Butternut squash stew

Hard to believe, but I have been cooking. Last night I made a chicken chili with poblano and sweet red peppers, hominy, and other things. It was very good. I didn’t write it down. Tonight I made a vegetable stew for the second time and it is positively yummy. If it weren’t for the Parmesan cheese, it would be vegan, but I think the Parmesan is what makes it particularly fabulous. Bonus—it’s really quite easy to make.

 

Source: In a Vegetarian Kitchen, by Jack Bishop

 

Butternut Squash with White Beans Stew with Rosemary and Tomatoes

 

Makes 4 main dish servings

 

3 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil, divided

1 medium onion, halved and thinly sliced

½ teaspoon salt

3 medium garlic cloves, minced (divided)

2 15-ounce cans cannellini beans, rinsed and drained (or use beans cooked from scratch)

1 small butternut squash (about 1 ½ pounds), peeled, seeded and cut into 1-inch dice (about 3 1/2 cups)

1 14.5-ounce can diced tomatoes

1 Parmesan cheese rind (I used about ½ cup large chunks of Parmesan)

3 cups water

1 tablespoon freshly minced rosemary

Freshly ground black pepper

 

Heat 2 tablespoons of the oil in a Dutch oven over medium heat until shimmering. Add onion and ½ teaspoon salt and cook until soft and golden, stirring occasionally, until golden, about 8 minutes. Add the minced garlic and cook until fragrant, about 1 minute. Add the beans, squash, tomatoes, Parmesan rind, and water and bring to a boil. Reduce the heat, cover and simmer until the squash is tender, about 30 minutes. Remove the cover and continue simmering until the stew thickens, about 15 minutes.

 

While the stew is simmering, combine the minced rosemary, the remaining 1 tablespoon of olive oil, and a pinch of salt in a small bowl.

 

Once the stew has reduced down, stir in the rosemary mixture and cook an additional 5 minutes. Adjust the seasonings with freshly ground black pepper and sea salt, to taste.

In which I call on George to make me smile

The post that you see just below this, entitled The Blonde Deceit, is a piece of trash. I'm leaving it up to remind myself that my whining is really dumb. It's a humbling experience. I only felt that way for a brief time . . . "Another Saturday night and I ain't got nobody." It is what it is. I'm generally quite happy in my single state and would be hard pressed to give up my immense independence for any man. Seeing couples together, cooing and feeding one another grapes, just gets under my skin occasionally and I get an ugly shade of green. Smack me upside the head if you catch me complaining again.

To counteract that lapse in judgment, I am repeating a post as a sort of antidote. This is a piece that I wrote and submitted to the Modern Love column at the New York Times. Aim high and get shot down. It was rejected by the New York Times but it did get in the online edition of Texas Monthly. Every word is true. And it reminds me that love comes in many forms. I'm grateful for George and he still makes me smile.

George and the Queen of the Neighborhood

I had lived in the neighborhood only a few weeks when I first began to notice him. My house was on a short street of just five houses and George lived at the far end. For exercise he would walk slowly to the end of the street, then back again, leaning heavily on a cane. One day while I was walking the dog I stopped to talk to him. He was short and stocky with tawny skin, wisps of thinning hair slicked down on his head. His speech was slurred and difficult to understand because he had a thick eastern European accent and, I soon learned, also had been affected by a stroke.

Over weeks, in the course of many conversations, he filled in the details of his life. When I met him, George was in his 70s, widowed, and a retired physics professor from Johns Hopkins University. He was born and raised in Hungary where his father had been a renowned psychoanalyst, a contemporary and a rival of Sigmund Freud. George still lived in the house where he and his wife had lived for many years, the house where they raised their daughters. The daughters had moved to distant cities and he still missed his wife. “My life is so lonely without her,” he once told me, his eyes filling with tears. She had cancer and died just a few years before, prior to his stroke.

Because he walked so slowly, if I saw him from my kitchen window, I knew how to time his walk so I could catch him on his way back. Often I would take out the dog or go to the mailbox, just to have a chance to talk to him. This pattern continued for a couple of years. We talked about the weather, the neighbors, our families, or his health. When the weather was bad or when he traveled, I sometimes went weeks without seeing him.

Two years after moving to the house, my husband left me. When I told George, he was shocked and said, “I can’t believe it. But why?”

“Another woman,” I replied.

“But how could he? How could he leave you? You’re the queen of the neighborhood.”

Salve for a broken heart. To know that this charming man thought I was worth having somehow helped to lessen the grief, the intense pain of the loss and betrayal.

When the divorce was final, my house had to be sold. George kept telling me how the neighborhood wasn’t going to be the same without me. The day before the movers were to arrive, George left a message on my answering machine, saying he needed to talk to me before I left. From the sound of his voice, I thought something was wrong, so I quickly called him back. He said, “I want to see you. Can you come to my house this evening at 7 o’clock?”

We sat in his living room among the photos of his family. We chatted about my new place and how hard it was for me to leave the house I loved. All the while I was worried, wondering if there was something wrong with his health. Why did he need to talk to me? What was the urgency? I braced myself for bad news, but he said nothing. When it was time for me to go, he walked me to the door and hugged me. “I love you,” he said in that distinctive George voice that sounded like Henry Kissinger on sedatives.

“You’re so sweet, George,” I said, “I love you too.”

“No,” he said, “I mean it. I really love you.” I was already at the brink of intense emotion because of the move, but now this sweet old man was telling me he loved me. That was the urgent message he had for me, the thing he had to tell me before I moved away.

