A Man of Constant (Useless) Sorrow

About a month ago, Kevin and I were walking along the railroad trail that runs through the center of Bermuda. The air was thick, and the trees overhead made a tunnel through which we walked. Every twenty minutes or so, we ran across another remnant of the British colonialism that I was so familiar with as a child. A stone marker, into which is perfectly etched the mileage from a certain point, perhaps Flatt's Village or Simonstown, and the initials of the political body to which the particular stretch of railroad belonged: B.N.R.R. (Bermuda National Rail Road), or, from memory, C.C.C. (Cape City Council) or S.A.R. (South African Railways).

Our topic of conversation, sprinkled liberally with my Tourette-like observations about our surroundings (hens with chickens, orange-gabled houses, hibiscus hedges, parish workers clearing vegetation with machetes, the cost of real estate), dwelt on guilt and remorse, and what the difference is between the two. Kevin started off the conversation as he always does: "So, I was reading today about these ideas. I want to run them by you . . . ." He went on to explain Wayne Dyer's concept of erroneous zones: that we have in us emotional areas in which we spend time that doesn't do us any good. By good, he means, cannot do anything to affect the present for good. To illustrate, Dyer uses the example of telling somebody that you're tired, or that you're not feeling well. He asks, what good does it do to tell somebody that you're tired? What can they do about it? How does it make you feel any better about your present state? Does it make you less tired? No. So, Dyer says, complaining about your tiredness to a poor soul who can do nothing about it except listen to you grumble, is actually abusing that soul. Now, if there is something they can do, like watch the kids while you close your eyes for ten minutes, then that's useful conversation because it positively affects the present. But, just to kvetch about the general state of tiredness with no hope of improvement, well, what's the point? The complaining just keeps you bathed in self-pity, and essentially immobilizes you in your tiredness.

So, Kevin says as we round the golf course, and come upon a field of zucchini hidden behind vines and stone walls, one of the areas in which we are fundamentally flawed is guilt. According to Dyer, guilt is the most useless of behaviors, and by far the greatest waste of emotional energy. We spend time in the feeling, worrying about what has happened in the past, contaminating the present with guilt, which does nothing to make the present or the future any better.

As Kevin spoke, I couldn't help thinking that perhaps we confuse legal and spiritual constructs of guilt. And that in the confusion, we prevent ourselves from moving forward and up and out of the guilty state.

Guilt, as a legal construct, is a pronouncement of a particular condition in which you are measured against the law using the rules of evidence. You either are, or are not, guilty of, for example, manslaughter. In other words, if you're found guilty, there is enough evidence, taking whatever evidence has been admitted into consideration, to find that it is significantly more than likely (criminal burden of proof) that you, even though you didn't mean to or plan to, you killed the old lady crossing against the light but within the crosswalk. You might be found guilty even if you haven't' actually done the act with which you have been charged. It's the judge or jury who gets to decide after looking at all the evidence (or the color of your skin in certain places) whether there is a likelihood that you did what they say you did.

There is always a punishment attached to being found guilty. This punishment can be a fine, an act (orange overalls in which to pick up trash), or detention for a time frame. Rationales surrounding punishment vary. Some say that the reason to sentence people to time is to punish them; others believe that it is to rehabilitate the offenders. That the time spent in prison will turn the offender from one who would steal to one who would work. Another reason to sentence people to prison is as a deterrent factor. Some think that knowing that a particular punishment is attached to a particular crime will act as a deterrent—supposedly the logic behind the three strikes and you're out approach taken to petty drug crime in the late eighties and nineties i.e., you will not distribute heroin, or buy it, if you know that you will face an enhanced jail sentence of at least ten years if you are caught this time. Being found guilty doesn't have to translate immediately into punishment. Sometimes, for example, when you get a traffic ticket and the city in which you have been caught (Provo, Sandy, American Fork, but not Pleasant Grove or Heber, speaking from experience) has a traffic school, you enter a plea in abeyance, which means that you are confessing your guilt but that the penalty attached to the crime will be suspended if you complete the conditions upon which the plea is based. If you don't complete traffic school, within the time allowed, the legal guilt resurrects itself and, having been found guilty, you are subject to punishment.

While legal guilt and punishments attached are familiar to us, problems arise when we transfer legal principles of guilt to the conditions of our emotional and spiritual lives. Guilt, generally, is emotional or psychological state in which we recognize that we have violated a moral standard, or, in the opposite, we not done something which we should have. In the face of our actions or inactions, we feel responsible for the position in which we find ourselves. As an emotion, guilt is useful. That sweeping sense of distance that fills you when you realize how far you are from what you thought you were. Some describe it as an oily sensation. I sense it as a chasm that opens up and pushes the present me away from what I imagined myself to be. Those moments, painful as they are, are crucial. For me, anyway, they are times I see myself clearly. I see what I am and what I want to be, and the two can only be seen at the same time by using my peripheral vision. This feeling of distance then is the by-product of guilt and it should propel me from the moment it came into view to creating a different present and future, and a different me. This, I think, is guilt put to good use.

There are other times, when guilt becomes a behavior, and a perfectly useless one at that. Guilt as a behavior is a constant return, again and again, to the site of the crime. By returning, we confuse the emotional and legal constructs of guilt and condemn ourselves to serving time in guilt that is absolutely unnecessary. Note: there is no jury or judge pronouncing guilt externally; it's our internal dog, off its leash, that returns again and again to its own vomit.

To illustrate this principle, I am reminded of a long conversation I had with a friend of mine a few weeks ago. We were speaking about the newly married issues we all face or faced: physical intimacy, emotional intimacy, in-laws, career choices, how much is enough? She had had a long running (even before she got married) sense that her mother-in-law disapproved of her every choice, including perhaps the choice of her son. This sense of disapproval was so strong that she couldn't be in the same room with her mother-in-law when opinions were being expressed, in particular opinions about whether women should go to graduate school, should work while raising children, should move away from their hometowns, should run while nursing etc, etc. My friend felt like all these comments were aimed particularly at her. From an outsider listening in, I could see a very well-meaning, essentially sweet, interested woman in her mid to late fifties offering running commentary based on her own experience to fill the verbal space between her and her young daughter-in-law. But the daughter-in-law, caught in her idea that her mother-in-law disapproved of her every breath, interpreted the conversation as a diatribe against her every action. I told her, "Just ignore her. Let her talk. She doesn't mean any harm. She doesn't intend any offense. Talk to her about it. Does she know you feel this way? " I repeated this over and over again. Her response was interesting: "I could never talk to her. I feel so guilty, so guilty that things are like this between us." Every time I suggested an action that she could take to improve the situation, like a discussion, or a letter, or a phone call, or an interest in the mother-in-law, my friend cried, "I could never. I just feel so bad that things are like this. I feel so guilty." I was lying on the couch by this time, my head sunk into one of the pillows. After about the fifth exclamation of guilt, I raised my head and almost-shouted, "Well stop! Stop feeling guilty. Do something about it."

I do the same thing with my house. I work from home. In my "I want to be a princess" brain, I would love to have a beautifully clean, neat home, where even the fitted sheets are perfectly folded in squares and stored in colour coordinated, cedar lined linen closets. I would love to have the beds made every day—by housekeeping. When I walk by my son's bedroom to see the duvet crumpled at the foot of his bed, I feel guilty. Guilty as in, "Oh jeez, when will I be able to pull my act together and either make his bed or raise kids that will make their own beds?" Does my brain acknowledge that 90 seconds of effort would produce the result that I desire? If I just stopped on my walk past his bedroom and pulled up sheets, straightened the duvet, it would make every subsequent walk past that bedroom today pleasant. . . . (I just went and did it; 73 seconds). So, what is it about feeling guilty about not having children who make their beds that I enjoy more than a made bed? What is it that causes me to live with my finger pushing on the yellow center of my soul's bruise, to feel the deep pain, in preference for moving on and making the bed?

First, guilt is an easy, effortless state to be in. Far easier to sit in guilty than to move on, out and forward. But, our souls are not part of a penal system that hands out time to offenders. There is no statute that says that daughters-in-law who walk out of the room on their in-laws have to spend 18 months feelings guilty, and then another 18 on probation. We can commit to change, to be a different creature right there. Second, perhaps, strangely, perversely, we enjoy guilt, and the feelings we get when we condemn ourselves to our guilty state. By being willing to feel guilty for long periods of time, by returning again and again to that guilty feeling, we fool ourselves into thinking that we are sensitive, caring, moral people. It feels good to feel guilty, in a way. We congratulate ourselves on being sensitive enough to realize that we have done wrong, and then we rejoice in the feeling. Well, rejoice is probably too strong of a word. It's more like the feeling you get when you've worked out really hard and your quads and glutes are sore, so sore that you can't even squat to go to the toilet. In that half-second where you are poised above the bowl, the feeling of pain, of muscles tearing as you sit down, actually feels good. At least, I feel good. I am reminded through the muscle pain that I have earned that pain, that the lunges across the gym with the weighted bar on my shoulders were worthwhile. But, my body is not designed to stay in that state. I should push through the pain, get the quads moving again, step up jauntily into my car even though the very movement causes me to grimace. Then, soon, in a few days, I'll be able to walk again, without grimacing, without pain. My legs will be stronger, and I will be able to launch myself and my bike off the curve going up the canyon with a power that will surprise me.

