Harvest Home (A Samhain Reading)

(Written for and read aloud to start an October 31, 2000 feast and celebration, tables lining the entire side of my backyard, piled with beautiful foods to share)

We gather in the harvest, gather close to us our memories, our pasts . . .

Gather the sun-speckles glistening on the swimming hole,

Boys and girls laughing in shorts and mud and splashes.

We gather in lying cross-legged on itchy grass, watching bright green leaves move against a pale blue sky,

Rivulets of sweat running slowly down our backs.

We gather in summer projects, fences painted, lawns mowed, gardens weeded.

Gardens weeded . . . gardens planted in springtime, bright green leaves uncurling, thirsty for sprinkled water,

Green leaves that sprang from egg-carton nurseries, inside, protected from the young year’s icy cold.

Now those seeds, those green gardens, the quiet care of winter, the hope of spring, the sweat and toil of summer,

Have made our feast-table, filled our store-baskets, reassure us with promises

That winter will not be hungry,

That the life-time will come again.

But now, it is full-time, ready-for-rest-time.

Harvest is in, harvest home.

We gather in the harvest, gather close to us our memories, our pasts . . .

Gather in Mama’s arms, tucking us in to soft blankets, whispering safety against the darkness,

Gather in Daddy’s voice, singing, clear and calling and ringing still in our dreamtime.

Gather in Grandma’s hands, making, making . . . chicken and blankets and hand-stories told with callouses.

Gather in Grandpa’s checkerboard, his memories shared and merged with ours,

His memories and hers, of stories before them,

Back through buggies and candlelight,

Back through sowing and harvesting,

Back through their heroes, their passions, their triumphs, their tragedies,

Back through journeys and voyages,

Through feast and privation,

Through harvest, and harvest, and harvest before . . .

We gather, at Last Harvest, at Summer’s End, among them,

We carry their lights within us,

The splashing sparkling swimming-hole laughter,

Of those who fought to vote,

And those who were afraid to,

Of those who left us stories,

And those who stayed silent,

Of those who died for what they believed,

And those whose strength lay in surviving . . .

We gather, among them, harvest their legacy,

Left with love for us to acknowledge.

Harvest our history,

Harvest the fruit of seeds planted long ago,

Of springtime hopes for our future,

Of summer’s toil on our behalf,

Of all they dreamed we would carry forward,

Of the weeds we culled away, that the harvest bounty be pure and nourishing.

Here we burn the weeds,

Here we carry their light,

Here we listen, listen to the voices of our ancients,

Listen, that we may harvest wisdom, harvest hope,

Bring the harvest home . . .

Here we bring the harvest home,

Warm and secure against the dark quiet no-time,

Here we listen, and in the darkness,

Here we begin to dream.

Rest, weary harvesters, in the quiet time,

Rest full with the harvest, secure in our history,

Listening to the lullaby-voice

That whispers still, in the falling leaves.

I can never successfully title a post about my mother. She doesn’t fit in a caption.

My mother’s been at it again, posting terribly inappropriate things in sometimes jarringly inappropriate places on Facebook, her Southern gentility clearly a lost victim to her utter lack of instinct about what constitutes propriety on the internet.

And tonight, she’s been driving my daughter bonkers.

But here’s the thing: Do you have any idea what a small proportion of women my mother’s age even use the internet? And what even smaller proportion of them interact frequently through any kind of social media?

Someday, when a generation only now being born has shaped the world into something as unimaginable to me today as web-based social media would have been to my mother at age 45, I hope that I can embrace it all as fearlessly and enthusiastically as she has. She’s ventured forth–and fairly thoroughly explored–the web from its fledgling infancy through today, making some colossal mistakes–her detailed worries about an upcoming colonoscopy really didn’t belong smack in the middle of a buzzingly active discussion thread about the fashion-choice rights of Muslim women in the US–but also succeeding in being right in the thick of a mutlibillion-player extravaganza, the rollicking, information-heavy, critical-thinking-not-required craziness that makes up a digital culture unlike anything that existed in the previous million years of hominid evolution. When my day comes–and it will, I know–I hope that I can wander my own strange future spaces with the same gleeful abandon, making tremendous blunders and tremendous friends as readily as she.