I searched for something to say to him, but couldn’t find the words. Now, several years later, I realize how much courage it took for him to say it and I wonder what he was thinking. If only the right words had come to me at the time. If only I had found the perfect thing to say to him. I would have told him that he was such a dear man, sadly the wrong one at the wrong time, that he warmed my broken heart, that he made me feel worthy of being loved, and that I would treasure this moment.

But I just said, “Thank you, George. I’ll miss you.”

The next day I, the queen of the neighborhood, moved away. I never saw him again and recently heard that he died. Rest in peace, George. I love you too.

The blonde deceit

Don’t believe it. Don’t go down that road, peroxide bottle in hand and hope in your heart. I’ve been blonde for less than a week and I can tell you it’s not true—blondes do not have more fun.

 

Perhaps I was expecting my life to change overnight. I got my hair cut early last week. My stylist loved the haircut and asked me to be a “model” for a new hair color that they were going to use at the salon. I got seduced by the lure of being able to say I was a model. Her salon colleague would make my hair platinum blonde to accentuate the new edgy haircut and I wouldn’t have to pay for it because he was demonstrating the color techniques to the other stylists. Why not, I thought. Just do me.

 

The deed was done. I’m a blonde, not exactly platinum but more of a brassy, orangey blonde, like one of those little rubber troll dolls with the long synthetic hair. Sadly, it’s not synthetic—it’s attached to my head. And it's almost buzz-cut short, but actually I like the simplicity of the buzz-cut short. It used to be my hair. I feel like an alien is inhabiting my body—a blonde alien who looks like an aged Annie Lennox in one of those animated Internet ads that shows what aging does to a woman. I’m the one who makes you shudder, the ridiculous one who should be using the anti-aging product.

 

I’ll live with it. Really, some very kind people have said they like it. I said I’d rather be edgy than be a total nerd. It may have been a mistake to say that aloud. I’ll live with it as long as it takes my roots to grow and then it’s back to nerdy old me, but with a very short edgy haircut.

 

But here’s the thing: while I’m trying to adjust to my abnormal hair color, feeling like I’ve gone to Poland for the winter while some trashy blonde inhabits my body, I’m experiencing an intense loneliness. It seems like everyone in the known universe is paired up with someone else; everyone has someone to hold them on a cold night when the wind is howling. Everyone but me. The drastic hair change did not change my life one iota—if anything, it became worse.

 

Yes, this is my attempt to be wacky and overly dramatic, exaggerating a silly hair situation that is not important in the grand scheme of things. The hair will grow out and I’ll be comfortable in my own saggy skin again. But, most likely, I will still be lonely. I have been praying about this and feeling guilty. Shouldn’t God be enough for me? Am I failing Him because I can’t easily slip past this human longing? I should be so filled with the Lord that I don’t need it. Is it a weakness? I don’t know. I want to say that God is enough, that His grace is sufficient for me. I feel like I am betraying Him because all that He has given me—life, salvation, the comfort of His unending presence—sometimes doesn’t seem like enough.

 

This blonde is having a hard time. And this would probably be happening to me, blonde or not blonde. It’s not much fun.

Talking trash

Photo by Matt McClain, The Washington Post

A couple of months ago I read an article that has been stuck in my brain, intriguing me, and making me feel guilty ever since. It was so striking that I just did a search for the article to make sure that I remembered the details correctly. Yes, I did. The mere fact that I remembered it and think of it often is a bit startling.

 

The article appeared in The Washington Post on October 29, 2015. (You can find it here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/10/29/all-my-trash-for-a-year-fit-into-two-plastic-bags-heres-how-i-did-it/.) It was written by a post-doctoral science and technology fellow at the University of Michigan.

 

This scientist challenged himself to live trash and recycling free for one year, and eventually he extended the experiment after the initial year. He writes that the average American produces four pounds of trash per day, for a total of 1500 pounds of trash per year for each person. He produced little more than seven pounds of trash and recycling in the first year of his experiment.

 

He composted food waste and did not count the waste he produced in his laboratory work. But he had to get quite radical to reduce his waste so dramatically from the norm. Apparently much waste is from food packaging so he devised ways to avoid that source of waste. For example, he carried a fork, spoon, and plate with him all the time so that if he ate out he did not dispose of any food packaging. He shopped at a co-op grocery where he didn’t have to buy packaged food. He didn’t use toilet paper. (I’m sorry, but that one is beyond my comprehension—he’ll have to explain himself to you—I’m bowing out on that detail.)

 

It is truly commendable that he treats the Earth with such respect. It makes me feel guilty that I have so much to contribute to our earthly garbage heap. Although I recycle as much as I can, I still have a lot of trash. How much of the meltdown of the polar ice cap is totally attributable to me? Am I making the poor polar bears live on a tiny iceberg? Am I displacing indigenous people all over the Earth? Since I read about his experiment and his measly seven pounds of trash a year, I am struggling with a huge guilt trip every week on trash collection day. And rightfully so.

A message for 2016

This year, rather than writing every post on this blog, I am going to share with you some things I have read that I find especially touching or filled with wisdom. Maybe even things that are funny. I don't know yet, let's see what crosses my path.

