I Used To Rule the World

Be pretty if you are;

Be witty if you can;

Be cheerful if it kills you

--from the plaque on Tom and Katie's chimney

I'm unemployed for the first time in twenty years. There've been some rough moments. I'm waking up in the morning and thinking, "Hmmm . . . what do I do today?" And I cannot think of anything that is on a deadline, nothing that absolutely needs to be done. It's a completely new way to think about time and about my necessariness. Just Tuesday morning I cleaned the kitchen and living room until it sparkled. (Confession: it takes me about as long to do that as to draft a memo on potential claims). Yesterday (Wednesday), I looked at the kitchen in the evening, sink filled with dishes from the day and the evening meal prep and thought: Surely not again. I just did that yesterday. I know the 9 am -12 noon line up on TNT because that's when I go to the gym. Sometimes, I just stay there, on the treadmill for two, two and a half hours, watching an episode of Vegas and then a whole basketball game on ESPN2 or a soccer game on FSN. I also find myself in the middle of the day wondering what to do with the three hours until the kids come home from school. My children's success has become mine, their homework my homework (It's unnerving for them, this intense maternal interest). I've read 38 books since October 21, and am working on three more simultaneously, one for each toilet I use and one for the car. In the back of my head, there's a little voice that makes occasional comments about the uselessness of my life and mumbles something that sounds like mighty and falling. It's louder on some days than others; I can't hear it very well, but it's definitely there.

A few weeks ago, I sat crying in my car in a church parking lot. (I admit I cry easily. The commercial by Proctor & Gamble running right now during the Olympics that shows the little kids all suiting up to ski, skate and jump that ends with, "To their moms, they'll always be kids." That makes me cry. The one about "the best picture I ever saw was the one that allowed us to know my wife's breast cancer was treatable"? There's me weeping at the kitchen counter while I read the sports page. But, normally, I don't cry about me. I don't let the other side see me blink. Just last week I drove up and over Boulder Mountain in a whiteout; road completely covered; drop off to the canyon floor on my left; mother, two sisters and two very cute nephews behind me. Looking at my face, you would think I was driving to Home Depot to pick up track lighting.) But, that day in the parking lot, I sat crying about me.

It was late afternoon—that lag time between 4.30 and 6 when you want to eat chocolate or bread. I was driving up the hill to our driveway. I knew waiting at home for me was Julia with a paper, maybe Adam with his homework, or maybe they didn't need me at all, a dinner to make, and socks, always socks. Suddenly, I burst into tears, those tears that come accompanied by a groan from the pit and a shudder that ends in the shoulders. Truth be told, I didn't want to go home. In that moment, I wanted to go somewhere I could order off the menu while wearing clothes that need to be drycleaned and talking to people who don't need me to be patient and kind, just clever and competent.

I didn't want the kids to see me crying, so I pulled into the church parking lot down the hill. I sat there, in the rain, with the windshield wipers on, Bono singing, "Stuck in a moment you can't get out of . . . ." I tried to call Kevin, but he wasn't answering. I could have got really angry with him for being so insensitive to me in my time of need (of which he knew nothing but that doesn't excuse him). In fact, I started to. I called him three, four times. His phone went straight to voicemail. I didn't want to sit alone with those feelings; I needed somebody to roll around in them with me. Tears rolling down my face, head thrown back against the headrest, still moaning, I seemed to drift into the eye of the storm—a momentary calm. To my mind came the words of an article I read at my mother's house a few days before:

"Self-reliance means using all of our blessings from Heavenly Father to care for ourselves and our families and to find solutions for our own problems. Each of us has a responsibility to try to avoid problems before they happen and to learn to overcome challenges when they occur. . . . How do we become self-reliant? We become self-reliant through obtaining sufficient knowledge, education, and literacy; by managing money and resources wisely, being spiritually strong, preparing for emergencies and eventualities; and by having physical health and social and emotional well-being." I had stopped at those words "emotional well-being" when reading that paragraph and thought, then and later, about the concept of emotional self-reliance.

I'm familiar with the notion of economic self-reliance. For me, it means that Kevin and I work for what we earn and we pay for those we spawn. We try not to make others pay for us or our children. We built up a reservoir to draw on when work is scarce and money isn't coming in. But the notion of emotional self-reliance was an interesting one. If I were to frame it in the same language as financial and educational self-reliance, it would go something like this: it's my responsibility to generate or develop emotions that allow me to exist in a state of well-being. In just the same way that I must become financial stable and self-reliant, it would do me (and my family) well if I developed emotional self-reliance. Being emotionally self-reliant means I am able to return myself to a state of well-being during those moments/days/weeks when emotions dip low or out of control. In other words, I find solutions to my own emotional problems.

Back to the parking lot: I sat there, hidden by the retaining wall, replaying Track 12: "You've got to get yourself together; you've got stuck in a moment and now you can't get out of it." If there were chocolate in the car, or a can of condensed milk, I swear I would have downed them both without even chewing. Then I noticed—on about the fourth time through—that the song also said, "But darling, look at you; you gotta stand up straight, carry your own weight. These tears are going nowhere, baby . . ." By this time, I'm getting a little tired of the crying, or at least the tears have stopped their constant flow; they're just a trickle and I don't think they're going to start up again. Breathing's back to normal. But I'm still punching numbers on my cell phone trying to find a companion for my misery (Remember, I don't let the other side see me blink. There aren't many numbers to call). Nobody's answering--luckily.

A very calm voice comes to my mind: "This is your deal. You have to work through this. This is not Kevin's deal. This is not anybody else's deal but yours. Figure out why you feel this way. Figure out what you want. Sit in this silence, this mess for a while. Let it come to you. But don't look for solutions or try to attach blame for this crying fit outside of yourself." Well, okay then. I sat for a few more minutes, and then went home. I walked in the door and spilled the beans to Julia, "I just sat in the church parking lot crying my eyes out."

"Ah, Momma . . . Let me give you a hug!"

