The man in the moon

On Sundays I go to worship service in a space that has beautiful floor-to-ceiling stained glass windows. For the past few weeks, while we’re singing songs of praise to God and while Pastor Mark is preaching, I’ve watched a man outside the stained glass window. His face is not visible, just his outline as he sits in the cold, huddled against the building. For a long time this morning he sat motionless. Through a golden yellow crescent-shaped section of the stained glass, I could see the shape of his downcast head. The golden crescent looked like a quarter moon. A quarter moon with a man in its center. Eventually he got up, brushed the dirt off his clothes, folded his blankets, put on his backpack and walked away. His routine has been the same every week. He must be able to hear us singing. I wonder if he can hear the pastor’s voice. He must have a sad story to tell, our man in the moon.

And once again I thought about my childhood friend Sarrie. I wrote about Sarrie a couple of summers ago after I spoke with a homeless woman in Georgetown. Here’s the piece I wrote.

Life on the Street

There’s been a code-red air alert here for the past few days—all that heat and trapped ozone makes breathing difficult, even for healthy people. The media have been relaying requests that people take the public transportation to cut down on car exhaust. I was driving on the beltway, trying to recall the last time I rode a city bus. And I began feeling guilty for driving my car and got to thinking about whether I’m just a snob, too elitist to take the bus.

Karen, whom I met yesterday, probably would be happy to have the money to take a bus. She’d probably feel fortunate even to have a reason, any destination that would put her on a bus.

She didn’t look bad from a distance. She was sitting on a bench outside the C&O Canal headquarters in Georgetown, smoking cigarettes and having an animated, angry conversation with the sky. It’s hard to tell, but she’s probably in her late 30s, slim with short brown hair. She was wearing heavy black biker boots, jeans, and a heavy shrunken sweater, despite the intense heat. The jeans were too big, rolled at the waist, but still sagging so much below her hips that the skin below her naval was completely exposed, and if one were to look closely, I’m sure her pubic hair was visible. I didn’t look that closely. She didn’t make much of an effort to pull up the pants.

I was with a group of people playing music and having a picnic lunch. No one in our group of musicians took offense when Karen came to eat the food we had on the table. We actually offered her more food, encouraged her. I sat and talked with her while she ate. Her body odor was foul and her hands were filthy. She told me her father was a Rockefeller and that her mother had been raped. She repeated these “facts” several times. Someone had stolen her clothes and she was trying to get to the consulate to get a passport so she could get back home. I asked her if she was an American and she said, no, she was from the Middle East. I doubt that was true because she seemed like she could have grown up next door to me in white-bread America. She mumbled something about 9-ll and the drug wars. I told her that I would try to come back soon with some clothes for her. I gave her twenty dollars and she quickly stuffed the cash in her pocket and left. And I thought about Sarrie.

Sarrie was my childhood friend. She was brilliant, beautiful, with a gift for drawing. She seemed to have it all. She was the only daughter of a Jewish couple who miraculously survived the Nazis and emigrated from Poland after World War II. Her father had been an engineer before the war and, in this country, found worked as a television repairman. She was their future. But in young adulthood her life got derailed by schizophrenia and she disappeared. I saw Sarrie in Karen’s face.

There are many people, men and women like Karen, living on the streets. I don’t want to sound like Pollyanna, but I wonder what Jesus would do. No kidding—shouldn’t we all strive simply to be kind and compassionate? It doesn’t burden me to talk to Karen, to humanize her, pray for her, maybe give her something to make her life easier. She enriched me. Sadly, she enriched me because I put Sarrie in her place and I felt that in a small way I was reconnecting with Sarrie.

And I thought that there, but by the grace of God, go I. I don’t want to be arrogant, throwing her loose change like a pampered suburbanite. But what else can I do? How can I approach it other than based on who I am and by doing it from my heart? She did touch me. She is not just another faceless person who is mentally ill—seriously mentally ill—and living on the street. It’s so dangerous for someone like Karen. She could disappear, die tomorrow and maybe no one will ever know. I’m sure she has family members somewhere who are heartbroken over what has happened to her. And in her confusion she probably has chosen to live on the street because there is not adequate help for her. It’s a mess. I ask God how he can allow such things to happen. He doesn’t answer.