Tonight, all I can tell my daughter is that, for all the completely valid headaches she causes almost literally at every turn, Grandma is an inspiration, too, and that I hope she’s not wrong when she claims that I and my daughter both carry more than a little of her rip-roaring, grab-hold-and-hang-on-for-the-ride spirit forward into a future as unknowable as it is exhilarating.

National Guard Troops Fail to Quell Unrest in Ferguson – NYTimes.com

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/08/20/us/ferguson-missouri-protests.html

Why we need to invest as much energy in training our officers of the peace in the skills of nonviolent peacekeeping, as we do now in violent confrontation:

“After more of than an hour of peaceful protests, some in the crowd began to throw bottles at the police, who brought out armored vehicles and tactical units. But many peacekeepers in the crowd formed a human chain and got the agitators to back down.”

And that’s all *after* the eruption of an enormous mess that might never have happened, had we proactively addressed racism and the dynamics of other aspects of diversity in real, complex, challenging ways before this month.

White Man’s Papers

The year I agreed to be volunteer coordinator for Native American Days at the C.H. Nash Museum at Chucalissa, I acquired in a week enough good stories to last a year or two. Some of those stories involve my son, who at age 4 was my most stalwart and tireless volunteer. Some involve Flossie, the matriarch who taught me a lot about how to be tough when challenged and showed me the wonders of the rewards that could come just from not backing down.

Recent events, though, have turned my mind back not to them, but to Ray, and a lesson he tried and failed to teach me all those years ago. I’d love to let him know I finally get it.

Ray was an aging full-blood Choctaw potter, who made his living both respecting and selling his heritage. His was the first demonstration booth on the left when visitors exited the museum proper to head out into the reconstructed village, so he generally got the excited attention of each of the thousand or more visiting schoolchildren before they were overstimulated into exhaustion by blowgun competitions, dancing, and pounding corn into a pulverized mess of flour. And, between busloads of eager kids and occasional homeschooled or adult stragglers, Ray and I talked–a lot–partly because he was handily located next to the museum, and partly because I really loved his stories and was trying to devour as many of them as possible before the opportunity passed.

After a few days of this, and after an incident with Flossie garnered rather a lot of attention and a surprising level of welcome–an incident which I suppose really should make it into this blog soon–there came an afternoon lull when Ray looked at me intently, sized me up, and asked me what my heritage was.

“I’m … American, really. Ordinary white American.”

“No … your heritage … do you know?” he looked at me intently, silently awaiting elaboration.

I thought about how to answer him, tried again … “Both sides of my family were here before the Revolution. I don’t really think I can claim anything but American.”

Ray studied my face, his own inscrutable. To this day I’ve no idea what his thoughts were.

“Your red side. Your tribe, your people. Do you know?” All the while we were talking, his hands kept working the clay, teasing the reddish-brown lump into a lovely bowl with a duck’s head, wings, even feathers – even when he wasn’t looking.

I looked back at him, confused. “Ray … I’m not Native American. I love what I see here, love what I know about the different peoples who were here before and those who still stand here today. But I can’t claim that; I’m just an ordinary white girl.”

Ray studied me for another long moment, saying nothing. Then he turned his head and spit into the dirt before fixing his eyes on mine. “You’re Indian,” he declared.

Phrases like “cultural appropriation” speeding through my mind, accompanied by images of hippy-dippy white kids holding drug-drenched “sweat lodges” and declaring themselves as enlightened as Cherokee buddhas, demanded I offer courtesy and well-earned respect without claiming someone else’s property as my own. I tried again to refute my friend.

“Ray … I love that you’d think that. Thank you. But my grandfather did my family’s genealogy, as far back as he could trace it. Both sides of my family were here before the Revolution, but before that they came mostly from Scotland, a few from England and France by way of Germany, but all Western European.”

Ray interrupted me before I could say any more, speaking quietly, slowly, his voice all deep muddy water flowing under ancient shading trees.. “How do you know that?” He paused, then continued when I said nothing, his enunciation making each word a poem, standing alone. “I say you’re Indian. I look in your heart, in your eyes, and I say you’re Indian. What makes you say different?” He waited, patiently.

