A candle, in defiance of sadness

December 16, 2012...the third Advent candle lit today, the last Hanukkah candle lit tonight.
A year ago tomorrow, my long-lost father was laid to rest in Israel. 

Two days ago, my heart was broken for families that I will never know.

Today, I'm going to hear  a choir perform Handel's "Messiah", in a church sanctuary that slightly resembles a synagogue, HA, which I did on this Sunday last year. My dad loved that glorious work and I grew up hearing it every Christmas. 

I take great comfort in the lyric, taken from Scripture, "Behold, I tell you a mystery; We shall not all sleep; but we shall all be changed in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet." 

We shall. We shall be changed...

In the meantime, we mourn for the lost ones in Connecticut, for the lost ones in Hurricane Sandy, for the lost ones in this Crazy Year That Nearly Was. My dad numbers among those.

Today, I pray for the parents of the kindergartners lost to evil, the children and spouses of staff lost to evil,  for the first-responders that encountered the aftermath of evil, as I get the house ready for the man who shares my life.

As I pray for those lost, as I pray for us left behind, as I move on into my bright future with Jonathan, I'm putting away some of Daddy's things. His daughter Kfirah, my sister, told me that in Judaism one is taught to mourn for a year and then forget that person. I don't know about that. You can't simply forget someone, especially someone who gave you half your DNA.

I've officially mourned for a year, after unofficially mourning for most of my life. I used to feel bad about that, and be made to feel bad about that.

I recently read a musing from one of my aunts, who lost her first baby, long ago before I was born. "... as this is the 52nd anniversary of our first son's birthday... in defiance of the sadness that still can overwhelm me on this day, if I let it,  I wrote to my three kids this morning to tell them how grateful I was for their lives..." If I let it. In defiance of sadness. 

"If I let it". We don't want to be permanently paralyzed by grief...yet we don't want to be cold as stone and forget that we loved someone once. She's a good model for that -- remembering the great love she had for her first-born and still pressing forward.

"In defiance of sadness." We can combat grief with said-aloud gratitude for joys in our lives, indeed, while we recognize and embrace our humanity and our tender hearts. My aunt has a tender heart, and I know that her faith in life after death gives her the strength and spunk to use the phrase "in defiance of sadness'.

I could spend this day mourning my father. In a way I am, obviously, and I don't feel bad about it at all. He loved me once, and I him. That's something to celebrate.

I miss him. I always have, and I always will.

However, 'in defiance of sadness', I'm putting away some of his books that I've kept in sight for years. I've kept them about me, like comfortable old shoes. I certainly don't ascribe to the Jewish hardness of forgetting all about the dead, but I think I can let go my grip on my grieving at last.


I don't know when that will happen for the families in Sandy Hook village.It may be 52 years, it may be 34 years, it may be never, that they will be able to feel defiance against sadness. Along with the Hanukkah candles, and the Advent candles, I'm lighting another one -- just for them.  This light is for them, in the sudden darkness that has engulfed them.

May they somehow know the arms of God around their shaking shoulders.

Oooh... shiny!!

       I recently went back to work (after a two-year hiatus due to StupidCancer and StupidCancer complications) and took on a squirrelly class of two-year-olds that'd had previously had little or no discipline. I came home exhausted for the few two weeks. This is why we have kids when we are YOUNG. HA!
       Part of the previous problem lay in the fact that they had been given worksheets to color and alphabet letters to trace -- and no other opportunities to be creative. Yep. In a two-year-old classroom.
     On one of the first days holding the reins I discovered a pack of glitter glue bottles in a jumbled-up cupboard in the classroom, and let my little ones decorate tiny tambourines I'd made with them.
One generally does not use glitter with two year-olds, but in the form of Elmer's glue it becomes fairly innocuous and quite captivating. One little sprite spent 40 minutes carefully squeezing out teensy-tiny squiggles of shiny strands, and the rest followed suit. To be honest, I snagged that box of glitter glue out of the cupboard two more times when plans had to be abandoned, before I'd developed a stronger schedule and curriculum.

Last Friday, I made sense out of the Big Supply Closet, finding yet more glitter glue and glitter and sparkly colorful beads and sequins and crayons and paints and other required elements of early childhood education Art Experiences. Color, sparkle, glittering...for some of us, it's the modern-day equivalent of finding buried treasure. Ooooh, shiny!!

Ooooh shiny! I laughed to myself in the supply closet. ( I could hear Jonathan teasing me with that phrase, when I abruptly change subjects in a nanosecond, distracted by something I want to share with him in the moment. LOL )

Pretty, ooh-shiny glitter-glue provided a back-up for me these past few weeks, when I needed to get those wee ones settled down and focused and teach about taking turns.

