La Beaupré

Last week Martin and I paused on this slope again at Mont Sainte Anne.



Here's the original essay.

Uncle Walt Keeps the Gate

July 18, 2007

My Uncle Walt died last Tuesday, just a few weeks shy of his 92nd birthday. An extremely pious Roman Catholic, he considered my father’s older sister, Alene, his wife until the day he passed on – 32 years after she left a short note and skipped out of the house like a school girl.

He was a goofy kind of guy, but I always liked him. He played the guitar and sang; he wore moccasins; he liked to play catch. He was a terrible driver. He liked to swim in the lakes in our part of central New York and appreciated my mother’s willingness to swim with him when no one else would. He used Grecian Formula on his gray hair and everybody knew it.

But his outstanding characteristic was his profound devotion to the Church. He made his daughters say the rosary every night. As a small child I remember staying overnight at their house and reading comic books while they fingered their beads and murmured the prayers over and over. It was both extremely exotic (they were the only Catholics in our extended clan) and extremely boring. It seemed to last for hours and hours as I lay flopped on their living room davenport, as Aunt Alene always called the sofa, listening to the cadence of their voices and watching my two older cousins glance at their watches and one another.

Uncle Walt was exceedingly frail when I saw him last at my father’s funeral in 2000. As we sat with our baked ham and potato salad after Dad’s informal service on the side lawn of the family farm, Uncle Walt told me how he drove each Sunday to Syracuse (at least an hour’s drive) to hear the Latin mass. The thought of an 85 year-old Uncle Walt driving on the New York State Thruway was truly terrifying.

He died on Tuesday, the day Pope Benedict XVI released his statement which contends, in part, that Protestant denominations are no more than “Christian communities.” This reiteration of the “Dominus Iesus” declaration of 2000 and the news last week about the lifting of restrictions for the Latin mass may very well have been too much of a good thing for the old guy. He must have died a happy man. Things were finally swinging his way!

No one else in our family was religious, including another uncle who was an American Baptist minister. The rest of us were Protestants merely because we weren’t Catholic or Jewish or Zen Buddhist. So it’s funny that my most enduring childhood memory of spending time with Uncle Walt and Aunt Alene is of those Sundays when they dragged me to Mass and I had to sit alone while they went up for Communion. It was my first experience of exclusion.

“You’re part of our family for everything else. You can wear hand-me-downs from your cousins. You can drink milk from the special Mary Poppins cup. You can fall asleep on our laps after you’ve run around in the backyard and we’ll stoke the damp hair off your hot forehead. But at Mass on Sundays you can’t approach, much less partake of the body of Jesus. Nope, sorry. Not allowed. Stay in your seat and be a good girl. We’ll be right back.”

It seems we Christians…of virtually every stripe…are very good at being gatekeepers of Jesus. When we humans attempt, through sophisticated theological debate or literal scriptural interpretation or the occasional lively claim of divine revelation, to have the corner on the Jesus market, it scares me. I’ve been there and can’t forget the sucky way it made me feel. Implicit in the act of keeping the gate is the notion that the keeper has access to information and power and knowledge and secret handshakes that the rest of us don’t.

I’ve always been tickled by the practice – started in Mormon youth groups, I recall – of determining one’s actions by asking the question, “What would Jesus do?”

Here’s my answer: “I don’t know! I’m not Jesus!”

As a parent of two young teenagers, I’m beginning to realize there’s a day in the not-so-distant future when they are going to shake our hands and say (I hope), “thank you, lovely parents.” Then they will walk out that door. When confronted with the inevitable choices life will bring their way, I hope to God they don’t ask, “What would my Mom do?” I want them to do the right thing because it’s what they know they should do. I want them to remember how we’ve taught them to live and to how we’ve taught them to treat the people they encounter. If they have to pause to ask the question, then I fear for the answer.

Jesus, that savvy teacher, left us such good, simple instructions. If we heed them well and faithfully, we shouldn’t have to stop and think.

There has been a lot of interesting talk about open communion in these parts and I understand (most of) the conversation and appreciate the arguments on both sides. The recent posts reminded me of my college roommate reading aloud a letter from an old boyfriend who was an agnostic and fairly cynical about Christian faith. He wrote that he was attending an Episcopal Church and that he liked the ritual. He “relished” walking up the aisle and taking Communion.

“Eeeuuuwww,” we both said when she read that part. “That’s creepy.”

But now I’m not so sure. Maybe the mysterious act of taking communion was the start of something for that young man. Maybe, as the songwriter Bruce Cockburn sang a few years later, “spirits open to the thrust of grace.” Who am I to say?

But then again, maybe being shut off from something mysterious and holy, something I didn’t understand when I was seven or eight, maybe that fed my yearning for the things of God. Maybe I’m still pondering these things decades later because they weren’t just handed to me. Does it matter how the gift is given? Does it matter how it is received?

But not everyone is an asker of questions. God gifts some people with the different propensities. Some people are like my Uncle Walt whose passion for the Blessed Mother and the Roman Catholic Church was all consuming. His need to keep that gate in place was as clear to him as breathing.

What does the question-asker do with an Uncle Walt?

Seven years ago, at my father’s funeral, I balanced a chinet plate on my lap and listened to him tell me about the Nocturnal Adoration Society. The next day I prayed he wouldn’t kill anyone while driving to the Latin mass in Syracuse.

Then today, I sent some flowers.

Displacing the Blame

It all started when Jerry Hames decided to retire as the editor of Episcopal Life at the end of June. My friend Tracy Sukraw, editor of the Diocese of Massachusetts’ paper The Episcopal Times, and I wormed an invitation to his goodbye party in New York as the surprise guests. We figured a surprised and delighted Jerry Hames would be a marvelous sight to behold. And, you know, it was.

On the morning of, Tracy flew from Boston and I flew from Portland, Maine. We found each other and took the AirTrain (seven bucks from JFK to Manhattan!) to midtown. Because this was just a quick trip and we’d be walking around all day, we limited ourselves to one shoulder bag. Mine was stuffed, and I kept needing to take things out of it to get to what I wanted at the bottom. I sensed this was not a good way to live, but without a convenient place to drop our bags (we were spending the night way uptown), I had no choice. Perhaps that I would lose something was inevitable. But, as I discovered when I tried to start my car back at the Portland airport several days later, losing my key ring was truly unfortunate.

If Jerry Hames was less wonderful and if Tracy was less game, I would never have gone to New York last June and lost my all my keys…keys to both of our cars, keys to the Diocesan House, keys to the Genesis Fund and its post office box and the key to my mother-in-law’s house that I’m still afraid to tell her I lost. The only reason I didn’t lose the key to our house is because we never lock our doors. That small mercy compensates for hardly anything at all.

Three weeks ago when I arose at 4 a.m. to drive to Stittville, New York, (same state – different universe) to take my mother to the hospital for surgery, I jiggled my coat pocket to listen for my keys. Clang, clang they sounded and I figured I was good to go. At 5:30 a.m. when I inserted my car key into the ignition after a coffee run at the Kennebunkport rest stop, I thought, “Gee, this feels funny.” I turned on the light and discovered I was holding my husband’s key ring.

Rut-roe.

Because I had lost my key to his car in June, one of the keys splayed out on my palm was the only key to his car in existence. That his keys were in my coat pocket is an uninteresting story that involves impatience, laundry, and designated driving and I won’t bore you with it, but that doesn’t change the fact that I was on a trip of undetermined length with the only key to my beloved’s car in my possession. Actually, when I woke Scott up at 6:30, he took it well. He knows Jerry Hames and likes him very much, “It’s Jerry Hames’ fault,” I said into my cell phone somewhere on I-495.

“I don’t think so,” my car-less husband said.

Scott borrowed a friend’s car to take our son to school and I fed-exed the keys from the road.

So yesterday afternoon, when I couldn’t find my wallet in my mother’s hospital room in Utica, New York, I thought back to the moment earlier that day as I sat in my car in the parking garage. “Should I take my wallet into the hospital or lock it in the car?” I pondered a moment, consulting my wiser self. “Take it, because you need someplace to put the money you get back from the cafeteria.”

Ah, the wisdom of moi.