So I tried again, as calmly and convincingly as I could. “Ray, I’ve seen the documentation. I have a binder at home with our family tree in it, all the birth and death records, the weddings and baptisms … ” He cut me off again, this time with a disapproving grunt.

“So you believe this because they showed you these things, all these papers?”

For a moment, I thought he finally got it. “Yes, Ray, I’ve seen them. I have copies in my binder.”

Ray fixed me hard with his fire–black eyes, his gaze boring into me with the strength of a thousand lifetimes lived as if his own through the stories he retold when I begged for them, and spoke again:

“Daughter, let me tell you something about White Man’s Papers.”

~~~

Confession and Bias

Today, as I headed out into the bright summer sunshine to spend my lunch break strolling through the park by the river, I called myself out as both directly affected by sexism, and clearly perpetrating it.

 

I crossed through the large bus terminal—my shortcut to the river—as I always do, and as I neared the funneling exit to the next block, I noticed a white cargo van parked halfway across the sidewalk, narrowing my most direct path to a corridor just a few feet wide.

Now, I’ve been accused, certainly rightfully, of being entirely too trusting and incautious of my own safety. I run around all kinds of places that perhaps I shouldn’t, usually in impractical heels and short skirts, and I openly befriend the strangest sorts of people. I truly don’t scare easily. But appearances aside, I’m not stupid, either.

As a woman in a culture that fails to ensure women’s safety, I’m conditioned to respond to a few situations with some level of hypervigilance. And a windowless cargo van parked in such a way that I have to walk close by to pass it, in a place with a known history of too many recent unsavory events, presents precisely one of those situations. It crossed my mind to detour altogether and take another route out. But, not only did I want to get directly to my sunny riverside, I also didn’t want to present as an already intimidated female; confidence is a surprisingly effective armor in everyday situations.

Instead, my eye quickly scanned the various other people close by, and immediately picked out the best available choice: An incredibly large, heavily muscled, very dark-skinned guy in a work shirt, calmly sipping his soda at a table just a few feet behind the chained-off boundary of the sidewalk I wanted to use, only a quick spring from the van should he choose to act.  Instinctively, literally without even thinking about it, I made eye contact, then flashed him a smile. He set down his soda and grinned back, then politely wished me a good afternoon. I responded in kind, and felt his eyes on me as I continued past the van, around the corner, and out of sight—and I was very glad for that, because something in me believed that, had anyone else suddenly presented a danger, Soda Guy would have leapt effectively to my defense.

Would he have? Americans are often conditioned not to get involved. And dark-skinned Americans in particular, have often been taught by a racist system that getting involved is exceptionally dangerous. In any situation involving a professionally dressed white woman and a big black guy in work clothes, the too-likely police response would be to arrest the guy first and ask questions later, even if he was actually the shining hero of the day’s big story. And I know that.

So was my simple open smile and friendly greeting enough to overcome all of that? What hubris of mine was it to think my smile so powerful? And yet I was convinced that, had danger threatened, he’d have acted. Without that momentary personal contact, some tiny transient sense of personal connection, I doubt anyone would act quickly enough to make a difference–which probably explains my instinct to forge a momentary link.

As I continued walking toward the river, now in the bright sunshine of more open spaces, a different niggling doubt teased at my awareness. I had leapt to a thousand assumptions in an instant, mostly based on stereotypes, and instinctively encouraged another human being to take action that could, in fact, have threatened his own safety.

The activist academic in my mind broke it all down for me. I assumed this guy possessed certain skills because he presented as large and male. (In fairness, I’d have taken exactly the same actions had the Soda Sipper been a strong-looking butch woman, but no such option presented itself.) I might have been more inclined to trust his intent, oddly for a woman with my demographics, because of his skin tone and hair texture. But like everyone else, I’ve been shaped by the life I’ve had, and the people who hurt me were always light-skinned like me, those who healed me almost always much darker. And even on those little unconscious-bias tests on the internet, I show a preference the reverse of what’s expected. We all have prejudices, even when they’re atypical and examined.

Judging by my actions, I also clearly thought I was entitled to Soda Guy’s protection, should Something Bad have happened, based on … well, absolutely nothing at all. The bottom line is, while as a human being I’m entitled to the human right of reasonable physical safety, that principle limits any would-be wrongdoers; it doesn’t as clearly compel a random guy to act on my behalf, possibly at risk to himself. (Actually, I’m glossing over a much more nuanced argument there, but it doesn’t need space in this post.) And given that I took positive action to attempt to increase the likelihood of just such a response, where does that leave me? Am I the privileged white lady who assumes she’s entitled to a black man’s muscle? Apparently, in this context and to this limited extent, I was. I didn’t like that description of myself.