_______________

Because of this experience and my brooding about emotional self-reliance, I've come to the conclusion that Kevin cannot make me happy. He would like to, and if I can articulate for him what I want, he will work to make it possible for me. Heaven's knows, he likes a happy wife. But, he cannot make me happy. That's my work. It's part of developing self-reliance, part of that really important emotional work of choosing to live in a stable place, and not allowing events, low blood sugar, or memories of past lives in dry clean only suits to throw me completely off track. Emotional self-reliance is choosing to live with less doubt, less fear, and more believing. Part of emotional self-reliance is not allowing voices that whisper of impending doom or negligible self-worth to take up residence in my mind. Just because the thought enters doesn't mean it deserves to stay. Just because it flits through does not mean what I have conjured up will come true, or that what I fear will come to pass. Being able to sift through thoughts and thus control emotions is "learn[ing] to overcome challenges when they occur." By so doing, I create within myself the emotional resiliency to weather storms like those that hit me driving up the hill to my own home.

From: Coldplay, "Viva La Vida."

I Beg Your Pardon . . . What I Really Wanted Was A Rose Garden

One woman I know believes that there exists between a couple an implied contract that they will stay the way they looked when they got married. This particular belief was revealed when she told her sister, my friend, about a couple in her neighborhood who divorced. The divorce, according to the Sister, was understandable because "you know, she broke the contract." "What contract? "my Friend replies. "You know . . . . the contract you make when you get married. You marry a certain kind of person. They look a certain way. You owe it to your partner to stay that kind of person. You can't be putting on weight. That's just not fair. The woman broke the contract." After laughing out loud in disbelief, Friend realizes Sister was for real. The promise to remain the same "kind" of person is part of her marriage vows. To her credit, Sister has kept its terms admirably. She can still be mistaken for a My Size Barbie.

This notion of "contract" has set me thinking. I'm thinking there are certain bedrock things that, given our individual nature, should probably be included in our marital contracts with each other. I'm not talking about prayers, scriptures, white shirts or tithing. I'm talking about the things that make this life, the one we're living now, honestly, particularly, individually pleasant.

I'm wondering about my "contract" with Kevin. What is the point at which I will not be able, like Tevye, to find an "other hand"? I'm thinking that, for me, it has something to do with new and beautiful. If we stopped moving into new, I would feel betrayed. Neither do I want to live ugly. Living an ugly, repetitive life would have me crying "Breach" before too long. I realize this has nothing to do with eternal life. Yet, it has everything to do with my earthly life and the way I am built, with what pleases me at my core.

I like beautiful shoes. (They don't have to be new; I've ordered some of my favorites off eBay). I like new clothes, beautiful books whose covers I can rub, new places, good restaurants (without cream of chicken soup in their pantry), different roads, beautiful ideas clothed in original words and a non-repeating summer annuals. The new/different doesn't have to be fancy. I like shoveling snow, digging holes, breaking ice on the driveway, painting walls and chopping trees. They're mini-adventures. I like to have little adventures, every day. This drive is so strong in me that I don't want to go to church some Sundays. It's not that I don't like my congregation. I just don't like doing the same thing week in and week out. It's my personal version of water torture. (Hard to establish traditions this way, I admit. But the Easter Bunny has managed to bring Cheese Whiz every Easter Sunday for the last fifteen years.)

Owning that fact about me, instead of hiding it, frees me to seek what I need to be satisfied. It also allows Kevin to meet a real need. Gives him a target to shoot for. Built into our budget is the Tessa "slush" fund for me to spend on whatever I want. Some puritan streak in me is ashamed of this. I want to be able to say that I like devising recipes from food storage, and that two six-packs of pink geraniums will do for summer planting. I could pretend to be satisfied, or even try really hard to be satisfied with the utilitarian, with the same. But, I'm not. After a while, I get moody, low, like some sort of seasonal disorder in which I'm deprived of light.

Interesting that I married a man who lives in the town in which he was raised, five blocks from his parents, in the same congregation as his childhood. Makes for a nice tug-of-war, my propensity against his. (That we still live here 19 years later makes me realize I'm not winning). Yet owning up to the actual, real bent of my heart (the semi-annual showing of Sweet Home Alabama; drinking condensed milk straight out of the can; the indoor soccer league with the Latin Girls; Sophie Kinsella novels in the bath; onion rings from Stans and a 44-ounce from Crest with no sharing; tiger print bras; distrust of authority in any form) makes this life, the here and now, a pleasant place to be.

Beneath the Dust and Love

Often in the past twenty years, I have been surprised by a feeling: as if I've woken to find myself in a place not altogether unknown, but surprising all the same: walking down the hallways of the high school, I expect to see Karen and Patrick hanging out by the book room, as they did in 1983. I know, intellectually, I'm 43 and on my way to pick up a child for the orthodontist, but pushing through those glass doors into the high school smell, I feel the sixteen-year-old thrill of walking down the hallway, hoping against schedule and tardy make-up, that he will be there today. And there he is, walking towards me, his basketball calves stretching Allen Iverson-thin into his khaki Dickies. My heart skips a beat, as I watch him saunter toward me. That he calls me "Mom" stuns me into present. To my surprise, the lanky man-child walking toward me with that half-hitch in his step, braces glinting, is not Derek, but my son, Christian.

A post-midnight with sleeping bodies in beds, lights off everywhere, except maybe over the sink, a cup of rooibos tea in hand, curled up on the leather couch, book on the arm, listening to the noises of the night house. I've spent so many nights in this position at this same time, that, if I am very still, and all I hear is my breath and the same heart beating inside me since before memory, it is hard to tell whether the breathing coming from the other room is my father or my husband; am I seven or forty-three?

Can I be all three? Because, sitting on the couch in my forty-three-year old body, I can still feel the hot flush of shame that fills a seven-year-old body when she realizes she is wholly out of step with the majority, that what she thought was normal was, in fact, quite startling. I can still remember taking my mother's hand to cross Main Road in Claremont, spacing my fingers to fit between hers, feeling the warmth of her palm cup against mine. My son Adam holds my hand as we run through the parking lot after the game (not as often as before but sometimes still) and when his little fingers fill the curves at the base of mine, for a moment I cannot quite tell whose hand is whose. I am simultaneously small Tessa, knobbly-kneed in green school uniform, and someone's mother. The years run through me like it was yesterday, today and tomorrow at the same time.

