Category: Memoir

::Life Its Own Self::

I did not want to write this, but it won’t leave me alone. This is life its own self. 

Come March 21, 2026, I will have lived it seventy and nine. Looking back, the road I’ve traveled is so long I can’t see clear to the beginning anymore. Yet it’s puzzling. I’m still eager, and curious, and filled with ideas … and, generally speaking, I have the energy to accomplish tasks that come to me, through desire or necessity. For example, after Christmas I’m gutting the powder room for a redo. My Christmas wish list is power tools. 

How is that possible? There are moments when I find a thought chasing at the edge of my brain:

“Will the old woman slip in and take over today?” I like Clint Eastwood’s attitude. When asked how he stays so youthful and sharp, he said, “I don’t let the old man in.”

I don’t wish to be cruel to the old gal. But I have way too much road to travel, things to do, family and others to love and interact with. 

Yet I do wonder. I wonder about “next life.” In our song ‘Glorious’, we wrote that our dreams are just a whisper of what heaven’s gonna be. I’ve watched NDE accounts where people share what they’ve seen, and it’s generally that there’s no way to actually describe it … the beauty and the splendor is beyond our limited understanding.

I accept that. I believe it. I hope and I pray that when my time comes, I will be there, and see it.

But not yet. 
I thought, about thirty three years ago, that God was through with me. My children were grown, and my marriage had crashed. I was, I thought, done. But what came after that was a human and a spiritual growth that could only be described as driven by the Almighty. He took all my broken pieces and put me back together. An author said, and I sadly cannot remember who, but he said, “Until your heart has been broken to grains of sand, you will never really have loved at all.”

I know now what that author meant. And I see that God could only have His way with me once I was fully His. I’m not perfect. But He is.

And He’s let me know that my daily surrender is enough to keep the old woman out, if only for one more day

1

::Nanny’s Back Porch::

I remember the glider. The arms and frame were painted chartreuse green. The cushions were upholstered in oil cloth with wide red and white stripes.

Nanny sat on it every morning with her cup of coffee and the morning newspaper. She drank her coffee in a china cup that sat on its own saucer. There were delicate flowers hand painted on them both. She added half and half to the coffee until it looked like caramel.

I remember the treadle machine. It sat against the back wall next to the door on the the concrete patio. The patio was large, and had a lofty roof. The area was cooled with a large ceiling fan that hung from the rafters.

I remember the gentle, rhythmic sound of that fan, and the air that it created.

Nanny’s patio was a place where I knew I could do anything. It was almost sacred in that way, though I didn’t know it at the time. But every weekday morning during my ninth summer, I did my chores, then called my Nanny.

“Nanny? Can I come over?”

“Come on, baby.”

I packed my little cardboard suitcase with my doll and fabric scraps, then walked the two and a half blocks to Nanny’s house.

I remember climbing the steps leading to her house. The front porch had steps of its own. Wrought iron columns painted chartreuse on each corner. Two pink flamingos stood amongst the flowers in front.

The house wall of the porch was knotty pine. A mailbox hung on the left side of that wall. It looked like a covered wagon.

Exactly like a covered wagon.

Nanny made it.

I followed the sidewalk around the left of the house to the back. When I reached the back, I lifted the latch on the large black iron gate. It slowly rolled open, I walked into the back and pushed it shut behind me.
Nanny was there on the glider, her back to me, holding the newspaper akimbo in front of her.


When I think about it now, it makes me tear up. I didn’t know then, didn’t understand, how hungry I was for a space where I could be my unbridled creative self.
At home the message was clear: do your chores, stay out of the way, be quiet. In other words, try not to suck too bad.

But here at Nanny’s, my nine year old shoulders dropped. The knot in my stomach let go. I could sew on the treadle all day long, and nobody would stop me. If I got to a place where I needed help, Nanny was there to lend it. No criticism, no shame, just safety.

I don’t recall her ever really championing my pursuits, but she never cut me down either. I was present and a participant in many of her own creative projects and, by that, I learned that anybody could do anything they dreamt up, all they needed to do was start.

I remember Nanny’s projects where she taught me to “sand with the grain,” to “paint in long, firm but gentle strokes on furniture,” and “never buy a sewing pattern, always make your own.”

Nanny would be horrified if she could see the pile of sewing patterns in my work room today, but all she taught me … about how to do things, and about trusting myself and my creative process – are literally what have inspired me and saved me.

0

::Mother::

You could say I had three mothers. She was a doting mother to the babies. She was a controlling mother to the children. She was a cruel mother to the teenagers. 

When I was a baby, then a toddler, she could be silly, loving, and fun. But the older I got, the more unhappy she became.