Seems like modern-day humans tend to sometimes use God as a glitter-glue entity. We know where to find Him, we know He'll come through in a tight spot, and He makes everything beautiful and sparkly. All of that true...to a point.

I stood with twenty other sojourners yesterday during Mass, listening to the litany as we were presented to the congregation and the priests. I stood silently, after giving my commitment to further my journey, with my fellow travelers, as my sponsor made the sign of the cross on my head, to help me think on God, my eyes to see God, my ears to hear God -- and so on with heart, hands and feet.
We returned to our pews and to the kneeling benches to pray. It's been a lifelong journey for me to find a house of worship where I didn't have, or need, connections to fit in, and my prayers on the kneeling bench oozed out in tears of humble gratitude.

Last night, a visiting priest 'happened' to touch upon on the disappointing election, and asked this of us -- if we trust in God, not just believe in His love and power, why can't we trust that God is up to something good in all the chaos? "Isn't He always?"

As I listened, knowing he had a good hold on the truth, I thought about half of the population of the U.S.,  who'd waited for God to flood the streets with 'glitter-glue' during the recent election, saving us from what we perceive as a truly tight spot. (I, for one, will have a hard time finding a full-time job with benefits, since the new 'HealthCare' Plan won't get repealed. I'm not alone -- and the millions of us who categorically reject the Plan have reason to worry.) We had our hopes dashed as we prayed for our nation to be restored under different leadership.

Somehow, God had not heard the prayers of over 100,000,000 people. How could that be?

'Glitter-glue' got flung. Sometimes still in the bottle, sometimes splashed angrily on blogs and e-mails and Facebook, and sometimes it just pooled out of abandoned containers and dribbled down the drain with our hopes.  Anger always covers fear...always. Adding to the passion, it's hard not to feel as though we need to constantly fight evil. It's the American way! " Bomb the enemy! Save democracy!" "Hi-ho Silver! Away!" " Use that slingshot! We are in the army of God!"

God, the ultimate Commander-in-Chief,  isn't a God of glitter-glue. We can't just apply Him to situations on demand.

Nor is He only a back-up plan, nor just for special occasions, nor to be used as a pretty Scripture-projectile missiles to prove our points. Even if there's a battle to be fought.

He is the Creator of the trees with which to make paper, and of the minds who create upon the blank pages. He's the Light that makes color appear...so since we're made in God's image, no wonder we love glitter! It catches the light and makes the world sparkle. Ooh shiny! isn't necessarily a bad habit...as long as we remember the source and purpose of the light.

He's always up to something good. Always.

He. is. God.

As the priest said last night, "we must open the door of faith", and I shall add, to let the Light in.

Be blessed.

Shenandoah, revisited...

My sister Karen and I used to go to the PTA sponsored Summer Film Series at the Fox Theater in downtown Riverside back in the early 70's. Our mother would drop us off every Tuesday afternoon, and afterward we'd wait for her to pick us up. While protected from the hot California sun underneath the awning of Shook's Shade Shop, around the corner from the grand old theater, we'd go over the movie we'd just seen again and again, as we wondered if the roller shade in the shop window had possibly been there since the Spanish-American War. HA . Those were the days... 

One 70's summer week, we saw Jimmy Stewart, and Doug McClure, and Katharine Ross, and a (pre-Dukes of Hazzard "Uncle Jessie") Denver Pyle in the gloriously filmed and wonderfully heartfelt "Shenandoah", a Civil war-era film. This screen shot shows the featured Virginia family seated around the table. Not but a few frames later in the film a bitter argument breaks out amongst the family members. Stewart, as the patriarch, insists that none of his sons will fight in this war unless it affects the family. 

Events unfold, family members die as casualties, and in the final frames of the film, most of the chairs remain unfilled.

We girls were so sad to see that empty table. Tears welled up in our pre-teen eyes, in the dark rows of the Fox Theater, and we told our mom all about it on the way home from Shook's Shade Shop. 

A similar occurrence has developed amongst the "family of Americans" during this long and ridiculously hateful political season. The left paints the right as hysterical conspiracy theorists and the right paints the left as commie-pinkos, to coin a phrase from the past. The family divides in the film as in the actual Civil War, brother against brother, and so has our country. 

Friends ditch friends over ideological differences. And not just ditch, but stab through the heart.

Family members stop talking to each other, even on common ground, because one can't stand a certain candidate whom the other respects, and so all other conversation becomes stilted and obligatory, if any ensues.