In my today, I have a husband; four children, one of whom started college last week and needs her tuition paid by the 9th; a mortgage; three cars and a borrowed scooter on which we pay the insurance; a soccer team to coach every Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Saturday of the season;; briefs to draft and complaints to prepare; an incontinent bulldog who doesn't like to do her business in the snow so, from November to March, chooses the family room entryway instead; grasshoppers that have invaded my flowerbeds; a weekly tennis group; dirty laundry piled to the window sill. None of these accoutrements make me feel grown up. I supposed they should but they don't.

I thought getting older meant I would suddenly be transformed into the competent, unruffled, self-assured adults who surrounded me as children--at least from my vantage point closer to the ground. I am still awaiting that transformation: I never wanted to clean my room as a child; I still don't. The amount of sheer concentration and energy required for to complete a load of laundry, folded all the way into the drawers, is staggering. I didn't make my bed as a teenager; I rarely do now. Not much has changed inside me on the domestic front as far as I can feel. The yesterdays of me tag along.

Even situations which come with getting older didn't cause me to feel grown up: the bile of terror rising in my throat as I realize I can still feel my toes just as they are about to cut through me for another C-section; the sinking loneliness that fills when when I realize at four this morning I almost shook my screaming three-week old; the numb of having no job, and no steady income; the shame of having left a child racked with seizures on the operating table because I couldn't control my sobbing. I did not feel grown up. I felt scared, alone, numb and ashamed--not feelings I thought belonged to the grown up life.

All I knew in these situations was that I was on the cusp of new and unknown. To add to my discomfort, I believed, for every story, there was a script, a set of easy answers, if I could only find them. I grew up amongst ready-made answers to my unuttered questions about what life I should live, what I should worship, whom I should marry, and not whether to have children but how many. Sometimes those "shoulds" fit like the hand-me-down dresses I used to wear from my older sister Margo. Pretty, but so tight around the chest and arms, I huffed my way through Sunday School to avoid splitting the smocking from armpit to armpit. Past experience with tightfitting, hand-me-downs notwithstanding, I'd pull out my catalog of shoulds and woulds: a new mother should feel consuming joy; a real mother would nurse through mastitis so severe her nipples crack from top to bottom; a supportive wife would have dinner ready and be willing to dip into the 401k; a competent attorney would so obviously know how to select a jury; a real coach would have prepared her striker for the offside trap.

Faced with such daunting standards, my own responses took on a "deer in the headlights then hit by a truck" quality--stunned into silence, then a stagger sideways, blinking rapidly. Always, always, my response contained an aspect of flight. Faced with the gap between what I thought a grown up me should be/feel/do and what I am/feel/have done, I feel to run--away. Me and Bono, we both want to run--to the waiting room, to a book which offers escape, to the mall, to the shopping cart on Zappos--anywhere I can start breathing again, and try wrap my arms around what it means to be where I find myself: not the real mother, not the real coach, not the supportive wife, not the competent attorney in a situation which so obviously calls for one. Then, having got my blinking and breathing under control, the imposter-me, who still remembers the feel of her mother's hand and wishes for it then, sidles back in to play somebody else's mother.

I am learning that, sometimes, it requires tremendous courage and nerve to simply show up, to be present in a particular day. To be completely utterly and present in the days in which you realize your business is failing and you will have to declare bankruptcy; in that particular day when it sinks in he is leaving you and your children and you will be divorced; in that day and the days that follow when you realize you cannot live with this man any longer and that you need to make a new life; in the days that you look at your children and their choices and weep for them and continue to love them; in the days after death; in the day where you take your beloved's face between your hands and ask him about "us"; in the days where there is $11.57 in the drawer and no milk until the end of the week; in the day you lose your job and the months of unemployment that follow. Those days that I never thought would be mine, which I could not have imagined--those are my most important days. How I face them shows me I have finally grown up.

Instead of running and apologizing on my return, I am choosing to stand. I'm letting the ebb of the unknown and uncertain flow over and through me. I'm concentrating on stillness. I'm trusting my solutions are sufficient; that the uncertainty which accompanies life will not overwhelm me; that the difficult conversations and laundry are necessary. I'm seeing that my willingness to show up, in whatever inadequate, diluted form, is the most significant measure of a grown up life. And, in my willingness to stand rooted, to be present, I feel the blossoming of calm.

Title: from Counting Crows, "Perfect Blue Buildings"

On the Road to Find Out

I was evicted once—from the adult section of the Rondebosch Branch of the Cape Town Municipal Library—for trying to check out Great Battles of World War II. I was 8 or 9 then, my library cards were an oak green with my name and the expiration date printed boldly across the front, 1976-03-03. The adult cards were bright yellow. I suppose that was the librarian’s first clue. The other must have been the small brown hand that came sneaking over the top of the counter, clutching three tattered cards, wilted by the summer heat. If she had peered over the edge, she would have seen me on the tip of my toes, nose crushed against the wood, straining for those extra inches. She told me, not too unkindly, that I was to go downstairs. I think the mortification of discovery was edged out by the pang I felt as I saw the Great Battles of World War II disappearing under her desk.

Children were not allowed in the adult library. We had our own library. It was at the bottom of the sweeping staircase to the right, behind tall doors with brass handles and a window in each, across which windows was spelled, in gold block letters like an old fashioned lawyer’s office, Children’s Library. We had our own librarian, our own books, even our own little armchairs with chopped-off legs. The library was beautiful. The light came through twenty-foot, white framed windows, sandwiched like archer’s holes between the sandstone cornices. The floors were hardwood, yellowish, maybe teak to match the staircase that wound up the center of the building.

