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   Tuesday, July 01, 2003
Back-tracking

I've left a couple of loose ends, I've been reminded. What about the aunt, the one I left confined to Whitfield for life? She did live in the Jackson mental hospital for the rest of her life, in fact, though her visitation was held in the same Ripley funeral home as my uncle's and she was buried nearby on a day as glaringly hot. Her story, too, would be well worth writing. Her name was Iva Jean, and she was the daughter of two Pentacostal preachers. Her mother I remember as an enormous woman with a booming voice, her father as a meek little man. I don't know much about her young life except that, for a while, she was a gospel singer on the Tupelo radio station. At her graveside service, a group harmonized on some of the hymns she used to sing on the radio. She married my uncle after he returned from service in the Pacific in WWII, something he never talked about except to mention a young woman he met while on leave in Australia and almost married. Somehow, from the beginning of leaving home, my aunt couldn't cope. My mother would come to visit when they lived in Ripley or New Albanuy and find her in the bed and my toddler cousins standing on chairs in the kitchen, trying to find a box of food they could eat from. Life didn't get a lot better for her after that, though she eventually lived in a very nice house in a Memphis suburb. Of course the shock treatments are a horror story in themselves; one of my friends in Australia wrote a powerful novel about the way women with mental illness were treated in those days.

Yes, they tried to bring her home from Whitfield several times. But by then she had moved from depression and swings of being a party girl to anger and violence. She particularly hated my uncle, tried to attack him, wouldn't allow him to visit her when they were finally forced to take her back. Besides, she didn't want to leave. She actually liked her world in the ward; all through the years she had a series of boyfriends and also women friends to gossip with. Even when my cousins visited, she really didn't like the distraction. She asked if they'd brought cigarettes and then returned to flirting with the man of the hour. I think of this as one of the surviving places of medieval torment, but she was happy there.

A family of a thousand stories, too strange for fiction.

....................................................................
Next, I was supposed to say more about Middleton and what I learned from Helen (who has been having a high old time traveling out West) about hometowns.

My dad likes for us to take him out to lunch when we visit. He used to want to go to a catfish restaurant out towards Memphis a bit, the strangest place. It was a huge blue aluminum siding building with no windows. Inside, the decor was unrelievedly brown: brown figured carpet, brown painted walls, brown oak chairs and formica tables, brown silk flowers. And there were tables enough for half of West Tennessee. A few customers would sit near the door and circle around a small salad and catfish bar. Outside, an enormous parking lot. Weeds grown up all around the building, steps, door. Well, anyway, the restaurant didn't make it, though the owners tried twice to make a go of it. So, when we visited a while back, we had to take Daddy to a restaurant located right at the crossroads (the new city limit signs say, "Middleton: Crossroads of the South" Bet you didn't know that). This place has changed owners several times. It was called Sandy's for a while. I forget the name now, but my dad doesn't like to go there because he thinks the owner is "an arrogant s.o.b."

But he really wants to go out so that he can show off his visitors, and if none of my siblings are there, I will do. So off to the crossroads we went one Sunday after church. The Methodists weren't out yet, so the place was only nearly full.
I really hate these outings because my dad's constantly calling people over and grilling them and me about whether we remember each other. I don't think there's been one time when I remembered the people, and rarely do they know who I am. Sometimes, they think I'm Susan or Becky. Well, this time we did all that with nearly everyone in the place, and I got my dad's refills from the buffet (you don't want to know about the food), and he got his cane and headed out to the car. Trevor had forgotten once again that a place like that won't take credit cards, so I paid the check. As I turned around, I almost ran into a woman who said, "Sandy?" And I said, "Bonnie!" I knew her instantly. That's important because I always thought if we ever had a class reunion, I'd have to study the yearbook to recognize people. Really, she was exactly the same except for the gray. Hair still piled up in the same way, no make-up, freckles, dress to her wrists and ankles. Wide smile.

I never knew Bonnie all that well, but we were absolutely glad to see each other. We talked about kids and grand-kids and how we never see anybody from high school--all that we could say without leaving my dad waiting too long. It's hard to explain but I felt that I had touched ground again in some way that mattered. I tend to remember the funny or bad things about where I hail from. But in that brief encounter I remembered a lot of good. And I saw what has Helen gained from making sure that she was still Helen from Paris, Tn, as well as Helen from Nashville.



   Monday, June 30, 2003
I've been thinking more about the 'pretend-like' of living, thinking in quite different ways, perhaps because I'm very far from being in a desert place right now. My desert blooms with the brightest flowers. And, to be honest, there are times when my faith in myself and the world boils dry, but as a friend told me long ago, I seem to have been given a gift of belief. My faith in God runs like a constant river through my life. Somehow I know that God will never turn away from me, will always love me, will always speak to me in ways I can trust, no matter where I am. My problems are usually with me.

Sometimes, it does come down to simply enduring, as Faulkner painted existence so often. But at other times, it comes down to dreaming. The imagination itself can be active, the dreaming meaningful, frightening, inspiriting. It can lead to steps of individuality and fulfillment. Yet so often we scold ourselves or laugh at ourselves for what we dare to imagine. So often we do not credit ourselves with bravery.