The previous evening my brother Brad, his girlfriend Lisa, and I were in the hospital dining room while they were working on our mom in the Intensive Care Unit. It had been quite a bad day with a worrisome close shave with the dreaded and invasive ventilator. Three weeks after surgery and we were back to the ICU. Brad hadn’t eaten and the cafeteria was closed for business, but you could buy sandwiches from a sort of automat machine. “Here, Sweetie,” I said, “I’ll buy you a sandwich. The turkey doesn’t look too bad.”

I put a ten in, retrieved the $2.25 sandwich, and waited for my $7.75…which didn’t come. The maintenance man patrolling the dining room told me to return the next day and the cafeteria people would refund my change. So that’s why I took my wallet into the hospital - because of the turkey sandwich situation. My wallet, it turns out, probably never made it past the parking garage. Later, I retraced my steps, talked with Security, poked through the garbage cans and finally left my name and number at the main desk. My mother had 20 bucks stashed away that I could use for tolls and I had a gas card in my glove compartment. I would make it back to Maine and I did.

Before I left the hospital, I called Scott at home. That morning we’d had a little tiff on the phone about some wet laundry I thought he should have noticed and put in the dryer without being prompted. “How do you walk past a basket of wet laundry a dozen times and not notice it?” I asked, befuddled.

“How was I supposed to know it was wet?” he cried.

From the parking garage I called to ask him to cancel our credit cards, I said, “Hi, it’s me. Please don’t be mad.” And when I told him what had happened, you know, he wasn’t.

Blame is a funny thing. As someone who has worked for the Church for a long time, I’ve seen a lot of blame passed back and forth. Anyone who follows the episcoblogs can’t escape the winding gyres of blame that circle each new development. I’ve always been pleased that I wrote an essay about which both Gene Robinson and Kendall Harmon seemed to agree.

The need to place blame is so human, so natural we’re hardly aware when we’re doing it.

Over the weekend I started reading Barbara Brown Taylor’s “Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith.” Though I still work for the diocese as a consultant, my family and I, once so involved in parish life, have kept our distance for the past few years. Scott was senior warden and chair of the last Search Committee. He played guitar at the family Eucharist every Sunday for years. Then suddenly something broke for us, and we’ve never quite been able to figure out what it was. We’ve visited other nearby churches, warm and welcoming all, but ultimately we believe in being involved in the community where we live. This is our church, but we feel removed from it and we’re stuck in a hard, sad place.

Taylor’s book is certainly told from a clergy point-of-view but, having lived the oxymoronic life as a “lay professional,” I understand her journey. The need to blame others for my lapse as a churchgoer is palpable. If only, if only. But ultimately I’m responsible for my own stuff. That’s what we’re trying so hard and so rigorously to impress upon our young teenage sons. You don’t like that grade in math? Oh…maybe you should try harder. You want an I-tunes gift card? Oh…maybe you should mow a neighbor’s yard.

But here’s the thing: I hate being responsible when it’s so comforting to blame others for bad things happening or good things not being done. On Saturday night if Brad hadn’t said, “Let’s go down to the dining room,” I never would have lost my wallet. In June, if Jerry Hames hadn’t retired, I never would have lost my keys in New York.

But here’s one more thing: Once you start owning up, it gets a lot easier. On Saturday morning, I stepped into my mother’s hospital room with a chocolate frosted donut as a peace offering. The word on the sibling street was that she blamed me for all the complications that had caused her to be back in the hospital instead of living independently in her own home. I had pushed her into a dangerous surgery and look what had happened.

But when I stepped to the threshold of her door, she held up her index finger to me, as though she were on an important phone call…but she wasn’t. She was in the midst of a very, very serious bout of congestive heart failure and had called for help. Nurses and respiratory therapists streamed into the room on either side of me.

Her struggle for breath was frightening. It reminded me of the brief days seven years before when my father was poised between this life and the next: the feeling that together we – he on one side and I on the other – were on the verge of something else, something unknown and slightly reckless. On Saturday my mother struggled for breath under the oxygen mask while we waited for a room in the ICU and for the three diuretics they had given her to kick in to relieve the fluid buildup in her lungs. I sat on her bed and sang all the old hymns I still knew by heart. She pulled off her mask and whispered, “Sing ‘How Great Thou Art’”, and I obliged the best I could.

If, as my siblings had warned me, she blamed me for pushing her into this awful, vulnerable place, she didn’t say it then. My mother held my hand and whispered, “I knew you’d come.”

Maybe I am to blame for the complications of my mother’s medical condition. Maybe we’re to blame for our restlessness with our congregation. Maybe we are all to blame for the current fracture of our church. But maybe blame doesn’t matter. Maybe blame is irrelevant to God. Maybe what’s important is simply showing up to church every Sunday and to every goodbye party we can manage whether we’re invited or not.

Maybe Jerry Hames isn’t to blame for my lost keys after all and maybe ten dollars isn’t too much to pay for my brother’s turkey sandwich.

Lost and Found by Faith - February 2005

Here is a list of things lost somewhere in our house right now:

• One Birkenstock sandal (right - mine)

• One U.S. Passport (mine)

• One L.L. Bean stainless steel soup thermos (Marty’s)

• One piece of driftwood (Colin’s)

• One Branford Marsalis CD (“I heard you twice the first time”)

• One black glove (left - mine)

• One video camera operator’s manual (last seen in Scott’s hand on Christmas morning)

Here is a list of things recently found

• One black Ann Taylor skirt (found wrinkled under a pillow on a chair in Marty’s room where he said he had stashed it one day a year or so ago when he was mad at me)

• One pair of black Merrills (Colin’s)

• One return address stamp (Scott’s)

• One camera battery charger (Scott’s)

Things come and go in our house all the time. If you were to spend two or three days here, you would eventually hear someone yell, to no one in particular, “Faith!”

You might think that some good soul was admonishing a fellow member of the family to have faith…to take heart… over some difficult or sorrowful task. But that wouldn’t be true. In our house the cry of “Faith!” means you can’t find something where it ought to be.

For about a year, between mid-2002 and mid-2003, our home was cleaned each week by a young woman named Faith. And before long, faith became a verb.

Linda, her predecessor, was a hard working single mom who had decided to get her real estate license and quit the cleaning business for good. I hated to lose her no-nonsense approach to our clutter but I was happy write a recommendation and see her move onto other things. After an unsuccessful attempt to obtain a slot on the cleaning schedule of the much-admired Patsy, someone referred me to Faith.

It was obvious from the first few weeks that Faith liked to organize a lot more than she liked to clean. Each Thursday I’d come home to find the stuffed animals on one of the boy’s beds arranged by color or size. Entertaining but a little weird. The dusty seashells on Colin’s windowsill might be set up in a mysterious tableau. Groupings of family photos might turn up on end tables in rooms where they hadn’t started out that morning. At first it was funny but then I realized that there were whole rooms that hadn’t been touched. I’d find a note that would say, “Sorry I couldn’t get to the upstairs.” Huh?

But then things began to take a more frustrating turn. On Halloween we were just about to leave the house to go trick or treating around the neighborhood.

“Go get the flashlights, Martin,” I called to Legolas, Elf Prince of the Woodland Realm, while I put the finishing touches on the Grim Reaper’s black eye make up. (That year, Colin knocked on people’s doors with his plastic scythe and, when they answered feigning fear, he said, “Don’t worry, I’m the Grim Reaper on vacation.”)

“I can’t find them,” Legolas replied from the cloak room.

“Use your excellent elvish eyesight.”

“I CAN’T FIND THEM,” he maintained. And no one else could either. Every single flashlight we owned, about six or eight of them, had disappeared from all their usual places.

“Faith!” I said, throwing up my arms. “They’ve been Faithed.” And we were forced to venture forth by the light of the moon.

A couple of weeks later I opened the cupboard in my office where we keep extra light bulbs and silver polish and ant traps and there were all the flashlights, lined up prettily by height.

“Faith.” I said.

Since then, whenever something disappears, it’s been “Faithed.” We know it will turn up eventually in a more logical place than where it was last seen, but that doesn’t really help a bunch of people who aren’t predisposed to order and organization.

After a year or so of rearranging our belongings each week, Faith said she had to quit because of difficulties finding child care for her daughter. From the few times I had been working at home while she was cleaning, I had come to know her story was much more complicated than that. “Godspeed, Faith,” we said, half-sad, half-relieved.

Soon after a berth on Patsy’s schedule came open and she’s been good-naturedly keeping us from spiraling into chaos ever since. She practices a kind of tough love. If the boys’ rooms or our offices aren’t picked-up enough for her, too bad. Better luck next week.