I spent months of my childhood there, even with the strangely colonial hours of operation: Mondays and Fridays, 10.00-18.00; Tuesdays, 10-13.00 (adults), 13.00-18.00 (children); Wednesdays, 10.00-13.00; Thursdays, 13.00-20.00; Saturdays, 9.00-12.00 (to coincide with the farmer’s market taking place in the alley between the library and the train station). I can't count all the times I would walk over the granite threshold, holding my breath in anticipation to be faced by closed doors. I had forgotten it was Wednesday, and with ruthless Afrikaner/British efficiency, those doors were closed at precisely 13.00. It was a long walk home on those days.

The summers were long; we had no television; the library was close by; and the walk took us through the river and along the railroad tracks where the engineers would wave to us from the steam engine. Why not go to the library? Besides, it was a place my mother would let us walk alone from a young age. So, I spent my summers walking to the library, wading in the river, waving to the engineers, dawdling alongside the tennis courts. Each visit I checked out three books—one for each card. Each day, I would read as fast as I could, and then return. I remember one zenith of almost psychotic reading, when I checked out By the Shores of Silver Lake, The Long Winter, and Little Town on the Prairie one day and returned them the next, all read from cover to cover. I had lived in a Dutch attic for months to evade, without ultimate success, the invading Nazis, and tunneled for what seemed like miles through German dirt, dropping that same dirt pocketful by pocketful as I walked the fenced perimeter.

Reading transported me; overcame the limits of my physicality; made other worlds and experiences possible. The day of my expulsion I already knew what it was like to fight in the American Civil War—I had read Across Five Aprils four times. I had already poured molasses on the snow and made toffee men; what molasses was, or snow for that matter, I had no actual idea, but Alamanzo had done it, and, therefore, so had I. I had caught clams, and picked blueberries in my overalls and gappy teeth.

I had one of those time-collapsing moments a few weeks ago. I ran into our public library to pick up Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs for book club. We were meeting that afternoon, around the lunch table, and I had about two hours to read those 90 pages. I had originally planned to check out the book, run home, ditch stinky gym clothes, shower, get presentable (not having a job to dress up for anymore makes every moment out of the house an occasion) and then sit down to speed read through the turn of the twentieth-century novella about Dunnet Landing, a fishing village in Maine. Then I saw, under the window, a row of armchairs with an end table a Shetland pony leg-length apart from one of them. My perfect fit. I thought I would sit down for just a minute. I sank into the armchair, pulled the table a little closer with my heel, crossed one leg over the other on top of the table, and began to read.

It wasn’t a quick read. Sarah had set coastal Maine—tongue, life and hearts—to paper. To rush through would be like running into the gift shop at Gettysburg and buying a t-shirt to say you’d been on the battlefield. So, I curled up and read. Then spread out, spread over, curled up again, and read more. Took the fifteen-minute snooze that tends to come on about twenty minutes into reading. You know that fugue state where the words start to blur, the patrons start whispering underwater, and your body goes noodle warm. Waking from such a state is gentle; the shift from sleep to wake unnoticeable. Then I read more in the hushed, twilight, dustmote sound that seems to permeate libraries the world over.

I showed up late to book club, unshowered, in my pilling Winter Olympics 2002 sweatshirt, and took the end seat at the lunch table. But I had met Mrs. Todd, the local herbalist whose rumbling, wide-bodied passage through her garden is marked by the scent of rosemary and thyme crushed by her skirts; and Mrs. Blackett, her 86-year old mother who lives with her bachelor son and her very best tea set on Green Island off the coast. And soon I would know Joanna who, after being jilted on her wedding day, put herself away to hermitage on a solitary island. She was, her neighbors said, one of those people better at “being loved than loving.” There—my shaft of light.

Andrew Carnegie paid for the construction of almost 1,700 libraries in the United States. According to his terms, he would provide the construction funds, and the town would provide the land and the operating budgets. Each town chose the design. There are Beaux Arts, Italian Rennaisance, Baroque, Classical Revival and Spanish-American Carnegie libraries in insignificant places like Grass Valley, California; Greencastle, Indiana; Squirrel Hill, Pennsylvania; and Jefferson, Texas, population 2,024.

Yet, among them all, there were constant design features: Each library had a prominent, welcoming doorway. Each doorway was accessed by ascending a staircase, so that when the person entered the library, their physical movement would presage their intellectual. In both body and mind, they were be elevated by learning. Outside every library there was supposed to a lantern or light post. For enlightenment. Inside, the shelves were open stacks. An innovation. Prior to Carnegie libraries, a person had to request a book from a librarian, like a perpetual Special Collections. One book at a time. Now, each person would be able to choose their books for themselves.

Thank you Mr. Carnegie for that innovation. Does anybody else love those pregnant moments when you run your finger over book spines as you walk down the stack, feeling the curve of an author’s courage swelling beneath. A literary roulette. Where will the ball land? Where will the wheel stop spinning? Who’s the lucky winner today? In the library, me, always me.

I love the sensations the library makes possible. Simultaneously slowing and lengthening my steps. Running my fingers along the spines of books. Hooking my index finger over the spine and pulling out the book for a 45-degree angled peruse of the cover. The dilation of my pupils when a book I’ve been tracking finally shows up on the shelf. The whiff of papery air that puffs up when I open the cover. The author’s eyes that stare at me when I turn, mid-chapter, to look at his picture, thinking, “How on earth did that face, living as it does with its wife, two children and three cats in Birmingham, give birth to these words?”

I know I’m waxing lyrical. But just this afternoon, I asked Julia to copy pages of my favorite books before we returned them to the library. “Why are you doing this, Mom?” she says. “Because I need to keep these passages.” “Oh Mom, you are such a nerd.” She ruffles my curls. “Such a nerd.” I suppose I am. But these words have moved upon me. Wind on my water. I have become Zeno’s arrow that is caught, stationary in flight, page after page, words piercing my here and now with their shaft of light. For me, it is no mistake he is called The Word, given the power of words to transform, transport and transfigure.

Title: On the Road to Find Out, by Cat Stevens.

Here’s to You, June Williamson

The world is so empty if one thinks only of mountains, rivers and cities; but to know someone here and there who thinks and feels with us, and though distant, is close to us in spirit - this makes the earth for us an inhabited garden.

