We Gather Together

The other day I was taking a morning walk through our neighborhood; the air winter crisp, the sky icy azure.  High above me, a raucous, insistent trumpeting swirled.  Looking up I saw geese gathering, circling around and around, over one hundred geese, their numbers swelling as I tallied. I stood, my head tilted skyward, and watched the geese form three V's, turn southward, and disappear beyond the horizon of trees.  A gardener raking leaves nearby raised his arm to the sky.  We pointed upward and nodded.  Our smiles spread through my body like warm sunshine.

Every year we gather with church friends at an annual Christmas party. The event follows a predictable routine.  We search for a parking spot along our hostess' long circular driveway, enter her wide foyer, and inhale the festive fragrances of December -- chocolate, cinnamon, vanilla.  Guests fill their plates with finger food and chat in the warmth of generous surroundings sparkling with candlelight, poinsettias, and laughter.    We listen to a holiday story, share favorite memories, and sing Christmas carols augmented with lighthearted favorites like Jingle Bells, I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus, and I'll Be Home for Christmas.  A pleasant glow accompanies us home.

Today our supper group, The Clean Plate Club, met for our yearly Christmas brunch, this time in our home. In preparation, Herb and I finished gift wrapping, plumbing repairs, and casserole baking.  Our guests are dug-in friends, familiar with almost fifty years of celebrations and griefs. Someone will start a story about a favorite Christmas gift, which for this group is often about an orange in a stocking, one rare Christmas orange still evoking a luscious aroma and extravagant flavor.  We doubt any mesh bag of oranges from today's Kroger grocery could match its allure.

At Thanksgiving a granddaughter asked, "Oma, do you have Hanukkah in Kentucky?  We have it in Colorado but it might be different in Kentucky.  Maybe you don't have it."  She needed to know since she was coming to visit during the seven days of Hanukkah.  How was she to choose between Thanksgiving in Kentucky and Hanukkah in Colorado?  She needed the customs and comfort of both events.

If our memories should fade, our desire for them would not.  Even when we least expect it, we find ourselves surprised by reminders of the order of life, its repetitions and natural patterns: geese gathering, leaf raking, gift wrapping, cookie baking, seasonal singing, candle lighting.  We bask in the glow of the familiar, its rhythm, and harmony.  We don't require intensity; we need balance and providence, that which is given and that which we create.

We pray for freedom from the temptations of discouragement and its devilish companion fear, which follow us daily, echoing from FOX and CNN, inhabiting workplaces and highways, even invading ordinary conversations.  Let us more deliberately step away from distractions and into essential patterns, colored by wonder, faith, charity, and godly love.

The Blame Game

My Honda's rear bumper represents a dilemma.  Who should pay for its jagged, smashed in damage?

Surely someone is to blame.

The fella at the Honda repair shop asked me, "Who was at fault?"  And the owner of Bird Auto repairs wanted to know what happened and who caused it.  "You should call that guy and ask him to pay for this!"

I shouldn't have to pay for my new bumper.  I liked the sound of that, zero for me, $700 for the other driver, who, by the way, drove away without a scratch -- unless he bent a tire rim or had to replace his two front tires when his right front tire failed as a result of slamming into my car's rear bumper.

Except...it's complicated.

On the way to Saturday market, I reminded myself not to park near the entrance to the lot because drivers had been entering it carelessly.  I chose a slot away from the entrance and away from any other vehicles.  No cars were adjacent to my car when I walked off to my favorite vegetable vendor.

When I returned to my car, it was dwarfed by an adjacent extended cab, long bed truck.  Apparently the pickup's driver also wanted to avoid parking near the market's entrance.

I'm well rehearsed on how to back out of a parking space. However,  I do not know how to see through a truck.  I now realize that asking someone to watch for me as I backed out would have been advisable.  But hindsight doesn't come first;  it comes when?  You got it-- afterwards!

After you slip out of the space, after you crane your head as if you really do have x-ray vision, after you hear the thud and feel the surprising punch of another vehicle hitting yours.  

Where did HE come from?  But of course, HE came from the entrance you had carefully avoided.

"Oh, I'm so sorry, ma'am," he said.  "Are you okay?"  He looked dumbfounded.  And he was sincerely sorry. "I just wasn't watching.  I was looking toward the other lane."

I thought, "%^*#%!"

"This has been the worst morning."  And he did look frazzled, this man on the way to buy vegetables for his wife, this man with the unperturbed family dog in the backseat.

"It's just a bumper," I said.

"I was hurrying.  My mother is in a nursing home.  My dad fell off the roof and is in the hospital.  I have to get to Indiana today.  And now this!"

After we traded essential information and asked things like "What's your dog's name?"  And "What church do you go to?" I drove off.

Okay, so he wasn't watching.  He was in a hurry and was distracted.  But... I chose the parking space.  Besides,  I could have asked a friend to watch for an oncoming car.

Why make problems for this fella?  Because he was more to blame than I?  Or maybe he wasn't.  Maybe circumstances simply complicated our Saturday-to-market choices.

I could have called him and asked him to split the cost with me.  I think he would have been glad to do that.  I went so far as to rehearse my request.  But I just couldn't do it.  It was only a bumper.  I would eventually have enough money to pay for its repairs.

Don't get the wrong idea here.  I can be self-righteous.  Just ask my husband.  Once I get on my high horse, it would take a crane to pull me from my saddle.

I just couldn't find any steam for blaming the other guy.  And without that steam, I couldn't ask for recompense.

So for now, I'm driving around with a jagged hole in my car's bumper.  I'm even getting used to it.  It's an image thing:  I'm the kind of person who can wait to have a bumper fixed, which kind of surprised me, the notorious perfectionist and consummate editor of life.

----------------
Blame is just a lazy person's way of making sense of chaos. -- Doug Coupland, author of All Families are Psychotic.

Purloined Cakes

Ellie traced the outline of her name on the lined paper lying on her desk.  E-L-L-I-E. The morning bell had sounded.  The twitter of five-year-olds settling into morning kindergarten rose and fell from pockets of the room.

"Good, morning, children," welcomed Mrs. Alexander.  "Does anyone have a birthday today?"

"I do!" shouted Stephen.

"Me too!" said Ellie, impulsively.

"Are you sure, Ellie?"  Mrs. Alexander remembered vaguely Ellie's birthday celebration in the fall, six months earlier.

"Yes, really.  It is."  Ellie knew she was fibbing. She could feel the fib on her skin and in her tummy.  She didn't know to say, "I was only kidding, but I wish it were."  She hadn't learned yet how to squelch spontaneous outbursts for attention.

In Mrs. Alexander's class all birthdays were celebrated with pictures of cakes, colored and decorated by the children.  Ellie loved coloring and decorating her cake picture, but disliked having to give hers away to someone else, even if that was the reason for the drawing and coloring, to celebrate someone else.  If it could be her birthday, she could keep her picture.  

