How To Give Back
Thoughts on expressing gratitude
Important Questions
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How To Give Back
When the arms of mothers aren't enough
What I remember most about Katherine was her arms. Warm arms, substantial arms, the kind of arms that strain against the sleeves of a cotton blouse when they hug. Arms that comfort. The arms of God are mothers' arms.
She came to us to pray, to us, the fourth Sunday of the month after second service prayer team, waiting at the front of the sanctuary for the lost jobs, the wayward daughters, the upcoming surgeries, the struggles with sinful thoughts, coming to us for assurance.
She came to us for hope. I touched her arm and prayed, startled when I touched her, startled that I found myself in her soul, for a moment, just long enough, startled by the blackness inside, so dark I could hardly stand up in it. We prayed, each one of us, and then I let her go, thinking my arms had caught her.
Sometimes arms are broken. Like the summer my mother had a boil on her arm, the left one, the side I sat next to at the table when I was five, when my head was just tall enough to lean over, after dessert, and rest against the thickest part of her arm, the softest part, the part where the flesh spreads out beneath the shoulder bone.
And later that week Katherine took her life, with her daughters' jump rope, in her basement, slung over some beam, I suppose. Did she search through a pile of castoff toys to find it? Did she step on the lid of the toy box?
Sometimes we just fail.
Could I have pulled her out of that? Should my arms have been enough? Only the arms of God could have snatched her up from that. And they did.
She came to us to pray, to us, the fourth Sunday of the month after second service prayer team, waiting at the front of the sanctuary for the lost jobs, the wayward daughters, the upcoming surgeries, the struggles with sinful thoughts, coming to us for assurance.
She came to us for hope. I touched her arm and prayed, startled when I touched her, startled that I found myself in her soul, for a moment, just long enough, startled by the blackness inside, so dark I could hardly stand up in it. We prayed, each one of us, and then I let her go, thinking my arms had caught her.
Sometimes arms are broken. Like the summer my mother had a boil on her arm, the left one, the side I sat next to at the table when I was five, when my head was just tall enough to lean over, after dessert, and rest against the thickest part of her arm, the softest part, the part where the flesh spreads out beneath the shoulder bone.
And later that week Katherine took her life, with her daughters' jump rope, in her basement, slung over some beam, I suppose. Did she search through a pile of castoff toys to find it? Did she step on the lid of the toy box?
Sometimes we just fail.
Could I have pulled her out of that? Should my arms have been enough? Only the arms of God could have snatched her up from that. And they did.
The Deadest of Ideas
When bad ideas die, do they go to heaven? What about the good ones? What about the ones that started with so much promise and then seem to slowly pull themselves in from the edges and wither?
The first person I ever knew who died was Gus Ray. It was a name that always sounded smoky and gritty to me, or maybe that's just how I remembered it later. Gus Ray. The boy who tried to kiss me on the playground in kindergarten. All I can remember is an outline of a round face, more gray now in my memory than it must have been alive, as if his very skin knew the way it would end. The boy who lived on the rented farm, who too often left us waiting on the kindergarten bus while he finished his lunch or found his shoe, and his mother, with her husky voice, would stand at the door of the bus and tell the driver, too loudly, what Gus was doing.
My mother told me while she was pulling my dress over my head, getting me ready for school. We wore dresses every day to school, even on winter days like that one, when we climbed the snow drifts on the playground and dug cave rooms in the dirty piles the plows had made. We wore pants underneath our dresses, that we took off after recess and hung up on hooks outside our classroom, never really drying before it was time to wear them home.
There had been a fire, my mother said, overnight at the rented farmhouse, and Gus and all of his brothers and sisters had died. And her face tilted at me like a question, like there was something she wanted me to say or do, but I didn't know what, didn't know what would be right, what would shed the idea of him away from me.
And then it was over, and the place where the farmhouse had been slowly grew over, until I could barely see the outline of the walls from the windows of the bus, and I don't remember ever wondering where his parents had gone, or thinking it at all odd that two adults had come out of that house, and six children had not.