--Goethe

I've met her twice: June Williamson. Once standing in line at Einstein's Bagels, on the first Saturday in October, after my early morning soccer game. And the other, about a week ago, in front of the clearance racks at Old Navy. I never knew she existed before that October morning. I suppose I had driven by her house in the southern part of the valley. Our children might have played soccer or baseball against each other in the Summer and Fall Leagues. But, we don't live in the same town, and our children don't go to the same schools, and so we are destined never to meet . . . unless, by some twist of fate and luck, we both decide to head to Einstein's on Center Street to get a bucket full of bagels to help us make it through four hours of televised church on a Saturday.

There I was standing in line, behind the tiny figure of a woman dressed all in black. One of those ballerina figures. About 5 foot 3 inches, impossibly long neck, with thighs the size of large zucchinis, clad casual chic in black yoga pants, and black base layer turtleneck, and some kind of black jacket or vest, nipped in at the tiny waist. She wears semi-hiking boots, that look really good on her about size 6.5 feet. Her hair has lowlights. Her coffee-colored hands are long-fingered and I can see the sinews connecting wrist to knuckle.

There's me, 5 foot 8, in soccer shorts, from which protrude my very strong, Shetland pony legs, with soccer socks shoved down around my ankles, my size 9.5's shoved into my son's Adidas slides, the sweat imprint of the shinguard still visible on my calves. My hair's pulled back in the ponytail I've been wearing since grade school and which I still find the easiest hairstyle of all. And, just like grade school, the curls have escaped the elastic and are buzzing madly around my very red face.

She's trying to find enough bagels to fill two dozen but everybody has had the same idea this morning. All the blueberry, cranberry, chocolate, honey wheat, cinnamon sugar, asiago, and sunflower seed bagels have already found homes. She is left with only odd varieties, like one cinnamon raisin, two spinach, one rye, and several dozen sesame seed, chopped onion and pumpernickel. All I really want is a salmon lox—smoked salmon, cream cheese, red onions, tomatoes, and capers on a toasted plain bagel. (Ten points if you know what the salty little caper actually is).

As she tries to find the assortment of bagels that will satisfy her children, I pull into the spot next to her along the display case to place my order.She turns to look at me, with a look of apology on her high-cheek boned face. "So sorry . . . there's just nothing left and I promised them that I would bring bagels." She has topaz eyes, and a sprinkling of freckles across her cheekbones. The accent is pure Midwest American.

We both finish ordering and move to the side to wait. The conversation starts easily. I can't remember what started it. But, by the end of the ten minutes it took to get our orders, and the extra five minutes we took just standing around not wanting to leave, I found a fellow traveler.

She's from Thailand, adopted by an American service man who married her mother. She came to Utah to attend university. Her name's not really June, but June was the closest English name to her Thai name, and so her father called her that. She's married to somebody she met in college, and has five children. They live in the southern part of the valley, in a town that, I would guess, has maybe ten darker than white faces. She finds out I'm from South Africa, that I too moved to the United States, and that we have both married Americans.

The conversation skips to high schools, and to why I like sending my kids to the "ghetto" high school in our town. I tell her about growing up in South Africa and not knowing about the other in anything but a very superficial way. I share that I want my children to not be able to know what the majority looks like and by choosing this high school, they have hard time identifying the power structure by the color of a person's skin. She tells of her daughter's struggle to define herself when her peers ask her what she is. Not many know where Thailand is. We question why it is that they even have to ask the question.We laugh that we look like each other's names. My name, Hispanic at first glance, and hers, the name of a fifty-five-year old, white matron with whirligigs in her front yard and a root cellar with bottles of parsnips and apricot jam.

I walk out of Einstein's breathing deeply, my face in a grin. I feel better for knowing that June Williamson lives near me. I think I might never see her again, or, if I am brave, I will call her up and say, "I would like to be your friend." Either way, I've had one of those moments when I come face to face with a soul I recognize. C.S. Lewis describes the feeling as that moment when one person says to another, "What! You, too? Thought I was the only one." I'm filled with a sense that this person I have known before. When we meet, it's not a "Nice to meet you" moment. It's a "Well, there you are . . . where've you been?"

Every winter, South African girls in primary school play either netball or hockey. I first saw Julia Elizabeth when I lined up next to her on the line that demarcated our defensive third from the center third. She was Micklefield's Girls wing attack; I was Oakhurst's Girls wing defense. We were ten, and playing netball in Cape Town in the mid-seventies. Julia, no doubt, wore her pink pleated skirt and white polo shirt; I must have been in my green pleated skirt and white polo shirt with my "takkies" recently whitened with a stick of shoe whitener to make sure they were sparkling clean and thus suitable shoes in which to play netball.

Our schools were both girl-only elementary schools, with about 200 pupils. I know Oakhurst had only one class per standard, about 25 students per class and 7 standards in the school. I think Micklefield was even smaller, housed as it was in an old mansion off Sandown Road. It was a private school. Our two worlds were completely disconnected, except for those 40 minutes twice a winter season when Oakhurst played Micklefield in netball.We met every winter on the line, and played against each other, Julia trying to pass the ball into her team's shooting circle, me trying to prevent their team's attack. On looking back, it seems strange that we played the same position for three years running, and thus always played against each other.

During the last game of our last year in primary school, we lined up again, big grins on our faces at seeing each other again. "So, where are you going to high school?" we must have asked each other, there not being a given area high school one attended, at least not in the white Southern Suburbs anyway. There was the girls-only Rustenburg Girl's High School for the academic, attended by my older sisters, or San Souci, for the not-so-bright; the religious St. Cyprians for the Anglican girls, and Herzlia, for the Jews; and then there was an upstart, a new school, only twenty years old, which was co-educational and English-speaking, called Westerford. "Westerford," we must have both replied. And then I remember grinning, knowing that Westerford with Julia wouldn't be half as strange as I imagined it might have been.

