Easter 2016: Joy, Laughter, Life!

Easter makes me itch, always has. When I was little, it was the damned dress, all lace and unforgiving elastic around my chubby middle. Hair ribbons! Pulling the skin taut across the skull, hiking the eyebrows. Perfect little Mary Janes and tight-tight tights. An endless church session – drone drone drone – incense tickling the nose and sweat crawling the ribs.  It was monstrous, I’m telling you.

In adulthood, the itch has become more a thing of the mind.

Well, here it is . . . why so quiet? Really, why is nobody shouting about this back-from-the-dead thing? Shouldn’t we be?

I think we should build a huge bonfire on Holy Saturday night and just push the darkness all the way back to the horizon. We should have all our friends over and sit talking beneath the moon with a wine glass in our hands until dawn cracks the sky open.

And then . . .  bells should be ringing everywhere, joy on the very air we’re breathing; we should be delirious with it. Because – in case anybody missed the big memo – we are God’s children and, ipso facto, we are happy. Poof! There is no anger, there is no hate, and here is the big one . . . there is no fear.  Because Jesus took that package for us. He wrapped it up in blood and tears and humanity and he tossed it in our laps and said, “open it.”  Inside?

Life. There is life

.

We’re meant to be joyful.

So throw away the pastels. Color the day in vivid emerald and sapphire and fill it with laughter. Toss every little transitory death that has victimized you into the clean blue fire and call it good. They were never yours anyway. Don’t ask yourself what you believe, or why or how. Just believe. Wrap your mind around the incomprehensibility of Eternal Life, and let yourself be awed. Not only are you good enough - you are, by your birthright, incredible. You just have to own it.

 

In a nutshell: Easter is probably the biggest thing that can happen to us here on Earth. I think we should all stop yawning and take notice.

Roll the stone away, people. Celebrate!

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Lovely and Forever: Rest in Peace, Harper Lee

Art by SSC-Art

Harper Lee died today, and that has me a lot more bummed than I would like to be.

So I pour a cup of coffee and I take it with me to sit on the stoop at Fire Station B, where a fierce Spring wind is scouring the prairie, warm enough to plant images of dandelions over the last vestiges of gray February snow.

I shouldn’t be so unhappy over the loss of someone I’ve never met, but I feel bruised inside, and I want . . . My fingers comb my pockets for the memory of cigarettes and come up with a small scrap of creased paper

.

Ah. I know what it is without opening it, so I leave it folded and return it to my pocket without looking at it.

The paper has last week’s accident victim’s name on it. She had a funny name, foreign, and I had scrawled it out painstakingly at the ER in order to have it with me when we did the report. I’ve actually washed these pants twice since that encounter, and each time I return the paper to the pocket without asking myself why.

Evidence of burn out maybe.

Maybe coping mechanisms slipping just a little.

No matter. The patient died, and now she is here with me while I think about Harper Lee.

That dead woman colored my childhood. Her words strung through my soul like the gentle drift of fireflies and illuminated within me the biggest desire of my life. The desire to write, to create . . . to take a piece of my own humanity and keep it, lovely and forever preserved for anyone who wanted to come in and look.

Lovely and forever.

So there it is. These deaths – the accident victim, the death of my beloved hero author – highlight nothing so much as the fleeting nature of life and the way we try so hard to hang onto it. We set the book on the shelf and we keep the paper scraps in our pockets and we pretend we know nothing at all of who God is and where the dead people go.

They do go. They do.

And that is okay; it is in fact exactly as it should be.

My fingers find the paper scrap, wad it carefully into a tiny ball and toss it into the wind.

RIP

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Rise Above

I received the most incredible one star review of my novel the other day. It dropped onto my virtual doorstep early in the morning and lay there like a steamy bag of poo until I finally gathered the courage to examine it more closely.

                Whew! Such a reek of animosity, such a stream of vitriol. So unnecessary.

                And it occurred to me . . .  at this moment, somebody, somewhere, is doing CPR on a stranger, and they are pushing every ounce of their will power, their entire essence, into making that chest gasp and heave on its own.

                There is a worthy endeavor.

                Someone is building a homeless shelter, someone is holding a child’s hand, someone is rescuing a raccoon from a foothold trap; and these are all good things.

                But.

It also occurred to me that the collective weight of negativity on our planet may well be our undoing, and if that is the case, then we’ll deserve whatever we have coming to us.

                Rise above, people, rise above.

                It’s not a good thing to hate, even in the virtual world, okay? That sort of thing eats away not only at your own soul, but the souls of everyone you touch.