This is a New Year's greeting from Rev. Bill Haley who is director of Corhaven, a spiritual retreat center in the Shenandoah Valley that I have attended. I also receive counseling from a spiritual director who is associated with Corhaven. This is the message that Bill Haley sent to bless us in 2016:
*************************************************************************

In this new year, in 2016:

May you know the love of God for you, at another and a new level, and deeper dive into this Truth that changes everything…

May your hands and your heart extend the Kingdom of God a bit further in this world, a bit further in the world God has given you…

May your eyes behold even more clearly the beauty of our beloved Jesus, the Glorious One…

May you know the loving Presence of God when you encounter pain and hardship, for you will…

May you know the strange Peace that comes from knowing God, come what may…

May your eyes behold a greater number of the countless blessings God has given you, from love…

May your heart expand to hold even more of it – the wonder, the hope, the sorrow, the pain, the joy, what is Real…

May you see God writing his lines through your life, the little pencil in his hand…

May you be given the gift of faith when the path is dark, a deeper knowing than the unknown...

May you know with all the more joyful confidence that your work matters to God,  whatever the work he has given you to do this year…

May your heart be newly broken by the news, and your response be newly emboldened by the Scripture…

May you know times of quiet and deep stillness, when the breath of God can be felt on your cheek…

May you go deeper into prayer, into intimacy, living deeper the communion that is ours with him…

May you be surprised by how God is working in you, and through you…

May you have experiences of God that leave you full of questions, and longing...

May you find your sails filled with the Wind, with prayer the only way to keep up…

May you find sustenance and strength in the Eucharist…

May you Love and Be Loved…

And the blessing of God–the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit–be upon you this day, the first day of this new year, and every day in 2016.

Coming out

Pema Chödrön

Shame. Embarrassment. Humiliation. Depression. All of these over a long period of time. My condition has gotten worse and I’m tired of trying to hide it, tired of all the time and energy wasted trying to hide my shame. So in an effort to declare myself free of this nuisance, I’m coming out.

 

Here’s my ugly secret: I’m losing my hair, so much that I can no longer conceal it. I have been to numerous doctors and had medical tests. I have tried everything the doctors have recommended with no success. There is a name for this condition—alopecia. (It is loosely related to psoriasis.) Some people get bald patches on their heads while some lose all the hair on their bodies, including eyebrows and eyelashes. At this point I have skimpy eyebrows and eyelashes but I have zero hair on my arms and legs. The hair on my head was always rather thin, but then I started losing patches on the crown of my head, then in the front, now big bare patches on the sides and the back of my head.

 

In my obsession I used to wash my hair in the bathtub, gather the hairs that fell out, and count them, trying to see if I could figure out on a real quantitative basis whether it was getting worse. There have been times when I thought the rate of loss had slowed, only to have it gain momentum again.

 

There is no cure for this condition and no likelihood of a cure on the horizon. Along with a vast array of snake-oil remedies, current useless treatments include lasers and prescriptions for hormones. Do I want to take hormones intended for men with side effects including breast enlargement, bleeding uterine lesions, and hair growth on random body parts? No. It’s not worth jeopardizing my general health for the sake of my hair. It’s just hair.

 

It’s just hair, I say. But I look at women with beautiful thick hair and that ugly wave of envy climbs into my gut, works its way to my throat, and starts seeping out of my eyes. Beautiful silky hair is the hallmark of femininity.

 

For weeks I think about femininity and what it really means. (No, I’m not giving you the Webster’s definition—it’s irrelevant—what is important is how I see it. End of sentence.) I’ve come to the conclusion that femininity is the light stuff, the marshmallow cream of womanhood. I just want to be the best woman I can be and hair does not make me a woman. It’s more important to feel strong, centered, proud. I can be that without hair.

 

I have an appointment with Annette, my hair stylist, early next week. It’s a regularly scheduled appointment, set up long ago. I’m going to tell Annette my thoughts, that maybe it’s time to give up the fight. Maybe a buzzcut? I love Annette—she’s edgy in her own individuality and one of the kindest, most compassionate people I know. She’ll tell me the truth. That’s why I love her.

 

It is just hair, but it’s my hair. But if maintaining a semblance of hair is keeping me living in a cage, then maybe I just don’t need it holding me back any longer.

 

I recently met a man who lost both of his legs in Afghanistan. He is no less a man, no less a human being without legs. Maybe he's grown in stature, become more noble because he hasn't let the loss diminish him. I know people who are suffering from cancer now. Some are dying. I have seen people permanently, horribly scarred by fire. (I had a bad burn on my leg once and I still remember the pain. I can’t even imagine. . . ) Walking around with a bald head is nothing in comparison. Nothing.

 

For a long time I refused to pray about the hair situation. I felt it was trivial, that there were much more weighty topics to discuss with God. And just recently I decided that nothing is too trivial, that God is my creator, that He has a boundless love for me, and I could bring it to Him. So I asked Him what I should do. I didn’t expect a response right away, no voice of God saying, “Call 1-800-GET-HAIR for Dr. Giangelo’s Hair Restoration Clinic. Guaranteed results or your money back.” Nope, no voice of God, no phone number. But a couple of days later, I was sitting in silent meditation and—out of nowhere—the face of Pema Chödrön popped up in my head. She is an American Buddhist nun who has written some wonderful books. I have read a couple of her books, never met her in person, but remembered her photo from the book jackets. The image in my head was of her with her buzz-cut hair and her glowing smile.

 

“Lord,” I said, “where did that come from?” And I knew. It’s okay. It’s okay not to have hair. It’s okay to be a woman without the usual fluff expected to be considered feminine. I can just be me. Even without hair I know that I will be beautiful in His sight.