Challenge

We’re two weeks into the new year and I haven’t made any resolutions. But I’m thinking about resolutions. If I think about it long enough and wait long enough it will be 2012 and I can start all over again without doing anything. There’s a plan I can embrace—total inertia.

Last night I watched the film Into the Wild, about the young man who wanted to escape the bounds of society so he challenged himself to live off the land, alone, in the wilds of Alaska. He died of starvation. The story got me thinking about how I would challenge myself, presuming I ever actually decided to accept a challenge. People challenge themselves to run a marathon (not me—my knees would disintegrate). They challenge themselves to lose a hundred pounds (yes—I need to lose weight, but thankfully not a hundred pounds). They may challenge themselves to bring order to their chaotic lives (I’m fairly organized so that’s not an issue for me). So if I’m not going to run a marathon, or lose a ton of weight, or conquer my clutter, what is a challenge for me?

My real challenges are more emotional than physical. What’s my biggest emotional challenge? Overcoming fear. I’m afraid of uncertainty, afraid of change, afraid of sickness and death. I even have a fear of fear itself. And right now I have all of these fears front and center in my life.

So what do I need to do? I can’t really mitigate uncertainty, change, sickness or death. These are all part of the basic human condition. I can’t pretend they don’t exist. Medication only does so much unless I get medicated into a stupor. I suppose I just need to be brave. Oh, darn it—can’t I escape somehow? I suppose I need to accept these existential fears and just keep moving forward and live well in spite of them. And I know that I need to pray. Prayer may be the only thing that really works. Even better than medication.

Stolen cornbread

I fully admit it--not only am I stealing the recipe, but I'm also stealing the photograph. I could have taken my own photo but there was nothing left but crumbs when I thought about taking a photo. I stole the recipe from Ina Garten and I stole the photo from her too. But I'll give her full credit. She's the queen!

It's a great cornbread, a very thick batter that's more like scone dough in consistency. The final product holds together beautifully and has a texture somewhere between biscuits and focaccia.

Don't worry about the two sticks of butter and the two cups of cheese--they have no fat at all in them. (And now you can call me both a thief and a liar.)

Ina's Cheddar Dill Cornbread

Ingredients

3 cups all-purpose flour
1 cup yellow cornmeal
1/4 cup sugar
2 tablespoons baking powder
2 teaspoons kosher salt
2 cups milk
3 extra-large eggs, lightly beaten
1/2 pound (2 sticks) unsalted butter, melted, plus extra to grease the pan
8 ounces aged extra-sharp Cheddar, grated, divided
1 cup minced fresh dill (no fresh available so I used 2 tablespoons dried dill)

Directions

Combine the flour, cornmeal, sugar, baking powder, and salt in a large bowl. In separate bowl, combine the milk, eggs, and butter. With a wooden spoon, stir the wet ingredients into the dry until most of the lumps are dissolved. Don't overmix! Mix in 2 cups of the grated Cheddar and the dill, and allow the mixture to sit at room temperature for 20 minutes.

Meanwhile, preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Grease a 9 by 13 by 2-inch baking pan.

Pour the batter into the prepared pan, smooth the top, and sprinkle with the remaining grated Cheddar. Bake for 30 to 35 minutes, or until a toothpick comes out clean. Cool and cut into large squares. Serve warm or at room temperature.

Healthy coconut cake

I found this on a website called GoodHealth.com so surely it is some form of health food. It's a recipe from Orlene Walton Sayers, the wife the the governor of Texas in the early 1900s. You have to love a woman from Texas whose name is Orlene who bakes coconut cake and calls it health food.

