I am not sure of god. Sometimes god is a potluck in my mind. I take a little bit of everything...Swedish meatballs, German potato salad, Irish stew, and some nondescript bean thing that has all sorts of ties to other countries named cassoulet baked fried refried...some days and absolutely nothing other days. I find myself in the sky floating like a cloud past my window...not really searching...more like on a leisurely journey where I don't have to think. About God.
My mother handed me a new Maryknoll Missal on the day of my First Communion. I was six and riding in the back of the car. In her stiff formal manner that was the norm when she dealt with me, she turned abruptly from her position in the passenger seat and handed me the holy book. Here, she said. This is from your Dad and I. This is the happiest day of your life.
I took the book and turned it over in my hands. Nice cover. It smells news. The inscription in my mother's handwriting, Love, etc. etc.
I am still waiting.
For that happiest day of my life concerning religion..
I am happier praying off my deck, or not, with a beer in my hand. If not prayer, than some sort of communion with butterflies and rabbits and feral cats running by and clouds.
I think I was always meant to be a non-religious doubting person in a sea of religious never doubting followers of Jesus Christ.
I have a hard enough time with God, let alone throwing in JC into the mix.
And all of the thoughts that others like me have thought....why war, why death, why destruction, why men power tripping, why not....have gone through my head and other thoughts.
About God. And religion.
Don't know. Have not come up with any substantial conclusions in my head.
My Facebook page reads the sun is God, or maybe John Lennon.
I'll go with that.
Thursday, April 26, 2012
Friday, April 13, 2012
Road trip
Itching for a road trip cross country to states I haven't been to. Louisiana, Georgia, North and South Carolina, Alabama, New York (shame on me), Maine, New Hampshire, Alaska. Or to places I've been often: west coast, mountains states, five state area surrounding MN. Doesn't matter where. Doesn't matter if there are no reservations. I could sleep in the car, eat at truck stops, watch truck drivers come in from a haul, and later depart myself. It's not so much in the destination, the old saying goes. You know the rest.
I like to drive. I like behind the wheel. I like new roads, old roads, gravel roads, good roads. I like bars in towns I never heard of. I like quaint places to rest my head. But if the smell of cleaning fluids and cigarettes permeate, I will get up at three a.m. and drive on.
I like old school houses that are turned into something else. I hope the ghosts of students past come back to ring school bells, slam books, start fires in grates to warm the souls. I like warnings on streets: watch out for the ducks.
When there are feelings of being immobile, both physically and mentally, there is the yearning for walking out to the car without anything in hand and heading south. Or west. Going to the Cities isn't quite enough. I used to drive cross country regularly. And take odd roads. And stop at odd places. Now life seems to regular, too tethered, too ordinary. The older I get, the more chances I want to take. The opposite should be true, perhaps. Might scare my children, again, with irrational ways or impromptu leavings. It's the kids that are suppose to leave, they said when I packed up and moved to California, not the mom. They were older, most of them, out of college. I assiduously went about loading up the car, deleting my life here, setting my life up there. When is too old too old. When is old enough not old enough. When does the list of things I gotta do deplete. Hopefully never.
There may be a road trip this summer. I could knock off the southern states easy. Or there just might be something that keeps me home.
I like to drive. I like behind the wheel. I like new roads, old roads, gravel roads, good roads. I like bars in towns I never heard of. I like quaint places to rest my head. But if the smell of cleaning fluids and cigarettes permeate, I will get up at three a.m. and drive on.
I like old school houses that are turned into something else. I hope the ghosts of students past come back to ring school bells, slam books, start fires in grates to warm the souls. I like warnings on streets: watch out for the ducks.
When there are feelings of being immobile, both physically and mentally, there is the yearning for walking out to the car without anything in hand and heading south. Or west. Going to the Cities isn't quite enough. I used to drive cross country regularly. And take odd roads. And stop at odd places. Now life seems to regular, too tethered, too ordinary. The older I get, the more chances I want to take. The opposite should be true, perhaps. Might scare my children, again, with irrational ways or impromptu leavings. It's the kids that are suppose to leave, they said when I packed up and moved to California, not the mom. They were older, most of them, out of college. I assiduously went about loading up the car, deleting my life here, setting my life up there. When is too old too old. When is old enough not old enough. When does the list of things I gotta do deplete. Hopefully never.