Everything happens for a reason NOT

 

I couldn't have said it better. How I wish I had written this but I didn't--zero credit to me. This is a blog post from John Pavlovitz from August 6, 2015. All credit to John, a man who has the ability to nail it on the head. I particularly love the fact that he uses the phrase "profound suckness." Thank you, John. The original post is at http://johnpavlovitz.com/2015/05/29/why-everything-does-not-happen-for-a-reason/.

 

That phrase.

 

We’ve all received it personally gift-wrapped by well-meaning friends, caring loved ones, and kind strangers. It usually comes delivered with the most beautiful of intentions; a buffer of hope raised in the face of the unimaginably painful things we sometimes experience in this life.

 

It’s a close, desperate lifeline thrown out to us when all other words fail: Everything happens for a reason.

 

I’ve never had a tremendous amount of peace with the sentiment. I think it gives the terrible stuff too much power, too much poetry; as if there must be nobility and purpose within the brutal devastation we may find ourselves sitting in. In our profound distress, this idea forces us to run down dark, twisted rabbit trails, looking for the specific part of The Greater Plan that this suffering all fits into.

It serves as an emotional distraction, one that cheats us out of the full measure of our real-time grief and outrage. We stutter and stop to try and find the why’s of all of the suffering, instead of just admitting that maybe there is no why to be found and that perhaps this all simply sucks on a grand scale. May you feel permission to fully acknowledge that profound suckness.

 

Any even if somewhere beneath all of it; far below all the dizzying trauma that we experience here there is a fixed, redemptive reason for it all, it’s one that will likely remain well beyond our understanding so long as we inhabit flesh and blood.

 

Deep within the background operating system of my faith there’s a buried, fiercely protected trust in a God who is good and in an existence that matters. But this core truth doesn’t come with the assumption that all things, (including all the horrors we might encounter here), have a purpose. It doesn’t come with a hidden silver lining always knitted into the fabric somewhere, if only we can uncover it.

 

To believe that, is to risk painting the picture of a God who is making us suffer for sport; throwing out obstacle and injury and adversity just to see what we’ll do, just to toughen us up or break us down. I find it hard to reconcile that with the perseverant hope in a God who is not out to squash me. 

It’s exhausting enough to endure the dark hours here and not lose our religion, without the addition of a Maker who also makes us bleed. Instead, I prefer to understand God as One who bleeds along with us; Who sits with us in our agony and weeps, not causing us our distress but providing a steady, holy presence in it. This still leaves me with the nagging question of why this God can’t or won’t always remove these burdens from me, but it does allow me to better see the open opportunity provided in tragedy.

 

There’s an oft-misused excerpt from a pastor’s letter to his faith community found in Scripture, where the author Paul writes:

And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose. Romans 8:28

This isn’t a Heavenly insurance policy paid with faith and exempting us from anything unpleasant, but the promise that if we choose to respond to all things from a place of love and goodness; that we, not necessarily our circumstances will be better for it.

 

In this way, I believe in suffering as a sacred space; one where we get to choose.

 

It’s not a supernatural cause-and-effect experiment from the sky, specifically designed to do something to us or in us, but it is a time and place where we can respond and as we do, we are altered. Our pain does not have a predetermined purpose, (otherwise we would be straddled with the terribly complicated task of figuring it out in a billion small decisions every single day), but that pain will always yield valuable fruit.

 

As much as I hate to admit it, my times of deepest anguish have almost always been the catalyst for my greatest learning, but I could have easily learned different lessons had I chosen differently. Yes, I certainly grew tremendously in those trying times, but I could have grown in another direction altogether with another choice. In that way, those moments of devastation held no single, microscopic needle-in-the-haystack truth to hunt for while I grieved and struggled, but there was still treasure to be found in the making of my choices and in their ripples.

 

No I don’t believe that everything happens for a reason, but I do believe there is meaning in how we respond to all things that happen to us, even when they are not at all good things.

 

Be encouraged as you suffer and choose.

Christmas in prison: A waltz

Christmas Eve, nearly midnight. I was nestled all safe in my bed, thinking about the people I love, searching for gratitude in the light of Christmas. I thought about my brother Mark and how he used to give me a huge hug every Christmas Eve, how I have missed him the past four years. I tried to remember his face and what came to me, like one of Ebenezer Scrooge’s horrific ghosts, was the photo of his face they put up on the big screen in the courtroom during his murder trial. It was his autopsy photograph. I don’t want to remember that, but I do.

And earlier that evening I had a Pandora Christmas station playing and I heard the simple, bittersweet John Prine song Christmas in Prison. It inspired me to get out my banjo and play all the John Prine songs I know. And Christmas in Prison was still stuck in my brain when I thought about my little brother Mark and cursed the horrible man who murdered him. At least the Maryland justice system has put the murderer in prison for many years. He spent another Christmas in prison, but my family spent another Christmas without my brother. The empty place will always be empty. And I hummed the John Prine song, a beautiful waltz, and revised the lyrics. I don’t know if my anger will ever go away. I don’t know if I can ever completely forgive the man who took my brother’s life. I don’t even try any longer—I just figure it’s between him and God. I’m glad at least he had another Christmas in prison.

