Catch a Tiger by the Tail

On a recent weekend two friends and I did something we have never done:  we left home together.

For millions of American women this is not a foreign concept.  They gather.  They gab.  They eat, shop, drink, watch chick flicks, and then they start all over again.  We don't really belong to that august sorority known as the American woman.  Ours is a weird little group, with weird little ways of whiling away a beautiful autumn weekend.

We got together to Create.  On any normal day we spend a lot of time thinking and talking about creating--unfortunately, perhaps, more time talking about than actually doing.  So this weekend the proof was going to be in the pudding.

There were rules:
1. No filing.
2. No sorting.
3. No cleaning.

That last item ain't so hard.  The first two, not so easy.  Some of us yearned to fill the yawning storage compartments in our vehicles with legions of plastic tubs and cardboard boxes, seeing endless hours of gleeful girl talk as the perfect antidote to the mind-numbingly depressing task of sorting.  But some of us are hardened taskmasters and would not allow such pursuits.

Eureka!  It worked.  We hunkered down and we got stuff done.  Fascinating, interesting, unusual stuff we wouldn't have done if we had stayed at home.  Stuff like the little gal above, cut from a 19th century magazine, sweeping her way along a pathway of technology created from a now obsolete computer card.

And we talked, a lot, about creativity itself--the elusive muse we try to "catch by the tail" and wrestle to our own ends.  In a fit of desperate avoidance behavior I hit Facebook (that old cheater of creativity) and found a fellow writer fighting the same battles had on this very day posted the following lecture about nurturing creativity--a talk given by writer Elizabeth Gilbert.  We listened while we worked, the result being more conversation, more thoughtful inquiry, and, eventually, more work:

It all boils down to this crusty remainder:  behind every creative impulse is the fear of failure and the fear of so much more.  We are the descendents of a long, lusty artistic culture based on "the notion that creativity and suffering are linked."  And, as Gilbert so pointedly asks, why have we accepted that?  Why have we let that ridiculously childish notion inform our view of the arts, to the point that if a loved one is considering following their passion into a world of art, we question their wisdom, their foresight, even, perhaps, their sanity?

Because it's just plain hard, there's no road map for living it, no prescriptive plan for results.  There's simply the giant question mark that all creative impulse must answer--that little bit of the divine placed deep in every human heart that yearns for an earthly voice.

And bottom line:  it's work.  Like anything else, it requires discipline, focus, repeated practice, and yes, even failure.  But...

Being Big

I am a big sister.  I have been a big sister since my brother was Kentucky-born, exactly eighteen months after my own Oklahoma City birthday.  That's the only kind of sister I know how to be:  big.

Our family went in what I thought was perfect order:  girl, boy, girl, boy.  Like critters hitching a ride with Noah we marched in perfect symmetry, two by two, and I was the boss of us all, because that's what oldest sisters are supposed to be.  I was perfectly happy with that arrangement.  Them?  Not so much.

Being the boss is hard, hard, hard.  You always have to be paying attention to what everybody else is doing.  You have to know all the rules, in case they forget, and they always forget.  You have to remind them to do stuff, like let the dog out, let the dog in, don't forget your homework, and lock the back door.

Being big is a lot of work.

But I was big enough for the job, and so I did it.  Sometimes they didn't like it very much, like the time I told my sister she needed to clean up her side of the room.  She got mad at me.  I got mad at her.  Stuff got thrown around.  Priceless (not really, but they could have been) mementos were broken.

After the battle she went to her side of the room and I went to mine.  She sniffled and I snuffled.  Before long we made up and went on downstairs to do other sisterly stuff, like fly as high as the sky on the death-defying homemade rope swing in the yard.

Or there was the time my brother got so mad he cornered me in the kitchen by the stove and threw his baseball glove as hard as he could right at my stomach.  I don't remember what very responsible big sister thing I had done that made him so mad, but I sure do remember that glove hitting me--thud--right in the gut.

Or there was the time I took charge of the TV after school and my brother got so mad he sat on my back, stuffed my face in the green shag carpet, and slugged me.  It wasn't my fault he didn't know what show to watch.

Then there was the day in junior high when I thought being a big sister had finally killed me.  My brother and I were both on the academic team together.  That situation is weird enough.  But to top it off, the coach had put us at the table in the middle of a big competition, right next to each other.  Bad coach.

Our team was given a question.  I knew the answer.  I was right.  I was always right.  But my brother wouldn't listen to me.  I whispered and I whispered and I whispered.  Finally he turned his head, looked me right in the face, and loud enough so every single person in the whole entire cafeteria could hear, said, "Would you shut up?"