Occasionally it’s Patsy who puts things away where we aren’t expecting them to go, but we still yell “Faith!”

It’s an peculiar thing to have someone you don’t know well deal with all of the intimate details of your life. I cleaned houses at various times in high school and college and later as a hospice volunteer when that was what a family needed someone to do. For several months in 1989 cleaned the apartment of an elderly couple. Ethelma was dying of a brain tumor. At some point during my assignment to them and to everyone’s unhappiness, she lost her dentures. The loss of those dentures was a small thing that loomed hugely between Ethelma and her husband Ossie. He blamed her. She blamed herself. The missing dentures marked a shift in her ability to care for herself. They marked an expenditure of money that they could not afford in the midst of her illness. Their loss conjured up a other hundred issues that had accumulated over the 50 years of marriage.

The tiny kitchen in their apartment in the elder housing complex was often in need of cleaning. I mopped and scrubbed and washed the cupboards. It was something I could do for them, and they were appreciative. One day on the floor in front of the stove a stubborn bit of food needed to be pried away. As I got down on my hands and knees to tackle the gummy patch, I caught a glimpse of something under the stove. The dentures! I whooped it up and rounded the corner into their cramped living room. We all whooped it up. Ethelma’s eyes glowed with relief and happiness. Ossie said, “I don’t know how we can thank you!” as though I had just found buried treasure in with the pots and pans.

A few months later at Ethelma’s funeral, the minister, who obviously didn’t know her very well, went on about how the two of them shared a love for Milky Way bars. “Who cares?” I thought, looking at the back of Ossie’s head several rows in front of me and wondering what he was thinking. “Tell us something real about her, tell us something intimate.”

For a year or two after Ethelma’s death, Ossie would call me now and then to take me out to lunch. Then I got a more demanding job in Augusta and a few years after that we had our children. Slowly the Ossies in our life (there were several around that time…older friends for whom Scott would wire a cordless phone or we would share a meal or I would take the time to visit on a Saturday afternoon) drifted out of our orbit. Or we drifted out of theirs.

A month ago I read Ossie’s obituary in the paper. He was 98. He had moved away to live with his daughter further down the coast a number of years ago. He told me once he remembered clearly the day his father arrived home from work with news that the Titanic had sunk with great loss of life. He told me he was due to be discharged from the Army on Monday, December 8, 1941, the day after the attack on Pearl Harbor. He didn’t return to civilian life until after the end of the war.

I don’t know what they said at his funeral. By the time I read the paper, it was all over. I hope someone told something true about him. I wish I had been there to tell the denture story…the age-old story of something being lost and then suddenly being found and of great rejoicing that follows. It is the exact opposite of being “Faithed.”

Certainly I know I’ll rejoice when Patsy finds my passport.

Heidi Shott
Copyright © 2005 All rights reserved.

Cleaning the Fridge - December 2005

One Thursday morning in November 1992 I was cleaning out my refrigerator when ordinarily I would have been at work. The night before my friend Denise had called to ask what I was going to do until she picked me up at noon to take me to the hospital.

“I’m going to clean out my refrigerator because it really needs it,” I said. “It’s gross and I find that I can deal with the smell now.”

The previous day, during an ultrasound, Scott and I had discovered that the baby I was carrying had experienced something called fetal demise. No heartbeat. It had stopped growing a few weeks before but no one knew. I thought I was phasing out of morning sickness when I was really phasing out of pregnancy. Suddenly, after weeks of holding my breath every time I opened the refrigerator and closing it as quickly as possible, it didn’t smell so bad anymore. A small consolation.

Denise said, “Hmmphh.” I knew that meant she thought that cleaning the refrigerator didn’t seem a momentous enough activity for such a sad day but she could think of no reasonable argument to be made for not doing it. She’s a physician, after all, and reasonable arguments appeal to her.

“I already got up and wrote a poem in the middle of the night,” I said, “What more do you want?”

The following morning my countertops were covered in jars and containers and mummified leftovers in Tupperware when Denise called again. Earlier, while doing rounds at the hospital, she had spoken with the ob/gyn who would be doing the little clean up operation on me later that afternoon. She told the other doc, Nancy, that I was cleaning out my refrigerator. “Nancy says you must be a very strong person to be doing something so ordinary on a day like this.”

“Bullshit,” I said. “I’m just someone with a nasty refrigerator and some time on my hands, but don’t say anything. Please let her think I’m a together person.”

But in that moment began the slow dawning that there aren’t many saints among us. The people we revere most are simply human beings choosing from among the options laid out before them and then doing the work they’ve been given to do. Most of them would avoid the hard and unpleasant stuff given the chance. Most, like Melville’s Bartleby, “would prefer not to.” But the difference between saints and the rest of us is they do the hard things anyway.

Since that morning 13 years ago I’ve done a lot of things that I would have preferred not to do: Our baby fortune changed the following year so with twins I changed a lot of diapers from 1994 to 1997. I have stayed up many nights at my computer finishing up a newspaper. On a handful of occasions I’ve told the difficult truth to someone who needed to hear it. I’ve squirmed while apologizing for my bad behavior any number of times, and I’ve confronted people on their bad behavior when it would have been easier to just let it slide. I’ve sat through a lot of meetings, trying to resist tearing at the skin around my fingernails. I’ve volunteered for things I didn’t really want to do for people who’ve needed me to do them.

I’ve attributed doing all of these hard things to the cost of becoming a human being, the cost of becoming someone whose faith informs her choices and for whom making good choices means the difference between sleeping at night or lying awake. Oh that our president would suffer some nighttime angst, but I’ve read he sleeps like a baby.



On Wednesday, the day before Thanksgiving, I clean out my refrigerator. Different decade, different house, different refrigerator, practically same contents, except now you can buy those tasty little mozzarella balls in your deli section. I plan to do a really thorough cleaning with all the racks and drawers out and the inside washed down. When it’s empty, Marty and I break a universal taboo by taking turns stepping inside and closing the door. It’s cold in there and I forgot it would be dark. I always think of my food as being brightly illuminated. “Don’t ever do this again, son,” I say when he opens the door for me. “Scores of children die every year in closed refrigerators.”

I decide to clean out the refrigerator not only because 1) refrigerators should be cleaned out every six months whether they need it or not and 2) I need to make room for the holiday food but also because 3) I don’t want our Thanksgiving guests to see its appalling interior. Our friend Tracy is coming on the evening bus from Boston. You can hide the state of your refrigerator for an afternoon but not for an entire holiday weekend and I want Tracy to think I’m a together person though I suspect she knows the truth.

I also want my husband to think that I do things around the house. It somehow retains its cluttered look even after Patsy comes to clean. A gleaming fridge interior is an undeniable example of industry. It says, “Damn! I did some hard work on my day off. I didn’t just sit around and work Sudoku puzzles.”

There is also a part of me that wants to lead a simpler life and a simpler life means consolidating the four open jars of Mt. Olive “Petite Snack Crunchers” into two jars. And who ever heard of Mt. Olive pickles anyway? Who buys all these jars of pickles?

As I scan the vast contents of the fridge arrayed across the countertop, I see I have a lot of consolidating to do besides the petite snack crunchers: two jars of raspberry jam, two jars of capers, two bottles of Lea & Perrin’s steak sauce, two jars of kalamata olives (pitted), and, inexplicably, three open jars of Marie’s Italian garlic dressing. I dispatch to the recycling bin an empty jar of Guiltless Gourmet Spicy Black Bean Dip that Colin, our own sweet Bartleby, has absentmindedly put away and then chuck a woefully expired Yoplait hunkered down undetected way in the back.

When I finish and have put everything away in an organized fashion, I take pleasure in opening the door and viewing its clean, well-lighted contents. I have done one small hard thing, a month or so belatedly perhaps and for some spurious reasons, but one right thing nonetheless.

As I stand with the door open, Scott walks into the kitchen with some last minute purchases for the coming feast. As he wheels around me with his bags, I see the shock of a gleaming refrigerator register on his face.

“Looky there,” he says, sliding into his native West Virginian, “ain’t you just the teacher’s pet!”

Heidi Shott
Copyright © 2005 All rights reserved.

