Getting This Off My Chest

There are times when I wish I had faith in something other than the persistence of life itself. I was raised in the Catholic faith and, as a small child, listened intently to all I was told by my mother and the nuns who taught our summer school. Some of it didn’t make sense. Some of the beliefs I was adjured to accept (God is good; God cares about humans more than other life forms, giving us dominion over them; God will save, rescue, support humans from evil, especially US citizens; that my soul was in serious jeopardy if I attended a service in a non-Catholic church) flew in the face of my experience. I clearly remember being excited when I was told that, as I prepared for my first communion, I had reached the age of reason. I took that to mean some of my more pressing questions – those surrounding the efficacy of prayer, the virgin birth, limbo and purgatory, who determined what was good or evil, who was eligible for heaven and hell – would be answered. I was sorely disappointed. The more I questioned, the more evasive the answers became until I decided for myself that most of what I was told was simply made up. Despite, or maybe because of, college classes in religious history, world history, world literature, and psychology, as well as exhaustive reading over the last six decades, that hypothesis still stands.

It is my belief, in this dichotomous world, that man falls prey to being divided in makeup, embodying some of both male and female, intelligence and blindness, good and evil. Morals? Up to us. Belief systems? Up to us. Determination of good and evil? Up to us. I no longer imagine a being that gives two fig leaves about what humans do. We are simply part of a system that continues both with us and in spite of us, an ever-changing system that places no more importance on human activity than it does on any other natural process. It is both a freeing and a frightening train of thought, but it places responsibility exactly where it belongs – on us.

That said, in the current world political situation, part of me longs to believe in a Jesus figure, a man so imbued with zeal that he still has an effect on mankind some 2000 years after his death. I want to cherry-pick Bible selections, make a super-hero of the man who in Matthew 21:12 overturned the tables of the moneychangers and drove them off with admirable wrath and a whip. I would send him to the Mexican border and put him in charge. I’d pray him off to Syria, to Yemen, to Russia, to the White House with his cleansing ardor. And in the best of all possible worlds every mother who ever loved her child would follow with me behind him, afraid but strong, gathering the children, reuniting them with their families, holding the orphans, feeding the starving, comforting the bereaved. It’s man’s inhumanity to man that most influences my belief that it is us, we humans, who simultaneously hold the happiness and sorrow of the world in our hands, our minds, our hearts.

Let Me Count the Ways

Love is like wind - you don't see it but you see its effects. I am reading to the Bean at nap time when she suddenly leans over the railing of her bed and hugs my head. I look up at her from my seat on the floor and her eyes are warm and sparkling and so moved by the winds of love that I nearly weep.

Tiny baby Lili stares at me as she drinks from her bottle and when I smile at her, she smiles back, her eyes lighting up as though someone has flipped a switch. Milk dribbles down both sides of her mouth but she doesn't care. We're in love with each other and that's better than milk.

I pull into their drive each week for my stint as Nini-in-charge and my son-in-law drops what he's doing to hurry out and help lug in my bags and boxes. My daughter waits at the door for a hug and a kiss. They make breakfast for me, fetch my special tea mug, make me feel as though I am the most special guest they've ever entertained.

The phone rings and it's my grandson wanting to Skype or my granddaughter wanting to tell me about her swim team or my son wanting to say he loves me or my daughter-in-law catching me up on family news. When I'm at their house I'm the center of attention. It's like being Queen For a Week and love sweeps through the rooms like a zephyr.

Every week there's the phone call from my distant daughter. Her laughter and mine get tangled in the phone lines until I'm sure everyone talking at the same time we are can hear it. She and her husband are professionals at picking out just the right cards for any occasion - I've saved them and whenever I feel blue I haul the box out and read through them. It's like opening a window so that love can blow through.

My oldest son in Oregon leaves "love you, Mom" messages in my email, on FaceBook, on the answering machine. He often tells me how he sends messages to me on the wind, knowing the jet stream will carry them eastward. When I feel a breeze on my cheek, I know it's him, thinking of me.

The mail arrives and there's a card or a letter with a "little something" tucked inside. My sisters never fail to anticipate my running short at the end of each month. I never do, of course, because of their thoughtfulness.

The winds of love are mighty, and they are always blowing.



photo borrowed from http://stock-clip.com/

Joy!

Bean chasing bubbles.

Joy is a green morning,

a child,

and bubbles floating 

free.

Making Memories

Packed away in a box marked “Easter,” are four baskets made of woven wooden slats. When they were new their colors sang together in bright spring hues of purple and yellow and pink. Now the colors are faded to soft memories and one basket is missing its handle. Each one still holds its nest of green, shredded paper “grass,” matted now and permanently indented with egg-shaped hollows where, years ago, heavy, handmade chocolate eggs decorated with swirls of pastel flowers lay in wait for Easter morning. There is a small crocheted chick in each basket. They used to snuggle over hardboiled eggs that had been dipped in colored water until the shells turned pink or green or heavenly blue

On Easter morning there were decorated, hand-blown eggs, the fragile shells painted with tiny skipping bunnies or miniature bouquets of flowers. There were also small, foil wrapped chocolate eggs, soft, sugary marshmallow Peeps, a handful of jellybeans scattered like fragments of a rainbow, and always a small toy—a plastic yellow chick that, when pressed down, laid a tiny white egg, a wind-up bird that hopped frantically about on stiff little legs, a gracefully sculptured rabbit painted robin’s egg blue with the faintest bit of pink blushing its long, delicate ears.

When I was a child, there was an exciting newness to Easter morning. New clothes were bought especially for Easter Sunday church services and the soles of new shoes had to be scuffed. Finding the carefully hidden Easter baskets was part of the excitement. It was the only morning I was allowed to have candy for breakfast. Dinner was traditional, too. Glazed ham alternated each year with roast lamb and there was fresh asparagus and a coconut covered cake baked in Memere’s cast iron lamb mold.

Even after they all went off to college, my kids would still come home for Easter dinner, and though the holiday had long since ceased to hold any religious significance for me, I clung to certain rituals. Early on Sunday morning the kids would drift sleepily into the kitchen, fetch cups of coffee and ask, just as they had when they were small, “Did the Easter Bunny come?” Then they would set off in search of their baskets, the same ones they remembered from early childhood. The Bunny never disappointed them. This year, however, with all my children far away and the grandchildren with plans of their own, the baskets will stay packed away in the box marked “Easter.” It is a landmark of sorts, the same way Christmases and birthdays away from home become milestones in the process of growing up. But, the baskets will keep, just as the memories have.


photo credit: www.bunnyrabbit.com