1984: Before I Was Born

Tags

1984, Capote, Harper Lee, history, In Cold Blood, literature, New York City, Pineapple, To Kill A Mockingbird, Truman Capote, Willow, writers, writing

Truman Capote died before I was born.

I’m sure I knew he had, because I had looked it up to tell my students last year. Today, for the first time, I typed his name into the Wikipedia website. I never type things I care about into the Wikipedia website. It feels like I’m cheating on the things I love. A literary adulterer taking the shortcuts to learning.

My husband asked me this week what year my favorite writer died. I said I didn’t know. I said maybe he hasn’t. He could be 87. I felt shame where knowledge lacked. Only hope spoke. Wouldn’t it be neat if he hadn’t died? If I had just sat on the steps of what was once his home and he still was? Truman Capote, alive! Arguably the most prolific writer of our time—alive! The man who changed the nonfiction novel with one controversial work, still wearing top-button-unbuttoned shirts under suitcoats and telling buzzed stories at the most party of all parties somewhere in this city. And we could be sharing air. Ahh…

I knew we weren’t. I just hadn’t learned him exhaustively yet. Or that his life had been exhausted.

All his works, I knew. The quirks of his life piqued my interest. I knew he was a lonely boy, that his friend, our literary hero, Harper had probably modeled her To Kill a Mockingbird character after him. The secret labyrinthical details of In Cold Blood, I had memorized. Dick’s deranged childhood, I’d researched. His special relationship with Perry; I’d asked all the questions there were to ask. The murdered Kansas family and those killers, that was the work that drew me to him.

I just didn’t know that there was no more know to know. Not since 1984, the year before I was born.

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the cowboy [4/5]

Tags

adventure, cowboy, engagement, history, love, marriage, relationship, restaurant, story

the waiting                    the clues[2/5]                    the ring[3/5]

I met him in a bar. Neither of us were there looking for phone numbers. I wasn’t just one young lady with a cocktail, in a bar where he was buying drinks for women until he took one home. That kind of beginning isn’t our kind of beginning. Still, he wasn’t mine for a long time.

I met him in a bar. He was the bartender. I, the waitress. He thought me too loud, dare I say obnoxious. I thought him haughty, conceited even. But then I caught a better glimpse. A striking young man tossing limes in the air, spinning while they slide onto the lip of the glass in his hand. He laughs with his whole body, his smile stays on his face a while after what was funny. When he speaks to customers, he crouches down at the table or leans comfortably over the bar rail; it makes everyone feel like they’ve known him for years. Like he’s charming and he loves them more than as a customer. He says he gets it from his dad.

And not only that from dad.  His middle name, too, which I took to using frequently, months into our slow-paced, casual courtship years ago. His full name is not Bradley, as I once imagined or expected it to be, but just Brad. Brad Alan, like on the disc covers I printed for him once, before studio days, and like he uses on posters for his solo shows in New York City.

When I wasn’t sure how to proceed, I learned most about how he would treat me, the way he was falling in love with me so tenderly. Bursting at every seam, cheeks aching from laughter, we filled sunrise to sunset with adventure and jokes, exploring our Midwestern city creatively. I pretended we were only friends, pretended no one knew I’d fallen for him. He never stepped where I didn’t let him go.

We didn’t make every decision with perfect precision. I could’ve drawn some of our lines with invisible pen, I reckon. But the history of us is something I’ve come to love. For years, I’ve been adventuring and exploring with this cowboy. We’ve dreamed so many dreams together. For years, figuring what makes him tick, dissecting the world together, asking questions, loving the mystery of life.  Only the very beginning of these next forty years. 

the ring [3/5]

Tags

Chicago, engagement, family, frugality, grandma, heirloom, history, love, marriage, money, proposal, relationship, summer, symbols, tradition, value, wedding ring

the waiting [1/5]          the clues [2/5]

While on the phone, approaching the border of Michigan and Indiana the other day, I learned the possible difference between cheap and frugal.