There may be a road trip this summer. I could knock off the southern states easy. Or there just might be something that keeps me home.
Thursday, April 12, 2012
Porch lights
My father always said that our mother did not want to be out on the farm, six miles from Comfrey, six miles from nowhere. Perhaps that was the reason she stood by the east windows in the living room looking down the road as if someone might appear on that dusty horizon and take her away. The few cars that did traverse that road were predictable: old Juney driving home drunk (interchange Juney with Henry or Sparks and it sums up the three regular drunks my father had to sometimes pull out of our ditch), the insurance man who would in time piss off my father to rage, and the mailman speeding over red rock ridge on his way to our mailbox.
Whomever Mother might have been waiting for never came. I conjured up a used car salesman from the Cities, that glossy-domed man who had long commercials enticing you with used but good cars. She had a boy friend before my father that no one knew about except for me. My sister was surprised years later when told her about Cecil. What precipitated our mother's telling the story to me about her first true love happened the night before she told me her story. My sister was long gone to the Cities by then, and I was left in charge, on Sunday card club nights, of my two brothers, nine and four.
With the two boys safely in bed and the front porch light on signifying all is clear, a car full of friends from Sleepy Eye came down the road on their way to no where in particular and s opped for a few hours. There was some drinking going on. Probably backseat almost but not quite sex, neither of which I had learned to partake in. Yet.
After a few hours, they departed, just before my parent's came home from a night of 500 and ham sandwiches.
The conversation about Cecil ocurred the next day after my parent's had discovered various sundry items on the front lawn: beer cans, a whiskey bottle, and a not used condoms still packaged. My father frowned at the thought of confronting me, which was usually the case, and went out to the hog barns, leaving my mother and I at the kitchen counter.
In her rarely used motherly manner, she stumbled upon the blocks of informing a daughter what was right and wrong at the age of fifteen. Everything she told me I had heard before, in much less flattering manners and cruder words. Giving up on the lecture, she lit a cigarette and poured herself a drink: Seagrams Seven with Seven-Up. Didn't most parent's drink that? She had another stash of booze in her bedroom closet, stuffed far back and under her winter coats. I would sometimes partake in the awful cheap port she hid on Sunday night babysitting stints with my brothers. Bored to death, I'd pour Dixie cups full of the cheap port, throw my head back and drink it down. I'd be passed out on the couch until I heard the garage door open and then I'd fly up the stairs to bed.
Your father wasn't my first love, my mother said. I was startled. Never had we approached a conversation anywhere near like the one that was going to ensue. In fact, my mother and I had little to say to each other most of our days. The only time we ever opened up to each other before was four years earlier when the local doctor put us both on diet pills, aka speed, to lose forty pounds. We lost forty pounds and our minds: we sat at the kitchen counter and laughed about everything: tomatoes, the mailman, telephones.
That particular afternoon of revelation however turned to Cecil. Cecil was my first love, my mother said. I was in my early twenties. We spent many days courting and going to the movies. I remember kissing him for the first time under a street lamp. I thought he was the one. I thought I was the one for him.
He went away one summer, she continued. His father owned a lumber yard up north or in the Dakotas. Somewhere. I didn't see him until Christmas. By then he had a bar maid pregnant and was getting married. I got a dear Agnes letter. I kept it for a number of years. I don't know where it went.
I suppose Cecil might have been the one my mother was waiting for all those years, standing by the ugly Sears curtains in the living room waiting for a car to come barreling down the road, screech to a stop, and take her away.
When that didn't happen, she found other ways to leave while still being there. There were two of us by then, my sister and I, when she started having illnesses, real and imagined. There would be two sons born as well, intermingled with three miscarriages and a still birth. My sister, five years older than I, remembered two miscarriages lost on the living room floor. It was probably why we got cheap living room carpeting to hide the red stains on hardwood.
I was too young to remember. On one of these occasions our mother sent Pat, then five, out to the fields to find our father. Sick with the flu, Pat was garbed in pajamas and a bathrobe. She remembers bare feet in winter because there had been no time for shoes. She remembers plowing, how the white bathrobe flew around her in the wind. You looked like an angel standing there on the edge of the plowing, our father told her.