However, and I don't know how to explain this, other than by this metaphor of muscles and pain, if I don't move through the pain, if I don't approximate my normal, everyday actions through muscle that is rebuilding itself into a stronger version of what I used to be, I retard my muscle rebuild and cripple myself in the process. If I refuse to move against pain, emotional or physical, I will hobble through life. Similarly, this guilt state that we sentence ourselves to cripples our here and now and alters our future. It's a counterfeit for the remorse that should swell up, and serve as a catalyst for personal change and momentum. So, my personal commitment is, whenever I hear the language of guilt coming out of my own mouth, I am going to stop myself and look carefully at the distance I feel between where I want to be and where I am, and step across the divide. I will keep moving.

Title: "A Man of Constant Sorrow," from Oh Brother Where Art Thou.

Oh No, Not You Again!

So help me understand this mentality, if you happen to possess it.    

I am reading along in a library book—this has happened to me twice in the last month. The first book was The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste, a fascinating book on what we have done in the past and what is now done to handle the millions of tons of human waste produced everyday across the globe. In the opening chapter, the author, Rose George, is trying to explain her rationale for using the word "shit" for what will be the hero/villain/protagonist of this entire book. She goes through various options, and then settles on "shit" as the term of art for the book, explaining that in most cultures and contexts, particularly those that deal with the substance on a daily basis, the term is not pejorative. Some kind, well-meaning, but, I am inclined to think, egotistical soul had crossed out the word "shit" and asked in the margin, "What about poo?" Roll my eyes in frustration. As if the author is going to answer back, as if the author needs to treat the readers as if they're five-year olds and use code words—poo, peepee, tinkle and willy.

This gentle reader was probably the same one (alarmingly, we must have similar reading preferences) who used permanent marker to erase the first occurrence of f*** that was appropriately used in a scene out of the Battle of Salerno in The Summer Guest. The problem was that that particular passage had more than one such term. Following chapters had a few more. The remaining bombs were left untouched. I wonder at the logical jumble that finds it acceptable to black out one word, but draws the line at erasing every trace of the offense. Is it to let future readers know that at least one of the educated in this university town has a refined sense of language? Or is it to publically register your anonymous disapproval so that everybody knows that somebody disapproved but will persevere in the name of art? Or did you just never get the etiquette lesson on how to treat property that is not yours? Hint: Leave no trace—of your dinner, of your suntan lotion, and definitely, no trace of your opinions.

I don't get it. I know we're supposed to roam across the face of the earth doing good of our own free will and choice, but, in what mentality does the definition of good include defacing something that doesn't belong to you because you happen to disapprove. You would no more think to come into my front garden and rip out the daylilies because they trigger your son's asthma than you could contemplate throwing a brick through the library window. But, somehow, in the privacy of your own bathroom, you think that it is helping the world to black out the word "shit." Would you have the courage to take your trusty pen to the expletive while standing at the desk under the eye of the librarian? Or is it only in private acts of moral rectitude that you excel? Which acts take place in places where you have self-appointed yourself the warden of the jail, monitoring and guarding against any evil influence that might possibly filter through.

I think you—the person who reads library books with a Sharpie in hand—also sit in the carpool lane in your Dodge Caravan/Subaru Forester/late model Crown Victoria/hybrid and put the cruise control at 60 miles per hour. Never mind the speed limit is 65. Never mind that the far right lane, the one with the semi's loaded with sheep and triple containers filled with canola oil, has an average speed of 75, and there is nobody, I repeat nobody, in the middle two lanes. At first, I used to give you the benefit of the doubt and think that perhaps in Montana or Washington or Wyoming, or Pleasant Grove, there has never been a carpool lane. And so, bless your rural little hearts, you think if you have more than one person in your car you have to ride in the car pool. I couldn't fathom that somebody would, of their own free will and obstinate choice, park their fannies (might as well be park when they're going 15 mph slower than the flow of traffic) in the car pool lane. But then, considering this is the land of "I can tote my gun wherever I want to even into church" and "don't tell me I have to wear a helmet," you aforementioned slowriders don't have the cultural DNA to meekly slide into the carpool lane simply because you're carrying passengers.

It has to be some other motivation that causes you to speed up to get into the HOV lane and then slow down, kick back, and crack out the knitting. Is it a power kick? What do you think when you look in the rearview mirror and behind you, stacked up like data packets waiting for transmission over dial up, is a long line of cars stretching back to just past the last access point? Is it a rush of righteous pleasure that you are acting like the moral governor of every car with the misfortune to be on the road the same time you are? Do you congratulate yourself that you are setting an example for the rest of us? Do you quietly purse your lips as we go by you in the middle lanes and pray, if not for our souls, at least for our insurance rates when we get pulled over? Or are you confident that by holding down the speed, you have won one for the good guys by completely eliminating any possibility that any person travelling within your influence on I-15 could possibly get a speeding ticket?

Kaye Gibbons' Ruby, whom I mentioned in the last post, had parents, who shared the same mentality as the self-appointed censor who dogs my reading list and blocks my flow of traffic : They brook no possibility that their children (or anybody else's for that matter) could possibly be exposed to the uglier side of life:

Growing up, I had absolutely no idea anything bad could happen in a life because nothing bad had happened in mine, no catastrophes. My grandmother died but mama and daddy helped me through it, and I'd spent so much time with her, watching her get weaker and weaker that I felt like dying was the next step for her, something that should naturally happen next.

But worse than my ignorance of any bad coming into a life was the fact that I didn't have the imagination, the pure imagination to see that hard things or ugly things might happen farther down the road. I was just whistling along. I can't remember making decision on my own. I might've made a mistake, and that was something my parents were real careful about. . . My parents protected me from bad choices by making choices for me. . . . My mama was the kind of woman who believed girls in girls clothes are less apt to get trouble than girls dressed like boys. I remember begging her for some pants to play outside in, and when she finally made me some she sewed eyelet around the cuffs, just a touch of girl on those pants. And my daddy and brothers were just as bad. If I had a tough piece of meat on my plate, the minute one of them saw me struggling they'd lean over, take my knife and fork from me and cut the meat up for me. I never rebelled against it, snatched my knife back and said, "I'll cut my own meat up, thank you." All the women in my family were calm women. They wouldn't have said a word. It was just the way things were.

    Kaye Gibbons, A Virtuous Woman, page 27-28.

We have a painting of a nude hanging on an interior wall leading to our living room. I think she's beautiful, particularly because she was painted in Czechoslovakia, before the curtain fell. She's an impression of a nude, backed with bright reds and blues. By this I mean, although she is obviously sitting quite primly on her stool, she has no facial features and her breasts are missing their nipples. (Or should I call them nip-nips, or pepperonis?) Still, she's definitely a nude. Every time we have the local youth group over for a meeting, or a party, Kevin takes her down and puts her behind the chair in the office. I was hurt at first. If they are going to descend en masse into my living room, the least I can do for them is to expose them to good, Cold War art. But, he insisted—which is not a posture he often assumes with me. So, down she came. Afterwards, I would rescue her from behind the chair and apologize to her as I put her back up: "I'm sorry. They just wouldn't appreciate you. I think you're lovely."

So, why can we take her down and put her up on a whim, but I bristle at you with your pen in hand hovering over a library book that I might check out after you? Because she's mine, and it's my house, and the parents of some of those boys and girls might, actually would, find it highly inappropriate for their children to be exposed to the female form at all. In order not to offend, Kevin takes her down and I put her back up when they've gone, accompanied by whispered apologies and the loving buffing of her frame. (Once Kevin forgot, and the left side of the room had a disproportionately large number of fourteen- and fifteen-year old boys with a good vantage point. (I hope they know there's parts missing!)).

But, the carpool lane is not yours. The walls of the local elementary school are not yours, and neither is the artwork. The library book is not yours. You probably didn't even contribute to pay for it, because, according to a combination of John Adams/Revelations/The Second Amendment/and Glen Beck, there's a misunderstood subsubclause in the Tax Code that definitively shows that you are not subject to the jurisdiction of the federal government, let alone measly county and city officials. But, I digress. Back to business: The author is not imposing her views on you; neither are you being forced to read her work, nor I to check it out after you. Leave the words alone. Let them stand. They were chosen by someone else, who thought them proper and appropriate. Let their best efforts stand. If you wish to rise up in public protest on the steps of the library, by all means, proceed. Despite my philosophical misalignment with your cause, I'll help you make the signs and even get the permit for your protest from City Hall. That's your First Amendment right to gather in public to effect change. But secret warfare, under cover of anonymity, destroying property and ideas and possible choices that are not yours, merely because you disapprove, well, at best, that's just misguided cowardice. And at worst, it feels like an egotistical, self-centered, overreaching need to control.