I was born happy. 

And she seemed to hate me for it.

I sometimes wonder if my mother thought she could give birth to her rescuer. At least I, as the oldest, felt somehow responsible for doing that. But there were five others. Did they ever feel what I did? Did they have the same mother(s) I did? 

Thinking about it now, it seems she wanted me, or us, to unring the cruel bells of her past. But she had shrouded them behind a curtain, and she refused to pull it back, to let us see. To know. To understand. Consequently, we had no clue what we were responsible for. But I, for one, wanted desperately to fix it for her. For us. Because the life we were living hovered above the deep end. At any moment it could drop and drown us all. 

But what were my mother’s dreams? What had she wanted to be, if anything, before marriage and children entered her life? I often wondered, and from a very young age, whether or not I was conscious I was doing it, I watched for clues. Who, really, was this person who carried me for nine months in her belly? 

She often sang softly to the radio, and her voice was beautiful. 

In the early years she and Daddy would turn on the radio, scoot back the furniture in the dining room and dance to the music. They were amazing. 

My mother was a singer.

My mother was a dancer.

She often would say that my first word was “pencil.” I remember her drawing for me when I was very small, and just learning to master putting lines on paper. Her drawings were charming.

My mother was an artist.

I can remember being very young, a toddler, and watching her put on her red lipstick and fix her hair every work day before Daddy came home . I was in awe. In my mind she was a movie star. A queen. She slayed me with her black hair and hazel eyes, her flirty grin when she looked at my Daddy. 

As a teenager, I wondered if any of her talents pulled at her, if that was what kept her in such a dark place. But my mother was someone I could not talk to about deep things. I tried once, and her only response, between drags on her cigarette, was,
“If you keep thinking about things like that you’ll drive yourself crazy.”

Had she driven herself crazy? I remember a time, back when we lived on North Marion Street, that things were very rocky. I was about four.

Mother had a controlling friend who must have been incredibly overbearing. One day, this friend came into our house and rearranged my mother’s kitchen, without asking her. I think my mother was gobsmacked, had no clue how to handle the invasion, and had no idea how to stop it. 

She resented this woman, knew she needed to break free, but felt trapped. Mother seemed to take it as if she was not smart enough, capable enough, to do anything. She fell apart. In the end, it seems it was a nervous breakdown.

The priest came to the house several times, and counseled my mother. Things got quiet for weeks, as if someone was sick, or had died. I was so young that the memories are sketchy, but Mother was either put to bed, or had gone away. 

When she was ‘back,’ she brought a new normal with her. And things were never the same.
Even now I wonder what happened, exactly, during those months, that caused the shift. Whatever it was, it marks the time when the singing stopped. The dancing stopped. The laughter stopped.

The drinking started.

Mother is gone now. Daddy too. I can’t ask them anything. All I can do, or try to do, is write myself to a place where I find peace. 

By writing it down, I sort through the wreckage of the past.  I do what I can to organize the broken pieces. I hope to find some pattern, or even beauty, that illuminates like a stained glass window. Beauty from ashes. Magic from shards. 

It happens. It happens all the time. And if it exists here in this life, I will find it. 

If mother is watching, I pray she’ll help guide me to it. She no longer has anything to lose, if she ever did, by revealing her story. And it is so intrinsically tied to mine, that my story can barely be told, without knowing hers. 

3

::Grateful::

Gratitude. People usually say thankful. Like, 

“I’m thankful it didn’t rain today, we’da missed our last game.” 

Or, “I’m thankful they started using skim milk in my latte, last thing I need is the extra calories.”

Being thankful is good, of course. I’ve been thankful most of my life … ever since, I guess, the Methodist minister’s wife picked me up at the gas station where she found me. I’d run away from kindergarten after daddy dropped me off, I was so afraid of being late again.

But now, in my dotage, I’m pretty much always grateful. 

Grateful I can hobble to the bathroom in the morning. 

Grateful I can plant my foot against the shovel, and heave piles of dirt in the garden. 

Grateful for clarity of mind, and the continuing passion for learning more, about everything.

Grateful for friends who take me, love me, and support me as I am.

Grateful for sunshine, and rain, and every season under God’s heaven — even this week in February, 2021, when we’re iced-and-snowed in. At this point, they all have a poignancy I’ve never experienced before. 

We never know when our last breath will be drawn, our last hugs given to those we care about, our last expression of love, however large or small. 

My most recent experience of love expression was the cleaning out of my garage. My son and grands helped, and we filled a dumpster with stuff that, had I not done it then, they’d have had to face it when all my “lasts” were done. 

I think about that a lot. My home, which I’m grateful for, is an estate sale in waiting. I know that, and it helps me take things a little lighter. 

