which I dared to believe the needles had injected magic after all.

Today, the roller coaster dipped again. 

So what's the lesson?  I will let you know.  At the moment, I'm collecting travel brochures. 

Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris

The last few days--where to start?

I'll start with last night's dinner, Lorraine and I on the patio of Down on Grayson, white lights twinkling, Luci on the ground quietly whimpering with desire to play with the giant Bernedoodle at the next table. 

We two humans enjoyed a yummy dinner--Thai steak salad and onion rings (I'd been craving onion rings for weeks) and I kept thinking how fun it was to be out, at night, in the world of people who go festive places at night.  

As we were leaving, I walked Luci over to the enormous dog, a bit trepidatious, but they liked each other right away.  For all their obvious differences, they know: we're both the same sort of creature.  

I felt so energized by the outing that I didn't want to go to bed. So I stayed up for two cinema trips, the pair of them lasting until 2:00 in the morning. Usually, I watch more  serious fare, but these picks took me to Bali, England, and Paris, made me happy and delivered sweet dreams. 

Ticket to Paradise was pure fun--starring George Clooney and Julia Roberts, long-divorced middle-aged parents of Lily. When Lily's law school graduation trip to Bali becomes romantic, her parents fly to Bali to save her from "making the same mistake we made." 

Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris is, at the moment, my new favorite feel-good movie.  It's about an English cleaning woman who follows her dreams, and that's all I'm going to say for now.  

Letting In the Truth, Embracing the Real

Dreams are delicate things... born out of hope and desire and air.

They are vulnerable to daylight, as fragile as a moth's wing.

The brush of a hand can crush them.

Dreams also have the power to fuel our journey to the future.

They drive us forth like engines.

Dreams are the bricks with which we build a life we cannot touch.

They are signposts and signals.

Dreams are the promise we make to ourselves.

Call the Midwife, Season 12, episode 8

Every episode  begins with a voice-over like this one by the mature Jenny who was a young midwife in Poplar when the series began. 

I haven't had much to say these past weeks, but much to take in.  Call the Midwife always offers the most wonderful embrace of wisdom and human to human love.  So I'm departing from what I'd planned to write about.  I'll just name this series an enchantment for me, a warm cozy blanket.

It's been a rough patch. Chronic pain has raised my blood pressure and caused me at times to feel like a virtual hermit, up all hours of the night, then catching up with sleep during the day.

In the big picture of things, it's small potatoes.  The world feels is anxious, too, in a chaotic global pain. Innocent people are being killed almost every day in America in places we used to assume were safe. In America--more mass murders than anywhere in the world. 

Two young extraordinary representatives named Justin were ejected from the Tennessee state house because they protested against gun violence. People are demonstrating all over the country about injustices against reproductive freedom and gun violence while extreme right leaders are doing everything they can to hold on to their puny pathetic power.

When I feel powerless, I watch (or read, or listen to)  something reassuring and powerful. Or I visit, in person, via email, and on the phone with good people.  I am rich in knowing so many. 

Dear precious people check in with me every day, walk Luci when I can't, bring food or share a meal, offer to go with me to doctors' appointments.  Yesterday, Will took me to breakfast and went with me to see the orthopedist, my second pair of ears.  It was wonderful to have someone who loves me help absorb information, strap on my new ankle brace, and help me feel peaceful on an otherwise stressful day. 

"Meanwhile the world goes on" keeps echoing in my mind, words from the Mary Oliver poem, "Wild Geese."

Way bigger things than mine are going on and on and on.  People are losing loved ones to disease and random violence.  

I haven't even finished the book I intended to write about on my last post. I've been so absorbed with the anxiety part I haven't even gotten to the "finding enchantment" part.  All I know at this moment is the truth of another line in this most recent episode of Midwife: "Go where the love is."

Each episode ends with an epilogue, too, like this ever so timely one: 

We cannot predict what the fates will bring.

We can only find strength and hope and survival in each other.

There will be new dreams one day.

There will be reasons to go on.

Let in the truth.

Embrace the real.

Open your arms to the things you did not look for, for you will find what you did not seek, be given what you did not know you lacked, and be lavished with a joy that takes your breath away.

Here are life's riches next to you.