People try and play the race card, even when people of the same race as a candidate oppose him politically. 

Religion comes into play -- " which is worse, Muslim or Mormon?" -- when neither are inherently bad to begin with. 

This family, this nation, this America is divided. I offered up a 40 Days of Prayer posting on Facebook during the last few weeks, focusing on finding truth, dignity, integrity, civility. All things which  I myself certainly need to work on, and which I see a deplorable lack of across the nation. Campaign signs are destroyed, vehicles keyed and damaged, candidates openly mocked -- DURING DEBATES. 

Perhaps this all began during the Kennedy campaign, when whispers that 'that Catholic will take over the country with the Pope' circulated viciously. 

Perhaps this all began with Nixon and his botched attempt to lie under oath. At least he had the dignity to resign and go away...

Perhaps this all began with Reagan and the Nuclear Arms Race, scaring the bejeebies out of all of us on a daily basis. 

Perhaps the deplorable lack of civility began with Clinton, whose quite admirable successes as President are forever tarnished by his degradation of the Oval Office to a publicly discussed den of sex, deceit, and lawsuits, along with the dubious and dire distinction of a trail of bodies who could have been witnesses in the lawsuits, to boot. 

Regardless of where or how it started, this election season split this country asunder, like lightning through a hundred-year-old oak that no one ever expected to fall. 

There are empty seats at the table. 

No matter who garners the votes on Tuesday, those seats will remain unfilled. Our nation is divided. 

One nation, under God, no longer indivisible, due to the current political climate. we are no longer "under God". IF we believe in Him, we tell Him how it should go, or we dismiss the thought of a God, or worse, we claim to be Christians but instead choose politics as our god, shunning family and friends who do not share our political thoughts. 

 No matter who garners the votes next Tuesday, we have become a nation at war -- the war of hostility and incivility and hatred. Over politics... we claim, but truly it's the lack of decency and morality that has led us to this place. We are at war, not only with terror, but with each other, in the pews, in the workplace, on the news, in social media. Brother against brother. 

As the Anderson family does in the above photograph, before they are forever disbanded, let us pray.

'Vitamin Deficiency'...

♪ We are Flintstone kids, ten million strong, and grow-ing ♪
www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHRKHNZLebY

That decades old advertising jingle for children's vitamins popped into my head yesterday, as is my wont. Random phrases of music flit about in there like quarter-note moths nearly all the time.

This particular jingle came out in '88. ( thank you, You Tube LOL ) Expecting my first baby, anticipating his arrival as my twin nephews were born, I lived in a constant state of baby-wonder.

24 years later, we await an election that has been fodder for vehemence, vitriol, and caused lost family relationships and friendships over ideological disparities. The kids in the target audience for that commercial, aged 3-10,  now have mortgages and babies and kids in elementary school.

Seems to me that we might be suffering from some sort of ideological 'vitamin deficiency'.

One can consume more than enough calories from the vast offerings available every day at the supermarket and eating establishments -- but how many of us hit the target for the vitamins and minerals we need without taking a supplement? A small percentage, perhaps.

The land of plenty hath produced a collective population of 'overfed malnutrition-ed patriots'. We've become consumers of our leaders as much as they have become consumers of their constituents, instead of leaders and supporters.

We vote for the 'brand' we prefer, the packaging, the promised results advertised, instead of sticking to healthier choices. Just as fast food clogs our arteries and raises our blood pressure, staunchly defending a candidate along party lines clogs our thinking and raises our collective ignorance.

Madison Avenue has lulled us into a marketer's dream state, where we are swayed by slick phrases and    glossy images...

... perhaps it's time for a more steady 'diet' where we get the political nutrition we need to keep this nation at full strength, and not simply what seems appealing.

Stormy Weather ♪

"Don't know why there's no sun up in the sky
Stormy weather..." We set out across the prairie yesterday as storms clouds gained strength. I braced myself for another rainy route to Lubbock... and halfway there, we drove beyond the storm. Hooray!!

Three hours later, under sunny skies and a fresh breeze, we got texts from home. "floods everywhere big rain tornado warning in Henrietta" YIKES. I almost felt guilty...and worried about my puppy-girl home alone with her skittish self on a thunderous day. 

Then my son and his fellow Matador Singers walked out to the 50-yard line and sang the National Anthem, and we cheered and hollered, and then the game went on cheerfully under sunny skies. Thousands of people whooped and hollered as Texas Tech University trounced their West Virginia U opponents, 49-14. What a glorious day! Sunny skies, happy people, unity, celebration. 

