Category: Philosophy & Musings

When asked where we live, I joke that my husband & I live in a halfway house. We are renting a place located half way between our previous life and our next life. You see, we sold our home in Beaverdale, where we’ve lived most of the last 20 years. We are building a new home in the country but it’s not finished. So, we live halfway between.

The opportunity to buy land in the country was unexpected. And, more unexpected was that we wanted to buy the land and live there. We had decided the house in Beaverdale was the last time we would move. And, the land was the “farm” my family bought and moved to the summer of 1973 when I was 10 years old.

An unexpected turn in my childhood, moving from the suburbs to the country. I threatened to run away when my parents made me move to the farm, away from all my friends. We moved anyway. The farm came to represent turbulence and change, the unexpected. I tried to go there as seldom as possible after my parents split up and mom moved back to the area we’d lived pre-farm.

So, I was surprised that I wanted to buy it when Dad passed away. But, perhaps the thing you have expected while reading this, I learned the land on which that farm sits is not the origin of the turbulence and pain. I love the land. And, I am half way home.

I can sweet talk, oh yes I can, but I choose to speak forthrightly. To declare, to proclaim. Speak now; find evidence later. But DO find the evidence. Don’t skip the hard stuff.

I’m known for outbursts, oh yes I am, but I choose to use my passion something like a fire tempers metal. Temper words. Anneal my words in the heat of experience. Smooth out the roughness.

I can be crazy, oh yes I can, but I deny others the chance to call me loose cannon. Crackpot. Be first to call myself out. Keep my options open.

I can lay on the schmooze, oh yes I can, but I choose to find traits in others worthy of my praise. A smile. An act of kindness. Acceptance of a responsibility. I choose to celebrate the precise. The smallest feature, the tiniest act.

I can storm, oh yes I can, but I choose to find the sunshine peering from behind the cloud. Go back to bed; start the day over. Again and again. Be the gentle rain that nourishes rather than the torrent sweeping the world away in its path.

I can wheedle, oh yes I can but I choose to drive a hard bargain. To pitch my position. Speak of what might be. Paint a picture of injustice and find solutions. Try my darnedest to get you on my side. Then end as friends.

How to become friends? Get to know each other. Isn’t that the way? Easy to dislike what you don’t know. So much more difficult to put down your friend than the one you’ve never spoken to. The person you have so much in common with.

How to talk to strangers? Break down the walls. No battering ram, no bullets through plate glass. Stone throwing is so Middle Ages. But perhaps a hammer and chisel picking at a small depression in the mortar. Expanding it bit by bit until it is the size of a peephole. Oh! Now I see you! Soon I can place my ear against the hole and you your mouth. Soon we can crawl through and stand beside each other. Progress is painful but necessary.

I can speak harsh words, oh yes I can. But I can heal too. With a touch. With a word. With a smile.

I grew up at Disneyland. Every time relatives visited from the Midwest, we took them there. There was no wearing jeans in those days. My brother Leo and I were four and three years old the first time we went. Mother dressed us up, me in my dotted Swiss pinafore, Leo in a white shirt, and dark shorts and shoes. You enter and leave the Park through Main Street. Sometimes as we walked out through the gate, Walt Disney was sitting on the balcony of his apartment waving to his guests.

Each time we went, we spent a good deal of time buying giant dill pickles from a barrel and listening to the party line at the General Store on Main Street. The Disneyland Band wandered the streets. On that first visit, the director invited me to lead the band. As he tried to hand me his baton, I reached for my little brother Leo, and I waved that baton with our arms around each other’s waists.

As we grew older, we pushed Grandma around the Park in a wheelchair, and she said that was scarier than any of the rides. We always twisted mom’s arm until she went to Tom Sawyer’s Island with us, the only place in the Park where you could wander on your own. We would get mom on the suspension bridge and swing it until she screamed. That didn’t really take much. She was scared of everything. Sometimes we got her into the “Indian canoe” where she swore she “never put all her weight down.”

Disneyland is the perfect fantasy. It offers a glimpse to the past and future. You can totally leave the present behind. Our family changed when we were there. The kids got to choose.

Leo is in 6th grade and I’m in 8th. We share the same recess and lunch periods, play together and go home for lunch together. We run across what was once an orange grove, then a field where we fought dirt clod wars and is now an asphalt parking lot that fills to the brim for five Masses each Sunday.

Usually we kneel as the Angelus rings from the Church bell tower, but all the rules are broken today. We burst breathless into the kitchen where mom is ironing; a starchy steam rising from my father’s dress shirt. A sweet smell, warm of the kitchen, mingling with the yeasty scent of bread dough rising.

The counters and backsplash are tiled blue slightly brighter than Wedgewood. Weekdays when he’s not traveling, Dad makes tall glasses of fresh squeezed orange juice, eggs, bacon and toast for breakfast. Mother’s plugged the iron in on the wall between the nook and telephone corner. She’s wearing a housedress, her hair neatly cut and curled. She turns up her hearing aid as we walk in.

It’s November 22, 1963 and Sister Mary Hope just announced over the Intercom, “President Kennedy has been shot!” We run into the kitchen to tell mother. “Is he dead?” “Yes.” “Good.”

I’d like to say my heart stopped. I’d like to say my own political ideas changed in that instant. I’d like to say the news cracked the shell of prejudice and stubbornness that was my worldview. I can’t.

Since the early nineteen-ninetys I’ve known big changes come to me after depression. Maybe that’s true of my high school-length depression as well. When I return to Bishop Amat High School after my first year of college, no one recognizes me. I can’t vote or drink, and I’m just getting my driver’s license. But I can protest. I can march. I can boycott class. Years later my mother will ask me, “When did you become a Democrat?”