 

Title: Australian Crawl, "Oh No, Not You Again."

 

Back in the Saddle

"Cowboy up, cupcake!"

--Colton, in The Legend of Colton F. Bryant, by Alexandra Fuller

It was day five of the Tour de France when I noticed a "movement" that has stayed with me for a few weeks. I'm not an avid cyclist but I watch sports, any sports, when I work out at the gym, and when I'm relaxing at home, and when I write (right now it's Inter Milan versus AC Milan, Inter up 1-0 in the 27^th minute). But that particular day, and for those past two weeks, it's been the Tour de France.

The peloton in the Tour is the main body of riders in a bicycle road race that, belying the massive amounts of raw power required to move those bikes up mountains and over cobblestones and alongside the Mediterranean, snakes its way through the France in a remarkably smooth, elegant mass. When the camera does a bird's eye view of the peloton, the mass of riders looks like quail moving through grass, or sparrows heading south, or the wind blowing across the face of the ocean. Over 160 riders, even 180 if there hasn't been a break away, packed together, drafting four inches to the left of the back wheel of the rider in front of him, driving their legs at an average of 90 rpm. The riders at the front of the peloton do the work, breaking the air for those behind them. As their energy depletes, they peel off to the side, and rejoin the peloton in the middle to the back to recuperate. In a well-developed peloton, riders in the middle expend up to 40 percent less energy than those who ride in the front. Interestingly, and fittingly, in the peloton, the front rider and the very last one receive the same time.

Nevertheless, it's better to be at the front of the peloton than in the middle or the back. If you watched the Tour de France, you'll have noticed the white and yellow jerseys of Columbia-HTC, with their star sprinter Mark Cavendish, streamlined together at the peaked front of the peloton, together with the turquoise Astana and orange and blue of Rabobank. In the sprint for the finish, if there has not been a breakaway and the peloton is leading the race, each team operates on the principle that the seven riders other than their version of Mark Cavendish will drive themselves to exhaustion, breaking air at the front, with Mark tucked in behind their back wheel. As the lead riders feels himself giving way to the burn in his quads that signifies oxygen depletion, he pulls to the side and another sacrificial ram takes his place, pistons pumping as they drive the last kilometers to the finish line. As they hurtle to the finish line, at a particular moment whose announcement I have yet to notice, the ram pulls to the side and opens up the road for Mark Cavendish, whose blocky thighs are turning his pedals at a mindboggling rate. Without a backward glance or a wave of the hand in gratitude, Mark powers past those who have worked to pull him along for the finish line. If he does as he is supposed to, all glory to the team, and perhaps the green jersey, winner of the most points, for him. It's a thrilling sight, to see all that power and determination moving at the speed of will and mind toward that finish line. I'm grinning just remembering those final sprints.

There's safety in the peloton. More people to do the same amount of work. At times in each stage, there's bound to be some brave soul who breaks away; some cyclist who thinks that he will be able to get a jump on the peloton. A few riders will break with him. But the peloton remains unphased. Unless they misjudge the ability and skill of the rider, it is rare for the peloton to react to a breakaway, particularly if it happens in the early kilometers of a stage. Wisdom dictates that the mass of the peloton, working together, will reel in any small group of riders, particularly a lone rider, with nobody to draft off who has to do all the work himself.

But, I'm not writing this to open up a discussion about the benefits of staying in the middle of the road, about the dangers of breaking from the pack etcetera, etcetera. I'm writing this because I saw, in the fifth stage, and again in one of the later stages, a brilliantly matter-of-fact rendition of rescue. Rescue has been on my mind lately, ever since a pioneer trek reenactment in Wyoming in June. I've been thinking about rescue, about how we rescue, about what people do when they are being rescued, about the timing of the rescue and when events are put into play, sometimes long before the need ever arises. Watching the Tour de France this summer, I believe I've found the way I would like to be rescued.

During the fifth day, Robbie Gesink, a "protected" rider on the Roba team went down hard in a crash. Who knows how it was caused . . . a cobblestone, a rider in front who changed tempo and Robbie couldn't react in time. I saw him tumble off the side of the road. The peloton didn't stop. The flock of bikes flung themselves past him. He got gingerly to his feet, testing his wrist. The road was empty of racers. Those who saw him fall rode right by without breaking rhythm. If it hadn't been packed with spectators on both sides, there would have been no way to tell there had ever been a race passing through moments before. He got back on his bike. He flexed his hand, twisting his wrist (which would turn out to be fractured). Suddenly, like guardian eagles, there were two Roba riders, in their familiar orange and blue. The riders didn't stop, didn't put their feet on the ground, didn't sit down to commiserate with Gesink. They turned to face the direction in which the peloton was pulling, slowed slightly to let Gesink slip in behind them, and raced to catch up to the main body that was cycling away at the rate of 30 miles per hour.

The commentator, Phil Liggett (who makes watching the race worth it just to hear him), purred, "Oh, here comes the team. They'll be back in the peloton in no time. Just you watch them work together to get Robby back." Sure enough, within five minutes, they were back in the main body. Besides, the fractured wrist, you couldn't tell there'd been a crash. "Ah . . . there you go. Well done, boys," Phil Liggett purred again in his British burr. "Nicely back, Robby. Nicely back."

In one of the later stages, another team's rider bent his front wheel on the wet cobblestones. Within seconds, a support car had glided in beside him, an industrious man hopping out with replacement in hand, the second man at the wheel sat with a radio to his lips. Into the camera view glided his three team mates, they looked down, he looked up, the wheel was tightened, and off they went, the fallen rider tucked in behind those who had turned back to bring him nicely back to the peloton. Perhaps it was his mistake that caused the wheel to buckle; maybe he took the turn too sharply, pulled the brake at the wrong time. But, in the exchange of wheel and the return of his team to pick him up, there seemed to be no recriminations, no discussions about what happened, about what he should have done instead. All I saw was a swooping movement, a gathering up of the fallen rider, and off they went, up in the saddle, thighs pumping, calves taut, off to catch the peloton.

I like that there's not much on the spot discussion. I appreciate that when the rescue is carried out, the rescued is expected to contribute to his own return. Even with fractured wrist, Robby Gesink rode off behind his team. Yes, one could say that there is a sense of the British prep school, jolly-hockey sticks, stiff upper lip about this way of rescue. That I'm just yearning for days gone by when I wore green, peter pan collars and white ankle socks and played netball during little break. But it's more than that. It's the real life fact that the world/peloton does not stop in the face of error. The forward movement goes on, and the rescued must speed up to catch up, which speeding up and catching up they are perfectly capable of doing. This manner of rescue seems to recognize that mistakes are inevitable, that mistakes and error (especially one-offs) are not indications of an inherent weakness that dooms one to a life of failure. As Ruby, the protected daughter in Kaye Gibbons's A Virtuous Woman, realizes after a disastrous first marriage, "It took me a long time to learn that mistakes aren't good or bad, they're just mistakes, and you clean them up and go on."

So, I am coming to think that when I fall or one of my wheels happens to catch on the cobblestones in my life and I end up face forward in the gutter, I want the Roba team to rescue me. I want the rescue eagles to swoop down, to hesitate in my vicinity, and to look at me, with my fractured wrist, as if they have every expectation that apart from that one fall and the small detail of the ulna, I am capable of tucking in behind them, just four inches off their rear wheel, and cycling toward the peloton. And I want to be treated that way—capable, with strength and power, with the ability to move forward under my own power. I don't want the sideways glances, or the murmurs, or the hushed voices. I don't want Jim Rome with his hysterical play-by-play which will inevitably veer off into speculation about what's going to happen now, what will be the impact of this fall, what are the statistics of riders who fall getting back to the front, and how much did the last minute change of coach/tire/bike shoe contribute to the crash. I just want Phil Liggett—who continues to see me as a professional rider, part of a team, who happened to fall on a turn—to watch our effort and skill and say, "Nicely back, Tessa, nicely back."

Our Cleanest Dirty Shirt

I love old buildings—always have. I try to sense who lived in there, to breathe in their lives lived hundreds of years ago. I try to hear the echoes of conversations trapped beneath layers of paint and linoleum. When I was a child, dungeons held a particular fascination for me. I thought I could almost hear the scream and could quite certainly see the desperate scratches on the damp, stone walls. (Realize this is the child who turned into the woman who is afraid to list two unwanted-for-the-past-three-years-cockatiels on craigslist because she's afraid she'll hurt their feelings.) But now, its churches and homesteads.

Driving south out of Bear Lake, you see a farmhouse to your left. The land looks like it hasn't been farmed in years. But the house is still there flanked by its now towering cottonwoods. The house is your typical Rocky mountain wooden homestead—double story; center door; two windows on each side, top and bottom. The paint's gone and the wood shines almost silver. All around is just a field; not even a dust road marks the way to the home. I always wonder who lived there, what they dreamed about, what fields they planted, where their flower garden was, where they buried their household pets.