That was only the beginning. I remember more illnesses and tumors and disorders than one person should carry themselves. There was a tumor she grew on her knee that required surgery. There was a faulty gall bladder, kidney stones. We were coming home one Thursday night from Perpetual Help Devotions when the kidney stones flared up and she lost control of the car. I remember the plowing out my backseat window, how close we came to a telephone pole.
Often, Pat and I would come home from school to find an empty house. I don't know where our brothers were. Probably carted away to family or friends. We had aunts who pitched in, a housekeeper from Leavenworth one year who only let me put one teaspoon of sugar on my Corn Flakes.
When the school bus rounded the corner a quarter of mile from our farm house and the back porch light was on, we knew we were coming home to an empty house. We sat together, my sister and I, because we got on at the parochial school and found comfort in each other's presence. That was not a common occurrence. I was more a thorn in her side, five years younger, and more than a little precocious. But on the school bus we teamed up because we knew what we might find when we got home.
Slow down, she would say as I tried to hurry our departure off the bus. That small space from school bus door to the door of the house always seemed a mile long and threatening to me when I knew we were going to be alone. In reality, our house was nearly on the road, making morning rituals easy: get up with only fifteen minutes to spare, down a cup of cocoa and a piece of toast just as the school bus rounded the corner, and then fall out the door, race up the ditch and walk up bus stairs.
When the porch light was on, we knew what to expect. We never told anyone, not friends, not other bus riders, that the house was empty. Instead, we descended the stairs, ran down the ditch and into the house. Always there was a note. Took your mother to the hospital, written in my father's learned cursive handwriting....Comfrey, New Ulm, Minneapolis, Rochester....were all interchangeable depending on the circumstance. Will stop in Sleepy Eye and get those applesauce donuts you like, stop in New Ulm and get hamburgers, won't stop, there's dinner in the fridge.
Our coats and book bags were dumped in the corner for awhile. Eventually we would tidy up, but the first ritual was locking all the doors, pulling all the shades, and locking every door.
Years and years later, when our parents died and Pat and I perused through those guest books funeral homes set out by the front door and give you as a gift, we discovered something very interesting. Cecil, the old boy friend, had been at our father's funeral. Three years later, almost to the day, he was a viewer at the funeral home when our mother died.
I never knew the man. Didn't know what he looked like. But perhaps our mother meant more to him than she ever knew.
Whomever Mother might have been waiting for never came. I conjured up a used car salesman from the Cities, that glossy-domed man who had long commercials enticing you with used but good cars. She had a boy friend before my father that no one knew about except for me. My sister was surprised years later when told her about Cecil. What precipitated our mother's telling the story to me about her first true love happened the night before she told me her story. My sister was long gone to the Cities by then, and I was left in charge, on Sunday card club nights, of my two brothers, nine and four.
With the two boys safely in bed and the front porch light on signifying all is clear, a car full of friends from Sleepy Eye came down the road on their way to no where in particular and s opped for a few hours. There was some drinking going on. Probably backseat almost but not quite sex, neither of which I had learned to partake in. Yet.
After a few hours, they departed, just before my parent's came home from a night of 500 and ham sandwiches.
The conversation about Cecil ocurred the next day after my parent's had discovered various sundry items on the front lawn: beer cans, a whiskey bottle, and a not used condoms still packaged. My father frowned at the thought of confronting me, which was usually the case, and went out to the hog barns, leaving my mother and I at the kitchen counter.
In her rarely used motherly manner, she stumbled upon the blocks of informing a daughter what was right and wrong at the age of fifteen. Everything she told me I had heard before, in much less flattering manners and cruder words. Giving up on the lecture, she lit a cigarette and poured herself a drink: Seagrams Seven with Seven-Up. Didn't most parent's drink that? She had another stash of booze in her bedroom closet, stuffed far back and under her winter coats. I would sometimes partake in the awful cheap port she hid on Sunday night babysitting stints with my brothers. Bored to death, I'd pour Dixie cups full of the cheap port, throw my head back and drink it down. I'd be passed out on the couch until I heard the garage door open and then I'd fly up the stairs to bed.