We drove home in the dark several hours later across the caprock, watching a "popcorn" lightning show for three and half hours. Not a second! between lightning strikes, all the way home. Somewhere, out there, a storm still raged.

This morning, while the birds sang and the breeze ruffled the freshly washed fall leaves,  two trees with huge limbs fallen partially blocked a street not far from our home. The sun shone on the fallen limbs, and the gaping gashes where they ripped from the trunks, dry streets bearing no other evidence of severe weather. 

Someone will have surgery this Thursday, a mastectomy of yet-undetermined severity. The sun will shine that day and the next day, but when she wakes up, she will be as the trees. Bits missing, gashes where smooth skin once lived, clean-up yet to be done. Her husband will do the delicate dance between helping her keep her chin up, while at once  journeying with her through a grieving process that all cancer survivors do. The days will be stormy. The sun will keep shining. 

Another person, much closer to me, will celebrate his 83rd birthday that same day. He'll be praying for her, that morning on his walk, since we share our prayer concerns as a father and daughter would, even though we are third cousins. HA Birthday cake and family phone calls with birthday greetings and blessings will fill the rest of the day, and the sun will keep shining. 

The yin and yan of this life on earth. Surgery and birthday cake, storms and sun, all at once. 

This precious life.  I believe in a God who created us in His own image, and I believe that He is an emotional God, else we would not have the feelings we do. Joy, sorrow, fear, courage...reflections of a Creator's own heart. We can mark all the days as good, surgery, celebrations, storms, sunshine, even if we don't smile -- or if we don't cry. 

All days, from the heart of a Father who loves and looks after us, in the dark on a road through the caprock, in an operating room ( and the aftermath), on a day celebrating the joy that beloved ones bring to their beloved. 

Someone recently mentioned to me that they'd rather read the happy things I write, it's their favorite style of mine. 

I admit, I love to report happy news. I wish I could always report happy news. I suppose I could, and eschew the unpleasantries of Life that makes us cry. Like cancer. Losing loved ones. Misfortunes. That person would probably prefer that I did. 

There are days to take stock of joy and days to pray over worries. I take the words of Christ to heart. " You will have trouble on this earth..but take heart. I have overcome the world." Remembering that gives me the ability to experience the emotions that God bestows, in response to circumstance. Even Jesus cried when Lazarus was dead, though He knew He would bring him out of the tomb, and Jesus celebrated at weddings. 

While we have trouble on this earth, we live from cake to cake, football game to football game, storm to storm. No matter how you look at it, win or lose, broken tree limbs or sunshine, we live. We live. What happens along the way is where we have time to choose how to live. :-) 

The sun will keep shining. He has overcome the world...

Daughters...

The Listening Post arrives accompanied with a John Mayer soundtrack today. Tune in, comment anonymously if desired, and thanks for reading my musings. :-) 

Last evening, after finishing the second helping of a dinner which my 20-something half-sister efficiently shopped for, whipped up, and served, all with with great grace and style (two nights in a row) -- she dozed on the sofa while her 20-something nephew ( my son ) and his girlfriend followed suit on the other couch and the living room carpet. Not long after that, I got on the phone to my oldest 20-something "daughter-by-osmosis" in the midst of a family crisis, and connected with her. In addition to the girlfriend, I have four half-sisters and a sister-in-law ( to their brother ), a quintet of "daughters-by-osmosis", and a daughter-in-law-to-be all in their 20's. I am surrounded by young women waiting to experience life. (I mostly live vicariously through them and make sure they don't turn out anything like me. ;-P )

While we were apart for roughly three decades, my childhood-crush-turned-Life-Love Jonathan became the proud father of five tow-headed girls -- and a equally adorable junior edition of himself. Over the years, as I read his mother's Christmas letters, I pictured his world of Barbies, My Little Pony, and and a endless collection of hair bows in contrast to my existence -- living amongst a plethora of Legos (which seemed to reproduce) and little boys constantly leaping couches like Power Rangers. It's good he had the girls, and not me. He's a very practical, calm, thoughtful, light-hearted person -- exactly what silly girls need in a daddy, and also what the one boy in the sea of Barbies needs in a dad. HA!

I was/am/will always be grateful that I never had daughters. My own existence as one was fraught with emotional peril and battles for survival...and the in-your-face-affection-and-activity of little boys and young men contained far fewer hormonal land mines than the ones I managed to detonate ( or get thrown onto) during my years as a young girl. Odd girl out in a trio of sisters, I never wanted a daughter to undergo the odd-girl-out experience, or suffer under my mostly-hysterical young adult female viewpoint. 