Orlene's Coconut Cake

(Serves 12)

Ingredients
1 cup unsalted butter, softened to room temperature
2 cups sugar
3 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla
3 cups flour
4 teaspoons double-acting baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
1 cup whole milk

Directions

Preheat oven to 325 degrees. Grease and flour the bottoms and sides of two 9-inch cake pans. Cover the pan bottoms with wax paper or parchment and grease the paper.

Cream together the butter and sugar until light and fluffy, about 6 minutes, with an electric mixer at high speed. Add eggs one at a time, beating thoroughly after each addition. Add vanilla.

In a separate bowl sift flour, baking powder, and salt together and set aside.

Reduce speed to low and stir in 1/3 cup milk. Add 1/3 flour mixture and combine. Add another 1/3 cup milk and half of the remaining flour mixture. When just incorporated, add final 1/3 cup milk and remaining flour mixture.

When just blended, divide batter between prepared pans.

Bake in preheated oven for 30 to 40 minutes, until golden.

Cool the layers in pans for about 10 minutes before turning out onto wire racks and cooling completely.

Frosting

Ingredients
3 egg whites
1 1/4 cups powdered sugar
Meat of one coconut, grated (3 to 4 cups)

Directions

In a clean bowl beat egg whites with heavy mixer at high speed until soft peaks form.
Gradually add 1 cup of the powdered sugar and continue beating until glossy. Fold 3/4 of the grated coconut meat into the beaten egg whites.

To assemble cake, invert one cake layer onto a serving plate and spread with frosting. Top with second layer, spreading remaining frosting over the top and sides of the cake.

Mix remaining coconut with the remaining 1/4 cup of powdered sugar. Press onto top and sides of the cake decoratively

Chicken again!

My late former husband used to mutter and grumble when he came home and I had made yet another chicken dish. "Chicken!" he would shout, "not chicken again." Yes, it's chicken again. So I hesitate to post the recipe. I think it's incredibly delicious but it could ruin my reputation. Not only is it chicken (again!) but it's another casserole and it has canned soup in the ingredient list. It's a recipe that my dear friend Betsy got years ago when she lived in Flagstaff. I've altered it (improved it, I'd like to think) over the years. So consider my reputation ruined but try it anyway.

Chicken Tortilla Casserole

4 tablespoons olive oil
3 boneless chicken breasts
2 teaspoons chili powder (I used Penzey’s Southwest seasoning)
½ cup white wine
1 onion, chopped
1 sweet red pepper, cut into julienne strips
2 cloves minced garlic
1 can cream of mushroom soup
1 cup chicken broth
1 cup sour cream
¼ cup sliced black olives
2 small cans whole green chilies, coarsely chopped
½ teaspoon cumin
1 dozen corn tortillas, cut into quarters
2 cups grated sharp Cheddar cheese
Salsa verde

Heat 2 tablespoons olive oil in non-stick skillet. Sprinkle chicken breasts with Southwest Seasoning and sauté over medium-high heat until brown. Pour wine in pan, cover, and cook over low-medium heat until chicken breasts are no longer pink. Set chicken aside and shred into large pieces after they cool slightly.

Sauté onion, red pepper, and garlic in remaining oil. Remove from heat and add soup, chicken broth, sour cream, olives, green chilies, and cumin.

Put about ½ cup of sauce mixture in bottom of a deep casserole dish. Put four tortillas (=16 pieces) in a layer in the casserole. Add more sauce and chicken in two more layers until casserole is filled. End with layer of cheese on top.

Bake 30-45 minutes at 350 degrees until cheese is bubbly.

Serve with extra salsa verde on the side.

Shredding

No need to write a single word today. Pastor Elizabeth Hagan has inspired me to get out the shredder.

See what she wrote at http://preacherontheplaza.wordpress.com/2011/01/03/new-year-shredding/.

No miracles

What if there is no such thing as a miracle?

There are a ton of aphorisms about miracles, all those pseudo-inspirational things embroidered on pillows or written in calligraphy on wooden plaques beside pictures of kittens or sunsets. For example: “Love is the great miracle cure. Loving ourselves works miracles in our lives.” Oh, just get over yourself, dear author, and the miracle of loving yourself. How hard is it to love yourself? Really! Is it a miracle?

