ONCE UPON A TIME . . .

[Summer is a time for reunions--family, school mates. This summer I've been reliving memories--looking back at my life, and at the lives of my children and friends. I have new neighbors who aren't part of my memories yet, but the ones who have moved on are still with me. Our church has lost members--moved to another city, changed churches, died--and those of us who are left remember them in prayers and in our conversations with each other. Following are thoughts published a few years back, memories of times I might have forgotten, but thankfully I have not.]

I am 9 1/2 years old. I’ve spent the summer with my dad while my mother went with her new boyfriend to Las Vegas to get married. When she and my new stepfather come home, my dad delivers me to a house in a town I’ve never lived in before; it is the home of my new step-grandmother, a woman I immediately adore. We three, the new little family, live upstairs in the big attic room of Grandma Randolph’s house while our house, one block east, is being wallpapered and painted. In a few weeks we move again, into what I come to know as our house.

Our house, which is rented, has big rooms, with high ceilings. My bedroom is in the front of the house, with French doors leading into it from the living room. It is bright and sunny and with the high ceilings has an open and airy feel to it. I love it from the moment I see it.

Thinking back on that house, it was only four big rooms: two bedrooms, living room, and kitchen, with a bathroom featured by a claw-foot tub; and a side small room I never discovered the reason for, but probably another little bedroom that we used as storage. There was a long back porch off the kitchen. Possibly a basement, but I don’t recall going down into a basement in that house. So, scratch the basement.

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I am 22 years old, the mother of three children. We—my husband and the three children—have just moved to a city I’ve never lived in before, though I did visit once for a couple of days. The house is rented, furnished, and it has two astounding, wonderful things about it: an automatic dishwasher and a spinet piano. We can afford beds and pots and pans and clothes; I have never believed I’d have a dishwasher and piano so soon.

That house has a basement and an upstairs, and an attached garage. My son learns to walk in that house and we put up gates to keep him from exploring stairways. The gates do little good.

In that house I watch TV while I iron, and on November 22, 1963, I see our president being assassinated. At that moment I become two people—one watching, and disbelieving, the horror of seeing someone as important as the president of our country being shot while on a campaign trip; the other person observing the children who play on the floor under my feet, keeping the cord of the iron away from interested fingers, answering the telephone when I get a call about the TV story.

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I am 36 years old. The organist at my little country church tells me a law office in the county seat has a vacancy for a legal secretary and I should apply. I go to the interview, sort of as a lark, to see what kinds of things people ask when they interview you. It is unlikely, I think, that I’ll get the job—my background is in English and French, I will soon sit the Master’s written exam for an M.A. in English Language and Literature, and I’ve been around the block enough times to recognize the value of a degree in English: You can either do anything or nothing. (Garrison Keillor is right on the money with his jokes about English majors. My mind is considering whether I’ll be better off working at McDonald’s.)

So I go to the interview, trot out my credentials, which look pretty anemic lying there on the polished desk of the new junior lawyer. Experience? (Rearing children, reading, cooking, doing laundry, driving like a madwoman to get to class on time 30 miles from my home . . . .) Can I type? (Wow, something I can do!)

What really got me the job was the fact that I could spell. They didn’t know that for certain, but they assumed I could if I was practically a Master of English. (It’s true, I could, and can, spell well.)

It was the first “real” job I’d ever held. And I managed it for another 30 years.

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I often hear people say, “In another life”—meaning, not reincarnation, but who the person was at, say, age 9 or 22 or 36. Do we really remember being that person? Or do we remember things we did? People we knew? Events that happened (perhaps)? (Or did they?)

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So much advice is written today about how to keep our memory sharp; how to increase memory (as if we were a computer and could add another 64 Mb in a little chip). How to keep from losing memory (put it in a little bag and tie it to our belt? Put it in our safe deposit box at the bank? Stick it in a box and put on a good tight label telling what it is, and add the date and our initials?).

I’m all for memories. But sometimes, it seems to me, too much emphasis is put on what we remember. Why should I remember every street address and telephone number where I lived during the years from, say, birth to age 20? (An impossible task—I moved 20 times in 17 years.) Or how to make white bread without a recipe? Or who wrote that book I used to read every single year? Or what cupboard holds the cereal bowls?

Maybe it’s about what is personal to me . . . to you.

I remember Grandma Randolph, who treated me like the little 9-year-old girl she never had, always had time to talk to me, even though she worked away from home, and who helped my mother alter the new dresses that didn’t fit my summer-plump body.

