One

My father had some truly endearing idiosyncrasies. 

One of them was his propensity for writing notes and taping them all over the house. Tangible short-term memory, you know, the sort housed outside your brain and with no need of efficient neural firing. Growing up we had a cupboard by the kitchen door that looked ordinary from the outside. Crack it open, though, and you would find the inside of the door covered, layered decades deep in squares of paper, some of the writing faded, some of it fresh, but all of it an enlightening look into Dad's psyche.

These were not just any notes like your average person would write. Sometimes they were motivational ("Objective-->Plan-->Schedule-->Achieve"); sometimes they were lists. Sometimes they were quotes that were simply too good not to write on a little square of paper. Since retirement, he started writing them on the calendar in his and Mom's bedroom. It was a diary, of sorts, and a testament to the best of his quirks.

The notes were lovable for their content, yes, but also for their style. Dad was an avid user of underlining, asterisks, circling, dashes, quotation marks, parentheses, and highlighting. None of these things were used appropriately, not in the least. They all served one function in Dad's mind: emphasizing something important (and who cares what the marks might mean to the rest of the English-writing world). 

My sister captured some of these notes in photograph. 

One of the crown jewels of the note collection, though, was one I just discovered today. 

Mom has been cleaning out our basement, and recently uncovered a box full of undeveloped film (much of which was from my babyhood and little girl days...here I thought I was unloved all these years...kids are old hat when you're the seventh one). Now that the film is developed and I'm home for Easter break, I spent a good hour today looking through it. There were a lot of treasures in there, early photos of the Johnson clan; two of my favorites, though, were the ones below. 

It was my first birthday. Dad, perhaps having used all other free space in the house to attach notes to, resorted to taping them on my toddler self. A homemade birthday sandwich board. The writing is a bit hard to read, but the captions make it clear.

 Front: 

1 "YEAR" Old Today

Back:

AND SMART Too!

Somehow these pictures bring a comfort of their own. 

As do the notes, all those little scraps of Dad's oddly wonderful insides made manifest. 

The road is long, but it is not without consolation.

Japanese Coat

I pull it out 

from where it hangs, 

bell-shaped--

green like the water 

at the bottom of a pool

when the sun slices through,

with yellow silk, finespun, 

and a red that startles, 

streaks lightning down my back.

The crane's neck 

winds its way across one shoulder,

its one eye gazing

unblinking in its head,

staring me out of countenance.

When last it looked at me

with that unflinching eye

I was not looking back, 

but rather at white walls

and a wheeled bed,

at tubes filled with fast-moving fluid,

at soft yellow hospital socks

that somehow made us laugh

when all we wanted was

a corner to weep in.

All was hushed,

every footfall an earthquake,

every breath consciously drawn.

I take the coat off its hanger

and slide one arm, two, inside,

before grasping the doorknob

and walking out to you

while the crane keeps watch.

You, Child

This is a prose elegy for the yet living.

[And thus, it is also an oxymoron of the first order.]

You, child, were the one who taught me. You with your voice so loud ("because I'm Irish," you say), with your revolutions and your petitions to get the science teacher fired, with your eyes like small moons once the others had left and we talked of life and systems and why there is a light at the end of the tunnel, even if it is not the one you think it is and will take some walking to get to. 

You, who walked with me as we passed beyond the bricks and into the light of the outdoors and the healthy air of free un-standardized thought, the kind that is not bound by paper and number two pencils.

I tried to explain Learning to you, why it mattered, why it was not synonymous with stolid buildings and an adult talking at the front of the room, with things that make you look in the mirror and see the invisible ink of failure scrawled finely across your forehead. You, in turn, explained Teaching to me, although you used no words. And in that one infinitesimal moment, the dike broke and the Irish voice quieted and the bold eyes grew wet, wetter still when they saw what pooled in my own. 

You, child, you feel like you are my own. 

I do not want to say goodbye.

November Day

I remember those minutes 

that stretched so long, 

a Nile of thoughts 

weaving around bends

and under overhanging boughs

back to when I was young 

and the world was white, 

and forward to when I walk to him, 

doe-eyed on my brother's arm, 

before being caught 

right now

in the eddying swirl of faces, 

a multitude of eyes 

looking heavenward,

or down, 

or into mine.

I had prayed, God,

 for an aurora

on that hillside, 

for the sun to gild us 

as we said farewell.

My mind still sees you there,

the flowers, the earth,

and at the last moment,

the beam of honey gold 

that shot down

burnishing us 

and setting us afire.

Photo credit

Growing Pains

The long push begins 

invisible in the velvet of earth--

time unreckoned,

strain unaccounted,

and inaudible groan yet unmade.

A wrinkle of green,

serpentine, splits

the sameness 

with the altogether new.

Old spaces cannot hold 

and old known has been un-known.

This is the rift 

that teaches of vines and branches, 

of how the lifeblood in You

is somehow mine, too.