The first day of school, we were assigned to the same class, 6C with Miss Jones, who wore semi-sheer blouses through which you could see her slippiest of slippy bras. Five years with Julia Elizabeth, or Jules, or Raynham, both of us in plaid, collared dresses. Five years of every day, copying each other's homework because our handwriting was identical, watching Mr. Bisset's beautiful hands from our front row in History, visiting each other's churches and youth groups, growing older, growing apart, moving back together again.

I saw her for the first time in twenty years last year when I visited South Africa, for the first time since I left for college in 1984. We're older. She's a traditional doctor, practicing healing and medicine from a workshop in her garage, filled with bones, rattles, herbs and stones. She also choreographs for her modern dance troupe, which was flying out the next morning to Algeria to participate in a festival of French-African dance. Her fingers are just as impossibly long. When we hugged in the doorway of her urban farmhouse the width and feel of her narrow shoulders was as familiar to me as the curve of my own children's. I felt time collapse as I stood there in that hallway.

Here she was, Julia Elizabeth. We span thirty years, most with very little contact. Yet, she is one of the tallest flowers in Goethe's garden of souls. She is my hollyhock, I suppose. I have a picture of the two of us as teenagers pinned to my fridge. It's tattered and water-spotted. When I look at us twenty-five years ago, I am filled with warmth. To know that somewhere on this earth, she still breathes and laughs and pulls her hair back with those impossibly long fingers is just a wonderful thing. Just in case, to keep her close, I have named my only daughter after her. I have my own Julia, a Julia Rose.

So, this is my paean to the kindred and kind and beautiful spirits who have risen at unexpected moments and filled my life. I'm sitting here in America, thousands of miles from my childhood, from my teenage years, from my mission, probably thousands of miles of thoughts away from those I'm thinking of. Time though, seems, inconsequential. That I have been there, with you, at some point is all that matters. I don't even know whether you think of me like I think of you. It doesn't matter; I don't require it to be reciprocal. Like walking into the Gallerria dell'Accademia in Florence and seeing David, in all his marble beauty for the first time, when I walk into this particular garden, I am always breathless with wonder.

Leather and Lace

Mary took the mirror from the wall and threw it on the floor. It broke up into many angled pieces. Each piece reflected something of their house and the clothing of their children hung on pegs on the wall, and one large piece shone with the image of the sky and its early-morning adornment of cottony clouds overhead tumbling southeast in the early breeze and the bright dots of cottonwood leaves.

Two married people found themselves on separate and barren planets, alone in a place called Young County in the remote land of Texas. In an instant they realized that the bonds between them were not strong at all, but very fragile, and if these were broken they would be solitary and isolated for all eternity, and all that they had made together and the children they had made between them would be thrown out on long orbits like minor comets. . . . They were caught up in a rage of destruction, both hoping at some point the other would realize how serious this was.

--Paulette Jiles, The Color of Lightning

We have a painting in our hallway to our bedroom. It's called Lovers Running, and shows a man and a woman dressed in white on a green hillside, holding hands, and running in their bare feet. Sometimes, I get the title mixed up and call it Running Lovers. The same artist, Brian Kershisnik, has done another painting, which he calls, The Most Difficult Part. It shows a man and a woman in black leotards trying to perform a gymnastics move. One figure's standing on its hands while the other holds the feet. While the bodies look smooth and plaint, the move itself looks difficult and the stance is clumsy. Brian has said this piece is his metaphor for marriage. Not the only one, but one of those images that helps him makes sense of marriage. I know what he means. There are times in my marriage that I would feel more comfortable doing the reverse backhanded double Swedish helicopter backtuck with a triple twist, than in going forward.

At those moments, precipitated in particular for me when I have not been what I had hoped I would be for Kevin, I feel myself pulling away. I am literally the running lover. And I'm running to the corner, putting myself there and waiting for Kevin to come find me. I become silent, and watchful. I don't initiate any conversations, and my replies are brief. I try to take my cues from him. I suppose I want to know that I am still loved, despite my inability to even remotely balance a checkbook while being able to use one with dexterity (one of my difficult parts). But I can't articulate that. Some part of me won't say it. I want him to feel that and sense my distress. I want him to be my emotional GPS beacon. I want him to come running, my personal St. Bernard to rescue me from the avalanche in which I continue to sit.

All he sees is that I am gone. Tessa is gone, somewhere else. I won't speak to him, engage with him, flirt with him, touch him. So, he searches his memory for what he has done to precipitate this kind of distance. He doesn't know that all I want is for him to come find me and to reassure me that, despite it all, I am still loved. Instead, he feels that he is not loved, that t here is something innate within him that must be unlovable because his actions certainly don't warrant such a withdrawal. Therefore, it must be him. And if it is him, the very essence of him, then what can be done about that? How does one change one's very nature?

These are our individual thoughts, as we grow further and further apart. There we spin the two of us, in orbit around each other, wary, and always aware that the other is in the room.

It is during these times that I want to touch Kevin so desperately my teeth ache. I orient myself to where he is, to the distance between us on the couch and to the console between us in the car, and his right hand resting on his thigh. The pull to him is actually physical. But, because of some rule I have devised about who makes what move first and when, I don't actually close the gap. I'm sure there are some of you out there who find this behavior completely baffling. You touch easily and often. Your preferred manner of sitting next to your family on the pew or in the car includes a backrub. That doesn't come easily for me. I watch people who touch easily, wondering how they do it. How do they push past the force field of personal space and march in with arms outspread, hands at the ready to grab shoulder, or wrist, or, our personal favorite, perform the double-thump man hug?

At night though, my resolve crumbles. It's hard to sleep in the same bed with your lover and not touch him. More than hard, it's unnatural. The entire exercise seems like a farce: Get into bed, speaking politely, take care to wonder what the other one wants to watch on TV, blankets pulled up, both lying flat on our backs, not turned to the other or turned away as comfort dictates. Kevin manages to slip into sleep slower than the three seconds it normally takes him—a full five minutes or so. He turns his back to me. I start to read signs in the sheets.