I remember people who were kind to me when my mother died—Aunt Dessie, Mom’s oldest sister, took me, her 15-year-old niece, to her favorite dress shop and bought me a tweed suit and silky blouse to wear to the funeral. I wore those lovely clothes for years and years. The suit was a color I now know as mauve, with little flecks of blue and grey. I think Aunt Dessie also bought me a pair of white gloves. (All my clothes had been destroyed in our house fire six months before.)

I remember going into surgery in Indianapolis, nearly three hours from my home, not knowing anyone in that vast hospital except the eight people—family and friends and clergy—who had come to be with me and pray for my wellbeing.

I remember losing a large measure of my innocence when someone shot and killed our young president.

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Today we celebrate our memories: personal ones, collective family memories; shared and unshared. Good memories, that we're happy to take out and stroke because they make us remember good times. Bad memories, yes, I celebrate those; they tell us something about who we are, how we coped (or didn't), what we might have learned about ourselves, about life, and living.

We need our memories: They are the stories we tell—to ourselves and to each other—and thereby connect us together.

A LETTER TO MY FRIEND ON THE OCCASION OF LETTING GO

[One of my dear friends died last week. I'm repeating this post because among the parts of my life that are disappearing are those who have to move on because of ill health and need new living arrangements to keep them safe, and those who have passed to a new realm. I know God is with them, and I pray that they know God is there. Always.]

My dear friend,

You have been working at your task for some years now. I recall the time you boxed up newspaper cuttings, greeting cards, notes from people you had helped expressing their gratitude—boxed it all up and left it to be collected the next time the city truck came through.

At the time, I wondered how you could let go of all those things. My accumulation is similar, and I’m finding it difficult to cull the items I still want to hang onto.

Why, I wonder, is letting go so hard?

Did you find it so? Did you agonize over whole stacks of letters dating back thirty or forty years?

Much advice is written—and re-written—in magazines, newspapers, on the Internet—but it boils down to this: “If you haven’t used it in the last _____ years, pitch it.” The only difference from writer to writer is the number of years—3 years? 5 years? 10 years?

What about something that has lasted 25 years or more? Does it now have antique value? Do I care about that?

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You’ve given me good advice about this letting go business. Take, for example, clothing.

·         Each time you buy new items, get rid of the same number of old ones.

Okay, I can do that. I usually have plenty: too-small, too-large, wrong color, scratchy, too hot, too cool—easy to find the right number. Sometimes, I say proudly, I can discard/donate even more items than I just bought. How about that? And since I don’t buy trendy styles, what I remove from the closet isn’t any more attractive than what I put in its place. The big advantage in taking this advice is that I don’t have to build another closet (or room) to house an increase.

Books, now—that’s a different story. I know you’re not a collector, and you take pleasure in passing on to other folks many books you’ve enjoyed. But you also keep some, because, you say, those authors pleased you and became like good friends; you look forward to rereading those stories.

So I’ve "taken a page out of your book" about books:

·         When my taste changes, I can recycle books by donating them to my library for their monthly sale or to the senior center where a minimal charge for used books puts a few dollars in the center’s piggy bank. If the books are mysteries, I check with my children first—they like different kinds, so I may be able to pass along something they haven’t read.

The hardest category for me is correspondence. In my younger years I wrote and wrote and wrote letters to my nearest and dearest. The Internet and email changed that, and though I still write letters, they’re usually typed to save my aging fingers. But receiving letters! What a joy! There’s nothing like a real letter, written/typed on paper, put in an envelope, and sent off via the USPS to arrive at my house. A cup of tea, my feet up, and I’m transported into the world of my friend or relative who sent the missive. It doesn’t get much better than that. No wonder I have trouble disposing of those good times, represented by letters and notes.

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In thinking it over, I’ve concluded that letting go involves more than sorting, discarding, and bagging it up for the trash collection next Monday.

Letting go means a break in a relationship with the items from which I’m parting. For out-of-date clothing, books I no longer read, there’s no trauma. But for very personal items—reminders of who I once was, who I still am deep down, and what I meant to somebody, sometime . . . the letting go can be painful.

So I ask myself these questions: Do I need those items to remind myself of who I was? Don’t the memories attached to letters, photographs, greeting cards remain with me?

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You’ve purged many, many things from your life. And I find you are still the same person, without all the physical baggage that you’ve shed.

Thank you for letting me see how that works.