I don't remember if we got the points or not.  I don't even remember if we won the match.  All I remember is exactly how much I wanted to slide under that cold metal table onto the cold linoleum floor and die a cold, quiet death.

Being a big sister can be so humiliating.

These days I'm a much older older sister.  They are much older younger siblings.  I don't call them on the phone and tell them what to do (well, not much).  I never get slugged and mementos are safe when we are around.  Somehow, in spite of ourselves, we all grew up.

But get us together in a room for a little while, and the "big" in me starts to worm its way out.  What do they expect?  It's my job.

This piece was written for instructional use in a 6th grade writing class in response to their prompt to write about their position in the family order.

Ad In

This past week I was lucky enough to see tennis on our country's largest stage.  This isn't it.  It's the second largest stage--Armstrong Stadium at Flushing Meadows.  The fellow in yellow is Juan Martin del Potro--he won the U.S. Open two years ago.  Last year at this time, when he should have been defending his title, he was rehabbing at Mayo Clinic in Minnesota--I know this because I was at Mayo Clinic in Minnesota at the exact same time and we became nodding acquaintances.  He was a lonely, frustrated young man, far from home, eating his lunch in a restaurant bar, watching on a flat screen what he should have been doing.  I was glad to see him this past weekend competing on this court.

Juan is from Argentina.  He speaks broken English.  His fans, all of whom had to stand in line waiting for seats to open up so they could have their turn to sit, shared impossibly tight bleacher seats with many folks who spoke broken English, if they spoke it at all.  It was hot.  It was humid.  The sun was unforgiving.  But every one was pleasant, even courteous.

I heard accents from all over the world in those stadium seats.  The night before I sat next to a Russian who could not contain his enthusiastic support of Davydenko, even as Davydenko succumbed to Serbian Djokovic's #1-ranked game.  His English was good, if unmistakably Russian.  He had a great time.  I had a great time.

I shared escalator stairs with Arabs in head gear, with orthodox Jews, with stylish French, and with animated Spaniards spouting the name Rafa on their breathless tongues.

We all shared the same seats.  We all touched the same railings.  We all ate the same food prepared in the same kitchens.  We all used the same, very personal, facilities. 

This scenario, worthy of a United Nations White Paper, was made possible by a little, bouncy ball and two men (or women) with rackets in their hands.

New York City.  Hot, sweaty, tight quarters.  As many nationalities, religions, ethnicities as you could squeeze in.  

Peace.  It's possible.  

Crank it Up

The past few days I've had opportunities to see a wide variety of people doing a wide variety of things--things they do well.  There can be no greater gift in life than to be a party to someone doing something at which they excel--and about which they feel true passion.

Some of that energy rubs off, like firefly phosphorescence, and we carry away a bit of their glow.  They don't mind.  There's plenty more where that came from--true passion is lifelong, not seasonal, and it takes more than the cold winds of autumn to dim that light.

Lately I've been knocking around on a few passions of my own, every single one of them involving words.  As long as I've been on this planet that's what it's been about--and one of the toughest things to learn with words is voice control.

Oh, I've got volume.  Just ask anybody who knows me--I can project with the best of them, know no modulation, and don't exactly sport the most endearing of accents.  Volume ain't the problem.  Control is.

Same thing is true of my writing.  I can wax as verbose as any word-y, dictionary-lovin', overblown, overwritten piece of drivel ever penned.  Finding that control knob--therein lies the proverbial rub.

Anyone who knows me (even superficially) knows I carry around a tiny little collapsible soap box.  It comes in handy when the need for opinionated oration arises.  I can whip that little box out, climb up on it, and deliver an opinion before my unwitting listener ever knows what hit'em.  And I can do it with some serious volume.

But sometimes the most powerful word is the one uttered with the most painfully precise modulation.  Perfectly calibrated, exquisitely timed, poetically chosen.  Now that's voice control.

Last night it was the perfectly timed words of old Will Shakespeare himself.  Romeo and Juliet died yet again on that stage, and guess what?  He got me all over again.  Sitting in an open air park on a Thursday night, jadedly aware of every plot twist and character--he still got me.  Gone are the days of swooning over the starcrossed lovers.  From my more elderly vantage point it's all about Mrs. Capulet and the sheer stupidity of her loss.  It's all about the total lack of voice control exhibited by those two families (played out in modern terms 24/7 on every cable news outlet).