For Stephen she made chocolate cake with strawberries.  For herself, she made a lemon cake with red rose buds.   On the blackboard in the front of the room were Stephen's and her name.    S-T-E-P-H-E-N.   E-L-L-I-E.  She carefully copied Stephen's name in purple above his cake.  Her own name she wrote in green crayon.

Mrs. Alexander collected all the cake pictures.  She would give them to Stephen and Ellie before the dismissal bell.

As the day continued, premonitions of dread and embarrassment seeped into Ellie's thoughts.  How would she deal with twenty-six colored cake pictures?  What would she tell her mother when she got home?

Her classmates congratulated her.  "Wait 'til you see the cake I made for you!"  said Susan, her favorite classmate.  "I made a chocolate cake for you," said Peter who liked to ride bikes with her down Poppy Avenue.  "Happy Birthday," said shy Judy.

What would she say if her friends discovered her lie!  The fib on her skin creeped into her neck.  Her feet squirmed.  Her eyes avoided Mrs. Alexander's.

As she left school with the twenty-six cake pictures in a folder, she considered throwing them away, but she felt like everyone's eyes were on her in the school halls and playground.  I know, she thought, I'll throw them out on the way home.

The walk home followed a short meandering street, up a set of stone steps through a neighborhood park, across Hillview Drive to Helen Avenue.  The cake pictures grew heavier and heavier with each step.  How could she throw away all the pretty cakes?  But what could she say when she got home?  She decided she would throw all but hers away.  In the alley behind the houses on Helen Avenue were garbage cans.  She would go home in the alley and discard the pictures.

As she walked through the alley, dogs barked.  A neighbor was hanging out her wash on a line.  "Hi, Ellie! Have a good day at school?"  Ellie squeezed the birthday folder to her chest.    She came to the garbage can behind the Brown's garage.  She put the birthday folder on the ground. When she reached for the can's lid, the tin lid scraped and clattered.  Suddenly dogs erupted in cacophonous barking and howling.

Ellie snatched up the folder and took off running toward home.  She raced into her yard, threw open the basement door, and pounded upstairs and into the kitchen.

"Why, Ellie, what's wrong?" asked her mother, Ruth.

"I hate those dogs."

"You can have some butterscotch pudding after you change your clothes. Oh, what do you have here?"   Ruth reached for the folder.  The pictures fell onto the floor.

"Nothing, just some pictures we colored."  Ellie swept up the pictures with her hands.

"Birthday cakes?"

"We all got cakes today.  Everybody colored a cake for everyone so no one would be left out."

"How nice."  Ruth took the pictures out of the folder and lay them on the kitchen table.  "Look how pretty they are.  Which one did you do?"

"This one.  It's a lemon cake."

"That's lovely.  It looks delicious.  Well, better change your clothes, Sweetie.  Then come have some pudding."

Ellie couldn't shake free of the gnawing lies.  The pudding felt like mud in her throat.  She wanted to blurt out the truth but it remained stuck somewhere between her belly and her tongue. For years thereafter the memory stuck like a stone, colored with shame and embarrassment, a good curative for her partiality for exaggeration.

.....

Then when Ellie was seventy, she told someone the story, someone other than her husband, who had long ago become accustomed to Ellie's flights into confession.  After all, her husband had his own stories:  locking a brother up in a rabbit cage and target practicing in the kitchen.

The story at first seemed about shame, about seeking redemption, the child within the aging adult looking for absolution by finally telling the truth, which all sounded utterly ridiculous now that her own children had fibbed their way through childhood and adolescence and recovered to be adults.  One could only laugh at guilt howling like barking dogs in an alleyway.

What if the mother had known?  What if the story was not about teaching a child not to lie, but about loving someone so much a person got a free pass upon which to start anew?

Two versions:  shaming or loving.  Which one happened in this story?  And how would the outcome have differed if the mother had said, "Oh, Sweetie, don't lie.  You know better!  No one in our family lies! You take those pictures back tomorrow to Mrs. Alexander and tell the truth!  Wait 'til your father hears this!"

I venture to say, this is how love works.  Since we are all flawed, we can help one another be better people by going forward, not backward, not faulting, not blaming, and by feeding, kindly feeding and trusting that nourishment works better than punishment.

Peace Is Like What?

I got stuck on peace last week.  Unable to come up with my own pithy sentence about peace I googled "literary quotes about peace."

Of one hundred different statements about peace all agree in attitude: Peace is desirable; conflict is disturbing.  From one hundred quotations by influential leaders four stuck to me. (This was not easy to do.  It took me days to decide.)

“If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.”

Mother Teresa 

“Yes, we love peace, but we are not willing to take wounds for it, as we are for war.”

John Holmes 

“God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.”

C. S. Lewis 

“My therapist told me the way to achieve true inner peace is to finish what I start. So far today, I have finished 2 bags of M&M's and a chocolate cake. I feel better already.” 

― Dave Barry

Googling one hundred quotations about peace sounds a bit obsessive, doesn't it?  But let's not go there. I'd only defend myself by saying I was looking for antidotes to the clash of conflict in the news and on the street.  

My exercise began as a light diversion and ended in a maze.  Here's why.

I began with "Was peace a feeling or a behavior?"  Seeing disagreement among spiritual and social leaders, I shifted to How many categories of peace are there?  and then to Does anyone agree on what peace is? 

Maybe similes and metaphors would provide clues.  I googled this fragment: "Peace is like a..."

In 2001 Leif Enger wrote a best selling novel titled Peace Like a River, a title inspired by the hymn It is Well with my Soul.  The novel's ingredients for conflict include kidnapping, murder, and death in order to illustrate that no situation is beyond the miracle of redemption.

In 1971 Paul Simon wrote Peace Like a River during the era of Viet Nam protests.  The first line says "Peace ran through the city like a river." The lyrics speak of enduring beatings and waiting.  "I'm reconciled/ I'm gonna be up a while"

In 1873 Horatio G. Spafford wrote the lyrics for the hymn It is Well with My Soul.

When peace, like a river, attendeth my way,

When sorrows like sea billows roll;

Whatever my lot, Thou has taught me to say,

It is well, it is well, with my soul.

A group named Goospel Soul Children offers the African-American Spiritual recognized by its promising words "I've got peace like a river...I've got joy in my soul", which can be downloaded as a ring tone.  

A Ringtone!  Now we are getting somewhere.

Instead of "Ring, Ring, Ring, Someone's Calling" you can hear "I've got peace like a river; I've got joy in my soul."  The nuance would be entirely different, even if it were your estranged brother calling for a loan or your spouse calling to ask you where the hell you are.