Where is God in our bad ideas? The ones that started good? The ones we try to shed like lost children or playground mishaps? The dead ones? Is He bound by our ideas? By what we call success?
How dead was the idea of being us? Of wearing our dust, and grit, and failures like some never-shedding, eternally unshruggable skin? Just so we could go home.
The first person I ever knew who died was Gus Ray. It was a name that always sounded smoky and gritty to me, or maybe that's just how I remembered it later. Gus Ray. The boy who tried to kiss me on the playground in kindergarten. All I can remember is an outline of a round face, more gray now in my memory than it must have been alive, as if his very skin knew the way it would end. The boy who lived on the rented farm, who too often left us waiting on the kindergarten bus while he finished his lunch or found his shoe, and his mother, with her husky voice, would stand at the door of the bus and tell the driver, too loudly, what Gus was doing.
My mother told me while she was pulling my dress over my head, getting me ready for school. We wore dresses every day to school, even on winter days like that one, when we climbed the snow drifts on the playground and dug cave rooms in the dirty piles the plows had made. We wore pants underneath our dresses, that we took off after recess and hung up on hooks outside our classroom, never really drying before it was time to wear them home.
There had been a fire, my mother said, overnight at the rented farmhouse, and Gus and all of his brothers and sisters had died. And her face tilted at me like a question, like there was something she wanted me to say or do, but I didn't know what, didn't know what would be right, what would shed the idea of him away from me.
And then it was over, and the place where the farmhouse had been slowly grew over, until I could barely see the outline of the walls from the windows of the bus, and I don't remember ever wondering where his parents had gone, or thinking it at all odd that two adults had come out of that house, and six children had not.
Where is God in our bad ideas? The ones that started good? The ones we try to shed like lost children or playground mishaps? The dead ones? Is He bound by our ideas? By what we call success?
How dead was the idea of being us? Of wearing our dust, and grit, and failures like some never-shedding, eternally unshruggable skin? Just so we could go home.
The Secret Language of Birds
Music was always the most absolute of things to me. Notes as true as concrete, each one its own picture, like something to be counted on, immovable.
Even in first grade, I could tell when the music teacher transposed the music in our songbook a whole step higher, and I wondered how anyone could make a mistake like that, playing the wrong notes, not the ones written on my page, and I quietly called her stupid, secretly angry that she was doing it wrong, and secretly pleased that it was I who had discovered her error.
Perfect pitch they call it. And it wasn't until some time in high school that I learned it was different. Who knew that everyone didn't hear that way, didn't pick perfect tones out of thin air on demand?
My father, when he could still hear them, could tell each kind of bird by its song. Not just a few. Hundreds of them. He kept a list of any he had ever heard. And when he sat at the supper table, one day around first or second grade, and told his parents and five older brothers and sisters they were listening to a white-throated sparrow, they laughed, as if that secret were far too great for their small brother.
Does he ever remember not knowing that secret language of birds, I wonder? They say that perfect pitch is inherited. I once tried to test my father's pitch to see if that were true, but he had no language for the notes I played, and he stood at the piano and smiled at my trying, like I had once seen him smile at a city person in the barn reaching for an empty pail of milk, until I gave up. He heard in tones that only made sense to God and him.
I imagine it is as if each dead stalk of weed at the edge of the field, each fence post, each decaying pile of brush could hold a private sanctuary, love poured out. and even when the snow covers the uneven clumps of plowed field, the voices of the birds must pull what's good and light from the ground and from behind the trees, until even the air is thick enough with it to wrap around you. Alone in the fields, in the woods, what good could that be to anyone else but him?
And me, with a voice so thin and small, I could hardly produce a tone that anyone would recognize, so small that at my conservatory audition the professor looked up from her notes to see if I was opening my mouth, as I stood behind the piano lost in the uselessness of hearing a perfect tone in my head, so disconnected from the one that comes out of my throat. What good was a perfect tone to a piano player? Except wrapped in the center of that perfect tone, when everything is right, it seems I could hear the heart of God.