I continued on, of course, to enjoy my walk by the river and even post a few pretty pictures to Twitter. But the debate still played out behind my thoughts, dissecting those few seconds of interaction from as many angles as there were lacy ragweed blooms in the park.

Part of me wanted to thank Soda Guy for simply existing, and for returning a stranger’s midday smile.

Part of me wondered if there actually had been some threat menacing from inside the van, and if some observer might conceivably have been deterred simply by seeing Soda Guy paying attention.

Part of me wondered if I was being just a wee bit paranoid to be uncomfortable simply walking alongside a cargo van parked half on the sidewalk where it didn’t belong. A different part of me answered with an entire feminist lecture series on the reality of dangers to which our society subjects its women but not its cismen.

And a big part of me suggested I needed simply to drop the whole nonincident and pay more attention to the beauty of the river and the rest of the world around me—which, ultimately, is what I did.

Except that this post proves I didn’t, quite.

*    *    *    *    *    *

(Image credit: James F Conahan Intermodal Transportation Facility, Wilkes-Barre, PA,  http://scootindavalley.blogspot.com/2010_07_01_archive.html . Today, as many days, I crossed from left to right at the “back” of the picture. The vans in this picture are different from and not connected to that described in today’s post.)

Re-Entry

Wow. Giving in to the impulse to return to this space, then looking to see how long it’d been since I’ve shared anything here–just so I get the time reference right–and finding that it’s been 200 days today since my last post… Really? 200 days? How did that happen?

During those 200 days, almost all of my energy outside of work and teaching has been consumed with a project I couldn’t discuss. I curtailed my online blathering as the easiest way to keep from saying too much; bits and pieces of innocent conversation can add up quickly. Even now, I’ll just say it’s a human rights project, and yes, it’s been worth every bit of myself I’ve given to it.

As the light begins to appear after a long quiet nighttime, though, I’ve begun to feel the impulse to write something here, something trivial, ordinary, simple… After all, life’s Big Things are no more than complex arrangements of little everyday choices, and I’ve often found the most meaning in the smallest acts. So I’m back, I think, even if slowly for now, with some little things to share.

Butch Packing, Femme Packing (Not What You Think)

5 days, 4 nights, Las Vegas.

Butch grabs two pair of jeans, three pair of shorts, one pair of dress pants, a seemingly random assortment of t-shirts and polos, a dress shirt and vest, some underwear and socks, and dumps them in a pile next to where I’ve laid out the suitcase. She explains she’d put them in the suitcase, except I’d just take them out again, so there they are on the floor. She adds dress boots and announces she’s good to go, then stretches out on the couch.

In that time, I have a good handle on what I’m going to take. Two nice dresses, five more casual skirt-and-blouse combos, a simple sweater dress, shoes, jewelry, and appropriate undergarments for each …

Butch looks at what I’ve amassed on the loveseat where things are getting organized. “What are you wearing on the plane?”

I show her the sweater dress with its accompanying shoes and jewelry.

Still stretched out on the couch, she looks at me like I’m insane. “Jeans. And shoes you can walk in.”

“I can walk in these.” 

“Please just wear jeans. You look like you’re ready to go out to a party. It’s a red-eye plane trip.”

 

Steve

My friend Steve just walked into the lab. He always wants to print his research, and hardcopies are 20¢ a page, so he brings his money to me at the very beginning, as usual. After paying off his 90¢ debt, he has a quarter, two dimes, two nickels, and five pennies left in his hand. I count it with him, slowly, showing him how I arrived at each intermediate sum, and let him know he has enough to get three pages before using his credit again. He considers a moment, asks if he can pay in advance. I agree. Then he asks—as he always does—“If I need more, could I get credit?” Of course he can.

Steve is mentally retarded, but perhaps the most academically industrious person I’ve ever met, precisely the opposite of my long-ago undergrads whose bright minds so often turned toward generating creative excuses for not having completed their assignments.

When I first met Steve, he was homeless, but he’s lived for a few years now in the halfway house up the street, which makes me worry about him far less. I’m relieved that I no longer need check with him on snowy nights to ask if he has somewhere warm and dry to go, or call around to try to find a placement when he can’t give me a specific, confirmed answer.

Steve also has the only approved credit line in the entire library that houses my lab. The first time he came up a little short, desperately wanting his printed page but with only 14¢ in his pocket, I agreed to let him bring me the remainder later. When my coworkers opened the doors the next morning, Steve was already waiting outside, six sweaty pennies locked in his hand, waiting to repay his debt.

After that, I threw a dollar in the cash box and let my coworkers know Steve’s credit was good. And he manages his $1 open line with a deep responsibility Chase Manhattan would love to find among their customers.