I'd like to upload a few ringtones to some characters who have crossed my path.  How about these:  "Slow down, you've got to make the morning last" for the guy who cut you off on the parkway.   John Meyer's "Waiting on the World to Change" for the mattress salesman who just pulled a bait and switch.  Michael Buble's "It's a Beautiful Day" for the endless complainer at the gym.

A ringtone would be a silly approach to tragic, seemingly insurmountable conflicts.  The Egyptians are erupting in the streets (It's a Beautiful Day).  Senator Cruz wants to unfund our health care law (Slow Down, You've Got to Make the Morning Last).  Schools lack funds to open on time (Waiting on the World to Change).  

And then something horrible happened in the midst of my goggle diversions.  Syrians were dying from chemical attacks.  I lost heart.  Peace?  How?  

The African-American spiritual’s line "I've got peace like a river" isn't frivolous.  It emerged from the brutal fields of American slavery and resonates with scripture.

Oh that thou hadst hearkened to my commandments! then had thy peace been as a river, and thy righteousness as the waves of the sea.  Isaiah 48:18.

Between Isaiah's warnings (8th century B.C.), the emancipation proclamation in 1863,  and today's headlines -- achieving peace, even identifying it, has proven to be illusive. It's the elephant in the room.

We usually must move along to keep up.  We don't have free hours to research thoughtful verses about peace.  We are lucky to sit still long enough to absorb a backyard view of flowers, birds, and shade trees, much less relax along the bank of a meandering river. 

We want peace, in any form, as a behavior, as a feeling, as a hope, for three seconds or forever.  We are advised:  peace begins within oneself and requires right choices; peace is not possible alone, without God, without communion with others, without love, without consideration.  

I'm thinking it might do to start small, maybe finish something.  I'm not a fan of m&ms and chocolate cake, but I could iron some shirts, grout the shower, and finish this post. We'll see how that goes.  

Then maybe I will be ready to move on to something more challenging, like not interrupting my husband while he's talking.  Listening to others without reacting -- don't think I saw a quote or ringtone about that one.  

Summer's Treasure

“Ol' man Simon, planted a diamond. Grew hisself a garden the likes of none. Sprouts all growin' comin' up glowin' Fruit of jewels all shinin' in the sun. Colors of the rainbow. See the sun and the rain grow sapphires and rubies on ivory vines, Grapes of jade, just ripenin' in the shade, just ready for the squeezin' into green jade wine. Pure gold corn there, Blowin' in the warm air. Ol' crow nibblin' on the amnythyst seeds. In between the diamonds, Ol' man Simon crawls about pullin' out platinum weeds. Pink pearl berries, all you can carry, put 'em in a bushel and haul 'em into town. Up in the tree there's opal nuts and gold pears- Hurry quick, grab a stick and shake some down. Take a silver tater, emerald tomater, fresh plump coral melons. Hangin' in reach. Ol' man Simon, diggin' in his diamonds, stops and rests and dreams about one... real... peach.” 

― Shel Silverstein, Where the Sidewalk Ends

Our friend was walking me through his miniature orchard on a ranchette near the Wyoming border.  "We lost our peaches in a late frost," he said sadly.  

At the same time last year, Bill had quietly handed me a peach and a knife.  "For me?"  I said as I greedily slipped a slice into my mouth. 

Amused, his wife watched me slurp and swallow what I soon learned to be their first peach of the season. If I hadn't been so happy, I would have been embarrassed. Our friend, the amateur orchardist had carefully pruned his trees and watched the buds swell from limbs above a blanket of snow, hopefully winter's last icy bite.  If a late frost nips peach blossoms, the trees won't bear fruit.

When I hear local peaches are ripe, I feel like dancing and singing.  It's love, all love.  

Think about it: what is the difference between telling your lover, "I left you a sandwich and an apple" versus "I left you a sandwich and a peach"?

An apple is as common as a sandwich, but a peach is extraordinary.  An apple is a hug; a peach is a kiss.

Two peaches rest on my kitchen counter top.  These two peaches are South Carolina peaches. They were a gift.  We are balancing our desire to eat these two peaches against a desire to appreciate them slowly.  Timing is important.  If we wait too long, they will ripen to mush.  But if we eat them right now, they will be gone.

In the refrigerator are four peaches remaining from my visit to a local orchard where I chose between two kinds of yellow freestones.  "Flaming Fury" won out over "Celebrity", mostly for the name but also for its tempting burgundy and golden orange skin, and thus imagined gustatory magic. 

People actually fight over peaches.  Georgia claims to be "the peach state." An iconic peach is on Georgia license plates and on its official state quarter.  A giant peach drops from a downtown Atlanta building every New Year's Eve.  Peachtree Avenue, Peachtree Presbyterian Church. Peachtree Road Race. Peachtree Publishers. Peachtree Gifts.  Peachtree -- everywhere.  However, according to a 2011 New York Times article*, South Carolina has rivaled Georgia peach production for years.

I grew up in Northern California where peach season lasts to October, which might account for California's ranking first among the top four states in peach production.  New Jersey, the original source of peach agriculture in the U.S., is ranked fourth.  Not that any of this rivalry makes a huge difference.  If we want to eat fresh peaches we will find them.  If the local peach crop fails, Georgia is only five hours away.

A peach has a scientific name -- Prunus Persica -- erroneously assigned by Europeans who believed peach trees originated in Persia.  Ancient Romans had called the fruit malum persicum, or Persian apple, which morphed to the French pêche.   In truth, peach cultivation originated in China, a fact supported by early Chinese writings and art, and confirmed by contemporary scientific analysis.  I hope Georgians won't be too disappointed to hear that China ranks number one in international peach production. 

Personally, I don't care who produces the most peaches as long as someone does. 

Here's what a peach awakens in my sensory memories. Pealing and pitting peaches with my mother.  Pulling a dusty quart jar of Elberta peaches from a basement shelf.  Making peach ice cream for a church social.  Driving down a Georgia highway off the beaten path in search of a Georgia peach and discovering a potter as well.   Returning from South Carolina with a box of peaches perfuming the station wagon.  Recalling how I could never convince a Vietnamese friend that a peach tasted better than a mango.  

A typical peach weighs 3.5 ounces.  When you eat a fresh peach, you consume 9.4g of carbohydrates, 8.39g of sugar, 1.5g of fiber, .25 gm of fat, and .91 gm of protein in addition to 20 vitamins and minerals.  More than 80 chemicals contribute to a peach's aroma. In comparison, a small apple weighs 4.8 oz and has 14g of carbs, 2.4g of dietary fiber, and 10.6g of sugar.  You need to heat an apple to appreciate its perfume.

If you want to boost your carbs and dietary fiber, eat an apple, not a peach.   If you want to savor an intoxicating aroma while sticky juice runs down your chin and eat the fruit believed by the Chinese to contribute to immortality and guard against evil, eat a peach.