 

Christmas in Prison: A Waltz (with a plea to the genius songwriter John Prine for indulgence)

 

It was Christmas in prison

As you sat in your cell

Living a nightmare

Rotting in hell

May you dream of him always

Even when you don't dream

May his memory haunt you

And his death make you scream.

 

[Chorus:]

Wait, just wait for eternity

Pray that God's mercy will soon set you free

Pray to Him

Plead with Him

Fall to your knees

His mercy

Forgiveness

The goodness

Of God

Santa and me: The Christmas terror

Take a close look at this child’s face. Does she look like someone who truly loves Christmas? Funny, but 60-some years later and I believe I have the same look on my face every year as Christmas approaches.

Is it any wonder? I’m sure we had to be at some “downtown” department store because that’s all there was in Washington, DC, in 1950. There was only the Tick-Tock bar in our neighborhood. There was no bus service, no 7-11, and certainly no mall. I probably rode downtown in the car (just a free-range toddler without a car seat, of course) and my parents handed me over to this creepy big man with a fake beard. Notice the big fat man in the big chair in the big city is groping me. It was my first encounter with a masher. He was probably on parole for child abuse, hence the number on the side of his chair. Even now I hate his silly striped chair and the fake Christmas tree—back then they certainly could have pulled in a real tree instead of that Ricky Ricardo Copa Cabana tree. That alone horrifies me. Notice my innocent little hand trying to pull his big hairy paw off my parts that would be under a swimsuit. I wonder if there’s a statute of limitations.

The Masher Santa was sufficient to ruin Christmas for me for a lifetime. But wait—there’s more. One year when I was old enough to believe in Santa and young enough to trust everything an adult told me, I was cruelly deceived by an old woman who was a friend of my grandmother’s. It was Christmas Eve and I was at my grandparents’ house, staring sleepily at the lights on the Christmas tree, when Mrs. Ritter announced she had heard a bulletin on the radio. Mrs. Ritter told me that Santa Claus’s sleigh (and his eight tiny reindeer) had been caught in foul weather and there would be no Christmas that year. I should have been relieved that the child molester was not going to sneak into my house at night.

Even then, I was a rather intense child. So on Christmas Eve every year from then on I had a stomach ache from the stress of worrying about Santa Claus. I would pace the floors when my family was sleeping. I would climb into bed with my mother because I was so worked up with anticipation and concern that I needed extreme comfort. I heard Santa and the reindeer on the roof. I swear I did. I distinctly remember quivering in bed with my mother, hearing footsteps on the roof, lying frozen with my head under the blankets for fear that Santa would know I was awake. Remember he knows when you’re awake. I believed it all; nothing could sway me from my belief.

I still believe. Even though I had to be Santa when my children were little, I still believe. Even though I now live alone and no one fills my empty Christmas stocking, I believe. So this Christmas Eve I’ll be lying awake in my bed in fear and anticipation, nauseated, waiting for Santa Claus. And I’ll have that look on my face.

Barbed wire

Photo from biggreencombine.com







The peaceful conversations we had in that period of time were rare. But once in that ugly, angry time between separation and divorce, John and I were sitting at a table somewhere and he asked me how I saw him.

“I see you as an incredibly bright, funny, fiercely protective, loving man, surrounded by a coil of barbed wire,” I replied after about a minute of thought.

He smiled wryly and looked away. “That’s pretty accurate,” he said.

Last week on a long drive from west Texas to Austin, I travelled over a stretch of highway to the east of Marathon where there had been a freezing rain overnight. The grass along the highway, the limbs of the trees, everything was coated in a thin sheet of glistening ice. Even the barbed wired fences shone in their coats of ice. The monochromatic beauty was stunning and odd. I thought of John. 

That figurative coil of barbed wire kept people at a distance from John. Who could not fear his explosive anger, the scorpion’s sting? But it also kept him ensnarled, unable to be loved for what he was. He paid a huge price for the painful protection. 

I have spent a good part of my life trying to untangle the source of his anger. He struggled with depression and anxiety. He had physical pain from a deteriorating hip and various other injuries. He felt that when he was growing up his family placed unreasonable pressure on him to succeed—he was the one in his Irish Catholic family of modest means who was going to make them proud. All of these things made him angry. All of these things he carried on his back like a sack of rocks his entire life.

He spent much of his adult life in therapy, analyzing all of these things, trying to find medication that would treat the symptoms. Yet I wonder if the real path of healing for him might have been found in forgiveness. Could he have found some peace with his body that caused him pain? Could he have forgiven his parents, the priests and nuns who taught him, his brother who bullied him, the legal profession that squeezed the life out of him? Could forgiveness have brought him some peace before his untimely death from brain cancer?

And more than anyone else in my life, I need to forgive John. What does this teach me? How does seeing his life in this perspective alter the way I respond to the memory of him? I don’t want to see the barbed wire transferred to our children. I can’t transfer the barbed wire to encase myself. Forgiveness.

Closed doors

https://www.flickr.com/people/mac_filko/

Only through hard experience am I learning to trust God’s hand in my life. Time and time again, when doors have been slammed shut in my face, in the final analysis I accept that my plans, my will, my schemes and dreams, were not what God had in mind.

And so here I am in a season of closed doors, seemingly a long hallway where I keep walking, getting weary, jiggling the locks, and nothing seems to work out. Guess it’s time for a remedial lesson in patience. Again.