~~~

Ever since long before I met him, Steve has been researching his genealogy. Before encountering my lab, this meant putting his name in a Google search to see what came up, over and over again.

But over the years, we’ve had a lot of fun. After drawing a tree bearing not only his name but those of his parents and three grandparents—he wasn’t able to figure out the fourth—he had more names to drop in Google.

And since a grandparent’s surname was Franko, we spent a good year figuring out who the Franks were and where they lived a long long time ago, and why they were called Franks, and why his family tree might also include Francos among its branches.

He searched for “Franko” a lot.

But in the process, he also learned how to copy and paste, and how to format a Word document to print information from more than one website on a single 20¢ page, and occasionally a bit more.

He learned how to ask other people for specific information, and somehow turned up one day with a copy of his grandmother’s baptismal certificate. It listed her birthdate and her mother’s name, but her father’s name was given as, “Ignotus.”

I explained what that meant, and he left it alone … for about a month. Then the baptismal certificate was back in lab, because maybe now Google could tell him his great-grandfather’s name.

It would take at least a half-dozen or more blows to his wide-eyed optimism before it finally sunk in that, if nobody knew back then, Google was not going to disclose the name of his great-grandmother’s BabyDaddy now.

Google has limits.

~~~

In a way, though, that moment was the start of a much bigger adventure for Steve. He became willing to venture away from Google and into actual genealogical resources—and we’re housed in the main branch of the county’s library system, for goodness’ sake. We can do genealogy!

Steve learned to operate the microfiche downstairs.

He set up a free account at Ancestry.com, and learned to use it well enough to be disappointed when the site wouldn’t hand over more information without a credit card.

He routinely uses military records, the Social Security death index, US Census records, and a wealth of resources many patrons don’t even realize our library offers.

And he does all this, learned to do all this, through hours and hours of diligence and repetition.

~~~

On Saturday, he wanted information about Austria-Hungary, because one of his ancestors was from there. He showed me the line with the unfamiliar word, next to “birthplace” for both married immigrants; the husband’s profession was listed as “laborer,” and Steve was excited to realize that this profession still exists.

Today, he’s using Heritage Quest. As I type this, he’s already printed his three paid-for pages, and has run 60¢ into his credit line. He hasn’t asked me for computer help even once; he can copy and paste and format like a pro, now. He also knows he can print up to two more pages before he reaches his credit limit. And I know he’s good for it.

~~~

About a year ago, another patron gave Steve a used three-ring binder, and I showed him how to use the hole punch so his printed pages could go inside. Steve liked this; his research looked far more organized and scholarly in a binder. I hadn’t known what he did with all his printouts before then, but apparently they went into a cardboard box he kept beside his bed. He often prints duplicate information, but that’s all right; he assures me he forgets about it and doesn’t mind the new pages.

But in writing this, it occurred to me to ask him about that binder, and Steve admitted it’s full and won’t close anymore, so he’s started putting papers in the box again. He moved his socks out to get the box back.

And I realized that I’m giving Steve a Christmas present this year. The guy really needs another three-ring binder.