What had God poured out, like wasted perfume, on a vessel for whom it seemingly has no use? Except to Him. The secret language of birds. Who else would spend such beauty, just for the joy of sharing it? Love, poured out, wasted for the pleasure of loving us, utterly useless, except to prove the genuineness of it. A language we will know, even when our ears have grown past the age of hearing, wrapping us in the heart of God.
Even in first grade, I could tell when the music teacher transposed the music in our songbook a whole step higher, and I wondered how anyone could make a mistake like that, playing the wrong notes, not the ones written on my page, and I quietly called her stupid, secretly angry that she was doing it wrong, and secretly pleased that it was I who had discovered her error.
Perfect pitch they call it. And it wasn't until some time in high school that I learned it was different. Who knew that everyone didn't hear that way, didn't pick perfect tones out of thin air on demand?
My father, when he could still hear them, could tell each kind of bird by its song. Not just a few. Hundreds of them. He kept a list of any he had ever heard. And when he sat at the supper table, one day around first or second grade, and told his parents and five older brothers and sisters they were listening to a white-throated sparrow, they laughed, as if that secret were far too great for their small brother.
Does he ever remember not knowing that secret language of birds, I wonder? They say that perfect pitch is inherited. I once tried to test my father's pitch to see if that were true, but he had no language for the notes I played, and he stood at the piano and smiled at my trying, like I had once seen him smile at a city person in the barn reaching for an empty pail of milk, until I gave up. He heard in tones that only made sense to God and him.
I imagine it is as if each dead stalk of weed at the edge of the field, each fence post, each decaying pile of brush could hold a private sanctuary, love poured out. and even when the snow covers the uneven clumps of plowed field, the voices of the birds must pull what's good and light from the ground and from behind the trees, until even the air is thick enough with it to wrap around you. Alone in the fields, in the woods, what good could that be to anyone else but him?
And me, with a voice so thin and small, I could hardly produce a tone that anyone would recognize, so small that at my conservatory audition the professor looked up from her notes to see if I was opening my mouth, as I stood behind the piano lost in the uselessness of hearing a perfect tone in my head, so disconnected from the one that comes out of my throat. What good was a perfect tone to a piano player? Except wrapped in the center of that perfect tone, when everything is right, it seems I could hear the heart of God.
What had God poured out, like wasted perfume, on a vessel for whom it seemingly has no use? Except to Him. The secret language of birds. Who else would spend such beauty, just for the joy of sharing it? Love, poured out, wasted for the pleasure of loving us, utterly useless, except to prove the genuineness of it. A language we will know, even when our ears have grown past the age of hearing, wrapping us in the heart of God.
Anticipating Pie
Someone asked me to tell the pie story the other day. It's a story that makes people laugh. Not like the stories my husband tells, of strange foods and strange countries, of scaling and conquering, of firsts and bests and physical feats. Pie isn't like that. Pie is comfortable. Pie is safe.
It was the thing my older sister chose to make, for the first time, when my mother was in the hospital and she was in charge of the cooking. Never mind that she misread the recipe, creating a hopeless, fragile circle of dough, too frail to move from the table to the pie plate without breaking. We stood around the kitchen table, offering ways to make it right, each suggestion sillier than the last, until it became one of those stories we tell each other, our arsenal of things we share.
Never mind it was my sister, who couldn't have been older than seventh or eighth grade, cooking for the eight of us plus two hired hands. Never mind we secretly despaired at the missed opportunity for pie. Never mind anything dark beyond our glowing circle, our kitchen, our table, our pie. It's the memory of the silliness that sticks to us, like the crust had stuck to the table, a scene that always looks a bit floury and white and dry around the edges in my mind.
And by now, every year the Thanksgiving pie is perfect, and we each make two or three of them, as if making up somehow for that memory. I was the one who first counted them, some small attempt at fairness, I suppose, no more or no less for each one at the gathering. And once they were counted there was no going back. Each one of us should eat our quota.