It was suggested to me that frugality is interested in a good deal, in the best value for the product purchased. Frugality likes to own nice things, things that don’t break because they’re mass-produced or put together with soft plastic pieces, things made with durable fabric, things that will last and look beautiful. Things that will flatter. Things that have worth but are also on sale. Cheapness has interest only in the price tag. When the price tag is as low as possible, cheap wants in. If there is a chance ice might melt in the Arctic and the price could drop a few quarters, cheap would prefer to wait.

I would like to be frugal, I said. But I fear I fall into the trap of being cheap. I could dance around the semantics of the issue, but the truth is, I’m cheap.  And I’d prefer not to be.  This lesson in definitions flipped a switch for me. I have to tweak my price tag obsession some days.

On the tail end of this DNA malfunction inside of me is the idea of value. In our early conversations, I didn’t value wedding rings at all. Wasn’t interested; wouldn’t even window shop if it were up to me. But there are two of us in this conversation, and I was open to talking about it, exploring my aversion to what I perceived as an empty tradition. Open, yes; but remaining uninterested, true.

I researched a number of hours. Found unique designs, sought after the origin of the ring, the meaning behind the ring finger and the circular shape, browsed photos of thousands of precious metals, even wooden rings to get ideas. Visited discussion boards as an unassuming guest, extracting the opinions of strangers.

As I chewed on the idea of value months ago, I mentioned as an example, passing down fine jewelry from someone like my grandmother. My grandma and I were very close; she died about five years ago from breast cancer that she’d been battling my entire lifetime. I hadn’t seen grandma’s ring since I sat on her daybed, making mountains of her wrinkled skin, twisting her ring around her emaciated finger. The thought left my head after being said and I moved on to wooden rings, which were becoming my favorite. I was actually taking to the idea of rings. Everything I was learning was lodging in my heart, finding a way to actualize the tradition.

My husband-to-be must have known since the moment I mentioned it that he would seek Grandma’s ring. I’m ashamed, for such an intuitive person, at my ignorance. He’d called Mom, she’s contacted my aunt, they’d gone over to Grandpa’s to find the ring in an old jewelry box, where it had been sitting for years. Now I, naive and never wanting to wear a ring at all, am wearing my Grandmother’s wedding ring during my engagement. A ring she wore for over 50 years of marriage to my now-sick grandpa.

In that, there is value. In this ring there is history and storytelling. There are two little rubies and a single-cut diamond framing the main stone. There is an illusion setting, popular decades ago to make a smaller diamond look bigger than it actually is. The diamond was important to Grandma. Without Grandpa even knowing, she had her ring reset years into their marriage with the diamond from her mother’s wedding ring because that diamond was bigger! That story, told to me in a joint format by my mother and aunt, makes me laugh. That’s my Gram. She would.

All of this life is on my finger. It tells the world how Brad asked me to be his wife. And how in history there is value. Life is so much more than frugality. And symbols aren’t empty if you fill them.

Finally, First

Tags

falling in love, first kiss, firsts, history, kiss, love, patience, relationship, waiting, years

Without planning to be, I was prompted on the topic of “firsts” by this intriguing post by a dear friend.



When the phrase “swimming in guilt” originated, I reckon it was a mild sort of guilt.  A regret that was thin and unveiled, that went away by morning, could be washed down by a glass of orange juice and a piece of toast, maybe.  Because I’ve tortured myself with guilt in years past, and it doesn’t feel the first thing like swimming.  It’s handicapping, pinning my arms to the sides of my ribcage, making the air thick and immobile around me.  Surfaces and things that were once sure are slippery and slimy, thick with distrust, every inch of my body is filthy, untouchable.  It’s not swimmy, this guilt business.  It’s thick and slow to go.