~~~

Just as I thought this was almost done, Steve asked my help to make a tricky 1920 US Census sheet all fit on one piece of paper without being too small to read. We got the page set up so he liked it, and he started calculating as I went to the printer. When I brought the paper back, he announced with a grin, “That’ll be 80¢ so far, right?”

You’ve got it, Steve. And you’ve come a long, long way in the last few years.

 

Exhilaration and Tears

I was a freshman in high school, and my brother and I had just scored a real treasure from the creek behind the farmers’ co-op: a big heavy pulley in almost perfect working order. OK, since a pulley is a simple machine, it’s hard for it not to be working. This one had a wheel on a hook, and was designed to have two bars, one on each side, connecting the wheel’s axis to the hook; one of those bars was mostly broken away, and the rest was a little rusty, but the whole thing was sturdy and seemed to work just fine. And we knew exactly what to do with it: ZIPLINE!!

The only rope we could locate was a roll of clothesline, the rubber-over fiber kind, but there was enough of it and it seemed strong enough to hold our weight. I climbed first into the willow oak to tie it securely a little more than head-high for the lower end. Then, while I climbed as high as I could into the walnut tree across our yard, Duane, Joe, and Travis wandered over to see what was going on, and stayed to participate.

Everyone wanted to go first, but logic dictated that either I or Duane, the two heaviest kids in the yard, should probably test the zipline before anyone else rode it. Duane tried to claim that place, but my brother intervened; for anything fun or nice, girls always always always got to go first.  Besides, I was already up in the tree.

So they passed the pulley up a relay of climbers, and I hooked it over the clothesline … looked out into the bright blue sky, planned ahead for how to catch myself against the willow oak at the other end, took a deep breath through a wide grin, and pushed off.

Exhilarating! No other word for it! And I caught myself neatly on my feet at the willow oak, laughing. The clothesline had stretched far more than anticipated, though, so I was right at the very bottom of the tree, now sitting on the ground with the line arched like a bowstring above me, my left foot resting on a gnarled root peeking above the dirt. Still laughing, I announced it was all perfect, and let go of the pulley, expecting it to stay right where it was while I got up.

Instead, with the sudden release of my weight, the clothesline snapped upward, launching the heavy industrial pulley skyward.

Before I absorbed that unexpected fact, the pulley came back down, and landed right on my left shin, conveniently still propped a couple inches above the ground by the root beneath my foot. I screamed.

Then I caught myself. I was not crying in front of everyone. No way. My brother came over to see if I was all right. I said I was, but we could both see blood beginning to seep through my jeans. He said maybe he should get our mother. No!! I did not want the kind of trouble that would follow her coming outside to find me crying in the dirt over a little bit of a bump. I scrambled to my feet, found I couldn’t really put weight on my left leg but could just almost fake it if I held my breath to keep from crying out.

My brother started for the house. Limping, biting back the sobs caught in the back of my throat, I hurried after him; when he paused to look at me, I passed him and made it inside first. At least I could tell my mother in person that it wasn’t anything big. And maybe a glass of tea and a few minutes on the couch with a book would be all right, too.

My mother made me roll up my now-bloody jeans leg, then declared that maybe we should let Dr. Ryan look at it. No way; I didn’t want to put a doctor visit in the middle of my afternoon! But my mother was adamant. I looked like a ruffian, though, so she sent me to shower and put on some proper clothing so we could go.  My brother slipped outside to dismantle and hide the zipline before my mother realized that “fell while climbing the tree” wasn’t exactly the whole story.

I did these things, although I couldn’t help noticing that my leg looked far worse beneath my skirt than covered by my jeans. It was clean now, and no longer bleeding, but an ugly black bruise was spreading over most of my lower leg.