Your father wasn't my first love, my mother said. I was startled. Never had we approached a conversation anywhere near like the one that was going to ensue. In fact, my mother and I had little to say to each other most of our days. The only time we ever opened up to each other before was four years earlier when the local doctor put us both on diet pills, aka speed, to lose forty pounds. We lost forty pounds and our minds: we sat at the kitchen counter and laughed about everything: tomatoes, the mailman, telephones.
That particular afternoon of revelation however turned to Cecil. Cecil was my first love, my mother said. I was in my early twenties. We spent many days courting and going to the movies. I remember kissing him for the first time under a street lamp. I thought he was the one. I thought I was the one for him.
He went away one summer, she continued. His father owned a lumber yard up north or in the Dakotas. Somewhere. I didn't see him until Christmas. By then he had a bar maid pregnant and was getting married. I got a dear Agnes letter. I kept it for a number of years. I don't know where it went.
I suppose Cecil might have been the one my mother was waiting for all those years, standing by the ugly Sears curtains in the living room waiting for a car to come barreling down the road, screech to a stop, and take her away.
When that didn't happen, she found other ways to leave while still being there. There were two of us by then, my sister and I, when she started having illnesses, real and imagined. There would be two sons born as well, intermingled with three miscarriages and a still birth. My sister, five years older than I, remembered two miscarriages lost on the living room floor. It was probably why we got cheap living room carpeting to hide the red stains on hardwood.
I was too young to remember. On one of these occasions our mother sent Pat, then five, out to the fields to find our father. Sick with the flu, Pat was garbed in pajamas and a bathrobe. She remembers bare feet in winter because there had been no time for shoes. She remembers plowing, how the white bathrobe flew around her in the wind. You looked like an angel standing there on the edge of the plowing, our father told her.
That was only the beginning. I remember more illnesses and tumors and disorders than one person should carry themselves. There was a tumor she grew on her knee that required surgery. There was a faulty gall bladder, kidney stones. We were coming home one Thursday night from Perpetual Help Devotions when the kidney stones flared up and she lost control of the car. I remember the plowing out my backseat window, how close we came to a telephone pole.
Often, Pat and I would come home from school to find an empty house. I don't know where our brothers were. Probably carted away to family or friends. We had aunts who pitched in, a housekeeper from Leavenworth one year who only let me put one teaspoon of sugar on my Corn Flakes.
When the school bus rounded the corner a quarter of mile from our farm house and the back porch light was on, we knew we were coming home to an empty house. We sat together, my sister and I, because we got on at the parochial school and found comfort in each other's presence. That was not a common occurrence. I was more a thorn in her side, five years younger, and more than a little precocious. But on the school bus we teamed up because we knew what we might find when we got home.
Slow down, she would say as I tried to hurry our departure off the bus. That small space from school bus door to the door of the house always seemed a mile long and threatening to me when I knew we were going to be alone. In reality, our house was nearly on the road, making morning rituals easy: get up with only fifteen minutes to spare, down a cup of cocoa and a piece of toast just as the school bus rounded the corner, and then fall out the door, race up the ditch and walk up bus stairs.
When the porch light was on, we knew what to expect. We never told anyone, not friends, not other bus riders, that the house was empty. Instead, we descended the stairs, ran down the ditch and into the house. Always there was a note. Took your mother to the hospital, written in my father's learned cursive handwriting....Comfrey, New Ulm, Minneapolis, Rochester....were all interchangeable depending on the circumstance. Will stop in Sleepy Eye and get those applesauce donuts you like, stop in New Ulm and get hamburgers, won't stop, there's dinner in the fridge.
Our coats and book bags were dumped in the corner for awhile. Eventually we would tidy up, but the first ritual was locking all the doors, pulling all the shades, and locking every door.
Years and years later, when our parents died and Pat and I perused through those guest books funeral homes set out by the front door and give you as a gift, we discovered something very interesting. Cecil, the old boy friend, had been at our father's funeral. Three years later, almost to the day, he was a viewer at the funeral home when our mother died.