A lot of my “firsts” were stuck in this mess.  I gave away when I should have held tight.  Pretended I was seasoned and wise, when I was young and fresh and new.  And I knew very little, in fact.  But I could spin a lie better than any gal I knew.  I spun beautiful webs of them.  Miles and miles of lies.  And inside those intricate highways systems, I gave myself away.  Mostly to men whose names I didn’t know.  Varsity football players, coaches on college visits, fraternity presidents, policemen, my friends, men who were no one.

There’s hardly a first I remember.  But I swam, slimed, unwove, disengaged myself from that guilt some years ago.  A nod to counseling, which I formerly didn’t believe in—whatever that means.

But this song doesn’t have to be in Dminor.  There’s a future for all those failed firsts.  There are firsts that are worth it.  Firsts that have never met guilt, who don’t sign up for counseling.  Firsts which have a gal catching her breath for days. I’ll tell you about this, her first.

For years she was in love with a man.  And if I told you the whole truth about her story, you wouldn’t believe me.  So I’ll just tell you this, which is a slice of the truth that you might accept even though life is not a fairytale and neither is this.  Since she met him, there hasn’t been anyone else.  Not another man, not a thought of one with any permanency or any stay.  Just a flood of him, thoughts on how to be with him one day.

Now, there’s never really been what they would call an us, or a they to this gal and this man, but nevermind that for now.  Suspend your disbelief.  Because, there was, however, a time when they spent all their moments together.  Over a year, maybe.  And this, for them, was their they.  She’d never kissed him.  I can count the times she’d held his hand, she told me every time.  I remembered them all except maybe the one I don’t remember.  And I watched her love for him grow.  And her desire.  But there never was a first time for them.  And then he moved away.

Months passed.  Close to a year, when you do the math.  She didn’t know what to expect when seeing him again.  I didn’t know if she’d still love him when she stepped out of the airport and into his embrace.  Would she step into his embrace?  Or a handshake?  Her body surged with heat as he scooped her up in the middle of winter; he told his friends he was picking up his girl.  And he was.  She was.  By the night, her cheeks were sore from smiles.  She’d come seven hundred miles to find that it was all the same.  That her heart was still swollen with him from all their yesterdays.

She’d stayed already a full day and they’d taken to holding hands here and there.  He had started it, which is the way it should be.  At the piano bar, they settled in after dinner with her friends.  I guess it was a double date.  I suppose, when I think on her stories, she’s never been on one of those, so that was a first, for firsts. 

She sat curled up in the corner, comfy, his arm around the back of the booth and around in a roundabout way, his girl.  The scene, it feels ethereal, she remembers, because between songs, he leaned over her comfy curled body, locked into him like a puzzle piece, and stole the kiss right off her lips. 

He left too fast, she leaned forward to linger.  He came back and kissed again, uneven, mismatched, so that she could feel his five o’clock on her flesh.  It was their first kiss.  The man I’ve watched her love faithfully for over four years, she just kissed for the very.  first.  time.

Halve the Caff

Tags

addiction, caffeine, coffee, dependence, habits, history, life, morning, patterns

I bought half-caff today. I was shopping at Meijer without a list, haphazardly rolling my half-cart up and down the aisles, walking by items I needed and picking up items I didn’t. I shouldn’t shop without a list, my mother always told me. She’s always turning up right.

I rolled down the coffee aisles for the free smells, not for a pound of Folgers, six bucks on sale. But I’ve taken to plugging in my Braun four-cup brewer every morning like I turn on the lights. Light switch, coffeepot, computer when I unlock my classroom-home-away-from-home. Only then do I take my coat off and suck in the deep breath that starts the day.

I’m starting to need the coffee. Addiction is making caffeine part of my pattern and I’m not so happy with the realization of the weakness, the dependence. Addiction runs in my family. We take to ignoring it’s negative effects, going on as if we’re unsplintered and whole, unbroken by the vices of the tendencies we entertain. I noticed how captive we were sometime in high school. And it helps to be aware. But it doesn’t make me immune.