Walking to the car, I remember my mother chastising me for limping. It was beneath me to “put on,” and I wasn’t getting any sympathy for doing so. I did my best to stop, although I still couldn’t really manage to put weight on my leg.

~~~

We slipped in the back door of the clinic as we always did; priests’ families didn’t have insurance then, and Dr. Ryan, like Dr. Avery before him, simply treated us out of his office without putting anything in the books, most of the time. (As an adult, I realize he had to have accounted for vaccinations and all the rest somehow. He probably covered those costs himself. But as a child, I just knew we were never supposed to sign in.)  After looking at my leg for just a minute, he announced we needed an x-ray. My mother objected, said we’d go home and see how it was tomorrow, but Dr. Ryan silenced her with a look and scooped me up in his arms like a doll.

He carried me all the way across the parking lot to the emergency entrance of the hospital, and then there was an x-ray, and waiting, and my mother irritated at how long this was all taking when she hadn’t finished her lesson prep for the next morning yet.

After the x-ray was read, Dr. Ryan wrapped my leg in layers of plaster and we had to wait for it to dry. There was a clean break through my tibia, and likely bruising but no obvious fracture on my fibula.

I left the hospital on crutches, my leg unnaturally heavy, already itchy, and still hurting. I hated that I couldn’t touch it through the thick plaster cast.

~~~

Six weeks later, after I’d discovered how incredibly quickly I could actually zing around on crutches, Dr. Ryan carefully cut the cast away, and I was free. Now my leg felt unnaturally light. He cautioned me to keep using the crutches for a few days, a little less each day if I could, until I got the strength back in my leg.

So the next morning I went to school for the first time that grading period with no cast on my leg. Such a huge improvement! Heading down the stairs for gym class, though, I unbalanced on my crutches and tumbled; I wasn’t used to the crutches on the stairs without the weight of the cast, and something just didn’t quite work right. This time the school nurse took me directly to the hospital, only a few blocks from my school, where I got a new x-ray.

I’d broken my leg right through the previous fracture, where it was still weak and incompletely healed.

Dr. Ryan came over from the clinic, and the cast went right back on for another six weeks.

But that time, I managed not to cry at all.

 ~~~

Next time we made a zipline–with the same pulley–we did it at the creek where we couldn’t get caught, and we used rope that wouldn’t stretch. And everyone had a turn to try.

Sunshine on Stage

My youngest daughter can sing like nobody’s business, and I could listen to her for hours.

When I asked her what she wanted for her fourth birthday, she told me she wanted to sing on stage. I happened to have a friend, Jodie, already booked to perform on the right date at a local coffee shop, and all it took was the request to gain joyful entry for my tiny daughter to a stage of her very own. She chose a song, practiced and practiced and practiced—translate that as, “My three-year-old won’t stop singing the same song over and over again,”—until the big night. Then, dressed in her favorite light-blue pageant dress, she took the stage as if she owned it, her entire birthday party seated in the house.

It was a simple little coffee shop, and when Jodie called her up mid-set, they realized the microphone was mounted far too high for her and couldn’t be lowered. My daughter’s four-year-old voice wasn’t big enough yet to fill the room on its own, so she waited, calm and comfortable on the wooden stage until Jodie and a couple others managed to arrange a chair as a perch to lift her to the mic.

While they did all this, of course, folk in the coffee shop started talking; the performance was halted. My tiny daughter planted a hand on her hip and surveyed the audience. “Grandma, I see you being good!” she announced. The crowd tittered, but apparently felt chastened enough to return their attention to the pint-sized diva waiting for her crew to set her mic.

And then she sang “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” and blew them all away. Perfectly on pitch, her angelic little voice was so lovely that a couple people asked if she’d lip-synched it despite the obvious lack of any equipment more advanced than a mic screwed onto a camera stand.

Shortly after that, I was approached with the possibility of putting her in commercials. She had just turned four, knew how to read, could memorize lines, and sang like a siren; add blonde hair and a pretty smile, and she was a producer’s dream. With Drew Barrymore self-destructing in the public eye at the time, though, I declined. If my daughter wanted to perform professionally when she was older, I’d support her all the way. But I wasn’t putting her in commercials just now.

At seven, she auditioned for the West Tennessee Children’s Chorus, and her formal training began.

At almost-nine, she saw a call for auditions, begged me to let her try to join Opera Memphis; they needed four children from a multi-state region for their educational series. I thought maybe the audition experience itself would be good for her, and agreed to fill out the form, making certain she knew this did not mean she was in. Far from it, this was her first-ever real audition, and was incredibly competitive; we were going just so she could see what a professional audition was like, nothing more than that.

We received our time slot and other materials, learning that more than four thousand children were auditioning for four roles. But we could listen to the ones shortly before and after her, so we were looking forward to the experience, seeing new things and meeting new people.

She sang. They asked her to come back.

She sang again, a different day. They asked her to come back again.

She sang yet again, on yet another day.

They offered her a paid position among their professional cast.

I would never underestimate my daughter again.