I never knew the man. Didn't know what he looked like. But perhaps our mother meant more to him than she ever knew.
On leaving town
I packed this morning and hauled various items to the car: clothes, food that might spoil in the fridge in a weeks time, shoes, coat sweater jacket because it has become @#$%^%$ cold out again. On one of the trips back from car to apartment I picked up several soda cans that had been tossed and flattened in the parking lot outside my door. As I was walking towards the recycling bin a woman with two dogs, a stroller and a baby, and a four-year-old boy walked by. What's that lady doing, the little boy asked his mother. She's picking up pop cans, the mother answered. Some people need extra money and so they go around picking up pop cans.
Wednesday, April 11, 2012
Revisiting an old life
I spent a week in California at the end of March. A friend asked me to go along for the fun, her daughter was doing wedding stuff and we could view wedding dresses and venues and flowers. Sounded good to me. And the extra bonus would be spending three days with my niece, Kerstin, and her husband, John Koester, and their dog Andy, in San Francisco. Advice, don't ever pass up a trip to California if you need a coastal trip. I hadn't been there for awhile, mostly touch downs by layover planes in the last few years.
I usually opt for an aisle seat if I can, but I was lucky enough to have a window seat on this return trip and gave up soda and coffee for a four hours seated view to my left. You traverse the heavily populated twin cities metro area dotted with lakes for the first few minutes. And then cross over the flat lands and prairie and hundreds of other lakes of Southern Minnesota. My brother worked for Northwest for years and years, took advantage of those free stand-by flights, and often knew when the plane was flying close to our farm near Comfrey and the Jeffes petroglyphs. My parents and my aunt owned a piece of the Red Rock Ridge for years, passed it on later to us. It was probably the obvious piece of landscape that stuck out like a wave to my brother passing by on a plane. We played on that ridge. We rode horses on the ridge and bikes down the gravel road.
Once past the predictable farmland in MN, you can tell where the land changes in South Dakota showing off badlands and foothills the glaciers so eagerly left in their wake.
We sat on the either side of a very nervous young man, Jehovah Witness I might have wrongfully guessed as he was dressed in the JW garb of street ministers. He gouged me twice in the ribs with his elbows when we were first on the plane. Kept wringing his hands and smacking his forehead. He did not look up for conversation. I can usually assess who wants to talk and who doesn't want to talk in about five seconds sitting next to someone. I fall somewhere in between, thinking if the plane would crash in flight, at least I had said hello to the fellow next to me instead of acting like he didn't exist.
I decided he was even too nervous for a hello, and took a benadryl and drifted blissfully into la la land, although not quite asleep. Surreptitiously I watched him from veiled sleep, was about to ask him if he wanted a pill or three himself when we crossed over the Rockies and that landscape caught my attention for quite awhile.
I love how we have this great spans of land where no one has walked on or built on or cried on or loved on or even died on. There are places on this planet where, once again blissfully, no human foot or fool or foe has touched. It is there where my imagination lets loose to just weather: wind comes here, rain, too, and tons of snow. I had a third cousin who died when I was seventeen and pregnant with my first child. My life was set in stone. Hers was not. She was a free spirit, wild hair, few strings tying her to one place. I had met her once, a wild child with lofty ambitions of seeing the world and saving the world or maybe changing her mind about the last one and just living in the moment while seeing the world. She took a trip with a professor and some other students her first year of college. Small plane. Good conversation, I'm sure...the kind you have when you're just starting college and you have your professor up there on a pedestal with his/her ideas and philosophies and dreams. The plane went down. It took a long time for authorities to find the plane and the bodies. I hope Mary Ellis was holding on those dreams as she met the earth and realized it was time for some other plane.
Usually in the Rockies the clouds snag us and cover up the view. That day it was a bit hazy but clear enough to imagine the rocky life below.
Twice gouged in the side again, I took another benadryl and this time drifted into a near rocky mountain haze of my own. Two hours later, we were coming down out of the sky, I saw the old familiar east bay
hills where I lived for four or five years, caught sight of the San Mateo Bridge.
I always close my eyes when we go in for the landing across the bay. Kerstin's husband John said how many times have you heard of a plane smushing into the bay. None, that I could think of. But I bet there was at least one.