In less than a week, a few of the frustrations, large and small:

(1) I thought I might build a little gramma cottage on my daughter’s property in Austin for longer visits with my family and with a vision for living there permanently in the future. But when I saw a potential plan for the cottage I realized it wasn’t big enough for me to do what I wanted to do—collect and paint furniture to fill it and have friends come to stay with me. With that option off the table, I’m saying “What next? What am I going to do?”

(2) My life felt lonely without a pet. My cat died almost a year ago. I thought I could not go through the grief again of losing my dear companion, but eventually the emptiness was worse than the fear. So I started the animal adoption process. I liked a pretty little orange tabby who continued to be available while I got approved and while I was out of town. And within hours of my finalizing the process she was adopted by someone else. Then I considered another cat that looked very much like my dearly departed cat Eva. Sadly, this sweet animal had been abandoned by her family and she didn’t have Eva’s trusting and affectionate nature.

(3) Feeling frustrated and alone, I realized I need a project. So I decided to paint my powder room—easy distraction. Wait—not so easy. Before I got started I realized there is mushy place in the drywall where the ceiling meets the wall. Water. Blasted free-range water coming from the bathroom above perhaps. So I issued myself a stop-work order and sent an e-mail to my contractor to come investigate when he can.

Experience has shown me that the Lord is not slamming doors shut; He isn’t gratuitously making life frustrating for me. Frustrations strung together like beads can feel like an instrument of torture.

“Shut up!” I just screamed silently to myself. Blah, blah, blah. I sound like a histrionic crazy old cat woman. (In preparation for the cat that I didn’t get, I went to the grocery store this morning and bought cat litter, a bag of cat treats, and a cheese croissant. On the way to the quick check-out lane, I looked in my cart and wondered if I should just buy a fresh pack of razor blades so I can slit my wrists if this is the sum total of my life.) Big deal—I’m frustrated, right on schedule for the winter depression to set in, and I’ve had a cruddy week. Stop your sniveling, you stupid old woman, do what you have to do, and move forward.

I told you before that this blog is my therapy. So I just did a Gestalt therapy on myself and saw how ridiculous I can be. Yes, God closes doors. But He opens doors that are more wonderful, perhaps much more surprising, than the doors He closes. I’m waiting. Impatiently.

Reluctant rebel

Today I was telling an old friend of mine the story of how I got thrown out of the Junior League of Washington. She laughed, thought it was an asset, and asked why I had never written about this on my blog. Hmmm. . . . I thought I had written about it at some point. Voila! Found an essay that is in my dusty old unpublished book. Instant gratification. Here's the story . . .



Reluctant Rebel

One day in my senior year of high school, while in Latin 4 class, there was an announcement over the PA system, “Miss Xander to the office please.”

Oh no, I thought, what have I done now? I jumped out of my seat and headed to the vice principal’s office. I could see the outline of Mother St. Eugenia, the vice principal, through the wavy opaque glass. When I entered her office, she stood and shook a piece of paper at me, saying “You! You!”

I racked my brain for what possible offense I could have committed. I hadn’t been smoking. I hadn’t done anything with boys, much to my dismay. I hadn’t skipped school since junior year when I was punished excessively for a single day’s fall from grace.

“You! Look at these SAT scores!”

I took the piece of paper from her hand—the scores were good, apparently much better than the scores of many of my classmates. I am sure the corners of my mouth began to creep up slightly before she explained the source of her displeasure. “If you can do this, why haven’t you performed better here at Regina High School?”

Although I did care about learning and wanted to go to college, I was just not cut from their mold and didn’t feel like playing by their silly rules. Besides, there seemed to be little opportunity for me other than going to my local state college, so why work really hard?

My parents were like counter-culture parents compared to the others. While my friends’ parents were pushing their daughters to get good grades so they could apply to private Catholic out-of-state colleges, my parents didn’t encourage me to go to college at all. My parents urged me to bleach my hair and thought that I could improve myself by being more “flashy”. I wore black tights, listened to jazz, and had books by beat poets, but my parents probably would have preferred it if I had been a Hooters girl. I never saw myself as rebellious—I simply didn’t want for myself what either the school administration or my parents wanted for me.

Much to my surprise, I won a full scholarship to my state college. But I had to live at home and it felt like an extension of high school to me. After a year in college, I fell in love and soon left school to support my husband who was in law school.

Several years into married life I tried to move up in social status. Big mistake. You can take a girl out of PG County, but you can’t take the PG County out of the girl. Since I was married to a Washington lawyer, I thought I should do what I could to be connected, to help his career. What a crock! I had a couple of friends who were members of the Washington Junior League, a large group of socially connected young women who ostensibly did charity work in the community. I had never belonged to a sorority and Junior League felt to me like what it must have been like to be in a sorority, except the women were mostly married and we didn’t live together. It was a very old-school social order—all the married women were listed in the directories by their husbands’ names, so I was Mrs. John L. Burke, Jr.

In order to be admitted, we had to submit letters of support, be accepted, go through a training period, and as an active member had to perform a required number of service hours. I volunteered to work at the Junior League Shop, a second-hand clothing store whose profits supported the charity work of the organization. My main duty at the shop was to change the window displays on a weekly basis. The shop was on a main street in the trendy Georgetown section of Washington. I developed some sort of theme (based on holiday, a local event, or a color scheme) and selected clothes and created displays in the store windows. Actually, it was fun, quite a hip job for a suburban mom with a station wagon, because I got to do display work at one of the most prominent locations in Georgetown.