A Verger of the Heart - July 2005

From the middle of September, I’d been bypassing pumpkins all around Lincoln County. “There’s plenty of time until Halloween. I can’t stop right now,” I told myself repeatedly. My sons didn’t hound me because they took it as gospel that I, as their mother, would provide the requisite pumpkin in due time.

But, by the afternoon of October 31, the Halloween noose had really started to tighten. In September our son Martin began spending hours designing, building and decorating props to transform himself into an authentic elf from The Lord of the Rings. I had sewn a green tunic for him a week or so before but never got around to hemming it.

On that fateful day, while working away at my computer, I looked up and was alarmed to see that it was 1:30 p.m. No pumpkin, no finished tunic, no Halloween candy. I zoomed into Damariscotta to get four bags of candy at Hannafords with the remote hope that they would still have a respectable-looking pumpkin outside with the mums. No luck! The natural food store had a couple of white Brazilian pumpkins. Nope! Louis Doe’s was my last chance.

Louis Doe’s Home Center has everything. There on a shelf outside sat one pumpkin with a concave back and a slightly mushy stem. It tilted. I was desperate, but was I this desperate? Shaking my head in despair, my eye caught the front window display. There stood a tallish, well-shaped pumpkin. I walked in the store and was dismayed to see the windowsill completely blocked off by a new display of birdfeeders.

I found the ever-sympathetic Louis and explained my plight: “It’s Halloween; the school bus is coming; you have the last good pumpkin for sale in Lincoln County and, by God Louis, I need it.”

“No problem, ” he said and went to the counter and hovered while his wife Judy helped another customer.

“What is it, Louis?” She said without raising her eyes.

“Heidi here needs the pumpkin in the window,” he said, giving me a conspiratorial eyebrow before disappearing down the plumbing aisle.

When Judy finished up, I started my little grovel routine but she was already moving boxes to find a way to climb over the top of the birdfeeders. Before I knew it, she was handing the pumpkin over a mountain of merchandise. She climbed back though to safety and my profuse thanks that she waved away with her hand. “Anytime!” she said and was off.

At home I whipped out my sewing machine and began hacking excess material from the sleeves and hem of the elf tunic. As I egged the sewing machine on, feeling bad for my second-rate sewing, for my busyness, for my deficiencies as a mother, I realized something rather profound: That Martin, later in life, will regard this Halloween as the best ever—the high-water mark of childhood Halloweens.

Isn’t memory is a strange thing? Already, just a few weeks later, it doesn’t matter that I was rushed and forgetful of pumpkin-buying and costume-making. It got done and there was happiness all around.

Sometimes the journey is important in forming and informing us, but sometimes closure and completeness, the end result, matters most. I’ve always marveled at the words Jesus utters in John just before he is betrayed: “I have said this to you, so that in me you may have peace. In the world you face persecution. But take courage; I have conquered the world!” (John 16:31 NRSV). “I have conquered the world? Already? Maybe if the disciples had listened a bit closer to they would have saved themselves a lot of hand wringing later in the week.

“I have conquered the world!” What faith, what confidence, what assurance. It’s so not me. At least once a week I wake for a couple of hours in the middle of the night to toss and turn and worry about everything: children, husband, work, the next day’s schedule, all the things I should have done but didn’t, women who are, right that minute somewhere in the world, suffering abuse and whose children are frightened, animals who aren’t properly sheltered on a freezing night. It’s ridiculous, but it’s my 2 a.m. bad habit and I can’t seem to shake it.

What I need, what each of us needs I think, is vision like Jesus to see beyond our current worries and fears. Jesus declared himself a conqueror on the eve of what the world would call his utter defeat. Why do we need such a daily miracle of conversion? Why do we need to work through our muddles anew every single day?

Advent is a time to prepare the way for the Lord into our rocky and preoccupied hearts. These hearts of ours are cluttered with pumpkin worries and with children and grandmas who don’t do what we tell them to do and with a million different things many of which could be fixed if only we thought first to ask the Judy Doe’s in our lives. Perhaps we need a “verger of the heart,” after that ancient tradition of the guy with the stick clearing goats and children out the way for the priest to come along. But we don’t need this verger only at Advent and Lent. This is a full-time, year-round proposition. Our need for this verger is in our DNA because, I think, God created in us a great forgetfulness. Into our newly-verged hearts, God offers us just the grace we need lest we get too happy and forget to return for more.

May the Great Verger whack your pumpkins with gusto.

Heidi Shott
Copyright © 2005 All rights reserved.

Big League Little League - May 2005

Not that Maine ever has had much to brag about when it comes to springtime, but this spring has been really awful. The tulips are just now in bloom. The thermometer has broken 60 degrees only a handful of times. We joke that Maine is the only state where March lasts 90 days. It’s not funny, but rather the rueful humor employed by people behind the Iron Curtain for decades. We’re behind the Frigid Curtain and it’s beginning to wear on our nerves.

While I would prefer to stay inside on these bone-chilling, drizzly days, it can’t be done: it’s Little League season. On Monday, after a day of rain, my son Marty’s game is switched to the drier high school girl’s softball field just a few miles from home. With the grass wet and without a folding chair, I sit on the cold metal bleachers with the families of the opposing team.

There’s a lot of talk in America that because of television and mass media we are losing our regional accents and colloquialisms. On the coast of Maine, it just ain’t so. Sitting with a bunch of Little League fans from Bristol, a small town at the end of the Pemaquid peninsula, I can confirm that the Maine accent is alive and well with the younger generation as well as the old salts. Ayuh. I suspect the traces of my Mohawk Valley accent are less bothersome than the fact that I’m cheering for the Rotary team rather than the Lions Club.

I’m watching our boys now up at bat. My son is on deck and making practice swings. As he steps up to the plate, I watch him from behind. At eleven he is well-built and the only boy on the team to wear his hair long – the fashion in his school but not the school where most of his teammates and his twin brother attend. As he settles into his batting stance, his uniform outlines his broadening shoulders and his cute rear end? I have rubbed those shoulders and swatted that behind a million times. How did our dear boy get so big?

When he strikes out, I see his disappointment from the distance, his head down, his shoulders sunk. But then I see him smile at something the batting coach says to him as he steps into the dugout. If this kind of disappointment had happened about something at home, he would be furious and sulky and likely to slam a door.

Suddenly two things occur to me: 1) Little League is teaching this boy something that his Dad and I can’t and 2) I’m absolutely freezing. I march through the wet grass to my van and drive the two miles home to get a coat, gloves, and blanket. My husband Scott and our son Colin have just finished Colin’s homework at the kitchen table and have made their way upstairs. “I’m going back to the game,” I call and stop in the kitchen to pour myself a warming shot of frozen vodka. I need all the help I can get.

Back at the game, I stand, wrapped in my blanket, on friendlier ground among other moms from our team who wisely brought chairs. We cheer, encourage, moan and talk about summer plans. But, as each boy gets up to bat, I wonder, What is he learning here? How will this shape him? Who is he and what kind of person will he grow up to become?

Marty is up again and this time I can see his face. With the first pitch he swings and misses. “Good swing, Marty. Good try,” his coach calls. He lets a ball go by, “Good eye, Marty, good eye, Baby,” an older man at the fence, the batting coach, encourages. But ultimately he strikes out again and I watch those eyes I know so well. Disappointed, but not mad. This is progress, I think happily, and it has nothing whatsoever to do with me.

Last weekend, after having been away from home for five Saturdays in a row, I had a bit of a lie-in. Scott made breakfast and let me be. I was reading a magazine about ten when Marty crawled in bed with me to say hello. As we were talking about something that I can’t now remember, I said. “Go get that yearbook on the windowsill under those books.” (About two years ago I dug my ninth grade yearbook from a box in the attic to settle some internal dispute with myself about a classmate’s name and it has sat on my bedroom windowsill ever since.)

“Why’s it called the Hollander?” he asked.

“Because our school was in Holland Patent, New York.”

“1977, that’s a long time ago.”

“This is me in grade nine, Baby, this is me in grade nine,” I said, stealing a line from a Barenaked Ladies song we both like.

I flipped to a caricature a senior boy had drawn of me on the flyleaf. He had nailed my Jay Leno-like chin perfectly and written some disparaging but funny comments about a girl in his class who annoyed everybody.

Marty was very interested the yearbook, and I smiled to recall a boy from my class who always addressed his yearbook comments “To So-and-So’s kids” because he said the person’s children were the only ones who would ever look at these yearbooks in the future. That boy once asked me to a dance and I turned him down because he wasn’t very cool. Now I realized he was probably extremely cool but I was too dumb to see it.