And we eat. Three, four, even five pieces each some years. We put our names on the family web site to commemorate our feat, those of us who dare it. We tell our pie story to our friends.
We are remarkable at unremarkable things. We have made our story about the pie. As if the other stories we might live were unrealistic expectations, or despair, or would take us beyond the kitchen window, the one that always looked as if the enormity of darkness beyond might push itself in on us.
What if, instead of anticipating pie, we were unremarkable at remarkable things?
It was the thing my older sister chose to make, for the first time, when my mother was in the hospital and she was in charge of the cooking. Never mind that she misread the recipe, creating a hopeless, fragile circle of dough, too frail to move from the table to the pie plate without breaking. We stood around the kitchen table, offering ways to make it right, each suggestion sillier than the last, until it became one of those stories we tell each other, our arsenal of things we share.
Never mind it was my sister, who couldn't have been older than seventh or eighth grade, cooking for the eight of us plus two hired hands. Never mind we secretly despaired at the missed opportunity for pie. Never mind anything dark beyond our glowing circle, our kitchen, our table, our pie. It's the memory of the silliness that sticks to us, like the crust had stuck to the table, a scene that always looks a bit floury and white and dry around the edges in my mind.
And by now, every year the Thanksgiving pie is perfect, and we each make two or three of them, as if making up somehow for that memory. I was the one who first counted them, some small attempt at fairness, I suppose, no more or no less for each one at the gathering. And once they were counted there was no going back. Each one of us should eat our quota.
And we eat. Three, four, even five pieces each some years. We put our names on the family web site to commemorate our feat, those of us who dare it. We tell our pie story to our friends.
We are remarkable at unremarkable things. We have made our story about the pie. As if the other stories we might live were unrealistic expectations, or despair, or would take us beyond the kitchen window, the one that always looked as if the enormity of darkness beyond might push itself in on us.
What if, instead of anticipating pie, we were unremarkable at remarkable things?
The Sound of Listening
There's a funny thing about Dutch people. We don't talk when we eat. Something I didn't know until I was gone from home and some other Dutch person named it, and then I knew it had been true, with five older siblings and two hired hands at every meal, there had only been quiet at our table while we ate.
It was I, they tell me, who filled the silence at the table. Until about the time I went to first grade, and then, perhaps it was the volume of the world that stunned me into silence. So much to listen to. And then I, too, learned the sound of it.
I learned my father's voice, achingly sweet, like the sound of a handful of marbles held tightly in your hand and crushed together, the kind of sound that makes my throat hurt with the richness trapped inside of it, like the ribbons of color suspended inside those marbles. I've been trying all of my life to describe my father's voice, and all of the years I have to listen will not be enough to get it right.
It was the sound that started every meal, the sound of my father's voice praying. And then the sound of listening while we ate. What did it sound like? Like a gift. Like warm mashed potatoes and gravy, and dessert at every meal. Like my mother's white cotton blouses and the smell of sheets hung on the line. Like something to sink into.
And at the end of the meal we took turns reading the devotional and Bible verses in the book we picked up every month from the table in the back of church. Even I took my turn as soon as I could read and it was the last thing we heard before we got up and the boys went out to the barn where they whistled along with the radio while they milked the cows and the girls chattered silly things while we washed and dried the dishes.
This quiet, this funny gift we learned, this offering, left many things unsaid. Perhaps a few of the good things, but mostly just the bad. And we measured every sound, like we measured the humor of my father's jokes by the length of time he smiled before he began to tell them, careful because we knew how important every word could be when most of what we say is silent.
It is the center, the quiet home, a gift I can give, and the place to hear the voice of God, this sound of listening, this peace. And I will spend all of the years of listening I have to get it right.
It was I, they tell me, who filled the silence at the table. Until about the time I went to first grade, and then, perhaps it was the volume of the world that stunned me into silence. So much to listen to. And then I, too, learned the sound of it.