So I did it for a couple of years, regularly went to meetings, and paid my dues. Then the board of directors announced that they were increasing the dues. I had witnessed how the board spent the League’s money and I was perturbed. The board had administrative offices above the shop in Georgetown. They had regular board luncheons and hired a cook to work for them. Had they completely lost sight of the fact that the expressed purpose of the organization was to serve the community? Why were they spending money having someone cater their lunches when they could have brought sandwiches from home and used the money to buy books for inner city kids?

I refused to pay the dues increase. They told me that if I wanted to resign in good standing, that I would have to pay the annual dues and then resign. So I resigned not in good standing. What a slut! I didn’t see my little protest activities against the Junior League as rebellious either—I simply thought what they were doing was wrong and I didn’t want to support them any longer.

So I’ve got some big blots on my permanent record—I was an underachiever in high school and I resigned from the Junior League of Washington not in good standing. You combine that with the fact that I joined SDS (Students for a Democratic Society, a leftist student activist group that protested the war in Vietnam) in 1965, and guess I’m more firmly in the counter culture than I ever realized. It’s a wonder that the Junior League didn’t do a background check and find out about my lack of ambition and my SDS affiliation and bar me from membership. Slacker, thrown out of Junior League, former member of SDS, and a banjo player? Couldn’t get any lower than that unless I had been a waitress at Hooters. I wonder if Hooters is hiring? Maybe I’ll make my parents proud after all.

Down Tobacco Road

I wrote this a few years ago for a writing class. It's all true. The road has now been paved and cleared. There are nice houses built on the road now with swing sets and picnic tables in the yards. It doesn't seem the least bit frightening.





Dixon's Store, archives neeldestate.com



 I can smell the beach house sometimes—the stale scent of heat and dust, suntan lotion, and Old Bay seasoning. I can feel the pain in my toes from stubbing them on the heavy furniture. When the weather is warm, clear and bright, it brings me back to the screened porch and the boundless view of the Bay, so wide at that point that we could see the eastern shore only on the clearest days. There I am on the upper floor, early in the morning, listening to the seagulls while lying in one of the old rusty metal beds. I feel the heat from the mysterious storage spaces under the eaves where there were boxes of sharks’ teeth we found at the water’s edge and arrowheads that my father had found in the tobacco fields as a boy. Black snakes shed their paper-thin skin in the dugout garage under the house near the old agitator washing machine with the roller wringer. The wind-up record player with only one record, “I’m a jaaaaaazzzzz baby.” The blue Shirley Temple glasses in the corner cupboard. Pouring vinegar on jellyfish stings. The old black tenant farmer who drove a horse-driven wagon down the road, shouting, “Cantaloupe . . . watermelon.” 

My grandfather on my father’s side built the beach house. He was an ice and coal man, at least until people got electric refrigerators and central heating. Even during the Great Depression people still needed ice and coal so he earned enough money to build a small house overlooking the Chesapeake Bay on an old tobacco plantation called Neeld Estate. My father grew up spending summers in the little house and his children did the same. We had no telephone, no television, no hot water. Then I thought it was dreadful, but in retrospect it was nearly perfect.

Despite the languid, idyllic summer days spent at the beach house, I am haunted by a menacing quality, a vulnerability that grew from the isolation and the solitude. The Neeld family still occupies the plantation house that has been there since before the Civil War. Growing up I heard a legend about a slave child who was thrown down the stairs and killed by the mistress of the plantation. It was said that the child’s ghost could be heard crying in the house at midnight. We avoided walking past the plantation house after dark, but one night, in my 15^th summer, I had no choice.

My friend Anna had come to spend a few days at the beach house with my family. Early one evening Anna and I walked down the road to the beach where we ran into Ray and his friend. I knew Ray only slightly from past summers, but he had a car and made us an offer hard for any 15-year-old girls to refuse, “Want to ride with us to North Beach? I have to pick up something for my father.” Of course Anna and I wanted to go. We could ride in a car with boys and listen to the radio.

What Ray was getting was not for his father. He bought beer in North Beach and headed back, but he turned off the road into a gravel pit about four miles from home. He stopped the car. I was in the front seat with Ray. Anna was in the back seat with the friend. One of them said, “Put out or get out.” We had never “put out” before but we knew what they wanted. We got out and they drove away without a word.

We were barefoot, on a moonless night, in an area I scarcely knew. There were no houses nearby and we had no telephone in our beach house, so even if I had wanted to call my parents I couldn’t have. We considered our options. The quickest way home would have been to go across an inlet between Breezy Point and our beach. “I don’t know how deep it is,” I told Anna, “and I don’t know if we can climb those slimy jetty walls on the other side.” So we took off for the one-lane dirt road we called Tobacco Road. It was the major connector between Neeld Estate and the rest of the world, but it had never been paved. “But what if a car comes along? We won’t know who’s in it,” Anna whispered. So we decided that we should hide if a car approached. We feared what a stranger might do to two girls walking in the night on a secluded dirt road.

We walked in the darkness as fast as we could, hid when we needed to, and prayed Hail Marys aloud. At one point a car approached and we hid out of sight on the side of the road. But Anna slipped off the side into a ravine where people had been dumping trash. I screamed, “Anna! Anna! Annie, please answer me!” No response. She finally came crawling up, shaken, with her feet bleeding. We continued to walk in silence. When we reached the paved road, a dog belonging to a neighbor with the unlikely name of Mason Dixon came out of nowhere, barking and growling. I wet my pants. Finally, we reached the Bay. We just sat in the edge of the water and washed ourselves as best we could, then we walked home past the old plantation house. We didn’t hear the child’s ghost scream. Our own experience was horror enough.
             At the time, I didn't tell my parents what had happened, fearing I would be punished for going in a car with boys. Anna and I innocently went for a ride with boys we thought we knew. We could have been raped or died trying to get home, yet we thought we were at fault. Over 40 years have passed and I have lost contact with Anna. I don't even know if she remembers that summer night in our 15th year when our innocence started to slip away.