As Marty looked at all the photos and I oohed and ahhed over various people, I realized that at the time these photos were taken, almost 30 years ago, there was no way for us to know what would become of us. There was no way to know how this experience of going to a small, rural high school would shape us.

“There’s Nora on the volleyball team,” I said. “She’s a Senior VP at Hewlett-Packard and runs a two billion dollar division of the company.” I pointed to a skinny kid in a loose basketball uniform. “There’s Ronnie. He’s just moved from commanding a surface vessel in the Navy and is working with the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He’s a major mucky-muck.” (I also saw photos of four great people who are on the heidoville list: my oldest friend Carol, now a nurse in Saipan, in an awful long dress I lent her for the spring choral concert; Alan, a poet/librarian in Texas, with his jacket slung casually over his shoulder in his senior portrait; John, a cartoonist here in Maine, at his drum set with the band teacher coaching him; and Mrs. Klossner, my ninth-grade English teacher, who still lives not too far from Holland Patent.)

But more than the familiar faces, whose whereabouts I can name, are all the other faces I can barely place. What happened to them? Are they happy? Are they accomplished? How did our common experience shape them?

I remembered when Carol dragged me to our 20th high school reunion five years ago. The organizers had played a mean trick by putting our senior photos on name tags instead of names. I came upon this guy whose lapel was covering his photo and said sheepishly, “I know I know you, but please help me out.” He grinned and said his name. I blanched. He was one of the most popular, good-looking athletes in our school, and I’d known him since fourth grade.”

“Oh, geez, Jim. I’m sorry I didn’t recognize you.” He had a bit of a tummy and had lost some hair. We shook hands and began to catch up. A few minutes later, Carol, walked up to us and immediately said in her warm, big-hearted way, “Oh Jim, how good to see you!” Gratefully he reached out and gave her a big hug and kiss. I could have smacked her.

Back in bed, I stole a glance at Marty’s bemused face as we came upon a photo of me in the yearbook: bad haircut, big plastic glasses, hopeful look. He laughed hysterically. “Look at you,” he howled, thrashing with delight.

“You should see Daddy’s ninth grade picture,” I said trying to deflect the criticism by betraying my poor husband.

“Dad not Daddy, Mom,” he stopped laughing to look at me with exasperation. “Please, we’re not babies anymore.”


Just last night, I lay down with Martin in his bed to talk about today’s schedule: He gets a ride to jazz band practice after school, then his Dad picks him up and they go onto a ball game in South Bristol. I take Colin to horseback riding and meet them at the game. It’s supposed to be a beautiful day, maybe even hit 70 degrees.

“I’ll leave your uniform on my desk chair so you can change as soon as you get home from jazz band,” I say. Only the hall light shines in on us, and he is allowing me to lay my cheek on his blond head.

“What are you going to write about tomorrow?” he asks.

“Little league,” I say, surprised and touched by his interest in my little project.

“What about it?”

“About how it’s teaching things I can’t teach you -- like how you need to keep practicing and swinging hard even if you don’t connect with the ball. About how if you get mad for not hitting well and you give up, you won’t be prepared to whack it when you get a good pitch.”

“This goes beyond baseball doesn’t it?” he says, lifting up his head an inch.

I smile at him in the darkness and reply with my best Maine accent, “Ain’t you some smart?”

Heidi Shott
Copyright © 2005 All rights reserved.

Nothing to Fear - May 2005

Late in the evening the two of us sat on the steps away from the rest of the guests, Grace’s wedding dress absorbing all the empty nooks between us and around us in the narrow space of the stairway. It was cozy and nice to have my beautiful niece drag me off to a quiet place on her big day.

“Do you know why I was late for the wedding?” she asked, her fingers fiddling with the folds of her dress. I could tell she wanted a cigarette. Shaking my head, I leaned in close. “I had an absolute panic attack. I couldn’t move. It wasn’t about marrying Ro, it was about everything in the whole world.”

As Tolstoy writes at the beginning of Anna Karenina, every happy family is the same but every unhappy family is unhappy for its own reasons. For my brother’s family things began to unravel with the air traffic controllers’ strike in 1981. When Grace was two and her sister and brother were five and six, my brother left his family and moved to Alaska. But miraculously his children, all in their twenties now, are doing well and still want him to be a part of their lives. Earlier that day, contrary to what everyone in all branches of the family had expected, my brother walked Grace down the aisle. When she finally arrived at the church, that is.

So Grace and I talked on the stairs while my husband hung out with the menfolk on the porch, the early summer breeze off the finger lakes stroking the trees and blades of grass in the park. Inside our sons, at their first wedding reception that went past their bedtime, were horsing around on the dance floor with their new-found friends.

We talked about how a nameless anxiety needs a place in our hearts to light upon. We talked about her meds and therapy. We talked about the many parts of your life a momentous event like a wedding dredges up, all of your various worlds are represented whether they have anything to do with one another or not. I told her about a puzzling photo taken at our wedding reception in 1985: my sister’s husband, a physical plant guy at a hospital in Utica, New York, is shown talking to my father-in-law’s old friend, a high-powered investment banker on Wall Street. They seem to be deeply absorbed in conversation. Over the years, as Scott and I have looked at that photo in our album, one of us always says to the other, “What in the hell were they talking about?”

For Grace and Ro, a wonderful young man who was born in India but grew up in the States where his father served in the diplomatic corps, this mixing of worlds was more than just puzzling. With careful attention to seating arrangements there was Ro’s family from India; the tiny contingent of Grace’s father’s family, i.e. my brother, my husband, our two sons and me; the huge, generous but protective family of her mother -- most of whose members my brother and I hadn’t seen in more than 20 years; and the couple’s own school friends and current friends. No wonder she was terrified. It wasn’t just putting her father and mother in the same room for the first time in many years, it was absolutely everything.

After Grace’s wedding last June, I picked up Small Wonder, a book of essays that Barbara Kingsolver began to write after September 11th. (I’ll have you all know that there was no small amount of time spent burrowing under my bed with near fatal dust inhalation in order to find that book for this essay.) I was astounded by the first paragraph of her foreword:

“I learned a surprising thing in writing this book. It is possible to move away from vast, unbearable pain by delving into it deeper and deeper – by “diving into the wreck,” to borrow the perfect words from Adrienne Rich. You can look at all the parts of a terrible thing until you see that they’re assemblies of smaller parts, all of which you can name, and some of which you can heal or alter, and finally the terror that seemed unbearable becomes manageable. I suppose what I am describing is the process of grief.”

How I wish I had read that paragraph one week before so I could have whispered it in Grace’s ear on those steps. “This is grief you’re feeling, Sweetie. It’s loss. It’s the regret and grieving for all the ‘what ifs’ and ‘what might have beens’ of your 24 years. You are a strong survivor but you can be stronger yet. You have real things to grieve but nothing, nothing to fear.”

I’m reminded of this moment because I just finished a novel by James Carroll titled Secret Father. It’s about three teenagers from an American school in Germany who cross over into East Berlin in the spring of 1961 just before the wall goes up. It’s told in turns by the father of one of the children and his son. As I read the last line of the book, “I had to look away,” I recalled that the father had written the same line earlier in the book. I spend a good deal of time when I should have been attending to other things trying to track down that earlier iteration. Finally I found it. What the father character, Paul Montgomery, looked away from was spoken by the mother of one of the other teenagers, a German woman who had suffered greatly during the war: “Fear, Mr. Montgomery, can be an expression of grief.” Oh my. How ideas do pile upon us.

The week before Mother’s Day, I engaged in several telephone battles with my 82 year-old mother in upstate New York. A few months before she had promised she would drive to Maine to hear our son Marty play alto sax in a jazz concert. On Monday, she called to say she had a doctor’s appointment rescheduled for Friday and couldn’t come. She felt fine but didn’t want to inconvenience the doctor. I told that a regular check-up should not stand in her way of doing something she wanted to do. “Break the trip up into two days. Spend the night in Springfield, Mass.” I told her. I told her she had to come and laid the grandchild disappointment on thick.

“Okay,” she agreed. “I guess I can do that.”

“Right you are, Mom!” I said brightly. “Gotta go now. See you on Thursday.”