Tonight it was Will's countrywoman, Jane Austen.  Fanny Price of Mansfield Park--now there's control.  Of voice, of thought, of life.  Control was the unbidden cornerstone of life for Jane Austen, and she mined it to its deepest, darkest depths in all her work.

Top it off with the quintessentially American character of bouncy little Molly Brown.  A whole different control button on that chick--loud, louder, loudest.  A woman after my own heart.  But don't underestimate Molly.  As soon as you do she will sucker punch the most sophisticated foe into openmouthed submission.

Every voice in every work completely unique.   And every voice one of pitch perfect control, of split second timing, of plain old real world honesty.

That's what I'm going after.  Power, precision, poetry.  And a little class.

"That's dignity--dignity, Mr. Brown, and we is gonna' get us some."

Molly Brown, Fanny Price, even old Will,  had the dignity of people who know how to survive in a thankless world of faux folks--they had the only voice control that counts.  Their own.

Mid-Summer Matinee

Back in the boondock days I took a class on modern cinema.  It was a good exercise because I was exposed to films I wouldn't ordinarily have watched--black-n-white French stuff I really didn't understand, Italian movies filled with oblique angles and dark shadows, rickety early Russian gems like "Battleship Potemkin".  You get the idea.

And I spent hour upon hour listening to several know-it-all classmates pontificate on the meaning of art.  The professor allowed such meditations to chew up the bulk of most class periods--the end result being, of course, we never defined "art" and I turned in my final exam certain that the value of my parents' tuition dollar had not been fully realized.

Some thirty-plus years later I find myself engaged in similarly circular conversations, only now with my own kids and their friends over the value or lack thereof in certain highly popular movies--movies which are either reflecting or shaping the culture in which we live.  Either possibility is frightening to me, because said movies seem so bereft of human spirit.  Funny they may be (depending upon one's own taste in humor), but humor that leaves me with a sour taste and a need to scrub my face isn't really funny in my book.

Generation gap?  Probably.  Subjective?  Of course.  It's summertime, after all, and the crop of summer movies has always been, even in my day, one of cotton candy carnival fare.

So how about some fluffy, adult-sized cotton candy?

Yes, that's Julia Roberts and Tom Hanks.  Yes, it looks like your typical leggy Julia Roberts-biggest grin on the planet-biggest belly laugh of any modern American film actress, fare.  But it's not.

It's better.  Tom Hanks and Nia Vardalos (of "My Big, Fat Greek Wedding" fame) co-wrote a script that is smart and funny, doesn't miss a single detail of the man who is Larry Crowne, isn't afraid to make Ms. Roberts a teeny bit unattractive with a nasty little drinking habit and a pretty nasty husband to boot, and a quirky assemblage of folks who make you want to go back to school at the local community college.

It's fun.  Sure, it's not real life, but wouldn't it be nice if real life was a little more like this--where a pipe-smoking neighbor with a perpetual yard sale who is a pain in the rear can also be a friend, where it's cool to ride a non-adrenaline pumping scooter (no chase scene in the entire flick), where the Dean of Students does tai chi in a bow tie, and public speaking is the new You Tube?

What makes it work is that they (Mr. Hanks, Ms. Vardalos, et al) know people and they like them.  They know we aren't perfect, out here in the suburbs and the backyards of America.  They know we're actually pretty dorky and kind of dull, but they also know we're kind of fun, too.  After all, every single guy isn't a hung over wedding crasher who can't remember the name of the last person he slept with, and every single chick isn't a pushed up, pimped out, revved and ready pole dancer. 

Ill-fitting khaki pants and a Boy Scout sort of do-unto-others attitude can be pretty sexy, too.  Thanks for getting it, Tom and Company.

Play List

I sat down at my computer this morning to do some basic appointment scheduling, e-mailing...the usual muck-a-muck business.  An unknown member of the family or perhaps a visitor to the house (we have many), left this surprise up and loaded, the perfect beginning to an ordinary day:

I'm old and out of touch with the current music scene.  Even in the days when I was young I was out of touch with the current music scene.  If it didn't make its way to my car radio, I probably didn't even know it existed.  With advanced age and ever more distraction, I am even less in tune.  But every once in a while some tolerant young person introduces me to a little known gem that makes me happy to share their musical universe.  Mumford and Sons are such a gem.

Young enough to be my own sons, they are old enough to see the world with brave new eyes, wise enough to reflect upon what they see, daring enough to share the vision, poetic enough to make it sing.