My eyes are starting to burn at the corners. I rub them until they’re red. The edges itch and I pull at the corners. They fall like I’m tired, but my body is awake. It’s calling for coffee, this broken body, forcing me into patterns I try to avoid.

So I bought half-caff to break the cycle. To slow the drip of caffeine daily into this body I drag around with me sun-up until sun-down. The patterns, for now, will remain. The caffeine, now, will be reduced away. With trickery, I’ll deprive my body of what it desires, doesn’t need, and I don’t want—but can’t stop—giving it.

Just Tradition?

Tags

agenda, atheist, believer, Christ, Christian, Christmas, confusion, history, holiday, Jesus, meaning, season, tradition, unbeliever, winter

I have to ask honestly. I’m not bringing the agenda that you think I have. Not even the agenda that I might actually have. No agendas here. Not even calendars or planners, just to make everyone feel entirely comfortable.

I’m coming with nothing but my most sincere wonderings. Just a fistful of curiosity, hours of pondering, and yet no answers, no resolve. I just can’t figure why.

I understand that we have cultural status quos and traditions of all shapes and sounds. I get, too, that some days it’s all we can do to just roll with the punches. Maybe it’s just that simple. I guess I’m looking for more. My unsatisfied self, meandering around in the garden of the I don’t knows. I’m always looking for more, digging deeper, trying to get to the bottom of things, when–in fact–I may already be there. So, pardon my ignorance.

I celebrate Christmas because I find that Christmas marks a day, commemorates a birth, that I believe actually happened. Yep, in the real, chronological account of history.  This earth.  Our past.  Real life.  I believe it mattered when Christ was born. Not only do I think it was real, and historical, but I think it changed the way the world functions and it offers us a space to respond.

Now, remember, I didn’t bring the agenda you think I have. I didn’t used to be this girl.  Didn’t believe any of this for years. I ignorantly, arrogantly, ignored it all and played like I knew better. I truly thought I knew so much better. But in the long, twisted story of it all, I searched for answers and made a choice, which Christmas paves the way for. I find Christmas a holiday that matters and makes a difference. We celebrate things, naturally, that matter and make a difference.

I just can’t wrap my still-learing, still-eager, always-seeking mind around it. You don’t think it matters, Jesus slipping into skin and living here two-thousand years ago. You don’t think he even did, or maybe that he did and that he was just a messed up fool like the rest of us. It’s nothing to you but a time to work hard in the industry or a few days away from the office, a break from school and homework, a time to book a flight and visit Mom. None of it makes any sense to me. How can you celebrate something you don’t believe in?  What makes you sing the songs or buy the gifts, don red and green and drink champagne at the holiday parties? 

My King is not your king, why are you celebrating His birth with me?

My Story

Tags

affair, brokenness, consequence, drinking, drugs, family, history, love relationship, past, poverty, shame, sin, struggle, trailer, trial, turmoil

This is not my story. I didn’t grow up in a trailer with rusted hinges on the only door and a perpetual creaking noise every time the wind groaned outside. I never had so many clothes that they only fit in one drawer, a drawer with no runners or tracks, a drawer without even a dresser. A drawer that would lie on my bed when I wouldn’t and sit on the floor while I slept.

In all of my choices, the bad ones were kind to me. I can tell of blackouts and poisonings, sickness and day-long sleeps only through hearsay. But of rehab or arrest, I yet cannot begin to tell the story. I have none of those stories, none that are mine. Of the loneliness of being without siblings or without the care of parents, I cannot tell nor can I imagine empty days such as these.

Never did I live only with Mom. Never for more than a few weeks, maybe months. Never only with Dad. Never did I fake love for one or the other for years. My mom didn’t leave me, fight for me, leave me, make the front page of the newspaper for sins too deep to share, an affair, leave me once more only to welcome me home with unassuming arms.

No turmoil of this degree built messy character in me. This is not my story.