~~~

When we moved to Pennsylvania, she lamented, “But Mama, I’ll lose my paycheck!” Since she wasn’t yet supporting our family and I was, it was a sacrifice we had to make. Both the West Tennessee Children’s Chorus and Opera Memphis moved into the “experience” part of her little-girl résumé, and she added some acting experience with a few shows in the little community theatre in Carbondale, then joined Marywood Children’s Choir. Along with a few friends, she auditioned for the big Christmas show in Tunkhannock, and at twelve years old, she strode onto their big stage without a microphone and held more than a thousand people enraptured with a simple spiritual, a capella. She made an impression; we heard from people who’d been there for that for a couple years afterward.

~~~

At that point, I commented to my mother in conversation that I really was stunned, that I had no idea where my daughter’s voice had come from, other than her own heart. My mother, never the most forthcoming with useful information, responded, “Well, my aunt did have a voice scholarship to Julliard …”

Maybe that was it.

~~~

A few years later, my daughter graduated from the Choral Society of Northeast Pennsylvania as well as high school, both a year early. She’d also done a few musicals at Wilkes University, and for a while I’d even managed to pay for some private voice lessons to help train her talent. St. Stephen’s well-known choir had her for a while as well, but she couldn’t really take the religious context there and it made her miss her beloved Quaker meeting, so she left that one despite adoring the incredibly accomplished musicians she got to meet. She’d done a few years of music camps, taken a college-level course in music theory, and performed everywhere from a local shopping mall to her brother’s swim meets to a couple amusement parks.

~~~

And then she was off to college herself, originally studying biology (Ecology and Evolution if you want to be specific) at Pitt, all the way across the state.

Just for fun, she took a class in East African Drumming and Dance. That’s what college is for, right? To explore things you’d never have encountered otherwise?

The next thing I knew, my skinny, pale, blonde daughter was chosen to solo the Ugandan National Anthem on stage.

She’s graduating this spring, with a degree in physical anthropology, a certificate in African Studies, and possibly a minor in Museum Curation if she can pull it off when they just started offering it her senior year.  She’s also now president of the East African Drumming and Dance club, and she’s teaching Swahili. Seriously. I sent her off to college speaking English and Spanish, and she’s teaching Swahili now. Never mind that, though; it’s not the point at the moment.

~~~

Just for fun this year, she decided to audition for her university’s elite show choir. One of the people who took her application had heard her sing, and expressed concern about whether her strong, powerful voice would blend with a choir. My daughter found a blank space in the margin of the audition application and wrote in every bit of her choral experience and training.

They gave her a place, and all semester she’s enjoyed the return to choral performance, which she hasn’t done in a while.

As a result, most of her new friends from that group hadn’t heard anything but her “head voice,” when the group put together their winter show. Since my daughter has a lovely light soprano, some of them expressed skepticism when she signed up to audition for the top solo spot, an Adele cover that called for power and presence.

I had to ask my daughter’s boyfriend to give me real details of the audition, and he was thrilled to indulge me. She’d been given the first audition spot, the one people expect to forget so they can hold the real contenders more easily in mind from later performances. As her boyfriend described it to me, she stepped forward, ignored the microphone, faced the gathering of her friends and advisors, and “let her Delta out.”

None of her choirmates wanted to follow her, but at the end of the night, her voice hadn’t been forgotten. They didn’t even do a second round of auditions before awarding her the part.

~~~

When she asked if I could come see her perform on December 7, I enthusiastically agreed, promising to be there even though I knew my girlfriend couldn’t make it.

And then we found out that her East African Drumming and Dance group is also performing later that same night—and she has the big solo for that, too.

And she has some other performance on Dec. 8. I really need to ask her more about that, but I just got that text earlier today, and we’ve missed our connection a few times since then.

~~~

So I am absolutely, positively driving across the state for December 7 this year, even if I do it alone, because my daughter will always be my favorite performing star ever.