We’re all in this big parler game called life, waiting for our number to be called. And while we play this game, let’s be grateful for the brilliant, heartbreaking, surprising, messy, beautiful life we’re living.

And may we never forget … there’s a last time for everything. 

1

::The Journey::

journey of love

It’s January 12, 2019. My last post was on returning home after my mother’s funeral. She died on Halloween Day. My Daddy died three years ago. So I am now, in my dotage, an orphan. An old woman orphan.

These days, life stretches out behind me, like it stretched out before me when I was young. I’ve been here awhile, and sometimes I wish I’d handled things differently, made different choices, seen different outcomes. But that’s a tight, smoking circle that always leads me back to this truth: the lessons learned were worth the price of the trip. I am who I am thanks to every little thing. And yet …

Days come and go, the sun rises and sets. I make choices every morning, change my mind mid-coffee, reevaluate over lunch, set out to accomplish “at least one material thing” mid afternoon, resign myself to the day I’ve spent over dinner, and start looking at the clock around six thirty, wondering if it’s too soon for pajamas. Do you do that? I don’t know, maybe I’m an island of internal conflict, arm wrestling with procrastination … winner gets ice cream.

But in the grand scheme of life, there are some things that I can feel good about checking off.

  • I’ve come through decades of counseling, most of it good, in my quest to unpack all the baggage, and to unearth who I was put here to be.
  • I’ve painted houses, and portraits, written articles, and songs, designed homes, developed media projects … each activity a response to the creative pool that undulates inside me. I never reached for fame. I was and am always on a mission to follow that creative urge, whatever it was or is, to its completion. 
  • Loving, more than being loved, has been my modus. “Spill love everywhere” is a motto I embrace. Even if it seems invisible; even if it appears, in the immediate instant, to make no difference at all. Keep it up. Keep going. And when I spill love on others, I can’t help but get some on myself. Love is messy. It gets all over everything. 

A favorite quote:

“Her finely touched spirit still had its fine issues, though they were not widely visible. Her full nature spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive, for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.” – George Eliot, “Middlemarch” 

In this huge world, with all these people, it’s easy to want to be relevant. Publicly relevant. To make a difference, and be recognized for it. But I’m consciously choosing, in this little life, to focus on the doing rather than on the being. It matters not who knows it, other than I. I know. I know the truth; the beautiful, ugly, magnificent, broken truth about who I am, what I’ve done/not done, for better or worse, throughout these years. 

When I lay my head down on the pillow at night, in the sober darkness, I am fully present for that truth. I beg God’s forgiveness, His mercy, and His grace. Broken people do broken things, every single day. We’re all broken. But we can — in our brokenness — aspire. Aspire to wholeness. And it’s love — of self, of others, of this life we live — that will get us there. 

6

::Beginnings and Endings::

Beginnings Disguised

Beginnings are sometimes hard to wrap our brains around. 

A baby’s last push into this world, that would be seen as an ending — of life inside her mother’s womb — and yet, that first gulp of air is the breath of Spirit; a beginning infusion which, repeated throughout her life, will sustain her, until she draws her last.

What happens then? Some say they know; have crossed over and come back. Who am I to question them? I can only wonder, hope, and believe.

I’m wondering this morning if life itself isn’t one long, dramatic birth canal that carries us to places we’ve only read about, dreamt of, and imagined. 

My mother is 96. She lies in her bed … old, frail, a mere shadow of the woman she’s been. She’s unresponsive, for the most part, and time is growing short. Soon, she will be gone.

But on that other side I see her emerging, young and beautiful, running into the arms of my Daddy, who passed four years ago. Truth is, I believe that, in many ways, she is with him now.

Beginnings — endings. The circle of life. All of it a painful, and wondrous, and a miraculous journey.

What the caterpillar knows as an ending, is the beginning to the butterfly.

Caterpiler and Butterfly

0

::Dot and Robert::

Dot Parker and Robert Benchley

 

I didn’t know about her for years. Never heard of her. Then, one day, in the period I would soon dub ‘the dark night of my ex-husband’s soul’ she came. A light dawned.

I’d always been a creative girl, a passionate teen, then while wedded I morphed into an unsure and eagerly accommodating woman. When I finally acknowledged the “past due notice” and filed for “the divorce,” I realized I couldn’t speak. No, listen, I could string words together, I could even sound coherent on occasion, but the kernel of “me” at the heart of it all was missing. When did I grow so soft?

There I was, plowing through the molasses searching for my focus when, at a Screen Actors Guild Directors’ meeting, I met Nat Benchley. ‘Benchley, Benchley, let me think,’ I thought as I smiled that smile and shook his hand.