I took a neighbor two peaches when I visited her this week.  I'd like to think she will continue to enjoy a good life, free of evil, and attain immortality.  No doubt her kind nature will reward her with a measure of immortality.  I'd like to think a peach or two -- the inspiration for a luscious poem by Li-Young Lee**; the subject of cultural lore and paintings by Manet, Monet, Renoir, and  Cezanne; the cause of interstate marketing rivalries; the favored fruit of kings and emperors; the source of twenty vitamins and minerals -- might also nourish her spiritually and physically.

Notes

* "Peach Rivalry Becomes War Between the Tastes" by Kim Severson.  New York Times. July 27, 2011.

** "From Blossoms" by Li-Young Lee, from Rose.  BOA Editions Ltd.  1986.  
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/171754

"'Something is about to happen,' he told himself. 'Something peculiar is about to happen at any moment.' He hadn't the faintest idea what it might be, but he could feel it in his bones that something was going to happen soon. He could feel it in the air around him ... in the sudden stillness that had fallen upon the garden."

-Roald Dahl, James and the Giant Peach, which tells the tale of a giant peach growing from bean seeds then transporting James beyond the abuse of his childhood.  

Careful Cooking

I think careful cooking is love, don't you? The loveliest thing you can cook for someone who's close to you is about as nice a valentine as you can give. --Julia Child


Our youngest grandchildren, ages three and five, are cooking for us.  The three year old runs off to retrieve a  frisbee (his cake pan) and then fills it with rubber mulch from under the backyard playground set.  His sister, the five year old,  starts the main course, Stone Soup, in a bucket of water.

"This soup needs spices."  She adds sand.  "It needs salt and oregano."

"We need a pie," says her little brother.

"A cherry pie!"  Together they load another frisbee with sand and pebbles from their play area.  She carries the "pie" to a swing.

"This is our oven," explains her brother.

Herb asks if the soup is ready.  They serve us with sand shovels and dishes.

The sun hasn't set, the parents won't return for another hour, the outside air is fresh, so we make menu suggestions.

"How about a salad with blueberries?  Or chocolate mousse?"

A sandbox chocolate mousse is apparently a familiar recipe: water, sand, and pebble morsels mixed together, then allowed to thicken through evaporation.

Suddenly thunder sounds in the distance.  The child-cooks look up and listen.  Big sister  reassures little brother, "It's far off.  It's okay."

The sky darkens, the trees whip, the swings sway.  Thunder echoes against the distant mountains.  We feel rain drops.

"Quick, Jonah, we have to move the food so it doesn't get wet!"

An emergency is underway.  The pounding thunder nears.  They carefully move pie, cake, mousse, and soup under cover.

"Stay under the deck," advises big sister.

"I'm cold," complains little brother.

We suggest we go inside, but we must walk up outside steps to the upper deck and enter the house through the kitchen door.

"Hurry, Jonah.  It's dangerous!" says big sister.  "Hurry, Oma.  Hurry, Poppies!"

"It's dangerous, Poppies!" warns Jonah,  his little legs pumping, his eyes wide with concern.

We, the child watchers, the careful grand-parents, are guided to safety by little ones.

Gone Fishin'

Tucked into a cove on the lake stretching into yonder hills is my husband. Herb and his host are bait casting from a boat along the southern shore -- two men in a boat drifting across rippling water.

A dragon fly hovers above waves of oats and wild blackberries along a stone outcropping. Barren trees, stark and scrabbly, rise from the lake's southern shallows. Like olive puffballs on ochre pillows, hackberries, walnuts, and cedars cluster on the hills. Native bluestem grass softens the hill ridges. The horizon stretches in receding horizontal ribbons beneath an azure sky.

A breeze rustles nearby trees. Birds sing in the softened air. A cow bawls in the distance.

Cattle graze along an earthen dam. An abandoned pontoon boat, dry-landed, waits for high water, absent now for four years. In the distance Herb's fishing rod bends and trembles, then suddenly snaps backwards. A fish has broken free, a rubber worm and hook stuck in its lip.

We are in my husband's boyhood territory -- the Flint Hills of Kansas. Nearby is the Tall Grass Prairie National Park, formerly one of the largest ranches in the United States, the Z-Bar, now 13,000 conserved acres but once more than 80,000 acres.

This morning my husband is at peace with the world. The scene is utterly quieting.

The Tea Cup Collection

“Take some more tea," the March Hare said to Alice, very earnestly.
"I've had nothing yet," Alice replied in an offended tone, "so I can't take more."
"You mean you can't take less," said the Hatter: "it's very easy to take more than nothing."
"Nobody asked your opinion," said Alice.”
― Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland


Today, I unwrapped ten cups of my mother's tea cup collection. The cups had been tucked away in wadded newspaper and in a cardboard box in our attic for nine years. In total there are eighteen vintage cups with saucers. Of these, eight favorites reside in my dining room corner cabinet. The remaining ten will soon be with my daughters.

In comparison to my husband who has collections of quarters, stamps, antique tools, and wooden toys, I am not a collector. I am a closet stuffer, an under-the-bed hider, and a procrastinator. I overbook everyday of my life. My home looks neat, but look out when you open a closet door. A gorilla might come bursting out just because I had planned to deal with it later.

Understand me here. I would have never, on my own volition, collected tea cups -- except for my mother and Mother's Day gifts.

Just before each Mother's Day, our father would take my brothers and me to a local department store where we would purchase a gift.  Our mother had started collecting bone china and porcelain tea cups in the 1940's, so Dad's shopping excursion was easy as long as we cooperated with his enthusiasm for Mom's collection.

Memory, or the lack thereof, requires a little imaginative arithmetic. We have eighteen cups. My parents had three children. Our mother died in 1954 when I was 12, when one brother was sixteen and the other brother was eleven. It's possible that for six years we each selected a cup for her on Mother's Day; however, my older brother remembers our buying her the tea cups together one at a time.

I recall standing on tiptoe to see over a glass case while a sales lady lifted cups down for us to view. Dad managed to create for us an air of magical anticipation and awe. We were to look only with our eyes.

My brothers and I could be rambunctious. One of our favorite activities was to careen in wagons down our steep driveway into the garage and fly through the basement until we coasted out an exit door into an adjoining alley. We climbed trees, rode bikes, played football in the street, and built forts. Bath time was a major scrubbing event.

But the tea cups -- these were for our gentle mother, who loved flowers, music, and art; for our mother whose eyes would flood when we disappointed her, whose devotion in the kitchen and the laundry had not escaped our attention. Our mother, who salved our oozing poison ivy eruptions, who taught us not to put our elbows on the table but allowed us to read surreptitiously at the table, who protected us from our father's unpredictable temper, and who advocated for us at school. Our mother, whose day rose and fell for us. Our quiet mother, who would rest from her chores by sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of tea and looking out through a bougainvillea draped window.