I learned my father's voice, achingly sweet, like the sound of a handful of marbles held tightly in your hand and crushed together, the kind of sound that makes my throat hurt with the richness trapped inside of it, like the ribbons of color suspended inside those marbles. I've been trying all of my life to describe my father's voice, and all of the years I have to listen will not be enough to get it right.
It was the sound that started every meal, the sound of my father's voice praying. And then the sound of listening while we ate. What did it sound like? Like a gift. Like warm mashed potatoes and gravy, and dessert at every meal. Like my mother's white cotton blouses and the smell of sheets hung on the line. Like something to sink into.
And at the end of the meal we took turns reading the devotional and Bible verses in the book we picked up every month from the table in the back of church. Even I took my turn as soon as I could read and it was the last thing we heard before we got up and the boys went out to the barn where they whistled along with the radio while they milked the cows and the girls chattered silly things while we washed and dried the dishes.
This quiet, this funny gift we learned, this offering, left many things unsaid. Perhaps a few of the good things, but mostly just the bad. And we measured every sound, like we measured the humor of my father's jokes by the length of time he smiled before he began to tell them, careful because we knew how important every word could be when most of what we say is silent.
It is the center, the quiet home, a gift I can give, and the place to hear the voice of God, this sound of listening, this peace. And I will spend all of the years of listening I have to get it right.
Like Trees Walking
By the end of the summer the trees on the bluff by our house will be gone. Not all of them, just the ones at the edge, at the very top, where the ground has started to slip away beneath, and the balance has begun to shift in favor of the fall, and not the ground beneath, and the next big rain could pull them down, dragging too much of our backyards with them. The neighbors tell of the flood of '92, and how they woke up early that Saturday morning and watched their trees slide down the hill. Most likely the end of summer is only thinking wishfully, and instead the first warm weekend will bring the chain saws out.
My mother used to say that my father would sooner lose an arm as lose a tree. When I was five the interstate came through our farm, cutting fields into odd pieces stranded on either side, cutting through the crick and the ravine, through the trees. The Black Walnut trees. The stand I imagine my father had walked from the time he tagged along with his older brothers. You know them, doing that. Like you know your hands. You know the pattern of roots sinking into the ground, which ones are good for leaning against, the smell of their leaves, the path worn between them, how far you need to stretch your head back to see the tops of them, so far your mouth hangs open just a little bit. Who would imagine something like that could ever go away?
And the men from the highway sat at our kitchen table, day after day, until it was done. Funny that I can't remember my father saying a word in all those meetings. I only remember an enormous silence, a stillness that froze his face, and his arms by his sides, and made me stop at the doorway, unable to break through the thickness of it to reach him. That summer the dust from the construction blew in from the east and settled on the tables and windows and the wash hanging on the clothesline.
The next summer we tried, once or twice, to walk through the culvert they built for the crick to run through, but it was long, and wet, not anything like walking under the trees, and my father had to carry me through the deepest part of the water. So we unlearned the boundaries of the woods we had known, and learned new ones. Some time after the last of the big equipment was gone and the first of the cars came, my father climbed the fence and planted trees, enough that years later, driving through, someone looking out the window might wonder what was different about that section of the road. It was only the dog that couldn't stop protecting the boundaries of his territory, slipping through the gaps in the fences on his nightly rounds, until he was hit by a car, and the thing that had been simply ugly became an unimaginable, eternal wound.
Like trees walking, the things we cannot imagine losing march out of our lives. Which is better, learning new trees, or haunting the old ones? And when we make the wrong choice, doesn't our Father carry us anyway? How tenderly my father must have lifted his dog from the side of the road and brought him home.
My mother used to say that my father would sooner lose an arm as lose a tree. When I was five the interstate came through our farm, cutting fields into odd pieces stranded on either side, cutting through the crick and the ravine, through the trees. The Black Walnut trees. The stand I imagine my father had walked from the time he tagged along with his older brothers. You know them, doing that. Like you know your hands. You know the pattern of roots sinking into the ground, which ones are good for leaning against, the smell of their leaves, the path worn between them, how far you need to stretch your head back to see the tops of them, so far your mouth hangs open just a little bit. Who would imagine something like that could ever go away?