Obviously, I don't sleep well. After much soul searching and bluster, I decide I'm just going to use his body for my own gratification in a reverse of gender roles. I reach out and slip my left foot into the space between his ankles bones. He doesn't respond. His breathing doesn't even change. I then spend the hours calculating what it means that he doesn't respond. Perhaps the snoring should tip me off that he is actually just fast asleep and doesn't feel me reaching out. But still I think and ruminate, my mind hesitant and fearful.

My body cannot wait though. I push my foot further, turning my body to spoon against his. I slide my right arm around his chest, and slip my left under his pillow. I rest my head against the broad of his upper back. Then, in his warmth, whether he is asleep or not, I don't know, I can finally sleep. Sometime during the night, the rigidity in his back will loosen, and he will sink toward me. His arms, which have been folded over his chest, will unwrap themselves, and his right hand will find mine. No longer lovers running. And maybe not then, but soon, just lovers. After, always the words: explanation, seeking forgiveness, giving forgiveness and reassurance, the laughing, the disbelief, the sheer relief that we are back together again.

I've written before about the capacity of the mother's body to teach me what I didn't know I needed to know. Things like the capacity of the body to provide sustenance for a child even though the spirit is unwilling. About the sacrifice required to mother well, giving all the body has to provide a safe haven for children entrusted to my care. Lately, I've been thinking about another lesson my body teaches me: when my heart and mind are so at odds with themselves that I cannot see straight and cannot talk straight, and when the distance between Kevin and I grows longer and longer, my body aches for him. I want him, with a hunger that's not, at least for me, a daily occurrence. I want his hands, his bare flesh next to mine, his fingers in my hair, his feet against my calves, our fingers knit together. I have been taught since childhood to learn to subdue my body, to discipline it, and to shape it, to take control of it and to push aside the urges and desires. In this case, wisely so, I am learning to listen to my body talk.

This hunger is, I think, my body's way of getting to where I want to be when I cannot get there myself. When my thoughts are so jumbled, and my ideas so convoluted, and my motives not even apparent to myself, my body knows with a wisdom beyond my own experience that what I want—body, mind and soul—is to be one with Kevin. My body knows how to start the process of healing, of restoring unity, and it will drive towards that with a pressure that cannot be stopped. It's my body's way of saying, this unity you seek, this oneness, where he reads your mind and you read his, that's not attainable yet (or ever). But this love, this physical unity, is . . . and it is the taste and the mirror and the bedrock and the promise of what can be.

I know some couples can't make love until it's all worked out, until all the talking is done. (Sometimes the talking takes months, and that's really too long of a time to ask somebody to wait.) But I cannot talk freely until I have made love. Chest to chest, with his arms around me, with my forehead pressed against him, I can talk. What I say then is what matters. It's not the jumbled thoughts, the half-formed recriminations, and the accusations that filled me before when most of me was worried I wasn't loved or even lovable. It's just my feelings, my fears, my thoughts, and my reasons for doing and for reading into what he did. And it's half of what filled my head before. The rest has settled or been blown to the wind, like the chaff, that inevitably grows up amongst the marriage wheat.

Title: Stevie Nicks, Leather and Lace.

Wanna Talk About Me, Wanna Talk About I

Faith Stages are not to be understood as an achievement scale by which to evaluate the worth of persons. Nurturance is required for growth in faith, but there is no substitute for life experience and the passage of time.

--John M. Rector

I'm sitting in a group of women, in suburbia. We're all the same faith. It's Monday morning, and we've gathered together to discuss, it turns out, exactly that, this faith. I think we are, ostensibly, gathered together to learn how to love life. The group has just started meeting and new attendees trickle into this front room, with its temple print, family photos in engraved frames, and flower swag framing the front picture window. As we introduce ourselves, some in the group are delighted to discover that there are other body talkers present. As I am sitting across the room from my sister L, I cannot whisper to her for clarification. (I'm thinking it has nothing to do with Wind Talking and Nicholas Cage.) L, who teaches yoga and attends meditation retreats and has just completed her brilliant service in the young woman's auxiliary (no connection between end of service and meditation retreat), has invited me. She is the link between me and the others. The woman who leads us is an alternative healer. I tend to take 4 Ibuprofen as a guard against everything, and will happily down expired Amoxicillin with a glass of cranberry juice to head off the UTI. The approach, while not exactly mainstream, is probably more neglectful than alternative. I am not well-versed in the language of this universe. Even after I ask L what a body talker is, I'm still fuzzy. The answer, "They use different modalities" does nothing to heal my ignorance. But, I have time on my hands (subject of another post about lay-offs and self-worth) and I am interested in learning about other ways of learning and experiencing the world.

One woman in particular has an anxious energy this morning. She says, "I am a gay marriage supporting, democrat, feminist Mormon." She throws the words out there like they're a challenge to a duel, not knowing her kind makes me feel all cozy. (I confess to being more fascinated and bewildered by hunting, homeschooling, John Birching, survivalist, natural childbirthing Mormons. Feminist democrat Mormons are a walk in the park.) She's taking a transformative leadership course, surrounded by lesbians who constantly challenge her very core, wanting to know how she can be part of an organization that supports something that will deprive hundreds of thousands of others of their heart's desire. Consequently, she is examining herself and her belonging, perhaps trying to find the terms upon which she and the church can agree to live amicably. She asks, "How can I be part of something that, at some level, is contrary to my personal truth?" I smile inside and I hope my eyes are soft as I look out. You see, I recognize her. I have asked those questions; have thought those thoughts; have resented the feeling that big brother is watching over my shoulder to see what I would do wrong next. I have lived with the tightness in the middle of my chest and the weight on the shoulders that seems to get darker as the three hours progress. I have also come to know it is largely self-imposed.

When I return from the gathering, Kevin asks me what we talked about. I reply, with a smile and with sincerity, "Oh, the usual . . . how difficult it can be to be a thoughtful, intelligent woman and to be a member of this Church in a predominantly Mormon culture."

I will admit I am struggling to write this post, but it is nagging at me. I can't find the images to give substance to the words. They are after all, very plain and simple words. But, I don't want to come off as a "wiser than thou." Taking strength though from John Rector's words that, in the development of faith, "there is no substitute for life experience and the passage of time," I'm writing this as my stone on the cairn marking this particular way.