On Wednesday she called again. “I can’t come,” she said. “I feel nervous about the drive. I’m happy here reading and playing the piano and I can get around so well. I’m not scared. I just feel funny.”

“Anxious?” I asked twirling the phone cord impatiently.

“No, funny.”

“Okay, whatever. Marty will be disappointed.”

“Tell him that I love him and I’m sorry.”

“Okay, Mom. Do what you need to do.”

“Will you still come out in June?” she asked.

“Yes, of course.”

I went back to my desk, steamed and frustrated. How big of a goddam deal is it to get in a car and drive a route she’s driven dozens of times? I hate that she is anxious and fearful. But then suddenly I was able to name it. I wasn’t mad at my real mother, I was mad that my real mother wasn’t my script mother. For years I’ve recognized that I’ve always wanted my parents to be different people than they really are or, in my Dad’s case, were. I don’t want a fearful mother. I want a strong mother. I didn’t want a foolhardy father, I wanted a wise father. Sometimes it’s been enough to remember that they’ve loved me and supported me greatly, but other times the ‘what ifs’ and ‘what might have beens’ overwhelm me.

But until I sat at my desk, here where I’m writing this just now, I’d never thought about my parents’ fears and anxieties, their own ‘what might have beens’ and the constant play, throughout the years, of the congenital worry gene as it courses through our veins – to each generation.

Just yesterday I walked down to the mill pond and lay flat on the sun-warmed dock. The spring current is swift down to the dam. I put my hand in and found the water shockingly cold. A bald eagle flew low overhead to its nest on the far side of the lake. I felt, for that moment, that I had nothing to fear.

Before long, I thought, we will set out the fake Adirondack chairs. After work we will sit in them, drink Coronas with lime and judge the kids’ jumps and dives off the dock. “Come in! Come in! Come swimming!” they’ll call to us. “The water’s great!”

Their script parents would already be out there frolicking with them, but their real parents are comfortable and lazy. “Come on!” they'll call, ever hopeful.

And this time, this moment, I’ll try, try, try to say, “Okay, okay, hold your horses, let us go get our suits on.”

Copyright © 2005 All rights reserved.

To My Favorite Aunt on Mother's Day

Every spring as they pull Easter cards from their racks, shopkeepers begin to stock Mother’s Day cards. As in any mass market, the product mirrors the people it targets: there are cards for young mothers, for old mothers, for grandmothers, for funny mothers, for religious mothers. There is also a measly category for "a Favorite Aunt on Mother’s Day." Here the greeting card industry lacks a certain creative spark.

Having grown up in an era when the extended family was said to be on the decline, I am glad to have been surrounded by lots of nosy aunts and uncles. My father's older sister, Elizabeth, whom we kids call Deedee, lived for many years on the family farm as a single lady secretary. She sold the farm to my parents about 30 years ago, and settled down just a few hundred yards away.

From the time I could cross the road alone, I got off the school bus and walked the gravel road to Deed’s house, banged on the always locked screen door, and went inside to eat something. She saved me leftovers in tiny containers, and I ate her buttered green peas or mashed potatoes cold, sometimes with mustard, to horrify her. Often she sat down with me, and we would rehash our respective days with candor and ease.

Over the years Deedee taught me important things that my funny, affectionate mother did not. While Mom taught me cribbage and bridge, Deed taught me how to iron a shirt properly, how to polish silver, to take butter from the end of the stick already sliced, and a hundred different things that guide my daily comings and goings.

Often she went way above the call of familial duty. One winter when the snow was of the proper crunch and she must have been pushing 60, she helped me build a snow fort. I can still see her hunkering down in the snow pretending to duck my snowballs. Before a trip, her house was the last stop to claim the envelope formally marked with my full name and "Mad Money" beneath it in her spidery handwriting. As I grew older, hers was always a dependable check cashing institution. And once, when my husband and I were teachers overseas, I called her collect during a wave of homesickness. We rang up a $120 phone bill, but we had a lot to say.

Now we talk about once a week. I don't go home anymore because the tremendous maples along the road by the farm have all come down in recent years and I can't bear it. So Deedee comes to visit me and covertly does my ironing. We talk late into the night, and she makes surprising revelations: how she was a bayonet inspector during the war at a farm equipment factory turned munitions plant, and how as a young woman she was home cleaning when she should have been out kicking up her heels. She brings me small family treasures like dainty needlework doilies my grandmother made and the lovely old coffee grinder brought over from Switzerland at the turn of the century.

Is this all sentimental? Probably. But it's true and full of startling amounts love and grace and kindness that I can never repay.

Once when I was about seven, I sat on Deedee's red-carpeted stairs and through the spindles looked at myself in the hall mirror while she carefully combed back my sorry, wild hair. "This is how I would do your hair if you were my little girl," she said, standing several steps below me so that our eyes met in the mirror. What I guess neither of us knew then is that I've always been her girl, and I can't find a card to tell her that.

[This essay was originally published in May 1990 as an occasional piece in the newspaper I was working for at the time. I clipped it and sent it to Deedee. She called, said she liked it and no more was ever said. Eight years later, after she died suddenly of a heart attack, I found it yellowed and creased in her wallet. I read it at her funeral a few days later. I guess a card wasn't necessary after all.]

My aunts, Alice and Deedee, shelling peas on the front porch
at the family farm one summer afternoon during the war

Heidi Shott
Copyright © 2005 All rights reserved.

Closer to Daybreak - February 2005

(one of my personal favs)

In my dream we were sitting around the table in a staff meeting at the diocesan office. A colleague announced that someone had discovered five snakes in the basement of the building. The Bishop turned to me in her empathic way that suggests she knows she's asking something difficult but that she feels you're up to it, and said, "Heidi, will you take care of that?"

I gulped and tried to muster the courage to say, "I'm the wrong person for the job."

"Mom?" I recognize this voice. Colin, my son, my love, my beautiful child. Many times over the years I've chosen to ignore this nighttime voice. If I do that, I know it will return in five minutes just as plaintive. The sooner I answer, the sooner we'll both get back to sleep.

I throw off the covers and stand up. Scott turns onto his back, breathing loudly -- the Breathe Rite Strips he has so much faith in doing a poor job of it. I walk down the dark hall into Marty's room. Colin is on a mattress on the floor. Since he's been sleeping in his brother's room he hasn't been wakeful, so I'm a little pissed at this beckoning but also a little relieved to be sprung from snake retrieval duty.

"What, Col?" I ask.

"Bad dream," he says.

"It's almost daybreak," I lie. "It'll be light soon. Go back to sleep."

"Okay."

Back in bed I press the light on my travel alarm to read "3:35." Compared to the time between the building of the Egyptian pyramids and now, it IS almost daybreak. I close my eyes and wait for the other shoe to drop. A few minutes pass.

"Mom?"

Back in the bedroom I lay down crossways at the foot of his mattress and say nothing.

"Don't talk," he says. "I don't want to wake up Martin." A moment passes. "Thanks." We settle down. A minute later he tosses a spare pillow my way. He has his tempur-pedic pillow that he blew his whole wad of Christmas and Birthday money on at Brookstone.

We settle down again, but after 15 minutes I begin to get cold and restless with my legs hanging off the side. He knows I'm about to leave.

"I'm getting cold," I say.

"You can climb in with me."

"Colin." He knows I'm trying to be patient.

"It would mean a lot to me," he says. "It would give you an opportunity to spend time with your son."

At this I smile and climb under the covers with him. It is very warm. He's like a little furnace. He offers me a corner of his tempur-pedic, a remarkable gesture.

We settle down and I begin to think about all the people I know who have probably been wakeful this night: Our godson, Lucas, a two-year old who has a standing 4 a.m. date with his parents in their bed; my mother, Audrey, in Louisiana visiting friends, no doubt listening to the radio turned down low and dozing; our friend Tom across the river in Damariscotta is a light sleeper and five-year old daughter Jenny knows it.

I have other friends who are wakeful people: one watches C-Span, another surfs the TV for late-night episodes of Jeopardy. Scott is often wakeful for a few hours at night. Sometimes I wake to see a flat place on his side and know he's playing gin rummy on the computer in his office. When I am wakeful, I go down to the couch on the porch with my book and fall asleep just as the sky begins to brighten.

I find comfort in these thoughts of others in the same boat, but it doesn't help me sleep--no matter how cozy it is here with Colin. From his twitchiness, I can tell he isn't asleep either.