And the men from the highway sat at our kitchen table, day after day, until it was done. Funny that I can't remember my father saying a word in all those meetings. I only remember an enormous silence, a stillness that froze his face, and his arms by his sides, and made me stop at the doorway, unable to break through the thickness of it to reach him. That summer the dust from the construction blew in from the east and settled on the tables and windows and the wash hanging on the clothesline.
The next summer we tried, once or twice, to walk through the culvert they built for the crick to run through, but it was long, and wet, not anything like walking under the trees, and my father had to carry me through the deepest part of the water. So we unlearned the boundaries of the woods we had known, and learned new ones. Some time after the last of the big equipment was gone and the first of the cars came, my father climbed the fence and planted trees, enough that years later, driving through, someone looking out the window might wonder what was different about that section of the road. It was only the dog that couldn't stop protecting the boundaries of his territory, slipping through the gaps in the fences on his nightly rounds, until he was hit by a car, and the thing that had been simply ugly became an unimaginable, eternal wound.
Like trees walking, the things we cannot imagine losing march out of our lives. Which is better, learning new trees, or haunting the old ones? And when we make the wrong choice, doesn't our Father carry us anyway? How tenderly my father must have lifted his dog from the side of the road and brought him home.
Think Small
My father thought of small things. He thought of grains of oats. Every year, some time before it was fully spring, he kept a handful of oats wrapped in a wet paper towel in a glass jar, on top of the china cabinet in the dining room. Maybe it was a nice warm place to keep them. And I would watch him, after lunch, reach for that jar and unroll the paper towel and see. He showed me the sprouts growing their way into the folds of the towel, soon to fill up the jar, like pale green promises of a summer of fullness.
Who knows why I thought of playing in the back of the truck parked in the big shed across from the barn, on that summer evening? There had been so many times when my sister and I, too short to see over the side, had boosted ourselves over the open tailgate. So I reached up and pulled the latch.
The oats were part of what we fed the cows. Not taking as much time and worry as the alfalfa, or so it seemed, but there they were, filling the bed of the truck. And I pushed back as hard as I could. But two trails of them dropped to the cement in little piles, leaking out of the not-quite-closed gaps on either side of the tailgate.
I could have run away, and let them spill on the cement floor, the floor that smelled of cold and grease, even in the summer evening. It would have been after supper when my father and the hired hands were busy in the barn with the evening milking, the whine of the milking machines and the radio insulating them from everything outside. And there I was alone, the only one to hold back the mistake I had made. And I held on. Stuck between, not strong enough to push it back and crush the few unlucky grains caught between the tailgate and the side of the truck bed. Stuck with guilt. Stuck in a place too big for me.
So I held on, bracing my weight against the tailgate, first with one foot then another, pushing against the heaviness of my arms, until there was no thought of anything else and my life had become the truck, and the oats that must be saved, and the smell of cement and grease, and the faint sound of the milking machines in the barn across the yard. Until the milking was done, and my father came to push the tailgate closed.
All it took was one quick shove and it was done. And never mind the few grains crushed in the effort, or the piles that could be scooped from the floor. My father had come to make it right. But the guilt still hung in the damp air, even as the blood crept back through the veins of my fingers. And the bigness of what I had done stayed on me, and a chafing thought grew in my mind that my father had not done it right, had taken too long, hadn't seen how hard I had tried. And the thought of it made me run from the shed to the house at the opposite end of the yard.
Think small. Think of the too big places our Father has rescued us from, and the way we chafe at His hand, like He hasn't done it right, like He doesn't understand or care, like He owes us. And think of how it makes us run away.
Who knows why I thought of playing in the back of the truck parked in the big shed across from the barn, on that summer evening? There had been so many times when my sister and I, too short to see over the side, had boosted ourselves over the open tailgate. So I reached up and pulled the latch.