For, although I was a daddy's girl and very secure in that realm, just as I was emerging into the tenuous world of young womanhood (the years when you want your daddy around to measure your latest heartthrob against) the professor/leader/wonderful Daddy I knew regressed into the teenager he'd never allowed himself to be -- and switched gears and families. As a young bride-to-be, I watched as he then literally ran off to another country to begin anew. 

It turns out it was the best for all of us first-edition kids, because he degenerated into something that had no resemblance to the man we knew as the head of our household. The infrequent worst days with us became the norm for the second-edition. Fortunately for them, they spent their childhood in Israel, where there isn't time for nonsense (with the gas masks in the living room and the automatic weapons next to the bed) and so they all survived with the (residual formerly British-occupied Palestine) tradition of oh-well-on-we-go resolve. At least on the surface. 

I personally think we humans, especially daughters, tend to project how we perceive our parents onto the image of God that we have. A loving, caring, involved dad gives the mother security in raising the young ones as well, and that fosters thoughts of a loving, caring, involved Creator in our lives. An emotionally or physically unavailable set of parents fosters the adverse.

A popular song came out a few years back, by the artist John Mayer. The opening lines sum this thought up, quite poetically:

I know a girl • She puts the color inside of my world • But she's just like a maze

Where all of the walls all continually change

And I've done all I can • To stand on her steps with my heart in my hands • Now I'm starting to see

Maybe it's got nothing to do with me

Fathers, be good to your daughters • Daughters will love like you do • 

Girls become lovers who turn into mothers   •    So mothers, be good to your daughters too

On the whole, my father was NOT good to his daughters (or his sons ) -- or either of his wives. The early years were the best... and as it turns out, I was as much of a mess as he, for a very long time. 

"...just like a maze, where all of the walls all continually change..." Still am, occasionally, except the walls only change color now, not shape, with the seasons. God's love for me has built sturdy walls that hold in Jonathan's love and light and laughter -- and mostly block anything unwanted, while we continue the journey we started all those years ago, with all these wonderful 20-somethings in our hearts and lives. 

Here you go, kids. Sage advice, from a pop artist. Sage advice. 

Fathers, be good to your daughters • Daughters will love like you do • 

Girls become lovers who turn into mothers   •    So mothers, be good to your daughters too

 

♪Try to remember the kind of September...♪

"♪Try to remember the kind of September When life was slow and oh, so mellow.
Try to remember the kind of September♪ When grass was green and grain was yellow.
♪Try to remember the kind of September When you were a tender and callow fellow.
Try to remember, and if you remember...Then follow.♪ Follow, follow, follow, follow, follow,
Follow, follow, ♪ follow, follow."

Darla Eichmann. I think that's how you spelled her name. HA She was the bubbly blonde female lead in Poly High's performance of "The Fantasticks", and for the life of me I can't remember who the male lead was... but this tune has stayed in my heart since middle school. A lovely, lilting, echoing air...a musical version of the breeze currently ruffling the leaves of the trees today.

Try to remember a different September than the one we remember today... a day where my friends Ann and Eva's husbands and my own personal Hurricane (then-spouse )  got locked down at Sheppard Air Force Base... a day when my brother Kirk's son sat on a military aircraft for hours on a tarmac, delayed for deployment because of the Towers' tragedy... a day when my little sister Alyson went into labor... a day when my three young sons, shown here, were on home school while we 'visited' Wichita Falls.

It's hard to remember "when life was so tender that no one wept except the willow..." as Tom Jones wrote in those lilting lyrics. Of course we wept, but not as a nation in mourning...this day in 2001 we wept collectively.

On a lighter note, remember that September has always had the power to make children cry, with the return to school. HA Just trying to lighten the mood. Every September has it's glories and it's sorrows. September 2001? Forever tinged with smoke and flames and loss and disbelief and horror, much like December 1941. 

Today try to balance those memories with the days 'when grass was green and grain was yellow...'. Most of us are grateful for a nation that rises from smoke and flames and loss with a renewed spirit. 

No matter what you remember about this date, remember that we are but passers-by in the annals of time, and that we cannot perpetually live in fear, lest we let the enemies of the past and present retain their power over us. We must live simply, and simply live, regardless of circumstance -- tragedy or victory. 

"♪Try to remember when life was so tender ♪That dreams were kept beside your pillow.
Try to remember when life was so tender That love was an ember about to billow.

Try to remember, and if you remember...Then follow.♪ Follow, follow, follow, follow, follow,
Follow, follow, ♪ follow, follow."