Sacred

One day last week I had a conversation with a friend who is struggling with feeling distant from God, feeling like the brokenness of her life is only moving her farther away from Him. She asked how I had coped with the losses I have suffered in recent years. Yes, I had felt that same distance, but in time I developed a closer relationship with God, not in spite of the pain but because of the pain. And I heard myself saying that I found something sacred in it.

The word “sacred” in relationship to human suffering sounds a bit out of whack. Was I being ultra-dramatic, spouting off a bit too much sanctimonious woo-woo?

It is absolutely true that my communion with God and my desire to continue to grow closer to Him would not be what it is today if I had not suffered some big, painful losses in my life. I have said it before and I’ll say it again—when life brought me to my knees, it was then that I realized that on my knees was where I needed to be. God did not cause the brokenness in this world. He didn’t point His finger at me and say, “Let’s see what I can dish out to her and let’s see how she’ll handle it.” No—wretched things happened that I could not control and that I will never understand on this side of heaven. After years of moaning and unending questions, I have stopped trying to analyze rationally all of that life junk. Ultimately it’s a big waste of energy. It’s like going into a maze that has no exit, because there are no answers that would make any sense to me now. It is not for me to know. I have pretty much accepted that life sucks sometimes. But the darkness, those wretched things, led me to a deeper and deeper reliance on the Lord.

We are not alone when in the wake of pain and loss we question God’s benevolence. Perhaps in our minds He becomes a maleficent overlord with whom we want no relationship. It happens to the best of us who call ourselves believers. In the abyss of grief after his wife died, even C.S. Lewis had his understanding of God shaken and he referred to God as “the Cosmic Sadist and Eternal Vivisector”—tough words coming from the revered author of Mere Christianity. (CS Lewis, A Grief Observed, p. 38)

Pastor John Pavolvitz wrote about this on his blog Stuff That Needs To Be Said: (http://johnpavlovitz.com/2015/05/29/why-everything-does-not-happen-for-a-reason/)

"There’s an oft-misused excerpt found in Scripture, where the author Paul writes:

"And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose. Romans 8:2

"This isn’t a heavenly insurance policy paid with faith and exempting us from anything unpleasant, but the promise that if we choose to respond to all things from a place of love and goodness, that we—not necessarily our circumstances—will be better for it.

"In this way, I believe in suffering as a sacred space."

Yes, he said it—suffering is a sacred place. For me it took much too long to get to that understanding, but thankfully God walked beside me through the whole ugly mess and I now rest assured that He will continue to be beside me.

Beauty school dropout

Here in Virginia it’s Election Day for local elected offices. So I dutifully went to my local polling place to cast my vote. (I’m so grateful that this marks the end of the annoying robocalls—it has been strangely quiet in my house today.)

In front of the local high school where those in my precinct vote, I ran into a woman I used to know from PTA activities when my kids were in elementary school. She kept moving up from PTA president and is now chairman of the county school board. She introduced me to a young man who is her colleague on the school board. The colleague recently moved into my neighborhood, on my street, just a block away. As I drove home I thought it was such good luck to have a neighbor on the school board in case I ever need something done in the county school system.

But then it dawned on me—what would ever cause me to need help from a member of the county school board? My kids are grown and have moved many states away. However, there’s that recurrent nightmare of mine with varying details that has to do with my not graduating from high school. For example, after years of work in both graduate and undergraduate school, I dreamed that I couldn’t get my graduate degree because I flunked a quiz in Mr. Wojick’s geometry class. The graduate program required me to go back and finish high school, then repeat college and grad school. Nothing counted because of that one geometry quiz.

I have to confess that geometry was not my strongest subject. I got almost a perfect zero in one quiz—just one lousy correct answer that was pure luck caused me to get 5 percent. It has been over 50 years since I earned that 5 percent and it still haunts me. However, I must have great intuitive sense when it comes to geometry. We had to take some sort of standardized national geometry exam and I breezed through it with a high score. How could that be? I guessed. I just looked at the measurements—if side A was 18.5 inches and side B was 36 inches, then I guessed that proportionately side C looked like it should be 42 inches. I didn’t waste time doing those tedious Pythagorean things. (It shocks me to know that I just used the word Pythagorean in a sentence. Will wonders ever cease? Next thing you know I'll be swimming laps at the Y.)

Other than the geometry bugaboo, I have found myself trying to graduate wearing only a slip—my dog ate the cap and gown. Many times I have had night terrors about not being able to find my assigned classroom or I had forgotten to go to the class all year and it was time for the final exam. Or maybe that was real life. Hard to tell. Now I’m going to panic. I need to find my diploma to prove that I really am a high school graduate. I don’t think my influential neighbor can help me get my diploma. Not only did I go to high school outside of this county, outside of this state, but my high school went out of business many years ago. The only thing I have is a fading photograph. That’s not proof. Am I going to have to sign up to take a GED exam? Please tell me there’s no geometry on the exam.