There's another house like that if you're going south on Highway 89, between Ephraim and Manti, on the right side of the road. Sturdy red brick with white around the windows and cracking gingerbread on the roof and porch. Another center door with matching windows. And again, towering trees that somebody planted even though they knew they'd be dead before the trees reached maturity. I wonder about the dreams that planted the trees and built the red brick house with a view of a distant temple. I wonder when the energy abated and somebody broke some of the window panes, filling the holes with cardboard and putting plastic over the rest—which was probably just before the parked the 1964 Ford pickup on the front lawn and never drove it again.

I tend to construct rosy pictures of people gone by. They were all loving, all kind, all faithful and honest. They would never have put plastic over their windows or parked their cars on their front lawns and forgotten to take them, and the tractors, and the lawnmower to the dump. They would never have moved out of the silver-hued beauty into into a double-wide on a lot in town opposite the 7-11 and picked up a job at the IFA. They would have stayed in their austerely beautiful wooden home planted securely between the cottonwoods, fronted by stalwart hollyhocks, and tried to make farmer's living in a valley that seems to grow nothing but raspberries for three short weeks of the year. For how could any other kinds of hands have given shape to such beauty except those hands that valued beauty? Surely the lives that gave form to that red-bricked beauty and the silvery sentinel were lives of superlative honor and duty befitting those who settled these high mountain valleys.

My mother read Mormon Enigma: Emma Hale Smith when I was about fourteen. Then we couldn't say the name Joseph Smith in her presence for the next fourteen years without hearing her sharp intake of breath. Kent Crookston described his experience after reading a journal which depicted Joseph Smith in a negative light. A voice whispered to him, "So, . . . you feel to reprove the actions of the prophet, do you? You are upset, here in the darkness, because someone wrote something in their journal suggesting that Joseph Smith was not perfect . . . Imperfection disappoints you . . .What do you suppose you would have done, had you been in charge in Nauvoo in those grim days? How would you have dealt with the apostasy, with the enmity, with the slander, with unending threats on your life? You expected perfection. You know better than that. Only Jesus was perfect. What imperfection would you have chosen for Joseph? Go ahead. You choose. What imperfection would you accept? . . . Shame on you."

I'm not sure which sin my mother would have let Joseph have? Which one would have been good enough for the founder of a church. Maybe a little idleness, maybe a tad forgetfulness, maybe a timidity that didn't offend, or an overabundance of vision that caused him to forget to close the head gate or feed the chickens? Sometimes I think we allow no sin at all, not in our prophets, not in our neighbors, and definitely not in their household pets who leave yellow circles on our front lawns. I suppose one doesn't really want a goldseeker/failed banker/polygamist/visions in a top hat as the one who restarted your faith. We want some knight in shining armor who always consulted with his wife before he did anything, who could not only win at stick pulling but also at business, who was educated at the finest eastern schools and accepted in the highest circles. Well, we got Joseph.

Some people have issues with him. When they come face to face with the real Joseph, not the public relations version, they falter. His quirks don't really bother me. Perhaps quirks is too placid of a word. Flaws might be better. Does it bother me that years after I heard the story that poor Joseph was hauled out of his home on a cold winter's night and stripped to the waist by a mad and evil mob, it comes to light that perhaps the reason the mob was so angry was something to do with a young daughter? Not really. Actually, it makes the behavior of the mob more understandable. Helps me to know that most people are not suddenly filled with uncontrollable emotions for no good reason. Does it make his prophetic nature less certain, less convincing. Not at all. A little more heroic actually. Failed banks, salamanders, top hats included, I think you've got to be some kind of something to be able to go into a grove of trees and come out of it saying you saw God and Jesus Christ, two separate, physical beings, and stick to that for the rest of your glorious, trouble-filled days.

Does it matter to me that it might really have been Brigham Young who ordered the hit on the company of wagons passing through Mountain Meadows, and that events were organized so that John Lee took the fall? No. It makes more sense than believing that the Indians suddenly became voracious and fell upon the wagon train, preserving only the children whom they later took to the white settlements—in exchange for what? Home-baked bread and a jar of honey? I think you need to have the nerves of a champion and other body parts of steel to come into a bleak, apparently unsettled land, and colonize it with people from a dozen different countries, with no common language or culture, and keep it from fracturing apart at the seams. If you make a few (or a lot) of autocratic, hindsight-foolish and very costly decisions, that's the risk of leadership in any culture.

I don't need my leaders heroic. I don't even need them halfway perfect. I think I prefer them to have a flaw in plain sight, like the mythic "purposeful mistake" in the Amish quilt, lest the viewer think the creation is perfect. Why is it that only Old Testament prophets are allowed to have flaws? They're doing funky things, left, right and center, like sleeping with their daughters-in-law, and dancing in drunken nakedness, and spying on bathing women. Perhaps the purpose of the Old Testament is to prepare us for the prophets in our midst. We started with young prophets, filled with vision and strength and energy, and perhaps not as much experience or wisdom as those who now come to the helm after forty years of acclimating within a clearly established organization. Young prophets, who are still learning, aren't so easy to package. Their stories don't fit quite so neatly. Yet, we want easy stories to tell, ones you can recreate with a cup of hot water, like a cup of noodles—predictable, reliable and the same every time, if a little unsatisfying.

I understand about wanting things to be new and clean, wanting things to be pleasant, kind of like life scented with Salt City Candle passion fruit. (I don't even like to wear new clothes after they've been washed. They just feel different.) But, we do ourselves a disservice when the stories we tell are sanitized, official, one-dimensional, without a not-easy-to-fix-flaw, or an ambiguity that remains unexplained.

First, telling the naked truth is so much easier on the soul. Can you imagine the communal angst that went rippling through St. George, Santa Clara, Cedar City, and Paragonah as the communities took it upon themselves to stick to the official story of a massacre? Every time they looked at the face of their wagon-train child the upswell of memory must have choked them. To live having to keep a cover on part of your life, because the real story cannot be told, takes its toll.

Second (I've thought about this for a while, weighing on one hand the need to be able to extract a moral, or illustrate a principle, by using the lives of those who have gone before), we run the risk of creating caricatures out of real, thoughtful and thoughtless, episodic lives. For example, take Thomas Marsh. All one has to do is mention his name and you think about cream. His life can be reduced down to, either, his failure to control his wife or his failure to listen to his leaders, all over a cup of cream. The way I've always heard it, if he had only been able to do one of those two things, he would never have become one of stock figures from our church history whose life is reduced to one of its most unfortunate, public incidences. Yet, there are other parts of Thomas Marsh's life that we hardly hear about.

Dissatisfied with the story as told during a Sunday School lesson a few weeks ago, I went searching for more of the story. I cried actually as I read Thomas Marsh's own take on the story of the cup of cream (but then I also cry reading the Reader's Digest, so take that for what it's worth). Telling stories as we are prone to do, we never meet the man who came to Brigham Young asking whether Brigham could be reconciled to him, and whether there could be reconciliation between himself and his former Church. During that meeting, March reflected for a moment, and said, "I am reconciled the Church, but I want to know whether the Church can be reconciled to me." We don't see the size of the heart in Brigham, and thus the size of the heart that is required of us, when he stood at the pulpit of the Tabernacle and said to the congregation, "He is here, . . . and I want him to say what he may wish to . . . Brethren and sisters, I now introduce to you Brother Thomas B. Marsh. When the Quorum of the Twelve was first organized, he was appointed to be their President." We miss seeing the depth of Thomas's soul when we omit his own words, spoken twenty years later,

I do not know that I can make all this vast congregation hear and understand me. My voice was never very strong, but it has been very much weakened of late years by the afflicting rod of Jehovah. He loved me too much to let me go without whipping. I have seen the hand of the Lord in the chastisement which I have received. I have seen and known that it has proved he loved me; for if he had not cared anything about me, he would not have taken me by the arm and given me such a shaking.

If there is any among this people who should ever apostatize and do as I have done, prepare your backs for a good whipping, if you are such as the Lord loves. But if you will take my advice, you will stand by the authorities; but if you go away and the Lord loves you as much as he did me, he will whip you back again. I can say, in reference to the Quorum of the Twelve, to which I belonged, that I did not consider myself a whit behind any of them, and I suppose that others had the same opinion; but, let no one feel too secure; for, before you think of it, your steps will slide. You will not think nor feel for a moment as you did before you lost the Spirit of Christ, for when they apostatize, they are left to grovel in the dark.

There, in his own words, is the story of Thomas Marsh. His comments raise more questions than easy answers. Questions about a God who whips back into the fold, about when does one begin to slip, about the gradual diminution of light that one doesn't sense when going the wrong way, about thinking you're standing tall when really you're upside down on your head with your dress around your shoulders and your knickers on display for the whole world (but, of course, you can't see them because your skirt's over your eyes), about the pull a wife has on her husband and the gentleness with which that should be used, about the magnanimity we extend to the returning, about the fact that Brigham had no other choice than what he did because it was not his church, the ark did not need to be steadied, and all are welcome unto God.