The Point Is

Tags

break-up, emotion, forgiveness, God, grace, history, hockey, love, past, relationship, repetition, spiritual warfare

There’s all that garbage about the repeating nature of history and all that. Has anyone confirmed if all of that is real? Maybe I should be the one. Because I’ve never had that déjà vu feeling, where you’re certain that this moment has happened before. It’s an eerie few seconds and then it passes. I’m not even sure if I think it’s real.

The point is, who really knows. Who knows if history is the repeating sort of thing or not. I mean, who are we to say what happened here before we came around, anyway. The point is, I can talk about me, and I’m more self-aware now than I once was. That’s the point.

No. The point is, it’s happening again. Whether this is history or just my story stuck on a scratched CD, it’s all happening all over again. I’m standing with the hostess at a sports bar; I’m the gal from out of town, asking for obscure hockey games on one of their twelve hundred televisions. They say no and I’m not sure how to follow. I’m hanging on words from one o’clock in the morning as I fall asleep hoping for holiness to overwhelm me. If I fall, I fall to foolishness, not ignorance.

You see, there was distance and drama in this abbreviated melodrama, but my heart was always for him. There was a man and he left and he’s back and I’m stuck. I think that’s the point, that I’m stuck. Stuck between here and him, want and should, go and never move, what else is really new? It’s all exactly the same. The same rotating and uneven schedule of wanting good and wanting more.

And it isn’t archaic Evangelical b______, either. The point is, I don’t have another motive. I do not love so that— I just love, so there. Some of my kind love so that, and I’m not one of that kind. Is that the point—that I’m not one of that kind? No. The point is that I just love him. The point is, love love love. That’s all. No more, no less. No strings, no consequence. He could leave me, hate me, tear me up. He could hide from me for a year or more. He did. But the point is, love love love. That’s all I have to give him. It’s real and it’s me and it’s inexplicably tied to the fact that I’m madly in love with a Savior, a King, the giver of all things.

He promises not to hide in big cities, behind women, but he promises after two rounds of beer. The point is not, still, that his words stitch me up. Or not that he’s done me wrong. We aren’t regular, we’re abnormal, your standard uncouple. The point is that I’m giving grace. If my God is my God, then this one gift will not end. I’ll give on both emotional ends. The point is or is not the way that I’ve missed him, the things that remind me of our time. Or that I’m proud of who he’s become. The point, I suppose, doesn’t matter so much. The point is getting lost in the details.

Whether or not it’s all happening again, the point is I wish both were true. The point really is that love is so American; it can’t be relied on for anything. These truths, I’m not finding in the way that I feel. The point is these feelings can lie.

The Penmanship That Defines Us

Tags

checks, font, history, pencil, penmanship, signature, words, writing

Ever since I was a little girl, I’ve found ways, mostly foolish, to mark my growth via penmanship. Looking back, I suppose it’s clear that, even in the early years, that pencil was practically growing out of my fat little hand.  Always writing, doodling, playing with words, even if it was just sliding the magnetic letters on the fridge around and upside down.  My penmanship has never been stable, only on temporary plateaus.  And, yet again, it’s on the move.

In grade school, I played with the presentation of my name, even on the heading of my papers in school. Striving for uniqueness and searching for identity from behind my rotund, dented, red, wire spectacle frames in middle school, I twisted my name around until it sounded like something fresh and different and “cool.” Atop my papers, teachers would see “Lin-Duh” and know that I wasn’t trying to be impossible or self-deprecating; I was only trying to distinguish myself as someone of worth and status. I wrote my name with smiley faces, with huge obnoxious dots over the “i,” with all capital letters, or with tails that swirled all over the top of the page. Sometimes my dad still calls me “Lin-Duh”, and the “Duh” trails behind him, through the kitchen, down the hall, around the corner, for years and years until I can barely hear the silent “h” any longer.