Nat immediately had me smitten, as most brilliantly eloquent men do … I do love a great mind. And his was incredible, I thought, until … well, his nickname for me was a little off putting. “Reverend Gorgeous.” I can barely type it even now. It makes me blush, and warms my heart. But that’s not the point here. The point is, Nat was sharing with me stories about his grandfather Robert, and how this woman, Dorothy Parker, was his sidekick and best friend.

Well, I’d never heard of the woman, and you already know exactly what I did. I looked Dorothy up, bought her books, checked her out … and thought, ‘HEY! I recognize that voice … that irreverent, brilliant, hysterically ironic voice. It . Sounds . Like . Me .’

So that was the first step, learning about Dot. The next meeting Nat and I attended was in New York, and he decided we should go some place called the Algonquin Hotel. Over martinis with three fat olives he educated me on the infamous “Vicious Circle” and — as we sat at that very same round table, regaled me with tales of how his Grandfather and Dot would hold court there everyday at lunch. And so, we and our colleagues sat. We laughed. We drank. Because, you know. Dot and Robert.

Hirschfeld drawings of Benchley, Parker, and company lined the walls. The more I learned, the more I was convinced: Nat and I should do a two-person show, Robert and Dot. I mentioned it to him. He loved it. But life got in the way, as it tends to do, and we never happened.

That was years ago, and I only remembered these things when reading a piece this morning by Dorothy Parker. I’m much older now, and am not sure I still have the swagger necessary to deliver a good “Dot” onstage. But I love my warm memories of Nat Benchley. I continue to relish Parker’s writing, her voice, and the very clear knowledge that it was she who, thanks to Nat, helped me find my own.

0

::The Microphone Business::

Vintage Microphone

 

When I was five or six I was drawn to the microphone at the Knights of Columbus spaghetti dinners. My Uncle John would step up on that stage and use it when he introduced Monsignor Fletcher to say the blessing. And when he announced the three piece band, made up of parishioners. Ladies with blue hair played the stand up bass, the accordion, and the saxophone. Their pearls and ear bobs swayed or bounced to the rhythms while the grownups danced.

But it was when they took their break, and the microphone stood up there all alone that I felt the pull. I wandered up. I sat on that stage, just a low riser from the floor. I pivoted and suddenly, I was there. I wandered over. I looked out at the people seated at long tables, talking and laughing. The microphone was about a head and a half taller than I was. No way could I reach it. So I stood.

Years later I would actually use microphones, in the studio and on stage. For years I worked in an industry where people think if you haven’t “sold” a song or gotten famous, you’re just a wannabe who didn’t quite have the stuff.

But the truth is, the fame part was never an issue. Never a goal. It was always about the music. And music is its own thing. Fame is about politics, and strategy, and not just a little bit about the dark side of our nature. There are those who squeak through to the main keylight unscathed, but it’s not a huge percentage.

Looking back on my years in the “microphone” business, I know that every prayer I ever prayed about it was answered. But the picture looked quite different than I had imagined. The clarity I have, and the perspective given by years of experience, make me grateful for being blessed to do what I’ve done, and am doing, without ever having sold or being driven by anything but the music.

 

0

::TOO SOON TO TELL::

The Good Book Open

A recent checklist:

Have you locked in on who you were put here to be?

Are you accomplishing all that you were put here to accomplish?

How much longer is your life’s to-do list?

How’s that memoir coming?

Will your work projects pay off?

What will be written on your grave marker?

Will you have a grave marker?

Will your grands know how much you loved them?

Will you have made a difference in any positive way?

What is the one thing, if you had to choose, that you’d want to be remembered for?

How will your children carry on once you’re gone?

What will happen to your writing?

What will happen to your artwork?

What will happen to your design work?

Once you’re gone, will you even care about any of this?

Questions that, once posed, tend to send me into one of two places: a deep and thoughtful period, or a moment of ironic flippancy where I say, “Who cares about that? I can only handle ‘now’.”

And really, those questions generally pop up only when I’m down. And I’m down so seldom that I had to conjure to bring them up at all.

I keep my eyes on the horizon, and my heart in Gilead. My path is my testimony, marked by my feet, which I put one in front of the other each day.

It is a varied, and a beautiful life. Trouble? Yes, we see trouble all around us. But we are not the trouble itself. No one is. We are the very love we seek; we are the center and the stillpoint of this amazing planet. And what we focus on increases. Think about that.

So, as I look back on this list of questions I raise, I can quietly and with blessed assurance say,

“It is too soon to tell. But I’ve read the Book. I know how this ends.

“And it is beautiful.”

1

Blog at WordPress.com.

Up ↑