In the reduction of his life to a convenient illustration of a principle, we not only do Thomas Marsh wrong, we also do ourselves wrong. We create an expectation that life is neatly packaged, that there are never any dissonant actions, that the moral is always clear, and that the person is either good or bad. We fail to recognize there are moments of weakness, sometimes years of weakness and fluctuation, in all of us. We are all, even God's anointed, at certain points in our lives, both versions of the King David: the cherubic youth filled with earnest desire and the married king filled with other kinds.

I play early morning tennis three mornings a week in what I call "the fancy skirt club." Four friends, the public tennis courts of the neighborhood park, a little bit of tennis, lots of therapy and a great excuse to buy cute tennis skirts. We keep two scores, one for actual shots, and one for idea points, as in, "Oh, that was a great idea . . . Too bad the frame got in the way." This morning the topic of conversation was an unfortunate religious education teacher at a local high school who found his picture on the front page of the paper after allegations of engaging in a sexual relationship with one of his 16-year old students. In terms of creativity, their exploits ran like an impressive high school prom night: mines in Eureka, hot springs near Delta, box cars up Provo Canyon! "Box cars," Cheryl shudders, "what on earth? Just think of the spiders." (Middle-aged, long married sex apparently has higher standards.) The ladies wondered at what point his entire life became a lie. Whether his marriage, his children, the lessons he taught, the experiences he shared with people were all a lie? Because, if he could do this, he obviously didn't believe a word of what he professed. And what about the effect of this on the teenagers he taught? What if they left the fold because of their disappointment in this man?

I wasn't so sure about the idea that nobody who truly believed could act as he did. After all, a lot of doctors smoke. I could see a man who, used to being found in the right way, ignored signposts because he was sure of the goodness of his own heart. I could see a man who fervently believed; who was mostly, if not all, good and who repeatedly made ridiculously stupid and dangerous decisions to ignore those repeated, soft warnings that must have preceded such foolishness. I shouted over the net, "Personally, I think this is an important thing to happen to the community. It requires us to sort through complicated issues of leaders, fallibility, falling from grace, separating the message from the flawed messenger, the power that teenage girls possess in their young bodies, the pride of righteousness that blinds us to our ability to fall. I'm just sorry for those involved that they offered themselves up a sacrifice, that it had to play out on the front pages." They just looked at me, sort of like the sun was in their eyes, but it could also have been interpreted to mean, "You're a crock."

"And," I would have continued, if I hadn't been intent on running down a crosscourt return and earning idea points for the shot that sailed into the tramlines of the neighboring court, "as for those sixteen year olds, you're never too young to come to terms with the fact that God uses whom he has, the willing, in whatever form we come. Look around, we're all he's got to work with."

Which leads me to my very own, personal third reason for wanting the whole truth and nothing less: When I learn that some members of the handcart companies who valiantly crossed the plains barefoot, in snow and freezing winds, on four ounces of flour and the wing of a prayer, later turned to accuse the men who volunteered to guard their possessions left at Devil's Gate of theft, I breathe a sort of sigh of relief. You see, in the space between the valiant crossing of the plains and the desperate, petty accusations; in the space between the colonies and the massacre; in between the brim of a hat and a pulpit in Kirtland, Ohio, I can find room on the pew of believers for me and my flawed discipleship.

Title: Crooked Fingers, "Sunday Morning Coming Down."

Old Habits Die Hard

"There's something wanting in me. I see you loving Henry, and understanding him better daily, and I know that death wouldn't part you in the least. But I—Is it some awful, appalling, criminal defect?"

Margaret silenced her. She said: "It is only that people are far more different than is pretended. All over the world men and women are worrying because they cannot develop as they are supposed to develop. Here and there they have the matter out, and it comforts them. Don't fret yourself, Helen. Develop what you have: love your child. I do not love children. I am thankful to have none. I can play with their beauty and charm, but that is all—nothing real, not one scrap of what there ought to be. And others—others go farther still, and move outside humanity altogether. A place, as well as a person, may catch the glow. Don't you see that all this leads to comfort in the end. It is part of the battle against sameness. Differences—eternal differences, planted by God in a single family, so that there may always be colour; sorrow perhaps, but colour in the daily grey."

Howard's End. E.M. Forster, page 267.

I hide things under our couches. A few years ago, when the couches had skirts, I hid unassembled, wooden cut outs under the couch. When I first got married, we had a Christmas workshop every year in our neighborhood at the local church. Lured by the finished products of women who can turn ribbon, bottle caps, baling wire, and their grandmother's corset into a chandelier, other unsuspecting women would preorder unassembled, unnailed, unsanded, unpainted pieces of wood to make up into Rudolf, Santa, cherubic pilgrims, a covey of American flags, or possessed-looking rabbits. This we did together in the church hall, sharing Styrofoam dinner plates with dots of paint and birthing stories. I dutifully ordered projects every year. Sometimes I finished; mostly I didn't. The unfinished pieces went under the couch; the finished pieces into some cupboard where they sat, remembered weeks after the appropriate holiday when I caught glimpse of them while I was looking for weed killer. I should throw them out, but, if I do, it's like admitting some kind of failure . . . that I tried this way of life and lost.

Wooden porch figures, pistachio jello salad, marshmallow fluff, tuna noodle casserole. . . I've tried.

I do not believe in the Boys Scouts of America—at all. I don't think it should be part of the church program (unless and until there's an equal organization for young women), and I definitely don't think the church organization should be used as a fundraising organism for this private organization. I'm actually appalled that people visit my house, in their capacity as church workers, to ask for money for the Boys Scouts. I fail to see the connection between an Eagle Scout and the driver's license. I do not believe that not having food storage will prevent me from entering heaven. It will help us when and if Kevin and I both lose our jobs at the same time and the dainty supply of Italian parsley, tomatoes, cilantro and basil from the pot plants (bruschetta anyone?) has run out, and we need another source of food with no cash to pay for it. But I don't know about getting into heaven because of barrels of wheat and powdered milk. (I still might be horribly surprised when I find out that's one of the questions.)

I question why white has become the only color in which one may attend church and participate in the sacrament, and why it is that sister missionaries need to look like nuns. Twenty years later, I still miss sleeveless shirts and strapless dresses. I don't think bikinis are immodest, and think every women, of any shape should feel free to wear one. Most Saturday evenings I sigh, thinking of the next morning. I would like to be cremated and spread over my flower gardens, while the Dixie Chicks sing "I wanna touch the earth, I wanna break it in my hands, I wanna grow something wild and unruly," followed by Queen, "I was born to love you." I couldn't think of greater tombstone than a big old maple growing up through me. . . . All these things are under my couch.

Yet, my sleeves have sleeves, Christian wears white to bless the Sacrament, I buy at the Macey's case lot sale; the first son got his Arrow of Light, the others play soccer, baseball and basketball on Wednesday evenings. I wish I could sing in the choir, but can't read music and can't sing high enough to just sing soprano, and Kevin's gone every Sunday anyway. But I schlep these other things with me. I sense, as Helen did in Howard's End, when she spoke of her inability to form a lasting relationship with a man, "There's something wanting in me. . . . some awful, appalling, criminal defect?"

I've paid lip service in previous posts to the idea that we are all God's creatures; we're all part of the menagerie that makes up his animal kingdom. When I tell that story, in my mind, unarticulated but assumed, is the notion that I am the horse, or the zebra, or the sable antelope. I'm never the warthog, or the anteater or the chameleon. There are times though when I come face to face with the opposite "colour" and I retreat. Last Sunday, by the end of Sunday School, I was quivering, feeling "fight or flight" rising inside me, my little warthog tusks shaking. The initial impulse is to run. Wanted to howl with Bono, "I wanna run." Mostly just run to a space that feels comfortable, where I don't feel out of sorts, where I am enough, where there is space for my cripple-crabbed response to the divine question.

Mostly I want to flee when I come up against a person who knows, with certainty, just exactly what the answers are, and just exactly how life should be lived. The question in Sunday School last week was, "Well, wouldn't you want to avoid all the pain and suffering associated with sin?" Offered, rhetorically, as if the only appropriate answer was, "Yes, of course (idiot)." My response, unexpressed, felt like the wrong response. Like the offering a warthog would bring to the animal banquet—a decaying log loaded with woodworms, fitting to her but appalling to everyone else.

The thing is I just don't know so definitely. Sometimes the only way to know is through, through whatever it is that haunts you, follows you, dogs you. And in the getting through, there is bound to be sorrow, pain, and then knowledge. My favorite article of faith, the one I hang on to, is the ninth: That God has revealed, that He does now reveal, and that He will yet reveal. Things will change. One of my favorite prayers is "Lord, I believe. Help thou my unbelief." It is a frequent plea. Ideas of which I was so certain, confident, sort of like the shocked "my child will never bite anybody" you utter when the childless you watches a nephew bite down for the first time, are waning. The things I do know I gather, in a smallish basket—stones that shine with a brighter, distilled light: that God knows me, and sends people, ideas, books, music, animals, young children, skies, mountains, water and wind to help me. That I can be sent to help others. That life is most meaningful when I help, when I am part of a community. That God still speaks. That I may try again, if and when I feel so inclined, hopefully sooner than later, but never too late. That at the center there is light and truth which is accessible to us all, and which will embrace and heal.