I’ve been thinking about miracles for the past couple of weeks as I pray for a friend who is seriously ill. Do I pray for God to perform a miracle or do I just trust him to do his thing? In the gospel of Matthew (Matt 19:26) Jesus said, “With God all things are possible.” All things would include things we think are impossible.

So what we consider to be a miracle may simply be God’s ordinary work. In one sense, everything he does is a miracle. What may seem exceptional to mere mortals could just be part of God’s plan that we can’t see or comprehend. St. Augustine said, “Miracles are not contrary to nature, but only contrary to what we know about nature.”

Nancy Gibbs wrote, “For the truly faithful, no miracle is necessary. For those who doubt, no miracle is sufficient.” I agree with Nancy but I don’t think I’ll embroider it on a pillow.

New-found faith

Freewriting exercise

Rick Bragg, Somebody Told Me, p. 186:

“The housing authority found Bill Simpson living on the street, relying on a new-found faith in God and the kindness of strangers.”

Billy’s smile could light up the room. Back then, before Vietnam, Billy Simpson and I danced in his basement. He had one record that he played over and over again on the little record player—Chances Are by Johnny Mathis. We danced real slow on the green and black asphalt tile floor while his mama’s dryer went thump, thump in the corner. Every once in a while we’d stop dancing to eat some potato chips and drink some RC Cola. And every once in a while his mama would come downstairs to put another load of towels in the dryer. She’d chuckle and say, “You two just love that song, don’t you now?” His mama was a real sweet lady. She was a nurse’s aide at the Catholic old folks home and Billy said she held the hands of a lot of old people when they died but she was so used to death that it seemed normal to her and besides, he said, she was real religious and just prayed to Jesus and all the saints when people were dying. Billy said she should have been a nun and he was probably right, except she wouldn’t have had Billy if she’d been a nun. I wondered how she could spend so much time with dying people and still be so sweet. I thought being with someone dead would near to kill me, but it didn’t kill Mrs. Simpson. Billy got a big break and went off to college on a football scholarship but soon he got in big trouble. He had been put on probation at the college for drinking and when he was caught cheating on an exam, the college kicked him out for good. That was bad news for Billy because he then got drafted and soon went to Vietnam. But I heard he started using heroin in Vietnam and the army kicked him out too. Sitting with all those dead people didn’t phase his mama, but the shame that her son brought down on the family killed her. No one was sure where Billy Simpson was when his mama died. Billy’s father tried to find him with no luck. Five years after Mrs. Simpson died I saw a picture in the newspaper of some homeless men eating Thanksgiving supper at a shelter run by Catholic nuns in Newark, New Jersey. I looked closely at the photo. Even though the man in the tattered coat and the baseball cap was older and worn by life on the streets, he had the unmistakable smile of Billy Simpson. I passed on the information to Billy’s family. The housing authority found Bill Simpson living on the street, relying on a new-found faith in God and the kindness of strangers.

Shivering

Dig the hole. Start climbing out. Dig the hole. Climb out again. I’ve been digging. Through sheer will I think about climbing out but sometimes it’s slippery and cold and I sit at the bottom, shivering. I know there’s sunshine out there somewhere because I’ve been out there recently, warm, walking in the light.

On Christmas Eve I was singing carols, cooking, thanking God for all my blessings. But soon the sense of loss crept in like King Herod, the villain in the Christmas story. I talked to my son and my daughter on the phone but after we talked I couldn’t stop crying. And a dear friend of mine has just been diagnosed with cancer and is about to begin treatment. I missed my dad. This was our first Christmas without our father. He was such a presence, the heart of our family. I just wanted to talk to my dad, to tell him what’s in my heart, to have him reassure me that everything would be alright, to stop me from shivering.