Spring

As I sat and read this morning, the piercing cries of a flock of geese filled the walls and slipped inside. Instinctively, instantly, tears sprang up. 

Yet I am glad of their discordant music. 

Even if their voices speak of other things, they also sing of spring. 

And it has been a long winter.

If You're In Need of a Smile...

...I have one here that would look great on your face.

Meet my Aidan-nephew.

Brother

No longer

is there a voice in my ear

telling me how the walls that crumble should be rebuilt, 

what is the best route to get from lost to where I want to be,

why I should tell my landlord that the squirrels have developed a taste for his house.

There is no advice, no fixing, no critiquing

when I don't want to hear it, 

and worse, 

there is still none 

when I do.

Today I had to call you, 

because you calling first might not cross your mind

and I needed a voice to give advice, to fix, to critique. 

With your voice in my ear

(not like his, but the best we both could do)

we talked of happy.

How too often I think of happy as the one thing 

I want and do not have,

the one thing He does not give,

rather than the oxygen I'm inhaling

and the children I'm loving,

the family in my heart

and the hope tucked away inside my chest

as it rises and falls with this life

that was breathed by God Himself.

We have words, you and I,

and we have silence.

We have blood that is shared,

and for today,

that is enough.

We Are Not Safe Places

I feed my hungry insecurities with your talents and you feed yours with mine. 

No one ever wins.

These words cut so clean, so true. One of the most beautiful souls I've never met wrote them. Her name is Esta. I stumbled upon her blog two days ago and have been reading it voraciously during the cracks in my days. The whole post I tore them from is here. Her writing is crystalline, piercing, honest.

Some rare days as I'm reading, it's as though just a few words illumine the space I'm living in like lightning through a bedroom window when I was six years old and it was two o'clock in the morning. This was one of those days.

My mind has been cluttered with a whole lot of things lately, each one deadly important but not receiving the time it needs to be thought through. I've been struggling with contentment, I've been struck dumb (or at least should have been--sometimes the tongue speaks when silence would be more wise) with the reality of my own smallness, my own helplessness in the face of bone-deep realities like anesthetized children growing up in anesthetized homes in an anesthetized society. I've found myself yearning for some sort of heroism, for the life spent in pouring out that somehow seems so much more exotic on an Indian reservation in the Canadian bush or in an orphanage in a third world country than it does spent in a second floor apartment in Small Town, USA recycling the old schedule of work, grad school, sleep and church week after week. I've been wrestling with my old friend Ordinary.

But then there is the question of motive.

Of escapism.

Of why I somehow think contentment would be more easily grasped There instead of Here, if loneliness would somehow dissipate if things were different.

No, loneliness is a steady companion, the type that has a knack for walking in step with you.

I've found that loneliness is of two strains: the type that binds you tight, constricts, cuts you off, blinds you to all but self, or the type that opens you up to the most weak and wounded parts of who you are so that you can numbly hold them up to the God Who already knows, already loves, already calls you child.

And as for contentment, I know the truth. The truth is that there is no contentment in the exotic for its own sake. There is no contentment in heroism if it is so self-aware that it names itself such. There is no soul more worth reaching out to than the one that walks across my path this moment, this hour, this day.  These souls that thread their way like quicksilver through my life--just these--are the ones most worth knowing.

A Feeble Tongue

One of my teacher friends turned a year older today. 

We've become close over the past couple of years. I think she knew that my ears were attuned to listening from extended use as a child who silently absorbed the talk of brothers, sisters, mom, and dad. When I was a child I was captivated by those whose virtue lay in their ready tongue, their ability to spin words so comfortably and release them with such ease, those who had no inhibitions that kept their words tucked away, safe and secret. As a woman, I've learned to talk when I must, to enjoy speaking when there is something to say, and to try to let words out when good may come of it. But I still find myself mesmerized by those so comfortable in their own skin that words come freely, whether their listener is young, old, boisterous, awkward, male, female, or what have you. I admire that.

Perhaps there is equal virtue in ready ears. These ears have heard some hard things from my friend over the past two years, about a son who doesn't know his way out of the 21st century, whose main escapes are marijuana, technology, and lies, about ailing bodies and wandering spirits, about life and death and a faith that only breathed for a few short years in Catholic school and left her with a nebulous, barely-there knowledge of a God Who is up there somewhere but doesn't really make sense. She prays to Him to sleep at night, but during the day her solutions are doctors and meditation and new age remedies and healing crystals.

Ears are not enough sometimes.

I say I will pray, and I do. She knows I am a Christian, but she doesn't know enough about what that means. She seems afraid of those who call themselves "born again"--she seems to associate the term with cults and disturbing backwoods traditions. I have yet to use that name for myself; her paradigm of what born again means wouldn't be able to fit me inside. 

Yes, I have ears to hear. But my tongue is weak. 

So for now, I pray. I speak what I can. And I try to give gifts that might say something, if only in symbols.