Some tell stories of their spiritual experiences with a beginning and an end. It's neater that way. Makes things more certain—definite beginning, definite ending, definite meaning. Somehow, I always find myself in the middle, always reshaping, always having to give up and to rethink, constantly paring away at the story I thought I found myself in. If I wrote a journal, the narrative would not actually be narratives at all; rather, personal essays, short, lyrical pieces of experience/emotion/fact/observation surrounded by attempts to make sense of the moment. Less absolute, less certain of universalities. More filled with moments of light that apply only to me, my personal brush with grace and revelation. Instead of the novel I supposed I would be able to draft of the things of which I were certain at the end of my life, I think I might be reduced to a haiku—just seventeen syllables but worth every sound.

So, knowing as little for sure as I do, I am shaken sometimes, when, armed with my little collection of pebbles, one cherry blossom, and a winter leaf, I come face to face with an apparent arsenal of absolute certainty, the entire greenhouse of a spiritual Home Depot as it were. I find myself lacking that attribute, and wondering if my soul, engineered as it is, is sufficient for the exacting devotion that seems to be required by those around me. The very same day I posted "Ready, Ready, Ready to Run," in which I said that I know now why Christian organizations build wells before they teach doctrine, I read a woman's account of paying her tithing in which she stated that she would rather have the living water of Christ than water in her pipes, rather have the bread of the Saviour's body than food on her shelves. On reading that, I remembered what I had written, and gave the deep sigh that normally precedes some serious soul searching. I spent the day wondering where was I that I wanted real water first; that I am wary of either/ors, and that my initial reaction was to wonder why she hadn't approached her family for help, or at least the local congregation. (The bishop's storehouse is always full). At the end of such wondering, I always feel less than enough.

Last year, I came to a spiritual resting place of sorts—a place where I needed a decision about the kind of faith and religious experience I would have, and whether I could have this faith within the collective arms of my church, or on my own. Plainly put, I did not want to feel "not good enough" anymore. I needed to identify the source of that feeling and try to move away from whatever black hole it lived in. But, I knew my reaction could not be to throw the baby out with the bath water, reject the good because of the unpleasant. I took out all kinds of doctrines and beliefs and turned them over, one by one, just like looking through the heap for a good fish at the market. Some I realized I didn't know about. Others I knew with as much certainty as experience had given me. Others were, if truth be told, not yet important to me. I looked at practices, and communal tendencies, trying to separate doctrine and culture. I "sat" for a long while, sitting, thinking, listening. I imagined life with, life without (a hard prospect when I have never known without). I came to certain personal conclusions about the kind of person I would be, about the voices I would listen to and the places I needed to be to be found about my Father's business.

I suppose I came to the same place Margaret did, when she advised her sister, "Develop what you have." Like Margaret's lack of love for children, there are certain things I do not love, that I will never get used to, that rub me the wrong way in this faith in which I worship. (Like I said, I love the ninth article of faith). But this faith has given me things I cannot imagine living without: like knowing we have heavenly parents who watch for us, that my soul is eternal, that this body is for pleasure and pain, that we are allowed to ask questions and answers will be given, that progression and existence is never ending, that joy is the ultimate design of this existence, that the souls of my children and my husband predate me and my involvement in their lives so I must be courteous and kind, that learning to choose well is perhaps the greatest skill I could acquire.

So (I'm not resisting well the literary urge to wrap this up in a conclusion and pull out an obvious moral), I'm learning to live in my space with my leaves, pebbles and blossoms, and allowing the others who file in with me at 9.00 a.m. to bring whomever and whatever they need into their own. It's not easy; not easy to come face to face with those "eternal differences" and not find myself either morally deficient or superior. I'm thinking I need to let the ideas/words/assertions come to me and let them flow over me, like water or good memories, feeling the need, the necessity, the desire, just as fervent as mine, to believe.

Title: Mick Jagger, "Old Habits Die Hard"

A Six-Inch Valley Through the Middle of My Soul

In response to a comment, I am posting this essay I wrote about twenty years ago. Originally titled "Drinking Blue Milk," I have renamed it in keeping with the tradition of this blog.

--for vinestreet--

I have often heard of the chastity lesson with the milk and the ink drop: Sister Smith drips, almost tenderly, the midnight blue ink into the whiteness. The point is, I presume, that the milk is supposed to be ruined. I have never seen it done, but would, I think, probably watch in delight as the blue tendrils curl softly, coaxing the white, joining in gentleness until the glass is filled with pale blue. I know I would do it again at home to see the softness of a new color come to life. I have heard that others use chocolate cake: offering the largest teenage boy a slice of cake, then, instead of using the knife, plunging his hands through the cream and crumbs to offer, as it were, a spoilt offering. I cannot but envy his sensation as his fingers pierce cool cream, then rough, warm crumbs, dark chocolate working its way underneath his nails. I would have asked to do it myself, to be able to feel the texture ooze through my tightening fingers like river mud.

I am the fifth child in our family—a girl, who always wanted to be a boy. Perhaps it was my brothers' fault: I wanted to be like them. I have two of them immediately above me in the family line-up: Jonathan, three years older than I, who was small and asthmatic (no longer). He played the piano and the girl parts in the school plays at his all-boys school. We fought constantly, perhaps because we had nothing in common, but maybe because I was just as big as he was until he hit his growth spurt at 17. I do remember though when we both had chicken pox. It must have been an uneasy truce that day. Mom was gone Visiting Teaching, the sky was pure blue and the breeze blew salt through the house—early summer in the Cape. Suddenly we found ourselves naked at the swimming pool in the back garden, our scrawny white bodies dotted in fiery red pox, jumping off the electricity pole into the deep end. The water felt cool against my skin and we laughed.

On the other hand, Paul is big and brawny with bow legs and crooked teeth. My mother was asked to remove him from nursery school, I think, when he was four: he was teaching the other children to swear. He had a mess of freckles strewn across his round face and report cards filled with comments like "A satisfactory result but Paul is not reaching his potential." His room smelled like rugby boots and mud. He played the recorder and the guitar, crooning "Norwegian Wood" into a tape recorder to send to the mission president's daughter up north, and about the only eligible Mormon girl in the country beside his sisters. Paul left for BYU when he was seventeen, the first of the children to leave. I dreamed I would marry Paul, but he loves Janet Nicole, whom he met in the Reserve Library. When she first saw him, he was wearing Easter grass in his moccasins—he wanted to be a walking Easter basket (as I remember or disremember the story). Janet knew it wouldn't be boring to spend a life with a walking Easter basket, so she married him.

I don't remember when my body started changing. I just know I never wanted to be a girl. I even fought once on the rugby fields of Rondebosch Boys High School with a boy who disbelieved me when I said I was a girl. Secretly, I am thrilled, but I have to defend my honor. So we wrestled until he finally conceded my femininity. I was ten years old. I even went through a phase where at night I prayed to be changed. Come morning, I would sneak my nighty up ever so slowly over my stomach only to be disappointed.

Womanhood came early the next year. It came before I wore a bra, before my first kiss. It came when Harry moved his hand slowly across my chest. He whispered roughly, "Let me show you how I love you." I kept my eyes firmly on my book, trying to pretend he wasn't there, that he wasn't doing what he was doing, that I wasn't feeling what I was feeling. "Touch me," he whispered as we walked between the pillars of the garden gate to the front door. His voice was hoarse. "Please, touch me." I ran, pretending I hadn't heard. I was twelve years old. He was my sister's husband.

It's a strange thing when you're twelve, in seventh grade at an all-girls school, and a man touches you. It's a fascinating, repulsive thing when you're eleven and a man shows you pictures, pulled from beneath the Welsh dresser in a secret drawer, of things you don't know the words for. It's an anxious thing hoping the family won't see when he kisses you hello in an open-mouthed masquerade of familial affection. It's an agonizing thing waiting to see who will take you home after a night of babysitting. It's fear rising inside as your sister asks Harry to drive you home; she's too tired. It's knowing his hand will come over the back of the front seat to find you in the dark where you sit huddled in the corner. Most of all, it's a frightening thing, when at eleven and twelve, your prayers are filled with earnest pleadings that your sister's husband will drown at sea and never, never come back.

I didn't know what else to do. I was twelve years old. He was my sister's husband. He was family. He told me it was a good thing, a beautiful thing. He told me never to tell. I never did. I loved her too much. And so I prayed, and feared, and prayed, and felt my body respond in ways I had never known. I hated my body; it betrayed me. I hated him; he betrayed my sister. I loved him; he was my sister's husband. I felt in some way responsible. If only I hadn't started developing so soon. If only I didn't look back when I was seventeen when I was eleven, eighteen when I was twelve. If only, if only, if only. Eventually, I just learned to block it out. I carried on doing homework, I carried on reading, I carried on (with a few bouts of bulimia in between). What else could I do? I carried on, in silence.