Here, in the faces of your friends... in the laughter of their children... in the tenderness of those you love and work and lived with.

This is community, our end and our beginning.

Enchantment and Wonder

When I asked a younger friend, "Do you ever wake up feeling agitated for no particular reason?" she answered without hesitation, "God, yes!"

Later, I read a few pages in a book called Enchantment, Awakening Wonder in An Anxious Age by Katherine May:

"Lately, I can't read a whole page of a book.  It is frictionless, this sliding of attention. I thought it would resolve once the lockdown ended, but it did not.  It's as if some kind of lubrication has been applied to my choices.  I intend to do one thing, but my unconscious shunts me discretely away. It has other plans for me.  I am supposed to be watching, I am supposed to be looking over my shoulder, alert to the next threat."

Isn't this a conversation we're all having?  Why do we feel different after Trump was elected, after January 6th 2021, after COVID, after lockdown, school murders with assault weapons happening every week? Older people might assume that anxiety comes with aging, illness, caring for others, or losses.  

When people twenty and thirty years younger are expressing the same feeling, I realize that a kind of homesickness feeling has hit us all.  

But the book has a subtitle: Enchantment, Awakening Wonder. 

I will let you know what I discover in these pages. 

Being Woke

When the MAGA Super-Girls and Super-Boys say "woke," it's not a compliment. Marjorie and The Guy Who Made up His Resume To Win Votes, for example.  

The extreme right uses "woke," as a pejorative.  It's bad to let kids read books about slavery.  Or books written by minority writers they deem to have a "hidden agenda."  It's terrible for teachers--a fireable offense--to talk about human rights of any stripe.  

Just as The Guy Who Made Up His Resume, the inventors of "woke" don't bother with truth-telling.  If a position goes against their own, it goes in the "Woke" basket, pretending that only liberals are curious, enlightened and tolerant. They want us to all go back to the past, to the imaginary lands of "Great" and "Again." 

If you, like me, want to hang out with people who don't fear truth-telling, the podcast On Being is a great place to start.  Krista Tippet has been interviewing scientists, artists, theologians, poets, and thinkers for over 20 years.  The conversations are always illuminating.  

You can listen to the rich archive on the podcast, or you can go to On Being and listen to them or read transcripts.  

For those who welcome awakenings and don't glorify sleeping in caves of right-wing opinion (which is all of you) check out Krista's community. 

On Being

Episode 1, Season 12, Call the Midwife

Not every new beginning is a good one.

There are things we cannot clean away,

but we can invest in the water and the light.

We can choose to listen and to speak.

We are more enmeshed in in each other's lives

than we can imagine.

We are all somebody's memory,

someone's joy, or their regret.

We are the weavers of each other's cloth,

the keepers of our fellow travelers in time.

Change is not a threat.

It is a chance, and if we embrace it

we can begin again.

   

Canaan Harris

Tomorrow I will be attending online my nephew's service in Colorado.  Pastor of Central Christian Church in Denver, here he is with his wife, Niki, two children, Ezekiel and Eden.

Canaan sang and played the guitar with his son,  an accomplished harpist. 

He had been sick for a few weeks, and was diagnosed with an aggressive cancer just four days before his death on March 13th.

Here is Canaan in a wheelbarrow with Day when they were 2 and 5, the first two grandchildren of my parents, Lloyd and Carlene. 

Traveling Without Moving Much

For the past few weeks, I've traveled a great deal--right here on my traveling machine:

From Ireland to Vietnam: Noble on Amazon, a true story about an Irish woman who improves the living situation of thousands of Vietnamese orphans. 

France of olden days: Marie Antoinette

Croatia: Faraway on Netflix is a romantic getaway movie in the tradition of one of my all-time favorites, Shirley Valentine. 

Italy: Paradise on PBS (the Italian version is Walter's Presents, not Masterpiece).  While it's a bit soap opera-ish, it's an enjoyable series.  Season 3 begins mid-April.  It tells the same story, in Italian as BBC series "The Paradise" and "The Selfridges." 

To ski slopes near Durango, Colorado: Pritchett family texts

To the land of childhood memories: A long conversation with my brother Bob. 

To the world of 1925 fashion, the year Carlene was born: Pinterest