In any organization, which an organized religion is definitely one, there will be policies and procedures. Some descend like the dews from heaven, some are drafted by committee; others are reactionary and arise out of situations for which there was no official response until the crisis arose. Some might be heavy handed; others might be shortsighted; others are the best we could come up with in the time allowed, while it is entirely possible that certain practices and procedures are inspired, the very best of man's mental effort lightened by grace designed to bless our lives. How does one proceed in the face of this bouillabaisse of practices? With patience and an open heart and mind, realizing that just because I have not yet had need of or experience with a particular program or procedure or policy doesn't create irrelevance. It also means realizing that my not knowing doesn't preclude others from knowing.

Just because I don't quite know yet doesn't mean others can't or that the principle or doctrine is unknowable or false. I was standing at the kitchen counter this past October, watching a session of General Conference. I believe I was eating an apple. As he proceeded to bear quite vigourous, and, in my mind, violent witness, the apple stopped halfway to my mouth. I could feel myself reeling from his language. I heard myself say, "Wow . . . wow . . . whoa!" His whole approach to testimony made me shiver and want to step sideways to escape the onslaught. Then I thought, or somebody thought for me, "Just because I don't know like that doesn't mean he can't and doesn't."

A woman tells of sitting in a Buddhist seminar. She is not Buddhist but she has come to Colorado to immerse herself in Eastern methods of learning. She expects something different than what she finds. There are gongs, bells, and circles she has to walk at prescribed times. The teacher is autocratic. She will brook no discussion as to when the bell rings, and how the circle is walked. Even the crossing of the legs is not open for interpretation. The woman bristles at the imposition of this structure on what she expected to be a freeflowing, gentle wind of learning. She fights against it in her mind and her soul. Ironically, in this retreat devoted to gentle Buddhism, she finds herself awash in antagonism. As she struggles against the restraints, she gains an insight: "There will always be a prescribed way. And, I will, at times, rub against it."

We all have buttons that push easier than others, and like the heel of my foot in a new shoe, there are places that will rub. My particular button happens to be women and their place in society. My sister doesn't happen to have that button but I do. Because that button is both my vocation and my burden, I bristle at times as I practice my faith. Typical of my issues is a conversation I had this summer with a friend whom we were visiting in Bermuda. He is the lay leader of a very small congregation, perhaps 25 people who attend on a Sunday. He was asking me about the things I wrestle with in the Church. I replied, "the role of women and the lack of power." He laughed, and said, "Really . . . the women run the church. They do everything." I replied, "I'm not talking about doing, Clar. I'm talking about power. About decisions, about who is sitting around a table when the decisions are made, about the different kinds of questions women would ask as opposed to men, about the different lines drawn and the different concerns raised if there were women involved in decisions and decision-making. It's about looking up at the stand and seeing dark suits, with a token woman. It's about women giving opening prayers and men giving closing . . . and everything that represents." His wife, the leader of the children in their small congregation, chimed in, "Clar, you know, when I propose a name, you don't just agree; you have the final say. I can't do anything without male approval." To his credit, he tipped his head thoughtfully. I feel the scar on the back of my metaphorical heel begin to throb.

My childhood faith was nurtured in a wood paneled chapel whose twenty-foot long windows were outfitted with gossamer curtains that used to float in the Sunday evening breeze out over the congregation and back again as the light left Mowbray, a southern suburb of Cape Town, South Africa. We were joined at some point in my childhood by Brother Wiseman, a black man who shuffled up the stairs, his three-piece suit folding dovegrey around his ankles, his grey felt hat with jaunty feather in band held between his hands. He shuffled his slow way from Sea Point, a wealthy Jewish enclave on the sea front, from a small dark room, probably in the basement, from whence he worked as a night watchman. I didn't know his story well; only heard snatches of it while I hung upside down from the handrailings, but it involved a Book of Mormon and a complicated combination of public transport to get him here on a Sunday morning. So, there he sat, a perfectly round, black head melting slightly at the jowls, atop a short, black body, sitting three seats from the door, two years before the Priesthood was restored to all worthy male members and twelve years before apartheid ended. What would possess him to spend his precious mornings off travelling on busses to meet with a bunch of white people in a white suburb who spoke a different language and who would not allow him to officiate in the priesthood ordinances like every other male there?

Surely, upon feeling the pull to join, he would have had the same kinds of questions, "How can I be part of something that continues to marginalize me? How can I be part of something that feels, in one part, so wrong?" (Part of me wonders whether this is the kind of question asked by the fish that has never lived without water, and now, being so familiar with the substance, wishes to swim in filtered Brita with a hint of lime? Perhaps when you're a fish that has finally found water deep enough to swim in, you are not so perturbed by the murkiness of certain corners and the silt which tends to gather in the bottom swells. You're just grateful for the air flowing over your lungs and for the increased ability to breathe deeply.) So, as to Brother Wiseman's answer to this question . . . I don't know the particulars but I could imagine that it would sound something like, "Here, in this place, you can find truth. You will not find all truth just yet, but you can find truth, and, you will continue to find more and more truth." Keeping in mind the image of Brother Wiseman sitting three seats from the door, greeting us as his calling required but with the two-handed clasp as his culture dictated, helps me when these questions arise. Why am I any better than Brother Wiseman who, along with Mary, kept these things and pondered them in his heart? Why am I anymore special than the black man who joined this faith in the mid-70s in South Africa? To what high and holy calling have I appointed myself when I believe that the entire organization of 13 million must change to reflect my personal inclinations? What is so special about me that I am precluded from also waiting, as countless others before me have waited—pondering and keeping?

One last ripple in the stream: In the waiting, there is always light. For me, my rubbing against the policies, procedures and practices of my religious faith has tutored me. My "woman" cross, as it could be called, has lifted me up to see that, in fact, the Father and the Son are the gentlest of men. What is more important for me, with my particular scar tissue, to know than that?

Title: from Toby Keith, "Wanna Talk About Me."