Competitive Christmas

No, the photo isn't my house. Sadly. It's a house down the street from me in Pimmit Hills. Every year it's gloriously tacky, a mixed message of Santas and Smurfs and an occasional helicopter. I love it.

When I was a kid Christmas decorating was a competitive sport. More than a competitive sport actually, sort of like a glittery version of ultimate fighting in Heitmuller Estates. My mother wielded a can of spray-on snow like a deadly weapon and my father spent hours on the roof with a hundreds of multi-colored lights and a staple gun.

Every Christmas Heitmuller Estates had a house-decorating competition. Despite the combined efforts of both of my parents, Trixie Herlihy always won first place. Trixie did things like wrapping her entire house in red cellophane with a big bow on top. The houses weren’t that big, but it still took a boatload of cellophane. So the next year my father put lights all along the peaks of the roof and all the eaves and he made reindeer out of plywood. Trixie had a nativity scene with live sheep. The annual Christmas rancor lived on

One December in the early 1960s my father was called to Florida when my grandfather had a stroke. So my mother decided that she and I were going to do the Christmas decorating on our own and this year she had the idea that was going to whip Trixie’s butt. My mother wanted to make our little rambler in Maryland look like a traditional New England house in the snow. So with masking tape we created panes on our big living room picture window. We used spray snow in a can to simulate the look of snow drifts in each of the “panes” and we used fishing line to hang ornaments in them. Then the pièce de résistance—she had seen it in a magazine—we glued cotton balls to the front door and sprayed them with glitter.

I don’t remember what Trixie Herlihy did that year, but she won again.

Heart attack

So I'm innocently browsing the Internet, looking for the Cooks Illustrated infamous recipe for pie dough. It's infamous because the secret ingredient is vodka. Yes, vodka. Is browsing ever innocent when I'm searching for anything to do with pie? Perhaps not. But, as I said, while innocently browsing I stumbled upon Smitten Kitchen's recipe for Nutmeg Maple Cream Pie. "Oh, heart be still," I muttered to myself when I read the recipe and looked at the photos. It's simple--maple syrup, heavy cream, egg yolks, freshly grated nutmeg, and vanilla. Heart be still is pretty accurate. I'm wondering if the pie will cause me to have a fatal heart attack and I'm wondering if it's worth the heart attack risk. I think I'll make it for Christmas Eve dinner, hoping I don't kill the entire family.

Here's the recipe that Smitten Kitchen adapted from the New York Times. Smitten is fabulous.

Nutmeg Maple Cream Pie

3/4 cup maple syrup
2 1/4 cups heavy cream
4 egg yolks
1 whole egg
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 9-inch pie crust or tart shell.

1. Par-bake pie crust: Preheat oven to 350°F. Line pie refrigerated pie shell with foil or parchment paper and fill with pie weights or dried beans. Bake 10 to 12 minutes or until beginning to set. Remove foil with weights and bake 15 to 18 minutes longer or until golden. If shell puffs during baking, press it down with back of spoon. Cool on wire rack. Lower temperature to 300 degrees.

2. Prepare filling: In a medium saucepan over medium-high heat, reduce maple syrup by a quarter, 5 to 7 minutes. Stir in cream and bring to a simmer. Remove from heat.

3. In a medium bowl, whisk together egg yolks and egg. Whisking constantly, slowly add cream mixture to eggs. Strain mixture through a fine-mesh sieve into a cup or bowl with pouring spout. Stir in salt, nutmeg and vanilla.

4. Pour filling into crust and transfer to a rimmed baking sheet. Bake until pie is firm to touch but jiggles slightly when moved, about 1 hour. Let cool to room temperature before serving.

Being chosen

In the past few days I’ve been re-reading the parts of the gospels that tell the story of Mary being chosen to be the mother of Jesus. (These are in both Matthew 1 and Luke 1.) As if he was reading my mind, today in worship service Pastor Mark preached about Mary.