Until one summer twelve years later.

I returned home after two-and-a-half years away, half of that spent in missionary service to find our family reeling and an older sister, numb, spirit deadened. After thirteen years, she had finally had enough. Enough of trying to raise children in a maelstrom of emotion, of trying to remain calm in the face of violent episodes, of trying to placate and reassure a hair trigger. In one long afternoon, Mom and I sat at a kitchen counter making chocolate cakes, and she told me the story. Then, hesitatingly, awkwardly, I told her mine. But it was not only mine. It was my younger sister's story too. He had done the same to her, convincing her it was right because Tessa, her older sister, had done it. In her distraught whisper, Mom said, "I must tell your father."

Perhaps the biggest reason that I never told anyone is because my father loves his children. I thought he would kill Harry if he ever knew. His reaction surprised me.

We walked along the beach front at The Wilderness, an isolated village on the east coast. The air smelled of salt and sand and the ocean mist creeping grey across the horizon. Mom and my youngest sister, Alex, and I had joined my father that weekend in his speaking assignment, about 600 kilometers from home, to a tiny branch of about 11 people. Arriving early after the six hour drive, we drifted to the beach where we had come so many summers before as a young family. I can see myself, brown curls sandstapled to my head, turning hand-sand-sky down the slopes of the dunes to land cold in the ocean. I am older now, the sun has gone down, and Daddy walks ahead of me, his legs still lean, his belly a little bigger, his hair grey. I can hear his words, the words I have feared for so long: "Oh sweetheart, I don't know why the Lord gives us such strong urges. It's hard to control them and so difficult to understand. But we must learn to battle them and to be forgiving." I consciously loved my father more then than I had in years. I wondered at his understanding of human nature. Then I remember he too had had to forgive another's urges so that his life and theirs could heal and go on. With his kind and gentle wisdom born of experience, he gave me the family's permission to feel the peace that I had felt for years. At that moment, for all I knew and had experienced, my episodes with Harry were gone and forgiven.

I had forgiven Harry. To enter the House of the Lord, I had to forgive. But the healing began long before that interview day. I don't think I was the one who consciously chose to heal. Through the silent and divine process of time and faith, the pain was gone, first buried to ease it, then washed away in an understanding born of age and time. My bishop asked me whether there was anything in my conduct relating to my family members that was not in keeping with the Spirit of the Lord. I remember searching the faces in my mind: childish fights with Jonathan, harsh words with Laura, but, more recently, letters of love and support; rocking Alex to sleep; Daddy and I watching Silverado on a rainy Saturday afternoon. From a recess, long unvisited, came shadows of fear and anger and Harry. I hesitated then, and said, "Yes, but it's over now." He must have understood because he said, "I sense no animosity." And he was right. I did not hate Harry then, ten years after the fact, and I don't hate him now.

I realize that what happened, happened. Not much I can do about it now. I had hoped my husband would have been the first to touch me so; but he doesn't condemn me. Sometimes, I wish I hadn't sat through youth classes knowing exactly what the teacher was talking about. I wish, in hindsight, that those very strong feelings and passions had not been stirred in me at such a young and inappropriate age. Often, and still, I wish I had not learned to associate those expressions of love and tenderness with sick men and misguided desires. That association is so hard to undo.

To preserve the normalcy of my life, there is another association I have been loath to make. I do not find it easy to call myself "a survivor of abuse," "a victim." Those are words I see emblazoned across angry T-shirts on the nightly news with Tom Brokaw—applicable to someone else more desperate, more vile, more dirty than I am. Or are they? To realize what happened and accept what I am because of a man's actions stirred a smoldering anger that I don't quite know how to deal with. So, sometimes, I smile, in self-deprecating humor (which is only to leaven my anger) at the thought of being a statistic. In the beginning, I used to cry. To be so violated and so young is so unfair, so unjust, so ungodly. While the understanding of human mistakes and the forgiving came relatively easily, my healing continues still. Mostly, I remove myself.

Before I was married, I did not think very often of what happened so long ago, but when I saw the stretch across the back of the mountain sky, or I saw the swell of the hills green in the spring, or when I felt a hand resting warm in the small of my back, and lips gently brushing my neck, then I remembered, not Harry, but the swells of passion and I had to fight against them. I knew, dangerously well, how to focus my mind on something completely unrelated to the activities of my body. I knew how to turn off the guilt; and how to rationalize, even enjoy in a panic-heightened state, what was happening to me. I needed to do that when I was 12. It was vital in order for me to psychologically survive. And Christ knew, even in my youth, how to succor me so that I could go on. He dimmed my memory and dulled the hate, turning me to acceptance and a hazy understanding of why Harry did what he did. At twelve, I did not consider myself a victim. In fact, I did not regard myself as anything out of the ordinary. For all I knew, I was normal, healthy, passionate.

But I am 26 now, married and a mother, and the legacy lives with me still. However, there is no longer one person who must suffer from this period in my life. In fact, when I was alone, I did not suffer. If I kept control of my life and my passions, I could avoid situations like those of 12 years before. But now, married, I think Kevin and I are both victims of what happened. I use the word victim with trepidation. I don't wish to shift the reasons for our situation onto anybody. But, in my case, I can share the blame. What happened is a dark thread in a rich tapestry, useful perhaps to make lighter colors seem richer in comparison. However, sometimes, it is hard for me to see anything but that one thread. I know I would never have chosen so dark a thread as that fear of intimacy and sexual guilt which Harry brought into my life.

I struggle to know that Kevin really loves me. I convince myself, through some strange logic, that if he loved me, he would not ask me to share myself with him. I struggle to dissociate the sacred acts of husband and wife from the perverted acts of a middle-aged man and a 12-year old girl. I misinterpret Kevin's loving caress as gropings. My mind tells me that Kevin cannot be the same as Harry, but many times, that silent, rigid, young girl is closer to the surface than I realize, waiting and watching with bated breath, trying not to panic as a hand comes closer and closer to her body. These are the things I struggle with.

I entered marriage with Hollywood dreams and third hour allusions to the delights of marriage. We were going to live happily ever after in satin sheets and temple garments. I thought, because Kevin and I were so passionate in our dating, that the same passion would continue in our marriage. I could not have imagined the irrational fear and guilt that accompanied our first nights. I needed more than Calvin Klein lace lingerie to still the sobs and screams welling in my throat. My perplexed new husband could not reconcile the stiff, frightened girl before him on the bed with the demonstrative, passionate woman he had been engaged to. We could not have imagined I would fight him, pushing him away to physically escape what I had mentally escaped before.

Our marriage is not smooth at time because of this. Kevin shrinks from expressing his affection (not a natural posture for him), not wanting to be mistaken for Harry. I retreat behind a barricade of silence, protests of fatigue and mountains of books. (Robert Ludlum is the equivalent of a swear word in our family. I took the Bourne Ultimatum on our honeymoon and finished the book—all 700 plus pages of it. Reading is my way of escaping, of going somewhere else when the intimacy required becomes too much.) We are beginning to talk. The talking helps. Knowing Kevin is trying to understand me helps. But how can you really understand a feeling, a fear so irrational, yet so real unless you have felt it yourself. The revulsion comes in a wave so unexpected that even the sweetest kiss turns instantly rancid in my mouth. The swell of passion that causes me turn my body into his freezes me even as I feel it. The fear and guilt are with me still. Even after bearing a child, I still feel afraid when I try to enjoy my body with my husband or try to enjoy his. Just as I learned to fight the passion, I need to now let it ride, climb on its back, do something, anything to enjoy those moments.

Kevin enjoys me. He loves me passionately. He's a remarkably kind, gentle man who entered marriage with the same passion-filled dreams I did but with the capacity to fulfill them. Unfortunately, he married me, a survivor of abuse. I don't think he regrets the decision. Nothing indicated things would be this way between us, that I would be so crippled. But at times, he struggles to know that I love him, that I find him desirable. Because if I did, I would want to make love to him. But, most days, I don't. I tell him it's nothing personal. He doesn't quite buy that. Round and round we go.

So we struggle through this area of intimacy and withdrawal, which may or may not be different, from the struggles each sexually inexperienced newly-wed couple goes through. I often yearn to love my husband but feel myself incomprehensibly incapable of expression, frozen in some adolescent fear of guilt and complicity. I cannot but help it would be easier for me, for Kevin, for us, had we not had to drink blue milk. While I am not ruined as Sister Smith insisted I was, I am irrevocably changed, different. To give oneself clean and undefiled, naive and inexperienced, eager to participate, must be a fearful, reverent, divine moment free of shadows and fear and guilt. It was a moment I never knew. But I know, I hope, that I can come to know that moment. If there is such a thing as forgiveness and a lighter yoke, then there have to be for us, for Kevin, for me, nights and mornings and lazy summer afternoons of sensual, sexual, divine moments. They are not with us yet. God willing, they will be.

Postscript: Fifteen years after I wrote this, I am thrilled to announce that we have been the blessed participants in many "lazy, summer afternoons." There have also been tricky nights and petulant mornings. But enough "lazy summer afternoons" that we keep coming back for more.