And so, out of respect for and with recognition of her motherly ways, for a short spell we behaved. We chose a favorite pattern, had the tea cup and saucer wrapped, and carefully carried our gift home to her.

I unwrapped more than tea cups today. Had our mother imagined she might visit the scene in the Royal Albert pattern "Silver Birch"? Had she wished to serve a friend tea from her Gladstone china cup with its laurel blossom motif? Did she hope to have a tea party when life quieted?

In our innocence, we children could never have foreseen the endowment embedded in our gifts. To a seven-year-old, childhood is forever and adulthood is something that happens to grown ups. How could I perceive the faraway day when I would write my daughters about the tea cup collection and say, "Please make a space for them in your life, on a shelf somewhere...out of love for me and respect for the grandmother who would have doted on you had she lived."

Come In. The Door is Open.

Born into the Great Depression, Herb's first years testify to the tension between need and charity. Farm families in Kansas suffered.  Drought desiccated crops. Herb never went hungry but recalls repeated meals of steamed wheat and lard gravy. Surely his mother awoke each day aware of scarcity and hunger.

The family farm sat along US 50 and across from the Cottonwood River and the Atchison,Topeka, and Santa Fe Railway. In the thirties itinerant men rode the railways, some seeking work, some escaping arrest, all of them hungry.

Strangers would walk up the lane to the Simmons' back door and offer to work for food. Since there was little to offer in work, Anna Simmons would dip into the family's meal pot and hand a bowl of beans or stew or steamed wheat through the door to a grateful, hungry man.

In chapter 20 of Steinbeck's novel Grapes of Wrath, the Joad family sets up in Hooverville in Southern California.  Ma Joad feeds her family inside their tent away from the hungry stares of starving children drawn to the family's campsite by the smell of cooked beans. Imagine her dilemma of conscience, the tension between personal and community responsibility, the feeding of her own people and the sharing with others.  She cannot bear not sharing.  After ladling out food to her family of six, she tells the gathering crowd of hungry children to go get some bowls.  Her act of charity is sacrificial, stark, and poignant.

I don't know about you, but if my children were hungry and the larder low, I'd think twice before handing out food to a ragged but polite stranger at my back door or shorting my family to feed the children of others.   But what could I say?  "I'm sorry" wouldn't  ring true.  I'd be lying; dishonesty with a lack of charity would only compound my dilemma. "I'm out of food; we are starving too" wouldn't  exactly be honest either.  Could I bring myself to say, "I'm so afraid my children will starve, I'm willing to risk your starvation for their sakes."?

Afraid!  Afraid to love, afraid to trust, afraid of giving, afraid of loss. Fear is the great isolator of people, an infection in the soul, the poison to charity, the muddy sludge in our communities.

We don't have to have food shortages to experience guarded behaviors and a lack of charity.  Conservative social behavior can be uncharitable.

New neighbors move in next door while we check out their Acura MDX, Honda Accord, two children, and a fluffy dog.  Work men awaken us at 7am with their hammering.  "Mexican" painters go in and  out of the driveway.  The new neighbors are strangers with unknown histories.

We are busy.  We have azaleas to move, an antique car to repair, furniture to deliver to a son.  We have a business. We have social obligations.  We've been  entertaining out of town guests for two weeks and will be leaving for the Cape next week.

Still we go next door and introduce ourselves.  The new neighbors have names.  They are friendly, and they look haggard. The painters are behind schedule.  The moving van will arrive in two days.  The family has been going back and forth between hotel and house.  The only place to sit is on the floor or hearth.

We could walk away; we'd done our part -- the introductions.  "Let us know if we can help" is not a commitment, not a sincere offer.  Too vague.

Then we say,"Would you like to borrow our vacuum?"  Our new neighbor smiles and gushes with gratitude, which fuels our imagination.  We have a playhouse once enjoyed by our now grown children.  We say, "Your children will love our playhouse out back." And more:  "Your parents must stay in our guest suite when they come." And finally, inspired by the possibilities we say, "You will be so tired the night before moving day, please have supper with us.  We want so much to visit with you....Help yourself to any pots and pans you might need....Here are some paper plates and cups.  Take these strawberries with you..."

We tell our maid to prepare the guest suite.  We buy Stouffer's frozen lasagne and salad in a bag.  We pop popcorn, set out Brie and crackers, and pull cookies from the freezer.  We select a nice wine from the cellar. We allow the fluffy white dog in the guest suite.  We give our new neighbors a key to our home.

Because we could not honestly turn away.  We could not say, "We are too busy to care."  It just isn't who we want to be.



But if anyone has the world's goods and sees his brother in need, yet closes his heart against him, how does God's love abide in him?  1 John 3:17-18


Note:  This post was inspired by two situations: family poverty during the thirties and the generosity of neighbors when a daughter and son-in-law moved to Atlanta.  Although I exercise creative license with some details, the events are essentially true, especially the kind generosity of next door neighbors in Atlanta.  The story of Anna Simmons' generosity during The Great Depression is part of family lore and matches all that I knew about her.  

Grandma J

My maternal grandmother didn't  stop from chores to tell stories.  I followed her to the chicken coop, to the garden, to the kitchen, to the well pump and the barn; watched her heat water, mow grass, wash clothes, separate cream, knead bread, and pluck chickens.  She was always showing me, her city grand-daughter, how to do something and why.

The hens frightened me.  They could suddenly fluff and flap their wings and charge at a little girl sent to gather eggs.  "Those hens won't hurt you." Terrified, I'd stick my hand under the irritable hens, grab some eggs, back slowly out of the coop, and run to the house.

In my California home, peas came from a Del Monte can.  At Grandma J's place, peas hung from staked vines in long rows.  Grandma J expected me to pick them.  With only half a bowl picked, I'd say.  "I'm through.  This is enough."  Grandma J would dip some water for me from the white enameled bucket beside the sink, walk me back to the garden, and pick with me.   Wouldn't it be easier to pick now in the morning than later in the afternoon heat?  And, Didn't I love her creamed peas?

At noon during the wheat harvest, Grandma J fed a ravenous crowd made up of neighbors and relatives.  From cellar shelves came jellies, cherries, pickles, corn, peas, beans, beets, and tomatoes; from storage barrels and baskets came potatoes and onions.  Her fried chicken was the result of a bloody and efficient drama: headless chickens running around the yard and odoriferous plucking on the side porch. Chicken parts dusted with flour crackled in hot lard in iron skillets atop a stove heated with corn cobs. The savory chicken disappeared as fast as Grandma could fork it onto platters.