Hailing from England, this new Fab Four is making its way around the world, living out their dream of "...[making] music that matters without taking themselves too seriously."  That's tough to do:  create something of import, of power, of substance, all the while never getting too big for one's britches.

Readers, photographers, culinary wizards--it doesn't hurt that these young men have numerous interests and passions, all of which fuel their music and make them guys you'd want to hang out with.  Shakespeare and Steinbeck come easy to their tongues, they manage an on-line book club that includes allusions to G.K. Chesterton.  Find me an American English major who's made his/her way through G.K., and I'll buy you a Diet Coke.

They aren't afraid to acknowledge the dark, because they are so vibrantly aware of the light, as they challenge the most basic human fear of dying in "After the Storm".  I'm loving the fact that even when alone, cold, soaked to the bone, the singer refuses to keep his eyes on the ground:

And after the storm,

I run and run as the rains come
And I look up, I look up,
on my knees and out of luck,
I look up.
 

And then, a reminder that life is full of one paradox after another, that perhaps it was thus designed in order for us to be jarred out of complacency long enough to notice, to appreciate:

Night has always pushed up day
You must know life to see decay
But I won't rot, I won't rot
Not this mind and not this heart,
I won't rot.

Now, to the heart of the song, to the deepest most personal fear shared by all humans:

I will die alone and be left there.
Well I guess I'll just go home,
Oh God knows where.
Because death is just so full and mine so small.
Well I'm scared of what's behind and what's before.

Bottom line--they make music.   Bottom line--they aren't afraid of the tough stuff of life, but they never forget the good.  


It's poetry, sure, poetry that sings with soul played by troubadours who aren't afraid to let themselves be overcome--overcome with sorrow, overcome with joy.

Travelogue

Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.

                                                 - Mark Twain, Innocents Abroad

Partly due to necessity, partly due to family, partly due to personal whim, I have, of late, been a certified road warrior. In the last week I've traversed the country on a southerly journey that took me from cool, green Minnesota to the blistering white sands of the Gulf.  

Stark contrasts in geography.  Stark contrasts in society.  Countless reminders of the basic humanity that unites us all.  

Here I, a mom from Kentucky, sat at a table with a sad-eyed Iraqi girl, and her own, unyielding mother.  She smiled at me and said she liked my accent.  I smiled back and said I liked hers.  Through an interpreter her mother spoke confidently, unquestioningly, of disciplining children, of cultural differences, of what is right and of what is wrong.  I never saw that graceful girl again.

I stood on the banks of the Mississippi where Twain's own eye had scanned the horizon and I thought about just how far that scruffy little river boy traveled in his life.  I felt his unspeakable sadness, I treasured his mustache-twitching humor, and I remembered that, no matter the sophistication of his audience, he always celebrated the best and the worst that makes us human.

I traveled the red dirt roads of Georgia.  I mucked through the muck only dairy cows can produce, I swatted at the flies and felt the sweat roll down my back.  I came face to face with the hard reality of  decent jobs no fat, lazy American will perform, and of the "illegal" dedication of sweetly sad men who gladly sweat through 15-hour days to provide for far away family growing up, growing away, without them.

I saw the handmade implements of men forced to create in order to survive.  I saw how ugly we can become, regardless of country, regardless of race, regardless of religion--I was reminded that the brutish animal isn't far below our shaved and deodorized exterior--and I reveled in man's own will to live, to care, to share.

I  thought about a country gone mad over a gross maternal miscarriage of justice, of a people more captivated by cupcake wars than by stopping war.  I looked forward to heading north on I-65, to looking into familiar faces, to hearing a familiar laugh.  I marveled at the resolve of those who came before me--the steely will to make this home for all of us--for those with accents just like mine and for those with uncommon poetry on their tongues.

And I was grateful.  For it all. 

Pain Lab 101

Pain is a four-letter word that is difficult to define.  It has an infinite number of meanings, of shades, of degrees, of intensities--as many as the earth has fingerprints.  My version of pain, both physical and mental, is mine alone.  The only way you can know or understand it would be if you could plop inside this fifty-year old body and slouch around the way I do for a few hours.

My idea of intense pain:  natural childbirth.  No Demerol, no epidural, no swoozy, woozy good stuff flowing into the willing vein.  Just gritting your teeth, breathing, concentrating more than you ever knew possible, and getting the job done.