The oats were part of what we fed the cows. Not taking as much time and worry as the alfalfa, or so it seemed, but there they were, filling the bed of the truck. And I pushed back as hard as I could. But two trails of them dropped to the cement in little piles, leaking out of the not-quite-closed gaps on either side of the tailgate.
I could have run away, and let them spill on the cement floor, the floor that smelled of cold and grease, even in the summer evening. It would have been after supper when my father and the hired hands were busy in the barn with the evening milking, the whine of the milking machines and the radio insulating them from everything outside. And there I was alone, the only one to hold back the mistake I had made. And I held on. Stuck between, not strong enough to push it back and crush the few unlucky grains caught between the tailgate and the side of the truck bed. Stuck with guilt. Stuck in a place too big for me.
So I held on, bracing my weight against the tailgate, first with one foot then another, pushing against the heaviness of my arms, until there was no thought of anything else and my life had become the truck, and the oats that must be saved, and the smell of cement and grease, and the faint sound of the milking machines in the barn across the yard. Until the milking was done, and my father came to push the tailgate closed.
All it took was one quick shove and it was done. And never mind the few grains crushed in the effort, or the piles that could be scooped from the floor. My father had come to make it right. But the guilt still hung in the damp air, even as the blood crept back through the veins of my fingers. And the bigness of what I had done stayed on me, and a chafing thought grew in my mind that my father had not done it right, had taken too long, hadn't seen how hard I had tried. And the thought of it made me run from the shed to the house at the opposite end of the yard.
Think small. Think of the too big places our Father has rescued us from, and the way we chafe at His hand, like He hasn't done it right, like He doesn't understand or care, like He owes us. And think of how it makes us run away.
Handing down the taste of fullness
I have a taste for certain ancient foods. Foods I grew up with. Foods handed down, too ancient for any of my friends to have seen them on their tables. Too old, even, to be written down, the routine of them burned into our muscles, the pattern of our footsteps from refrigerator to stove and back again. Foods we call home for at six o'clock when we aren't quite sure how much of the next ingredient to add. Concoctions that would feed a farmer's family with a loaf of bread, two eggs, a few strips of bacon and just one cup of milk. Or would spread a pound of hamburger onto sixteen hamburger buns.
They have names like Owl's Nests and Russian Fluff, and a taste of ancient farm kitchens, wood stoves, and grandmas in yellowed photographs. Egg Butter. We'd carefully spread a thin coat of this golden sauce to the edges of our toast, because that was the way our parents did it for us before we were old enough to spread our own. And at the end of the meal we were full. Not wanting, not to be pitied, not afraid.
Even today I bite my tongue as my husband spreads what I think is too much on his slices of toast. Is it possible that the batch I make for the three of us once fed us all?
Who knows if my mother served those meals because she had to, or because it was just what we ate on a Sunday night or Tuesday morning breakfast when she had forgotten to take anything else out of the freezer? I don't.
And my son won't know the taste of scarcity in those ancient foods. Just the taste of fullness and the certainty, as real as the crunch of toast, and the scent of bacon, and the determination of 161 years of grandmas at the stove, that it will be enough.
They have names like Owl's Nests and Russian Fluff, and a taste of ancient farm kitchens, wood stoves, and grandmas in yellowed photographs. Egg Butter. We'd carefully spread a thin coat of this golden sauce to the edges of our toast, because that was the way our parents did it for us before we were old enough to spread our own. And at the end of the meal we were full. Not wanting, not to be pitied, not afraid.
Even today I bite my tongue as my husband spreads what I think is too much on his slices of toast. Is it possible that the batch I make for the three of us once fed us all?
Who knows if my mother served those meals because she had to, or because it was just what we ate on a Sunday night or Tuesday morning breakfast when she had forgotten to take anything else out of the freezer? I don't.
And my son won't know the taste of scarcity in those ancient foods. Just the taste of fullness and the certainty, as real as the crunch of toast, and the scent of bacon, and the determination of 161 years of grandmas at the stove, that it will be enough.