After the blessing, with everyone seated, Grandma J disappeared into the hot kitchen to convey platters of chicken, loaves of home made bread, pitchers of fresh milk, bowls of cream peas, whipped potatoes, and cream corn, and plates of cherry pie slices.   Her face glistened with perspiration. Her women helpers stirred, ladled, poured, carried, and cleared; they then ate after the men returned to the fields, their conversations spilling useful family gossip.

From the well came cool drinking water; from a cistern, bath water.  We shared a common dipper without fears of germs.  At night Grandma J heated bath water on the stove, then poured steaming pots of water into the tub.  Alternating first turns, my brothers and I shared common bath water.  After my parents bathed in another round of steaming cistern water, my grandparents bathed.

Cats were not allowed in the house, but when my family visited, someone broke the rule and brought newborn kittens with their momma in a box to my grandparents' bedroom.  "Don't touch those kittens.  They're too young and might die," admonished Grandma J. Listening for Grandma's footsteps, I'd sit beside her treadle sewing machine and stroke a soft kitten with one finger.

During one winter interlude around a wood stove while skeining yarn,  Grandma J told me she'd come to Kansas as a small child in a covered wagon and had lived in a sod house with a dirt floor.  Snakes sometimes wriggled out of the sod walls. She vividly recalled when her father had killed a poisonous snake. I imagined her in a homemade feed sack dress, her eyes wide with fear and her father attacking the snake with a hoe.

On her bedroom dresser was a metallic silver blue music box with a lid. The box wasn't actually a box since it was round like an upside down bowl.  When I twisted the top of the "box", it played "Fleur de Lis".   A young man who had lived with the family and hired himself out for food and shelter during the Great Depression had given the music box to Grandma J when he left the farm.  She treasured his gift and only allowed me to play it once a day.  "If you play it too much, you will wear it out," she'd say.

When my mother died in 1955, Grandma J flew out to California from Nebraska and stayed three weeks. She cooked, she cleaned, she drove us around.  I asked, "How do you do it? You lost your husband, your son-in-law, your daughter-in-law, and now your daughter."  Her answer:  "You have to keep on, no matter what."  I wanted her to hug me and comfort me, but she wanted to leave a living impression.

When I was sixteen,  Grandma J allowed me behind the wheel of her new Ford sedan to practice driving on dusty country roads.  When I was in college, she took the train to visit me in Oregon.  She slept in my roommate's bed and ate with us in the common dining room.  She attended classes with me and did needle work while I studied.

No philosopher, she wrote me every month about practical activities -- caring for my cousins, going shopping, attending a quilting party, making meals for a sick friend, and visiting relatives --  until age and memory loss overtook her. Every grandchild has a story of her taking them out to eat or to a miniature golf course, about reunions and picnics, and about her straight forward, no nonsense approach with a carful of kids.

When she retired from farming and caring for her widowed son's children, she moved to town and became a postmistress. Independent and intelligent with numbers, she had effectively managed the family farm with her son's help after my grandfather died in 1954.

In 1984 she died when I was 32.  She finished her last years in assisted living unable to recall her children's names when they visited.  Born in 1894, she had lived nearly 90 years through homesteading, Prohibition, the Great Depression, WWI and II, the Korean War, the Cold War, and the Vietnam War.  She had witnessed the transformation of the telephone, electricity, and television;  experienced the transition from horses to tractors, and trains to jets; benefitted from antibiotics, painless surgery, and vaccinations.

After her death her daughters laid out on a table many of her personal possessions, from which each family member in a hierarchal rotation could choose two things. The music box, tarnished from oxidation, sat unnoticeably among items of obvious value.  I chose the music box, which now sits on my dresser.  I play it once a year on my mother's birthday.

The family had set aside for me an oil painting of the farmstead that I'd done as a mother's day gift for Grandma J when I was 22. The painting now hangs in my study, the view reminding me of new mow hay, naps on the sleeping porch, the windmill's ticking, cows bawling, bread baking, and softball games played on the front lawn.

These objects, the music box and the painting, remind me of the invaluable intangibles my mother's mother left me: perseverance, responsibility, forbearance, devotion, and faith.  I learned from her how love was work, that life was a long journey, and fulfillment came as we worked together.  Being gentle but firm with people does work.  Gossip can be harmful or helpful, depending on how we use information.  Helping others is the best gift. Viking double ovens and All Clad pots and pans are not essentials for a delicious meal and a satisfying life.

And -- to keep on going, no matter what.

You Can Do It!

When You think it can't be done, think again.

A recent visit with a friend reminded me of when I faced a period of financial and emotional uncertainty so burdensome I often woke in the night in tears.  I'd bundle up in a blanket and step out onto the deck and stare into the night until a prayer came to me.

Prayers can be elusive.  We can feel a gnawing need, absent of words.  Our thoughts can be so jumbled, our feelings so overwhelming, we can't navigate them.

The story is simple. I was separated then divorced, with three teenagers at home and later one daughter, then eventually two daughters, away at college.  Each month I faced mortgage, utility, car, and grocery bills.  A high school teacher, I worked long hours, taught night courses at the university, and took graduate classes.

Someone had given me a gratitude journal, which I tried to fill in at night before sleeping.  Often exhausted, I'd write things like "I'm grateful for being tired" or "Thank God, I won't have trouble sleeping tonight." Discouraged, I'd write, "My hand can hold this pen."   Driving to work I'd feel encouraged because I had been given another day, had helpful, devoted children, a job, and energy.  This cycle of energy expense and renewal played out for six years.

I was not alone.  At the time 60% of all households were led by single mothers.  They too experienced discrimination when applying for credit cards, auto insurance, and jobs.  A potential employer for a prestigious state position asked me how I would manage since I had teenagers at home and no husband.  When I asked an agent why my auto insurance premiums had increased, he said because I was divorced, so I switched to another agency. My applications for a credit card were denied until the NEA offered me a credit card.  

When the dryer broke, I hung wet clothes on lines strung tree to tree.  In the summer we used air conditioning sparingly only at night.  During the day we hung out under a huge walnut tree or went to the library.  We used cars primarily for business.  Every dime counted.  My children worked -- paper routes, retail, food service -- whatever it took to put gas in the car, go on a date, buy clothes, get to school and work and sometimes help Mom pay for a vacation.

My son would hang about while I put together the monthly menu and budget. "Are we going to be okay, Mom?"  He wouldn't relax until I'd paid every bill.  He committed himself to getting straight A's and a full ride to college.  When I would insist that he go to bed and rest, he'd say, "I'm going to make sure you won't have to struggle like you do to send the girls to college."