What strikes me as simply amazing is Mary’s faith and her acceptance of God’s will. She was just a teenager when the angel Gabriel delivered the startling news that God had chosen her to be the mother of the long-awaited Messiah. Imagine that—an ordinary teenaged girl. God chose a teenaged girl to bear his son. Being chosen by God did not make her life easy. To the contrary, it made her life much more difficult. Certainly she was ridiculed and considered a sinner for being unmarried and pregnant. And she witnessed the horrors of her son’s unjust crucifixion when he was in the prime of his life.

I sometimes wonder if she ever regretted the decision to accept God’s plan for her. When God chose Mary, she had to surrender any plans she had for the direction of her life. Did she yearn for an ordinary life without the tremendous weight of being the mother of the Messiah? Did she have any idea how God’s plan was going to be played out? Did she wish that her son would just work as a carpenter, marry a nice Jewish girl, and give her grandbabies? Perhaps so, but she accepted the will of God when her son was conceived and she gave her life over to God, not knowing what it meant but with trust in his plan.

Being chosen is risky business. Like Mary, we who by grace believe in God are chosen. We may be ridiculed, we may question our faith, and we not have easy lives, but aren’t we blessed?

Assaulting the senses

I've got a batch of rutabagas simmering on the stove. They stink when they're cooking but I love the earthy taste of rutabagas, served mashed with only butter, salt, and pepper. Perfect for a cold winter day. Like today. The human sense of smell cuts through the brain to some primary memory central. And in this case, the smell of rutabagas wafting through my house reminds me of the persistent cabbage odor in our old apartment in Silver Spring, sometime in the late 1960s.

In 1967 my new husband John and I moved into a swank apartment in a brand-new, elegant, contemporary high-rise building. At least it was swank to us, struggling young students. The day we were married we moved into a fifth floor apartment, bringing with us only a mattress, a second-hand dresser, a small table, and two chairs from Salvation Army. Soon we inherited a cheap motorcycle that John sometimes used to commute to classes. We were afraid someone would steal the motorcycle so we snuck it onto the elevator and into our apartment and kept it in our living room. Eventually we bought a green area rug that some guy was selling out of the back of his truck. I suspect it was stolen or maybe it was a remnant left over from carpeting the lounge of a second-rate country club. The rug shed horribly. Everything we owned was covered in green fuzz.

Picture our living room—beautiful floor-to-ceiling windows, parquet floors, a ratty parrot green area rug, a table barely big enough for two, and a motorcycle. We lived there rent-free because John was the building night porter, meaning he got the emergency calls in the middle of the night when Mrs. Lebowitz’s toilet wouldn’t flush. John knew nothing about plumbing but somehow he charmed himself into the job. From the rooftop of the building, in April 1968, we watched the fires burning in the city during the riots after the assassination of Martin Luther King.

John was in law school and couldn’t be a night porter forever, so after a year in the swanky apartment, we moved to more modest quarters. The only apartment we could afford was a ground-level unit in a musty old World War II era garden apartment complex. It was sweltering. The building's furnace was directly under our apartment and we never, not once in two years, turned on the heat because heat just seeped up through the floors. We didn't need heat and there was no air conditioning until we installed a rusty old window unit in the living room window.

The building smelled like a combination of cabbage cooking with a hint of leaking natural gas. The only thing worse than the cabbage smell was the dead cat smell. There was a herd of feral cats on the property. In an effort to eradicate the cat problem, the property maintenance man closed off the cats' access to the utility room under the building. The cats got sealed ­in the utility room and died directly under our floor. The smell was so bad we had to move out for a week.

The apartment was ugly, it smelled bad, and it was noisy. It was on a major road, but the noise of the traffic was more tolerable than the music Herb and Linda, our next-door neighbors, played day and night until the walls shook—the theme song from the film, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. We survived. We were young, we were foolish, we were delirious from the odors and the incessant Western movie theme.

Lil Libby

Writing exercise today. But I slightly changed my rules this time. Yes, I closed my eyes and picked a book off the shelf and, sight unseen, found a sentence and wrote a piece around it. No paragraphs, no plan, just go! But this time I stuck the sentence in the middle.