Title from Bruce Springsteen, "I'm on Fire"

Ready, Ready, Ready, Ready to Run

I survived May. And might survive June.

The laptop hard drive is still crashed, along with all my legal files for the last three years, the family photos, and the iTunes of over 1,500 songs. Not to mention the hundreds of Sims characters that died with it—to whom Adam didn’t get to say good bye properly. Apparently, I got it so hot it actually melted. The hard drive itself is in a freezer somewhere, right next to Ted Williams, hoping for a resurrection in a kinder technological time and age. That happened May 1st, an auspicious start to the month, that only went downhill from there.

The Supplemental Reply to the Supplemental Opposition to the Reply to the Opposition to the Motion for Class Certification is being stamped at the San Diego Court house as I write. Every case has been checked twice, every subtle allusion to Defendants’ incompetence and disingenuity has been slightly smiled at many times, every legal premise tied firmly to the extant case with a simile so clear even the thickest judge could draw a favorable comparison.

The water has been restored. Turns out the little swamp to the north of the house that gave us bulrushes so beautiful we could reenact Moses in his little basket boat wasn’t really a natural spring. And the pipe that dripped water wasn’t really just part of the old irrigation system, but actually our water main—which the landscaper cut early on a Friday afternoon. (Did I tell you Provo City doesn’t work on Fridays? Part of the very efficient four-day work week). We’ve gone without toilets before (and discovered that our sewer line runs in an L-shape about 650 yards down the hill), but without water for three days! You can’t fix that with an Albertson’s bag and a shovel. No teeth brushing, no hand washing, no dishes, no laundry (the silver lining?), no cooking water, no showers, no baths, no watering the garden, no fresh water for dogs, cats, birds. By Sunday evening I started to understand why Christian organizations build wells and houses before they teach the message. Somehow a Saviour seems just a little theoretical at the point where you have to walk seven miles to fetch water in a paint can propped on your head. Forget living water, just water will do fine.

The U12 AA Division 2 soccer championship has been won, which required me coaching games about every night of the week for the last week of April and the first week of May, at the same time as Little League started, as the same time as Spring Basketball started, at the same time as All-star Softball started, at the same time as every possible end of school year function and important sporting event: Softball Banquet; National Honor Society banquet; Senior Prom; Senior Dinner Dance; Senior Tribute; Seminary Graduation; Seminary Graduation Talk; mother-in-laws Mother's Day Brunch; Ranger’s soccer tryouts; the dance festival; the third grade Legends of the Corn God play in which Adam played a rock; the fifth grade American Heroes Wax Museum, in which Seth played Colonel Saunders with live chicken in a cage; the New Scouts overnight; the Cub Scouts day camp (not attended—more guilt); the UVU basketball camp; the interminable weekend spring basketball tournaments; the Fathers and Sons camp; the AAU tournament; the beginning of lacrosse. All the while, I was thinking, I have no documents from the past three years; I have no documents from the past three years; I have no documents from the past three years, and our family has ceased to exist in photographic form.

New soccer teams have been found and formed for next season—which all need to be registered for tomorrow, and I still need to figure out how to resize a photo, and track down a birth certificate for a boy whose parents are, apparently, in Denmark.

The oldest child, and only daughter, has graduated from high school. If the pictures showed my ankles that day, you could see a dirt ring where the mud from the pond that leaked oozed over the top of my sandals about thirty minutes before the ceremony started. The curly hair is not a style; it’s a minimal effort, and has, if you could touch it, dirt in it, which only provides more volume. The tears that burst out of me like (no joke—a broken water main) when she walked across the stage were completely spontaneous. I turned to Kevin and sobbed, “I can’t remember her life at all. Did she have a good one?” “Pure Victorian hysteria,” said was the expression on his face.

The Senior All-night party, thrown on the night of graduation, is over. The consequent sinus infection is almost. I had not believed it possible to entertain fifty seventeen- and eighteen-year old boys with five dodge balls and a basketball from midnight until five in the morning. Who knew? Those 3.99, Ben Stiller, dodge balls were the afterthought bought hurriedly at Shopko after the ping pong tables I lined up to deliver to the high school all proved too big to get out of their basements. They’d all been assembled down below and had never seen the light of day. The basketball was dredged up from the back of the car, a remnant from basketball season, and covered up with balls, cones, pinnies and ladders from soccer season. Forget the inflatables, the bingo, the karaoke, the DJ, the hypnotist. The boys played dodge ball for hours across the width of the gym, with a basketball game played blithely in the middle of the killing ground.

The stream through the backyard has been relined with river rocks. (My children DO know how to work!) The hill behind the house is cleared of Chinese Elm and partially planted with perennials and covered with chocolate bark. The others still wait. So far I’ve lost one ruby red gaillardia to unplanting and a few speckled yarrow are looking iffy. But the cone flowers and the sage are doing swell, and I’m sure the transplanted red hot pokers will make a strong comeback next year. (I laugh at the plants in the nursery whose tags say, “Prefers well-drained, evenly moist soil with regular fertilization.” Yeah, don’t we all?) The baby blessing for 60 and the surprise 40th birthday party for my sister with about 100 guests five hours later on the same day came off without a hitch; barely a rain shower.

The sprinkler system is currently being installed. For one brief shining moment that was known as June 6, 2009, the back garden in my own home matched the back garden in my dreams. No more. Now it looks like a giant mole has made its home beneath us. Either that or a really low budget WWI movie is being shot on site. No more irrigating with moving pipe and skirts tucked into my underwear. I’ll miss those mornings, when the water arrives with a rush over the waterfall. My best watering days were on Sundays when I’d run home between meetings to check to see whether it had shown up yet (we’re at the end of the line). If it had, I’d strip off my dress and shoes, and running in underwear and pearl earrings, move sprinklers and watch watering patterns, my feet soaking in the cold water moving across the lawn. I’d return to church, wet around the edges and under my bra, hair dripping mist, smiling—my own communion.

The trek has come and gone, as has the post-trek commemoration a week later. Enough! I haven’t finished that laundry yet, or returned the borrowed tents. I also still haven’t mailed out our Christmas cards or Julia’s graduation announcements. I might do that by the end of the summer. While I’m at it, the Christmas wreath is still under the couch; and as I don’t remember using it this Christmas, I’m thinking it was from last Christmas; but we might have used it as a centerpiece this year; that’s a definite maybe. (It will take me about three minutes to take it downstairs to the wall in the basement that holds the various wreaths. But, last time I was on my knees looking for the remote under that particular couch, I thought, "Aaaagh, is that still under there?" and made no move to take it downstairs. Don't know why I resist so.)

In the very middle of it, I swore off matching socks for the rest of my life. The vow went something like this: “I am not matching socks anymore. From this moment on, I am not matching socks. See that bin right there. You can all go dig in that bin. Matching socks makes me feel very bad about myself. I don’t want to feel bad about myself anymore. “

Three days later, “Mom, I can’t find any socks.” “I told you, I am not matching socks anymore. See that bin right there. You can all go dig in that bin. Matching socks makes me feel very bad about myself. I don’t want to feel bad about myself anymore. “ “But what else do you do all day Mom, except play on the computer.” “I am not matching socks anymore. See that bin right there. You can all go dig in that bin. Matching socks makes me feel very bad about myself. I don’t want to feel bad about myself anymore. “ He’s been wearing the same pair of yellow baseball socks (unwashed) for the last five games. He takes them straight off, sometimes after sleeping the night in them, and pairs them back up so that he knows where they are. It works for us both.

Not to mention, it has rained for three weeks straight. Grey skies; hail on Father’s Day. It feels like Utah has up and moved to Oregon, or London, but with no added benefit of Wimbledon. I'm getting to the point where I pack eggs away in the microwave and my keys in the fridge. As for the six-layer dip that we bought at Costco last week and Seth swears he brought in from the car, I'm afraid to find out where it actually is. We haven't seen it and can't find it. I'm sure we'll smell it pretty soon.

Yet I breathe.

And can I tell you my deepest thought, after all this? I fear I am at the stage in life where my boobs have become a bosom—that broad, table-like shelf, one continuous form, upon which one might rest one’s arms, a baby, or one’s dinner plate. The body part whose configuration forces one to choose either above or below when learning up against a window sill, or a fence, or a counter. The kind of body part that looks good on the front of ship or the front of a hospital matron who walks competently through the dimly lit corridors, clipboard clutched to side of said bosom, said bosom trussed up in a contraption (that comes with its own instruction manual) from Dillards Lingerie department and draped in water-colored silk, with a brooch pinned to the upper left, the first thing one sees as it breaks the air in front of her. “Good morning, I’m Sister Tessa, and this is my bosom.” I don’t mind getting my mother’s hands. They’re earned through months of mornings and afternoons spent pulling weeds and planting. But, my grandmother’s bosom! I already have her Shetland pony legs. Did she have to bequeath me the bosom?


Title: Dixie Chicks, Ready to Run.