Indeed, I was never alone.  As I was driving down a familiar street near campus one late afternoon, on the way to yet another night class, and dining on a sandwich between home and a parking lot,  I suddenly felt a voice -- sonorous and authoritative -- say, "I told you, you will never be alone.  I will always be with you."  Suddenly I was awash in reassurance and confidence. I felt lighter.  Even the light around me, in the trees and on the road, changed.

The children's father fulfilled his responsibilities at some sacrifice for himself, for which we will always be grateful.  Whenever the children questioned my judgement, he backed me up one hundred percent.

My father believed in me.  When I said I wasn't sure I was strong enough, he said, "Just do it."  When I said I needed to increase my salary, he advised, "Take graduate courses.  The time will quickly pass."

When I wavered, my step-mother provided practical advice.  She cared for me when I came home from surgery.  She said, "You must eat meat and vegetables and fruit. You must maintain your energy"  and "The children need to see you are strong."

Kind and patient, my brothers and sisters-in-law stuck with me without questioning my choices.  One brother paid for travel, another called frequently.  A sister-in-law sold me a lawn mower at a give-away price.

My parents paid for a daughter's braces.  My father sent a daughter to musical festivals.  A friend loaned me the cost of graduate tuition. Another friend covered a year of piano lessons.  One friend called every evening for a year to give me ten minutes of stress release.  A male friend taught me how to change oil and change a tire.   When I was recovering from surgery, three friends took turns staying with me and helped with the children.

I learned how to do taxes, repair wires on a stove, fix fluorescent lights, repair faucets and toilets, and service a lawnmower.  I learned how to be alone with myself and not be lonely. We need to know we are all an essential somebody, despite trials and troubles.  We need to accept that the opposite of fear is love; how we can be stripped of every familiar and comfortable accoutrement and still love and be.

To visit me today in the same home with its mortgage now paid, to see me comfortably wrapped in relative security and snuggled next to my husband of twenty-one years, to talk with our thriving grand-children, you would hardly guess at the depths of discouragement and level of courage I once experienced.  I forget it myself from time to time.  I call it the dark ages, as if it were behind me, which it can never be since it helped mold us and undergirds this family today.

Bundled up in a blanket, I might still step out onto the deck into the night and stare into space and wait for a prayer to come to me.  I do so with a conviction and faith borne from raw experience. If nothing comes, I just try again later, and then later, and then later.  Something will come of it, just like when I write these posts without knowing really where beginning will lead.

Must it Be?

Must it always be the flesh of the innocent

To awaken us from time seduction

And bring us vividly to the grace of the present?

--from John Schuler of Kildaire, Illinois, read by Curator and Poet Holly Bass on NPR's Tell Me More, April 18, 2013.

Yesterday while police in Boston were closing in on the Boston marathon bombing suspects, my husband and I were digging holes for shrubs.  We did not read or watch the news.  We were not ready.  Violence is so indigestible. 

Violence is a familiar companion in life, and inevitable, like disappointment and illness.  We know this truth but we resist it, sometimes to the point of denial.  We don't have to go to the holocaust for proof of deliberate denial of human horrors.  We can pull from our own personal histories.  The man beating a woman in the alley beneath an apartment window.  The neighbor slamming his three year old against a garage wall.  The student assaulting a teacher in her classroom with a knife at 6AM.   The rapist climbing over the balcony and into the apartment on a bright spring morning.

"This can't be happening. Go back to sleep," I thought, when I heard the woman screaming and the trash cans crashing.  And I did.  I went back to sleep.  In the morning, they were gone but the alley was littered with trash.

"I should call the police.  That father is abusing his son, " I said.  My listener advised, "Don't get involved.  You don't know for sure."  I did eventually call the police but waited far too long.

The teacher felt safe. The school doors were locked.  She was well-liked.  The morning was young.  Her assailant appeared suddenly.  She fended him off with her bare hands, grabbing the knife blade and screaming for help.  Schools are quiet places at 6AM; help came slowly.  She would never be able to forget the incident.  She tried to resume her teaching career, to overcome her fears, but it was impossible:  Scars covered her hands and arms.  I convinced myself I was safe; it didn't happen to me; it wouldn't happen to me.  Then one day a female student attacked me and tried to get me to react while I backed out of a door way.  I called for help.  No one came.  The student called her mother and grandmother and accused me of choking her.  "This couldn't be happening to me," I thought.  But it did.

The young woman was alone in her apartment.  The dogwoods were blooming outside her second story bedroom window, the luscious creamy blossoms an invitation to a glorious day that never happened for her, not for days or months afterwards.  Although she lived on a busy downtown city street where sirens were as common as chirping birds in the morning, she had never considered it unsafe to open the balcony sliding glass doors for fresh air.  "It wouldn't happen to her."   But it did.

I once spent a year studying genocide.  I looked for clues into how human beings, needful of love and affection and capable of charity, could with deliberate determination march people into excavated ditches and mow them down in mass. Evil apparently resides dormant in all of us and can burst from us when confronted with the right stress ingredients -- chemically, biologically, psychologically, culturally.  Humans are capable of irrational craziness.   In spite of compelling evidence from history and life, I resist this truth -- even though I myself have done some nutty things when under stress, nothing unredeemable, mind you, but certainly momentarily irrational.

From reading Elie Wiesel's Night, Romeo Daillaire's Shake Hands with the Devil, Immaculee Ilibagiza's Led by Faith, and Samantha Power's A Problem from Hell, I gained this much:  we have the power within us to react to violence with amazing courage and creative resistance.  Our spirits have the resilience of both passive and active survival and reconstruction.  Wiesel could not prevent the holocaust but he could narrate its truth and how love survived although drenched with hate.  Daillaire could not prevent Rwandan genocide but he could resist the pulling of United Nations forces from Rwanda.  Ilibagiza survived for a year in a locked bathroom under the protection of a courageous man while machete wielding boy soldiers terrorized her ethnic group and searched for her. Powers drew upon her experience as a correspondent to show how individuals risked careers and lives to get the United States government to act against human rights abuses. 

I'd like to think all of us act with courage for peace daily, in ways we take entirely for granted.  We don't yell at one another.  We accept our failings and forgive one another.  We feed one another.  We share. We take turns at stop signs.  We work for improvement in ourselves, our families, and our community.  

When the Boston marathon bombing happened, we could not digest its senseless horror.  So we worked in our yard to plant a tree and six shrubs.  Herb dug for ten minutes while I rested in a chair; then I dug while he rested.  One hole, webbed with three inch roots from a removed red bud tree, had to be twenty inches deep and wide.  We used a bishops spade, an adz, a post hole digger, and a chain saw.  Ivy and rocks interfered, and fatigue.  But we got it done.

This morning we were finally prepared to digest the ongoing news of the aftermath of the Boston bombings.  The manhunt is on, one suspect dead, the other on the run.  The net closes tighter and tighter.  The vision is horrifying, police in protective gear with assault weapons drawn, neighbors hiding indoors.  Fear reigns, creepy and all-consuming, like a raging fever.