The White-Haired Grandma
Last names didn't apply to grandparents. It's not like there were a lot of them left by the time my son came along, the youngest of a youngest of a youngest, with only two complete sets among us. Not like my friends' children who had their Nana's and Papa's and Grandma Helen's and Grandpa Burt's. We didn't need that kind of code to tell them apart, we thought.
But my son thought differently, and even though there were only two of them, they became the Black-Haired Grandma and the White-Haired Grandma, and I could almost feel my husband's mother cringe at the description of her light hair. But she smiled through it. Like she smiled through the six months or so when we each went by the name of a ninja turtle, and the White-Haired Grandma was temporarily Donatello. How happy she was to populate his imagination. How often she wished out loud that she could get down on the floor and play like she had with her children and grandchildren. My son would be her last.
The White-Haired Grandma. Where else would he ever find that kind of love? And when she died, the summer after second grade, the memory of it grew out of him like he grew out of action figures and imaginary names.
Is a loss as great if we don't know it? Or greater? My son has played hundreds of soccer games without his grandma on the sidelines, birthdays and Christmases have come and gone, and there is no one who stops by our house just to see his latest toy. And he is happy.
While my heart aches for an empty space around his life that was once filled with love, like God must ache for us who forget Him.
But my son thought differently, and even though there were only two of them, they became the Black-Haired Grandma and the White-Haired Grandma, and I could almost feel my husband's mother cringe at the description of her light hair. But she smiled through it. Like she smiled through the six months or so when we each went by the name of a ninja turtle, and the White-Haired Grandma was temporarily Donatello. How happy she was to populate his imagination. How often she wished out loud that she could get down on the floor and play like she had with her children and grandchildren. My son would be her last.
The White-Haired Grandma. Where else would he ever find that kind of love? And when she died, the summer after second grade, the memory of it grew out of him like he grew out of action figures and imaginary names.
Is a loss as great if we don't know it? Or greater? My son has played hundreds of soccer games without his grandma on the sidelines, birthdays and Christmases have come and gone, and there is no one who stops by our house just to see his latest toy. And he is happy.
While my heart aches for an empty space around his life that was once filled with love, like God must ache for us who forget Him.
The promise of cars
I never forget a car. I don't know why. What random event from my childhood burned that ability into my brain? I may forget a name, I will likely forget a face until I've seen it three or four times, but once I know what you drive, I will always know it. And when you buy your next car, I will know that one too, like I know the car you had before it, and the one before that.
Maybe it was my brother's car that started it. I can still feel the cool cement of the garage floor on my bare feet, and smell the old grease and aquamarine paint. A '57 Chevy. It looked fast, even there in the dark garage. It took him time to fix and polish. It took him places where teenagers went, places I couldn't go yet, places where girls dressed in gloves and high-heeled shoes that clicked on smooth floors rode with him in the front seat. It took his hopes and dreams.
Or my sister's first car, that used green Rambler. We laughed at the custom name plate glued to the dash. Who would think of having their name printed on their car? I took my sister away to her own apartment in a different city, a place where she cooked her own meals, and made her own friends, and didn't even call much when the washer broke, or the car got stuck in the snow, or she needed a good recipe for chocolate cake.
I have a car. It makes me smile. I park it far away from other cars to keep it safe. It takes me fast through curves and on-ramps, fast enough to make me feel sorry for the other drivers in the cars that can't keep up. It doesn't take me where I most want to go, like past frustrations, or through fear, or into that place in the soul of my teenage son where he looks out at the world, the place I knew inside and out when he was three.
I never forget a car. They put their promises on us, sometimes, shiny and new, pledging us beauty and speed and sophistication we couldn't possibly have apart from them. What promises do we put on them? Do we promise to grow up as beautiful and smart and successful as the expectations of us?
Do we print our names on our cars and take them with us? Do we take them as fast as we can, not looking back at failures, or stopping for fear, straight into what we really wanted from our lives—our souls?