Fairly uneventful flight, save for the jabs in the ribs. When we were getting off the plane, the young man nervously gathered up his stuff, but just as he was heading for the aisle looked down and gave me a sneaky little smile that made me sit up. Huh, I thought. If he didn't want to talk to either of us, his ploy certainly worked.
Later, my friend Suzanne and I wondered if he had acted up on purpose the whole trip out. And that attached to his suit on his lap was a camera. And our nervous glances caught on video for all the world to see.
Probably not. We were just grateful he was not with us on the trip home.
I usually opt for an aisle seat if I can, but I was lucky enough to have a window seat on this return trip and gave up soda and coffee for a four hours seated view to my left. You traverse the heavily populated twin cities metro area dotted with lakes for the first few minutes. And then cross over the flat lands and prairie and hundreds of other lakes of Southern Minnesota. My brother worked for Northwest for years and years, took advantage of those free stand-by flights, and often knew when the plane was flying close to our farm near Comfrey and the Jeffes petroglyphs. My parents and my aunt owned a piece of the Red Rock Ridge for years, passed it on later to us. It was probably the obvious piece of landscape that stuck out like a wave to my brother passing by on a plane. We played on that ridge. We rode horses on the ridge and bikes down the gravel road.
Once past the predictable farmland in MN, you can tell where the land changes in South Dakota showing off badlands and foothills the glaciers so eagerly left in their wake.
We sat on the either side of a very nervous young man, Jehovah Witness I might have wrongfully guessed as he was dressed in the JW garb of street ministers. He gouged me twice in the ribs with his elbows when we were first on the plane. Kept wringing his hands and smacking his forehead. He did not look up for conversation. I can usually assess who wants to talk and who doesn't want to talk in about five seconds sitting next to someone. I fall somewhere in between, thinking if the plane would crash in flight, at least I had said hello to the fellow next to me instead of acting like he didn't exist.
I decided he was even too nervous for a hello, and took a benadryl and drifted blissfully into la la land, although not quite asleep. Surreptitiously I watched him from veiled sleep, was about to ask him if he wanted a pill or three himself when we crossed over the Rockies and that landscape caught my attention for quite awhile.
I love how we have this great spans of land where no one has walked on or built on or cried on or loved on or even died on. There are places on this planet where, once again blissfully, no human foot or fool or foe has touched. It is there where my imagination lets loose to just weather: wind comes here, rain, too, and tons of snow. I had a third cousin who died when I was seventeen and pregnant with my first child. My life was set in stone. Hers was not. She was a free spirit, wild hair, few strings tying her to one place. I had met her once, a wild child with lofty ambitions of seeing the world and saving the world or maybe changing her mind about the last one and just living in the moment while seeing the world. She took a trip with a professor and some other students her first year of college. Small plane. Good conversation, I'm sure...the kind you have when you're just starting college and you have your professor up there on a pedestal with his/her ideas and philosophies and dreams. The plane went down. It took a long time for authorities to find the plane and the bodies. I hope Mary Ellis was holding on those dreams as she met the earth and realized it was time for some other plane.
Usually in the Rockies the clouds snag us and cover up the view. That day it was a bit hazy but clear enough to imagine the rocky life below.
Twice gouged in the side again, I took another benadryl and this time drifted into a near rocky mountain haze of my own. Two hours later, we were coming down out of the sky, I saw the old familiar east bay
hills where I lived for four or five years, caught sight of the San Mateo Bridge.
I always close my eyes when we go in for the landing across the bay. Kerstin's husband John said how many times have you heard of a plane smushing into the bay. None, that I could think of. But I bet there was at least one.
Fairly uneventful flight, save for the jabs in the ribs. When we were getting off the plane, the young man nervously gathered up his stuff, but just as he was heading for the aisle looked down and gave me a sneaky little smile that made me sit up. Huh, I thought. If he didn't want to talk to either of us, his ploy certainly worked.
Later, my friend Suzanne and I wondered if he had acted up on purpose the whole trip out. And that attached to his suit on his lap was a camera. And our nervous glances caught on video for all the world to see.
Probably not. We were just grateful he was not with us on the trip home.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)