This afternoon Herb and I will dig up some shrubs and replant them.  It's one of the things we can do until the fever subsides. And it takes us "vividly to the grace of the present."

Resources

http://www.npr.org/2013/04/18/177765547/tell-me-more-wants-your-poetry

Psalm 30

Romans 8:38-39

Please Forgive Me

“ When you refuse to apologize, it actually makes you feel more empowered. That power and control seems to translate into greater feelings of self-worth.
- Tyler G. Okimoto, researcher at the University of Queensland
From http://www.npr.org/2013/04/01/175714511/why-not-apologizing-makes-you-feel-better

Friends and I have been discussing the above quote and NPR feature on apologizing. The resulting discussion prompted me to write about apologies and forgiveness. I invite you to read the linked article and respond on my blog, on my Facebook Page, or in an email.

..........

This is Just to Say

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold”
― William Carlos Williams


In the spring of the first year of my second marriage, I failed to pay our light bill. The consequences are unforgettable. The utility company cut off our electricity and stuck a notice to our front door. Herb came home from work at 3 o'clock to find the garage door wouldn't open, the computer wouldn't power up, and the bathroom light wouldn't switch on. Since he had come in the back door, he missed the notice on the front door. Thinking a transformer had blown, he called the utility company.

While Herb was discovering we didn't have any electricity and then driving to the utility company to pay the bill, I was leading a curriculum workshop for 70 faculty members at Warren East High School in the school cafeteria. Floor to ceiling glass covered one cafeteria wall. Around 5 o'clock someone told me Herb was outside in the hallway. I saw him through the glass. He was pacing back and forth and slapping a piece of paper against his thigh. He was mad as hell!

For two months, at school and home, I'd been buried in paper. I'd taken on too many responsibilities, had moved professional priorities ahead of domestic ones, and neglected our finances. The light bills got lost in the shuffle.

I apologized, but the apology felt inadequate. The cliche "I felt like a worm" is apt. A silence descended upon our happy home. I avoided his eyes and spent the evening sorting through every stack of paper in my study. I feared another bill might have slipped my attention. Besides, I needed something to do while I nursed my guilt.

In this case my apology needed to be linked to solutions. I wanted to feel forgiven, but I also needed to fix the problem. Herb began sorting the mail for us and filing the bills, a job he's done perfectly for twenty-one years. I eventually resigned from my curriculum duties and reduced my professional load. When online bill paying became available, I quickly signed on.

What if I had said, "I'll fix it," but never apologized? According to Tyler Okomoto my self -esteem would have been enhanced by thinking, "I'm NOT sorry," and further enhanced by not saying, "I'm sorry."

I used to tell my children, "Don't apologize; fix the problem." I believed that apologies without solutions were wasted rhetoric.

If their grades dropped, I expected a nose to the grindstone solution. If one of them missed a curfew, I expected a show of sacrifice: every evening at home for a week. Penitence was more important than apologies.

Today, if my husband loses his temper with me, I expect him to apologize, but he's a fixer. "I'll take care of it," he says. And he does.

One of my dear friends, now gone, always said to me, "Forgiveness was forgetting." She convinced me by her actions and words that whatever wrong had passed between us was completely forgotten. I can't begin to tell you how comforting her approach was to me, the master of ruminating remorse.

Another friend mastered the fine art of communicating with only our best selves, so much so that I rarely felt any apologies were necessary. I'd always wished she hadn't told me about her breast cancer at a restaurant. The roar of customer voices felt like a tsunami wave in my head. I felt like ice water had been poured over me. I couldn't swallow. I became dizzy and nauseous. But I never let on. I didn't want her to feel as if she needed to apologize. I learned later that she had tried to tell me her diagnosis in other settings, but I was immersed in the business of divorce and not tuned to her needs. She preempted my apology with her understanding.

However, as I've aged, I've encountered situations that cannot be easily understood or repaired. The solutions seem obscure or may require cooperation from another person. What if someone apologizes for words misspoken or for unkind or rude behavior, but the situation fails to heal? Or what if I apologize but don't feel forgiven? I am at a loss when this happens, dumbstruck. I feel responsible for the healing and frustrated when my efforts fail.

Here's where an ironic loop happens: We might feel inadequate because we had apparently failed with convincing forgiveness or apology, unlike my friend who led me to believe all was forgotten. We might fail at accepting a dear one's foibles, unlike my friend who understood and forgave my preoccupations before I was aware of any slights. We might suffer from so much guilt, we cannot free ourselves even with an apology. We might harbor hidden resentments and fears. Or we might not know the words to say and simply choke.

In loving others we want to be strong and humble, unselfish and kind, sympathetic and generous, reliable and consistent. We fail often. How much should we apologize for our preoccupations and inadequacies?

A steady stream of I'm sorry seems weird, don't you think?

And yet, I watched a simple apology between two friends that completely defused a potential argument when he said to her, "I'm sorry, I didn't understand the situation." Suddenly she felt badly for him; he was so earnest.

She also does a believable job of apologizing. She's self-deprecating, witty, and sincere. In apologizing to me, she's caused me to want to comfort and reassure her. I can't bear for her to be sad or to feel guilty.

We have lots of help on the topic of apologizing. A google search on Barnes and Noble's website produced over 3,000 titles with the word apology in them, including various versions of Plato's Apology, Mitt Romney's No Apology: Believe in America, Tony Danza's I'd like to Apologize to Every Teacher I Ever Had, and Gary Chapman's and Jennifer Thomas' The Five Languages of Apology: How to Experience Healing in All Your Relationships.

The topic is ancient and ever fresh.


“I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing.”
― Plato, The Republic

Matthew 6:12: "Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors."

“To err is human, to forgive, divine.”
― Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism

“The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.”
― Mahatma Gandhi, All Men are Brothers

"People are often unreasonable and self-centered. Forgive them anyway. If you are kind, people may accuse you of ulterior motives. Be kind anyway. If you are honest, people may cheat you. Be honest anyway. If you find happiness, people may be jealous. Be happy anyway. The good you do today may be forgotten tomorrow. Do good anyway. Give the world the best you have and it may never be enough. Give your best anyway. For you see, in the end, it is between you and God. It was never between you and them anyway.”
― Mother Teresa

1 Corinthians 13:4-8: "Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends. As for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away."

“True forgiveness is when you can say, "Thank you for that experience.”
― Oprah Winfrey

“Never forget the nine most important words of any family-
I love you.
You are beautiful.
Please forgive me.”
― H. Jackson Brown Jr. From Life's little Instruction Book


If you stayed with this post and reached these last lines, you've reached the essential core beneath all of my thoughts:

“To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you.”

― C.S. Lewis