William Styron, Three Tales from Youth: A Tidewater Morning, from a story entitled Shadrach, p. 42.

“Junk and auto parts were a sideline of Mr. Dabney’s.”

Lil Libby was sitting among the weeds beside the mailbox, just sitting there counting mosquito bites and picking at the scabs on her legs. All that summer she spent half the day sitting by the mailbox, waiting for who knows what. Lil Libby did not get her name because she was petite. Far from it—Lil Libby was huge. Her full Christian name was Lillian Elizabeth Dabney, in honor of both of her grandmothers. Lil Libby dropped out of high school in her first year, not long after she started. She was too big to sit at the desks at Washington and Lee High School and she was sick of being the object of ridicule. So long before she might have learned the Spanish word for water and long before she had a clue what algebra was all about, she ditched school for good. When she wasn’t sitting by the mailbox, she spent her days on the sofa watching The Price Is Right and her soaps. She only got up off the sofa to adjust the rabbit ears on the television or to prowl around the kitchen to find where her daddy had hidden the cheese puffs and the Pepsi Colas. “Doggonit, Da,” she muttered, “A girl could starve half to death in this house looking for something decent to eat.” Trouble is most people would presume Lil Libby was the victim of circumstances, just a redneck who could not rise above her humble background. But Lil Libby came from good stock, from landed gentry who had a couple hundred years of prosperity behind them in Virginia. But her daddy was in a precipitous decline from the status that he was born to. Her daddy didn’t toe the line to honor his family pedigree. He had no ambition beyond catching an occasional big fish and he earned a meager income leasing land to the local chicken processor. Junk and auto parts were a sideline of Mr. Dabney’s. Most of his inventory of junk and auto parts was scattered in the back yard, all the way down to the creek. Lil Libby’s mama didn’t have much ambition either but she had just enough ambition to run far and fast, leaving behind her daughter and her husband. No one knew where she went and in the past 10 years she never once tried to contact the girl. But apparently Lil Libby believed her mama would come back to get her. She refused to give up hope. Hope was about the only thing she had going for her.

Longing

It’s the first of December and I don’t want to look into the abyss. It’s a pattern of mine to start a downward emotional slide at this time of year. First comes the pre-dread phase at about the time Christmas decorations appear at Target. By late November I’m becoming anti-social and may stay home alone on Thanksgiving, eating a veggie burger and a bottle of beer for good cheer. But when the first of December comes, the Christmas season is in full tilt and I’m into the nose dive.

In this age of psychobabble and full disclosure (I know I’m part of the problem—I’m writing a blog for heaven’s sake) most people are aware that the holiday season may not be all happiness and light for everyone. The holidays can just be a reminder of the big holes in your life, a longing for family and friends who are gone or who never existed in the first place.

I’ve been reading a great book, a novel entitled The Solace of Leaving Early by Haven Kimmel. In a passage about Amos, a young pastor in a small town in Indiana, the author writes about longing.

“That wasn’t what he really wanted to say. What he was aiming for was nostalgia, heartache, homesickness. Or stranger yet, the heart’s desire to return to someplace it had never been.” He sees a beat-up old car on the highway carrying an impoverished Hispanic family—parents and six children. He envies them. “And who on earth would want to be those parents? Amos did, and it wasn’t the first time. Certain houses caused the same wave of longing—the look of a particular curtain in an upstairs window, or a bike left on the lawn—and some movies.” He asks himself why this happens. “Because we have abandoned an infinite number and variety of pure possibilities, and perhaps they live alongside the choices we did make, immortalized in the cosmic memory. Perhaps there are unknown lives walking alongside ours, those paths we didn’t take, and we reach for them, we ache for them, and don’t know why.”

That’s as good a description of longing as I have ever seen. But I have a plan. I won’t long for what I no longer have. I won’t long for what I never had. I’m going into the Christmas season with prayer and a new heart and thank God for His infinite blessings. Wish me luck!