                If you are actually sitting at your computer somewhere spewing endless streams of hatred, you’ve got to stop. Because we’re all connected, right? Your hand in mine, like it or not, is the only way we’ll get through this life intact, and right now you’re weighing the rest of us down. Pick up your chin, look around you, and understand . . . it’s coming down to brass tacks, isn’t it? We live in a world where the unborn die by the thousands, the refugees cry at the gates, and gun sales are through the roof.

Some would say the sky is falling down around us.

                Please, please understand. The world needs you. And it is not okay to waste your time huddled over your laptop spewing nastiness at all and sundry. You’ve got to jump into the fray, you’ve got to make your life count for something. What you think of an anonymous writer’s novel – or of Caitlyn Jenner’s boobs, or the Starbuck’s coffee cup - is moot, and these are unpardonably silly topics to have frittered your time away on.

Rescue yourself.

Christmastime Courage: An EMS Story

The call comes in around six a.m. because that’s when old people tend to get up. Rain or shine, winter or summer, sick or retired – they like to see the sun rise. I’d been at a house fire the night before and my partner had been chasing transfers, so the page for the little old lady fall doesn’t hold a lot of appeal. We grouse around, find our boots, and set off in the early morning chill with the ambulance lights bouncing off the downtown Christmas lights and the new sun cutting the horizon.

                Feeling the lack of coffee.

                Our patient is supine on the floor of a living room that is rife with collectables, Santa wrapping paper and two walkers. The obligatory poinsettias on spindly end tables. Maneuvering the cot will be a difficulty, but not impossible, so my partner initiates that project while I tend to the fall victim.

                Almost certainly a broken hip, with the classic rotating of the ankle, the shortening of one leg. She rates her pain at a ten – on a scale of one to ten - in that quiet way the elderly have of voicing a difficulty without letting it own them. She had fallen, she said, in the bathroom, but Frank had helped her to get dressed and had gotten her this far before they both gave out.    

                “He was going to take you?” My question is abstracted; I’m listening for her blood pressure.

                ‘To the hospital?’ was the tag on my unfinished question, but she misunderstands, and answers a bit archly. “Well, he always has. Taken care of me.”

                And for the first time I see Frank. He hovers in the kitchen doorway on the telephone – small, thin and bent. Not looking as though he could take care of anything this morning.

                My partner has wrestled the cot into the living room, and from there it’s easy peasy – our patient is small, our cot a modern wonder. Pillows for comfort around the hip, two steps going down the porch, across a beautifully manicured lawn and we’re in the rig with a minimum of discomfort.

                I dash back for the jump kit, across the porch and into the living room. And for the first time I see Frank.

He’s crying. He had, of course, thought we’d left, and he’s leaning against the china cupboard with his face in his hands, shoulders shaking, when I come back in.

                He’s quick. His head comes up, hands mop his cheeks, and I notice how big those hands are, How rough, with their stubby nails and scarred knuckles.

                “Forget something?” he asks drily.

                Courage wears a lot of faces. But this face, here today, is the one that’s breaking my heart.

                He’d always taken care of her. And today he couldn’t get her from the bathroom to the front door. Always held her hand, and today we’re doing that. Slept with her for probably sixty years and tonight he’ll sleep alone. In one horrid and irrevocable moment, his life has changed utterly, and he wants to know if I forgot something.

                Yeah, I forgot to be kind.

                Courage is hardly ever about the rush you get when you dash into the house fire. It’s not about extricating the accident victims from the mangled car or even doing CPR on the SIDS baby. Courage has love and compassion at its core.

                So I put on my own courage face and breach the comfort zone between myself and this man I have only just seen; and I hug him. At first he stiffens, but then he hugs me back and for a long moment we just stand there like that.

                Finally I say, “Do you want to ride to the hospital with us?” and Frank and I walk out into the new morning.

 

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*Art Source

We Loved October

 I’ve always been a bit startled by the concept of a God who demands an accounting at the end of the day. The notion of “Where did you err?” is a frightening one, and the list, alas, all too long. But here - what if the question is “What did you love?” Will the list, again, be unending?

                I hope so.

                But for now, let’s stick with October. Dear God, we loved October. Every glorious, gold-tinged, sweet-smelling moment. We ate popcorn in the bleachers at the football games; we kicked leaves all over the yard; we laughed, hard and often.

                October found us strewing decorations all over the house like madmen. Jack-o-lanterns, witches, twinkling orange light strings. To hell with the diet, we gained extra pounds in cookies and millions of teensy candy bars.

                In Galena, we drank too much wine and sat on the porch of our cabin with the owls hooting and the crows cawing all around us. All night, we talked, laughed, reminisced.

                Three birthdays in October! Beautiful faces reflected in candlelight, family and friends gathered, another year whooshing past like the leaves blowing off the hill.