"When my men are hungry, I can't always feed them. When they are tired, I can't always let them rest. But I can share my vision with them, and, as I share it, it grows.
It is vision that wins wars."

These lines were attributed to Julius Caesar in the TV biopic I semi-watched last night. I should remember, but can't, whether he actually said such a thing. Something similar, as I recall. This is true, I think, of leaders who can inspire others. Even in moments of greatest doubt, they can call up enough of their dreams to convince others, and consequently themselves. The dream grows.

Yet I'm wondering if a similar wisdom might apply to more private acting out of dreams. How many choices, judged from the outside, are seemingly pointless, merely symbolic, even silly? Somehow the Corvette show in Nashville this weekend has drawn the attention of the media from NPR to internet home sites. People seem to enjoy at least a half-laugh at the middle-aged men who are the owners of these cars for the most part. We label them as in "crisis" or ridiculous. Likely, we analyze what they are sublimating by engaging in such a pastime.

I've always admired anyone who holds on to something beloved, especially if the person finds both ability and enjoyment meshing, as some of these car-restorers do. Yet maybe it's more than that. Perhaps in people like this we're finding the evidence or the tentative exhibition of who they are, and who they dream of being. The world and its demands stifle so much. Are the ones who give in and give up our models because they make no waves? What may the owner of a Corvette preserve or create? To what extent is he keeping an adventurous spirit alive?

So he could use the money and time otherwise. Yet who are we to say he could spend them better? Remodel the living room. Two weeks in a condo in Destin. Whatever we approve of more. But at what cost? Okay, there's a lot of "pretend-like" in this choice, perhaps. Maybe some people own and never drive. But there is nothing inherent in aging that says a man could not feel as free at the wheel (at least in some ways) as when he was eighteen. We glamorize the freedom of youth anyway. No one feels utterly free. Maybe it is those who pretend-like who never age, who in some ways never die. And who knows where some of them may yet go?


   Sunday, June 29, 2003
Becca spoke today of how even religion is a stage and all of us poor players strutting and fretting , often on the surface of the boards. She linked her analogy to the purpose of ritual, of liturgy, of our weekly acting out of the Last Supper. As always, a story she told gave me a moment of illumination that was new. The story was of a man who had lost his beloved wife to death and afterward came to church because it was something they did together. In his grief, the words meant nothing. They were the emptiest of mumblings by people standing around him. But he kept mumbling with them from no power but memorization, until one day "The Lord be with you," in the voice of the others made its way to his heart and he wept as he prayed for himself, knowingly in need, what he had prayed a thousand times by acting it out.

I no longer marvel at how Becca's lessons are meant for me, how they speak to my needs, to what I lack, to what I seek. This one of being a player gives me hope. This analogy goes far beyond what is spoken when people sit, stand or kneel in pews. The need to "pretend like" is there in every corner of our lives, particularly, I think, during desert days. That is, during the days when we feel it is futile to do anything. Becca made me think of the words "play" and "player" and their linkage to our childhood games. Back then, we knew we had to "play like" becaise we were children, powerless to seize the roles we tried out harmlessly in our back yards. How far I have come; how far I have fallen away. These days, I likely wouldn't taste a mud pie, and I know that a dress-up box will not a princess make. There are times when I think the Great Flood could not water my dead dreams, my dessicated faith. Yet I continue to dream about what I might create. I still paint my lips and hang myself with jewelry. I want to believe and to accept the joy God means for me.

I tell my students that writing is an act of faith, but that faith is no grand, certain thing. It is like Indiana Jones crossing the invisible stone bridge , trusting that it will appear to support him with each step he takes. But this analogy only works, I think, if we see him as no real hero, certain to triumph before the credits roll. It's the taking of the step that matters, the sitting down for an hour to put pen to paper, not whether we can jump from one train car to another. With all kinds of faith, perhaps some of us measure ourselves by the wrong models. For all of us, at least at certain times, the best we can do is "act as if." Yet it feels terrible, like the worst kind of hypocrisy, to merely mouth words of faith in the sight of God.

For me, it helps to compare this not against the certainty of a saint but with the pretend-like of a child. Maybe there is within the empty acting an expressed desire for a role, a place, we can'f find right now. Maybe there is a tiny crack opening in an attic window of our souls that might let God in.

I don't know why I think so, but I suspect that the desert days, the black holes, sometimes are connected to a fear of God's love and mercy. It is easier, somehow, to create for ourselves a God of harshness and judgment who would vomit out our empty posturings than to expose ourselves to unknown winds of faith and forgiveness. There is a kind of giving over that is necessary before we can go in peace and love to serve the Lord. It is a giving over of the heart that cries "Lord, be with them. Be with me." The little girl who sings lullabies to her doll, not even thinking of the words, someday bends over the face of her own infant, sobbing out the lyrics that ask for protection while the baby sleeps. In our grown-up fear and doubt, we say, "I believe" until the day we do.

Thanks be to God. Alleluia. Alleluia.