With love and appreciation for who you are,

J

THOUGHTS ON GRADUATION

It's been decades since I went through a graduation ceremony. Don't remember much about it, except that I was wearing white high-heeled shoes, and my name was called halfway through the alphabet, so I had plenty of time to wonder and worry if I was going to disgrace myself by falling up the steps to reach the Superintendent of Schools who was giving out diplomas, or if I was going to, instead, fall down the steps on the other side as I exited the stage. Neither happened--I made it up and then down, intact and upright, diploma clutched in my sweaty hand.

In memory, graduation from high school took place on a Sunday afternoon, and I started college the next day. Probably it wasn't quite like that, though I did indeed go to summer school at the college in my town. I took 12 weeks of Chemistry--the whole freshman year: 4 weeks of 101, 4 weeks of 102, and 4 weeks of 103. We had class and labs from 8 AM to 4 PM, five days a week. By the end of the course, it was September and my schedule included English, Math, Physics, and 200-level Chem courses. For me it was the big time.

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Some of the rituals for school graduation remain the same--diploma ceremony on a Sunday, party at home in the back yard/community room/country club/library/fire house, wherever a venue is available--then a summer of fun/work/prep for college--and before you know it, the graduate is thrown out into what seasoned folks love to call The Real World. (What do they think school days are? Make believe? Fantasy Land? It's all Real World. Just different arenas.)

Other parts of the moving-on business are very different nowadays.

I don't remember anyone in my era graduating in January. But it's not uncommon now. Students can also take college courses in their high school--get credit for high school and for college. One advantage is that some of the lower level college courses in English and Math can be taken while in high school and thus free up college time for electives or, more likely, additional course work in the major area of study.

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Graduation as a rite of passage makes sense. It's a signal, a sign, a physical experience that means we step out of one kind of life into another.

In the school district where I live, 5th graders had a graduation program or party; one school conducted a 5th-grade walk to visit former teachers; these students will go to the middle school in August. Middle School 8th-graders had a day out for a movie, cookout, and yearbook signing. High School students participated in graduation walks to their former middle and elementary schools.

And then there are those who rack up a lot of college course hours in our pursuit of Perpetual Student status. For those people, graduation day never comes.

I confess to having continued long after the normal time for finishing a degree. These days we like to say we're "lifelong learners," a lovely phrase that lets us keep on studying and learning and never graduating. But we thought of ourselves as perpetual students, and had to field the "real life" question at every turn.

For some folks it may be a cop-out--if we're always learning, that's a good thing, right? But what if we never apply what we've learned? Is it good to say we're "going to be" instead of saying "we are"? Apparently hard questions appear in all phases of life.

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There are other kinds of graduation experiences.

Some folks see getting married, starting a family, buying a house as the natural progression from being a single to being part of a new family.

Career-minded people, single or not, look for advancement in their chosen fields of endeavor. Gain experience, try different fields of work within the broader picture, test the waters in a sideways move--all are ways of continuing to learn, and continuing to move forward.

Retirement means, for some, a kind of graduation from a "regular" job into an abundance of time to enjoy life as All-Sorts--family stuff, travel, part-time work, volunteer work, making a former hobby or side interest into the main show.

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I heard a few days ago that public school starts in about four weeks. Four weeks! Good grief--I thought we just finished graduation parties. While students return to classrooms in August, the recent grads will be gearing up for college classes, heading off to boot camp, filing job applications and securing interviews. Some will continue with jobs they've had during school.

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The underlying message here seems to be--Life Goes On. 

Nothing stops - you pause to catch your breath - then you continue on a path. If you don't like that path, or it doesn't help you be the person you picture yourself to be, then you find and pursue another path. Life goes on--and on--and on.

And we can be grateful for that.

FROM SEA TO SHINING SEA

Today we celebrate Independence Day. On this day in 1776, men from 12 of the colonies signed a Declaration of Independence from the mother country, England. The official vote in the Continental Congress occurred two days earlier, July 2nd. After that vote, a committee headed by Thomas Jefferson wrote the official Declaration.

John Adams, one of the delegates, had written a letter to his wife, Abigail:

The second day of July 1776, will be the most memorable epoch in the history of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival. It ought to be commemorated as the day of deliverance, by solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations, from one end of this continent to the other, from this time forward forever more. [from Adams Family Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society]

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The United States celebrates in solemn events and riotous ones, from the serious contemplation of what freedom means to the joy of being able to express our gratitude openly.

However you celebrate--if you do--remember the men who made that possible 243 years ago. And be safe.