Sure, it hurts.  But you know when you enter that weirdly gratifying place that it...will...end.  And that at the end of the tunnel is a sweetly swaddled little face with midnight blue eyes lying across your exhausted body.  Talk about gratification.

But there's another kind of pain.  The kind that never goes away.  This variety makes doctors furrow their brows and look back at the chart, wondering what they've missed.  Wishing they had another pill to offer, another diagnosis to define.  This pain goes by the moniker of "chronic."  The addition of that one adjective is, for most, an instant death sentence to the normal life of one's dreams.

That word, along with a few others, has brought me here:

This small, understated sign is the only advertisement of the Mayo Clinic PRC in Rochester, Minnesota, a place where people get their lives back.  To the average reader this description may be a bit melodramatic, perhaps a little over the top, smacking of a made-for-TV Lifetime movie.  To a mom who's been here with her kid for three-plus weeks, it's a simple statement of fact.

The program starts out with instant, total immersion.  There is no hand holding, no kum-ba-yah let's all sing a song of misery together kind of gathering in.  There's a hit-the-ground running to-do list for kids and parents alike that sets folks on edge, that instantly shoves us out of our comfortably worn grooves of coping, and forces us to examine what our (and their--the kids in pain) lives have become.

That's the first pang--the first indication that this ain't gonna be easy.  And that first day I knew I had to grit my teeth, bear down, concentrate and get the job done, all over again, only this time with absolutely no guarantee of how it all would end.  Even worse, I had to watch my kid while she did it, too.

There are lots of long hallways here...lots of hard steps to take.  And many of these kids come into the program on the first day in a wheelchair.  For a lot of reasons, some due to bullheadedness, some due to luck, mine walked in on her own steam.  But that fact in and of itself has amazed and awed some of the best docs in the country.

What happens behind these doors and in these rooms is a fascinating, complex process of science, humanity, and hard work.  The best of the best work here and focus their fine intellects, their vast knowledge, and their expansive hearts on our kids.  They know what they are about--and no matter how much the kids may balk and stumble, no matter how pissy we parents become, they never lose focus on the goal:  getting these kids back to the lives they want to lead.

They aren't asking for much.  In most cases they want what the rest of us take for granted:  just a regular life.  Or as regular as they can get it.  Along the way they've lost the basics--for some it's walking, for others it's running, for some it's being able to stand up without passing out or throwing up or both.  For most it's a seven-day-a-week life of normalcy that they mourn, not climbing Mt. Everest or quarterbacking the Super Bowl.

For the parents it's a blessed day or two with normal worries about normal kids:  dating catastrophes, bad grades, fender benders, college applications, tuition bills.

And for the lucky few who make it here, for the lucky few who make it through, at the end of these three and a half weeks, with continued work and focus and commitment, that's exactly what we all will have.

Naming the Names

A few days ago I wrote a poem for someone who is dying.  I have never met Sneezy and I never will because he is beyond the ability to speak--and when he is able to manage sound those precious seconds should be preserved for those who love and know him best.

But I sat at a table and wrote a poem about him.  On the back of my first draft, when I had a few blank moments to fill, I began a list.  A naming of the dead.  In a matter of seconds I had fourteen names.  Fourteen souls who, for a variety of very sad and very personal reasons, had no longer been able to tolerate life on this earth and had chosen, in that last split second of darkness, to move on.

Then I added more names.  People who had tried, but failed (or, depending on one's prespective, had succeeded, by staying on earth).  Those whose struggle had at least been enough to reach my own ears.

The list is varied and complex, just as the lives reflected are varied and complex.  But one constant is there, a steady stream of sorrow, a dull abiding drumbeat of pain.  There, in every name.

One name is still raw.  My neighbor.  A boy two years younger than I, now a middle-aged man, who came home to his parents' welcoming arms, who fought, who worked, who tried really really hard.  But who in the end just couldn't stay with us.  I never knew him as a man.  I never even really knew him as a boy, any more than I really knew anybody else in high school.

But I remember his eyes--they were big and beautiful under a thick fringe of long dark hair--even then it seemed he was trying to hide those beautiful eyes behind that beautiful hair.

And I thought about Sneezy.  He had fought hard for many months, for long days in and out of hospitals, rehabs, operating and recovery rooms.  His refusal to give up, to let go, to miss a chance to tell one more joke, to get one more laugh, was still palpable in those who knew him best.  His will to live was with us in that room, even though I never saw him open his eyes or heard him utter a single word.

Two men.  Two lives.  Both bumping up against mine.  Neither of whom I knew.  Both I will never forget.