"I'm going back to bed, Dude." I say with a sigh. "I'll put your sweet dreams blanket over you. That will help."

This blanket used to contain magic. It is one of two wonderful, heavy-duty quilts made for the boys before their birth by our friend Joanne. When they would wake in the night, I'd go to their room and say, "Oh look! Your sweet dream blanket came off. I'll just re-adjust it and everything will be all right." And it always worked. In recent years the quilts have lost some of their magic in the daytime, but at night they regain a measure of their old power to protect the children in my absence.

I climb back into my own bed. It's grown cold and Scott is far away across the king-sized expanse. I try to find a comfortable position and begin to pray. I recall a line from Psalms that says, "The angel of the Lord encamps round about them." I pray that angels of the Lord will encamp around the four corners of Colin's mattress, of Marty's bed, of our bed, of the beds of everyone we care for, of the bed's of everyone we don't know, of the beds of everyone in the whole universe. In the cadence of this ever-expanding prayer, it is impossible to remain awake.

When I was cleaning out my desk recently, I found a yellow sticky note on which I had written, "Don't worry about the world ending today. It's already tomorrow in Australia." There's something reassuring about knowing that somewhere the worries and terrors of the night have been pierced by the light of day, even if it is not where I am. There's something comforting about knowing that someone will come when you call and lie at the foot of your bed and say nothing. There's something sweet about knowing that you're the one who can do that for another human being: a child, a friend, a lover, a parent, and even, sometimes when you're listening closely enough, a stranger.

Just before I drift off, I think that perhaps I will leave a deck of cards at the head and foot of Colin's mattress tomorrow night. The angels at the four corners of his bed must get bored and might appreciate the chance to play a little late-night gin rummy. I gaze at the clock again and through the fuzz of near-sightedness, see that it is 4:45.

It's still not daybreak, but it's closer.

the sweet dream quilts made with love by Joanne Rawlings-Sekunda

Copyright © 2005 All rights reserved.

Chasing the Sun - January 2005

The sun was a hotter pink than any outfit ever worn in the seventies.

On Monday I am doing the usual weekday thing: drive around to pick up a kid and bring him home while wondering what to do for dinner that would appear to have been planned all along. I’m tooling south on Route One in the dismal January late afternoon light, a faint pink twinge reflecting in the clouds. Suddenly, through the trees ahead, I catch a glimpse of an enormous hot pink sun on the horizon. It’s weirdly large and weirdly pink, and I expect that if I turn on the radio I could only tune into the soundtrack of “Gone with the Wind.” Then a slight bend in the road and it’s gone. “Damn! I want it back.”

I step on the gas as though this will make a difference. In the past I’ve been cheated out of good sunsets by not arriving at the Wiscasset bridge in time for the sky to the southwest to open up fully to my view across the Sheepscot River. The most glorious seconds will have been lost to the quickly fading sky. But I’m not going as far as Wiscasset today so it’s probably hopeless anyway. I’m turning south toward Boothbay and woods line the road all the way.

Oh well, I should be grateful for my brief thrill. But as I approach my son’s school, a meadow opens up and there it is, slightly obscured by the trees that line the river. I slow down and take it in. Too big and too pink to be allowed, the sun seems to hover on the edge of the hills beyond Wiscasset for a moment. I used to be a pastel person, but I’ve changed. I used to be embarrassed by expressionistic color and Keats and Wordsworth and Beethoven and Tchaikovsky. But I’m not anymore and I don’t know why except that life is now a little more interesting and reckless.

The surprise of that outrageous sun has made me feel plucky and alive in a way I don’t expect to feel in January in Maine. There’s an audacity about this sun that awakens something in me that is most often stirred on vacations to warm places where we watch the sunset with a rum drink in hand and dinner reservations in the offing. Maine is a place of understatement and subdued choices of trim paint. It’s a place where it’s socially acceptable to wear bean boots just about anywhere if the weather calls for it. People understand.

I remember reading a comment from the survey given to Maine Episcopalians when they were choosing their next bishop several years ago. Someone wrote of his hopes for the next leader, “Bean boots on your feet and a shovel in your trunk are more important than a cope and a mitre.” That made me laugh out loud. That’s us.

I am picking up my son Marty at school. He has just started rehearsing for a musical called “Footloose.” I recall that it’s about a young man who moves to a new, uptight community and shakes everything up with his dancing. I think of that and realize that the sun and my pursuit of it makes me feel just that way: footloose, kick-ass, young!

Last Sunday we had a marvelous day. Breakfast at Moody’s Diner, that Route One institution, then skiing and tubing at the Camden Snow Bowl. Even though Camden is 45 minutes from home, we bumped into 12 people we knew. Afterward we drove into Camden for an early supper at Cappy’s Chowder House. (Just down the street from the Camden Deli where, in October at a diocesan lunch meeting, I spotted not one but two Pulitzer Prize winners in the span of 15 minutes: David McCullough and Richard Russo. Yee!)

As we parked and walked up Bayview Street to Cappy’s, we passed a bar tucked down a little alleyway.

“Dad and I went dancing there a long time ago before you boys were born,” I said.

“That we did,” said Scott merrily.

The boys had been throwing snowballs at each other but now looked back at us like we had lobsters growing out of our ears.

“You two went dancing?” I realized that, except for my niece Grace’s wedding last summer and the occasional messing around in the living room, they’ve never seen us dance.

“It’s not pretty, but it’s something we can do when the need arises,” I offered.

Right now, on Thursday evening, Marty is doing his homework at the kitchen table listening to the soundtrack of “Footloose” as I write in my office/laundry room around the corner.

I’ve got to admit, it makes me want to get up and dance. Just now he switches from the stage production CD to a CD Scott made a number of years ago called, “Dance Tunes.” Kenny Loggins version of “Footloose” is the first song. “Let’s listen to a professional do it,” he says to no one in particular. And the music comes on. It’s too much for me. I stand up, go to the porch off the kitchen and move the mini-trampoline out of the way.

Until recently I could have pulled him to his feet to fool around with me, but now he’s eleven. Maybe in another 15 years he’ll be ready to dance with his mother again. I don’t care. This is too much fun. “Footloose” moves to “Knock on Wood” to Aretha’s “Who’s Zooming Who?” to Stevie Ray Vaughn’s “When the House is a Rockin”. I’m willing to risk being heckled by my kid for all the fun I’m having. I get overheated and whip off my fleece and laugh to find I’m wearing my t-shirt with the Diocese of Maine seal. Somehow that’s funny.

“Mom, what are you doing?” Marty howls from the couch, laughing. “You’re 43!”

“So what?” I say.

“Mom! You’re not 43, you’re 42! Don’t you even know how old you are?”

“I forgot!” and try to pull him up. “Why don’t you go get that Bruce Springteen CD I bought you for Christmas?” I say, doing the twist like my mama taught me long before she needed her hip replacement.

His twin brother comes into the kitchen with a concerned look on his face. But Colin sees we’re having fun and is still game enough to join in if I promise him 20 more minutes playing “Age of Empires” on the computer. Just then Scott comes in from work and looks at me quizzically as if to say, “I’ve known you for almost 25 years. I love you. Nothing you do will ever surprise me.”

He says over Robert Palmer’s, “Simply Irresistible:”

“You’re dancing.”

“Yes,” I say. He smiles, plays a little air guitar and then wanders away.

This is better than a sunset.

And suddenly I know I can name what I am feeling. It’s joy.

Footloose. It’s hard to remember to be that way with all the pressing concerns of our lives: meetings and deadlines and dentist appointments. But occasionally, unexpectedly, a burst of color invades our lives in mid-winter and the best thing to do is to step on the gas, to do anything to catch another glimpse before it ducks under the horizon.

Copyright © 2005 All rights reserved.

The Color Wheel - December 2004

When I was small my parents had a light wheel that would shine red blue yellow red blue yellow over our stylish aluminum tree and the living room ceiling. The whole extended family that included my father and his six siblings always spent Christmas Eve at Uncle Ray’s and after we arrived home I would lie on the floor and gaze at the tree, all the presents, the ceiling. It was a peaceful, glad time in the midst of a chaotic, disheveled family. Within a few days we would be in Florida visiting my mother’s mother and Mom would have bummed the 20 dollar bill Uncle Ray had given me in a Christmas envelope.