Through most of high school I doodled.  I played with ink and symbol in margins and white space.  I drew the names of boys I said I loved and my best friends that would, of course, be my best friends forever, in big, block fonts.  I added color and design, drew people and pictures in with flowery something or others and pasted it all on the fronts and backs and inside outs of my notebooks and binders.

When I began to sign checks, I panicked because my signature was inconsistent and messy.  They’d never know if it was me or my identity-stealing bank robber signing Linda A. Sullivan.  Or should I only sign L. Sullivan?  Some folks I knew signed with letters and lines, like, L scribble, S scribble.  Should I do that, too?  I practiced on sheets of paper, like girls do when they want to marry a man and they replace hers with his last name, to see how Mrs. Linda whomever would look and sound.  Fantasy.  Pages and pages of capital L’s, A’s, S’s, trying to find a tilt and size and style that looked on paper like my personality felt.

And even now, as a teacher, I’m finding myself a new font for writing on the marker board with those fat Expo markers, most of which are dry yet sit stealthily on the ledge of the board, mysteriously without ink. The CAPS LOCK seems to be working well.  It’s hard to write on the board in a straight line, CAPS or no caps, but the letters seems to stay legible when they’re all capital. 

On paper, I’m finding my hand comfortable, again, with a pencil, getting used to changes and mistakes in my lesson plan book. I enjoy the rough feel that resonates in my fingers and wrist when the pencil scrapes unwillingly against the paper, leaving graphite shavings and often, erasure crumbles behind.  I feel older as I write in cursive, like I haven’t in years.  The pace slows my words, makes me patient and I finish the “s” with dainty curvature before beginning the next word. 

My writing takes a new slant, literally, as my penmanship changes with this season and that.  This penmanship defines and redefines me.

Blessed

Tags

blessed, blessing, Christian, Christianity, definition, English, etymology, God, history, pagan, perspective, religion, words, worldview

The adjective “blessed” has a trillion parts to its definition, as most English words these days.  I gravitate to the familiar synonyms, phrases like: sacred, holy, worthy of adoration or worship.  I’m looking through the lens of a worldview that trusts that God Almighty gives and takes away.  So He’s the dude doing the blessing.   Thus, my innards get slipknotted when folks are blessing and gettin’ blessed outside of the sacred.  How dare they?  It’s true, though, there’s some skewing of perspective in my preunderstood approach.

So it goes, the etymological history of ‘blessed’ tells are pretty tight-knit story.  It originally comes from an Old English verb which means, to bless, wish happiness, consecrate.  The Germanic equivalent connotes a consecration with blood, like a Catholic-style sprinkling, I imagine.  The Anglo-Saxons used the word [and consequently the process] in pagan services, worshipping false gods and forces, and “blessing” the folk with symbolic things like animal blood.  Here’s the switch: when those very people, the old school pagan worshippers, converted to Christianity, the word “blessed” became somewhat syncretistic, acquiring slightly new meanings as the translations of the Latin Bible began to have an influence. 

Brilliant! [light bulb turns on]  So connotation for ‘blessed’ tends to be Biblical, not because it began that way and was defined as such, but because it was a tag-along into new ventures after already having held meaning.  So when we’re blessed by the sovereignty of God in various ways, it’s legit.  We’re not sprinkled with anything, but the positively connotated term is true.  Our situation has become more holy and happy because of an outside force.  But my investigation has broadened the boundaries.  Because, I guess, since ‘blessed’ came from pagan roots, pagans can be blessed just as well.  A blessing doesn’t necessitate the inclusion of God, even though every time I use it, it will include such an assumption.  To be blessed separate from the power of God just refers to the way something is favored or fortunate, brought increased happiness or content.  Something that urges thankfulness.

Still seems odd to me to be thankful to nothing.  Can thankfulness have no direct object?  I suppose it can, but I’ll assure that mine never will.  My thankfulness will always have direction.  My blessings will come from somewhere.