                We sang around a bonfire, we scavenger-hunted, we played dress-up with the delight of small children. We sat transfixed before the millionth showing of “Hocus Pocus” and got goosebumps crossing the yard in the dark after “Nightmare on Elm Street.”

                Halloween! The gem in the crown. The rush, the exuberance, the very air alive with expectation. Could there be anything better?

                Chocolate, rum, granny smith apples – all sweeter in October.

Life – yes, sweeter.

                And that Oogey-Boogey Man November lurking just around the corner? BOO! It's here.

An Ode to Tommy Pickles: Hero of the Millennials

Baby Boomers worry a lot about the next generation, don’t we? Funny kids, always on their magic phones, never in church. Chock full of news about spirituality and hashtags, but they don’t know how to balance a checkbook. We blame their video games for the violence in our nation, their lax beliefs for God’s new absence in America. We wish they’d learned more about math and less about the Perfect Selfie, am I right?

                Actually no, I’m wrong, we all are.

                Theirs is a generation of vivid color, bright love, universal acceptance. They not only like new toys and new ideas, they understand them, and while their God may not look like ours, I’m pretty sure He’s very much a presence.

                In short, they’re the Nickelodeon kids - the little ones we parked in front of morning cartoons while we brushed our teeth and fished Pop-Tarts out of the toaster. They did homework with Hey Arnold and learned about wildlife with Eliza Thornberry. But most importantly, they watched The Rugrats, and people, a generation weaned on Tommy Pickles can’t go wrong.

                Do you remember him lighting up your television screen with that big toothless grin? Toddling in and out of trouble with his diaper sagging and his “sponsitilty” clutched to his chest?

                “A baby’s gotta do what a baby’s gotta do,” he said, and he did.  Tommy is the John Wayne of the Millennials - adventurous, courageous, and guided by the firmest moral compass known to man.

                He taught us about loyalty - always at Chuckie’s side, nudging him forward, encouraging. He didn’t let the bad monkeys take Dill away, even though a large part of hoped they would.

                Stubbornness? Did anyone ever dig in like Tommy when he was on a mission? Whether it was reaching the cookie jar or breaching the playpen wall, when Tommy Pickles had a goal he by God reached it.

                Tommy gave us an openness to different cultures and beliefs, accepting with fascination stories from both Jewish and Christian grandparents, noticing but not giving a hoot that Suzy and Kimi’s skin was a different color than his own.

                He taught us to be comfortable with ourselves and to have fun. “Nakey is good, Chuckie! Nakey is free!”

                Imagination? Tommy created whole worlds from his seat in the sandbox, and he took everyone with him.

                We needed Tommy Pickles; we still do.

                Take heart, people. He lives on in the hearts of the next generation.



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Summer Imp

Summer is for the child in us. You know her – the giggling, golden imp who sleeps until ten, wakes up with her hair in a tangle and doesn’t look back on her way to the lake. Bare feet, brown shoulders and sand in her swim suit bottom, that’s her.

I’m an adult.

I do adult-speak, adult thoughts, adult action all day every day, and sometimes I think I’ve completely forgotten the language of the child. Do you remember that easy happiness? Big, belly-aching laughter, tears on your cheeks, feet kicking with sheer exuberance?  The wonder found in waxing moonlight, Daddy’s Pall Malls and first kisses? The cold rush of creek water around your ankles, the whisper of ghost stories beside a campfire?

Summer beckons us backwards, calls us home.

Ah God, what heaven, to give up taxes and jobs and the tangle of relationships. To have a conversation that has nothing to do with car payments or dead people.

The child in us remembers, she knows how. If we let her out, she’ll play music on the car radio so loud your eardrums will burst. She’ll kick off her shoes, curse like Davy Jones and drink rum through a straw in a paper cup.

It’s summer! She’ll scream it before she belly-flops from the raft into the mossy green lake water. No school, no job, no bills . . . No worries.

Ah, there it is. No worries. That’s why she laughs.

And here is where we butt up against the impossibility of ever being her again. Because the adult has learned the fine art of worry and is loath to turn loose of it. Worry, it seems, is intrinsically bound up with every article in our grown-up arsenal – our spouse, our children, our house, our jobs. Our happiness?

Ah no. Draw a line. The worry could go – couldn’t it?-  if we let the laughter back in, if we allow ourselves to be mesmerized by the flash of minnows in creek water or the swoop of barn swallows above the hill. It’s still summer – it’s not too late – and I propose a compromise. Give the imp just a toe in the door. A day off work, a double scoop ice cream cone, pink toenail polish from the dollar store.

Soon enough, the leaves will fall and the taxes will come due. I say, let’s laugh while we can. Let’s eat watermelon and dance in the moonlight and for a teensy window of time, just be.

No worries.

Happy August.     

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