That light wheel is long gone, but, to my delight, a several years ago my Aunt Deedee dug a similar one out of some cavern in her basement and gifted me with it like it was a holy family relic. And I am glad. My boys love it; Scott scorns it and deems it a fire hazard. I prefer to turn it on when the children are in bed. I lie on the couch and allow the past to visit me, which isn’t the least bit like remembering.

The same unbiddible fullness found me a few days ago when I felt compelled to make Christmas cookies. The boys and I had made the dough. It had chilled overnight for several days and there was nothing for it. It had to be done. We made one batch before dinner but I had to finish. I had already pulled out the little recipe booklet that Deedee complied for me just before the boys were born. Some recipe cards were typed, some were clipped, and some were in Deedee’s or Aunt Alice’s hand. It is always poignant to see their handwriting: Deed’s slanting… “Candy Cane Cookies” or Alice’s script just short of a tremor “Swedish Nut Balls”… But as I began making the little balls for Alice’s thumbprint cookies that “mixture of memory and desire” as T.S. Eliot described it, washed over me. I thought of the annual plates of mixed Christmas cookies that the three sisters, Deedee, Alene, and Alice, would miraculously produce each year for each family…Those little molassesy guys with the kiss in the middle, the powdery nut balls, and candy canes, the sand tarts, and ginger boys…the sugary bells and trees with the hard, little, silver cannonballs. I realize now that it was a Stukey-woman competition. My mom, a modern, Midwesterner, who has always thought that there aren’t many dishes that a little Lipton’s Onion Soup Mix couldn’t improve, never felt compelled to play.

As I rolled the sticky dough for sand tarts (with two almond slivers stuck in the middle) and scrutinized Deedee’s handwriting for clues to what she had written, I felt grateful for what we had in our extended family – as nosy, meddling, and financially interwoven as my father and his siblings all were in their grown-up lives. Only the fourth child, my Aunt Alene, who is still a feisty though failing 89, remains.

I feel grateful. So many people I know don’t have recipes and they grew up in neighborhoods with no extended family around. I grew up within walking distance of four houses where I was always welcomed unannounced at the dinner table. It’s only now that I have my children that I realize how rare that was and how rare is certainly is today. Most members of my family are nutty as fruitcakes, and not always in a charming, innocuous, way, but they’re mine and I’m theirs and it doesn’t pay to pretend it’s not true.

Today, Christmas Eve, is a busy day. My in-laws have already been here for brunch, our dear, dear friends the Soucy/Steinbergers and the Zoller/Richardsons are coming for an evening of grazing, scrabble, pinball(!), and non-stop talking between early church and late church. This afternoon Scott and I are still wrapping presents and our sons are, much to my shame, watching back-to-back episodes of Gilligan’s Island we ordered from netflix.

But when everyone leaves tonight, I suspect the non-UL approved color wheel and I will have a little communion in the living room in front of the tree…and I know that for a little while I’ll remember what it feels like to be a Stukey from Stittville. And I think it’s safe to predict that some thumbprint cookies will be eaten and a little wine consumed.

Merry Christmas, friends. Thanks for trusting me with this Friday thing.

Copyright © 2004 All rights reserved.

The Magic of Pinball - December 2004

Back in March my boys and I were struggling with what to get my husband for his birthday. He’s a guy who’s happiest when he has some problem to solve, some nut to crack, some bit of business to perseverate on. So we made arrangements to visit Mike Knudsen’s basement.

Mike Knudsen is a fascinating guy with a wide range of interests: writing and playing music, collecting and repairing antique musicmakers, old radios, early electronics and more I probably don’t know about. In his basement he has a dozen pinball machines in various stages of repair. So one Saturday morning the boys and I drove over to test-drive the games while enjoying the tunes from his terrific old jukebox filled with classic rock and roll 45s. We had a great time bouncing from pinball to pinball all built between the 1940s and the1980s. We took digital photos to show Scott so he could choose the one he wanted us to buy for him.

Secretly the boys and I had our hearts set on a 1964 Williams game called, for no apparent reason, Wing Ding. The theme is, really and truly, water skier girls in modest one-piece bathing suits. It has a cool feature that allows you to win an extra turn when you rack up nine little tiny balls in the backbox by getting the ball stuck in various holes on the playing field. Wing Ding is loud in a mechanical sort of way with lots of bells and boings and the sound of the score board spinning its wheels as you rack up points. Scott was enthusiastic about the idea of buying a pinball machine from Mike, but there was no way he, Mr-Experiential-Learner, was going to decide by merely looking at some photos.

A month passed before we were able to set a time to invade the Knudsens' house again. I must confess that until last spring I’d never given any thought to pinball. None at all. I’d played occasionally in arcades on the boardwalk in Ocean City, but the payback never seemed worth the loose change I would have to part with. Back at the Knudsens', I realized it was a mistake to allow Scott entry into this hobby heaven. After a loud and lively hour, he and Mike had agreed that we would buy two pinball machines: Wing Ding and High Speed, a electronic game from the mid-eighties that has a real police light that flashes and a siren that blares. What had I started?

Thus began several months of pinball widowhood, not the playing - we couldn’t actually buy the games until the addition to the house was finished and we had a place to put them - but the internet searches and ebay scouring. Books like “How to Repair and Restore Pinball Machines,” issued, spiralbound, by places like Joe’s Garage Publishing Co., kept arriving in the mail. Finally on Fourth of July weekend Scott announced that he had conned our friend Michael into driving to Worcester with him to pick up a broken machine built in 1979 called “Flash.”

“What?” I complained. We were hosting a lobster feed the next day for 40 of our closest friends and relatives. “You’re driving eight hours in one day to pick up a broken game no one knows how to fix? And pay money for it? Are you nuts?”

“Flash is one of the five great games.” The Love of my Life informed me as though any fool knew this. “Fixing it is the fun.”

So Flash, with its “artwork” of scantily-clad blond women, arrived in our garage, dirty and broken and sad. “Look at those women!” I shouted when he set it up. “We have young boys! Those are very nearly bare breasts!”

“They are not bare-breasted,” he defended his prize sniffily and pointed to a halter top on one buxom lass. I thought of the wholesome Wing Ding with its prim water skiing girls. How can Sandra Dee compete with Stevie Nicks?

Every night for the rest of the summer, Scott was out there tinkering with the girls in the garage.

If I can trust in anything in the universe, I can trust that home construction projects always take several months longer to complete than promised. Ours was no exception. When the dust cleared, Mike Knudsen delivered Wing Ding with our promise that when our pile of money recovered from construction we would purchase High Speed, (one of the other greatest five pinball games, I’m told). Within a few days of Wing Ding’s arrival, Scott was able to discover his last glitch in Flash and now we had two working pinball machines. Flash, with its electronic pizzazz, was loud in a synthetic way. But four people could play at once, and it had a third flipper mid-way up the playing field that made the action much more exciting.

Plus there was the added benefit of not having to put money in to play. You can play again and again, unless someone is waiting in line (an early house rule established after an fracas between the boys).

It's addictive, sort of.

Because I often work at home, Wing Ding and Flash have become for me over the last month, what a game of Free Cell used to be…a little interlude between projects…an short inter-chapter between the finished pages of the web site I’m working on. And it’s more healthy. It offers more opportunity for exercise in that I must run upstairs from my office to the new game room in order to play. I have to use body English to nudge the ball around the playfield. But like Free Cell, like Lay’s potato chips, it’s hard to stop at one game. Especially because it’s free.

I’ve found myself playing multi-player games on Flash with people who aren’t there. I do my best for everyone. I play with my three siblings mostly, trying to play extra hard on behalf of those who’ve had some hard knocks in life. I don’t mind losing when it’s my turn when the others do well. I’ve found that with Wing Ding the maxim “Them that has, gets” rules. If you win extra turns by skillful play, you have more chances to meet the extra turn point threshold, thereby winning an even higher score. We decided early on that we would keep a running total of our personal bests in dry erase marker on the backglass. With no inter-family competition, we can cheer for one another’s amazing saves and console one another at unfortunate moments.

I hear the words, “Bummer, Mom” a lot.

I doubt I’ll ever decide to learn how to restore and repair pinball machines, but there is something fun and cheery about these two pieces of pop culture escapism we’ve invited into our house. I like them, despite the clothes-challengedness of the Flash girls, because it’s hard to worry about every single thing in the world when you’re battling to keep the ball in play.

Copyright © 2004 All rights reserved.