RITES OF PASSAGE

[This essay first appeared in July 2014! Yes! Ten years ago!! And except for references to then current events, the information and the joy buying school supplies always brings are still real, valid, and in the cup-runneth-over size.]

Yesterday I went to my local discount store for a short list of necessities. Necessities are likely to be augmented by an item or two that won’t break the budget but will please me in some way.

Such as: School Supplies!

It’s that time, folks—photocopied lists of supplies for each grade of public school—four short aisles, stuffed full, devoted exclusively to the needs (and desires) of shoppers who have elementary school children. Or, people like me.

Desert or Jungle?

A little impulse....

I was early, so no one could elbow me aside to get at the crayons (Camo Whammo! By Crayola), compass for drawing circles of any size up to a 12” diameter, or Fiskars blunt-tip scissors (with a safety sheath—and stickers!) in purple. To hold all these treasures, I found a small pencil box—plastic nowadays, alas (back in the day, they were cardboard, and we called them cigar boxes—because they were). Three-ring binders didn’t call my name, nor notebook paper, tabbed dividers, report folders. But my hand lingered over the Sketch Diary—such a pretty cover! And that lovely slightly rough paper ideal for pencil drawings. My fingers itched to create something on the empty pages. Very tempting. Then I remembered I already have several sketch books at home, various sizes, so I probably could wait for another year on that item.

What I did buy (besides the little items that fit neatly in the plastic box), were spiral notebooks—four of them, one-subject, 70 sheets each, roughly 9x12 inches. They’re ideal for making notes for my stories, writing scenes, or sometimes jut noodling ideas. And I bought one composition book (the kind we used in college a few decades ago) for my daily journal. I have a stash of these—different colored covers, or covers with different designs in black and white—but it’s always good to have an extra. You know, just in case.

What has any of this to do with Rites of Passage? I’m glad you asked. If your memory is still functioning, you’ll recall that once upon a time school supplies were strictly allocated per grade. In first grade—thick pencils about a half-inch in diameter, that filled a small fist trying to make the loops and slashes that turned into words; a very wide-ruled tablet for the little fist to practice those words; and an eraser, for the inevitable error.

Fast forward to fourth grade—talk about your rite of passage! We got to write (yes, cursively write) with fountain pens! And real ink! That was my first real intimation that I might, someday, be included in the adult world. Grownups wrote with ink and fountain pens. Teachers. Parents. The lady at the bank.

Much later, probably junior high (middle school to you younger folks), more freedoms were bestowed on us. We could actually choose our own three-ring binders, write all over the outside if we wanted to. Sadly, by the time I entered seventh or eighth grade, the ubiquitous ball point pen had come into being. I hung on to my fountain pens through several more decades; but eventually it became difficult to get quality ink and I retired my favorites to a drawer where I can visit them on occasion. And I still search for top-of-the-line ink for those precious pens.

Our grandchildren and great-grandchildren are experiencing rites of passage in the electronic age: second grade, iPads; fourth grade, tablets; sixth grade, laptops. All supplied by the school, with rental supplied by the parents. Inevitable, I suppose. After all, the world has become electronic in character. And my inner child sighs a little for the days of thick pencils and wide-lined tablets.
I still get a warm feeling, though, when I see little folks with big crayons in their fists coloring the placemats in restaurants. I wonder if any of them have Camo Whammo?

 

 

 WEEDS!

Wild Tiger Lilies

[Does your calendar say it's July? Mine, too. So why, I wonder, am I seeing an August landscape as I travel around NE Indiana? Today's post could have been written yesterday. But never mind what the calendar says--it's August on the ground.]

Weed: n. A plant considered undesirable, unattractive, or troublesome, especially, one growing where it is not wanted in cultivated ground.

Uh-huh.

Weeds make a good metaphor for “undesirable, unattractive, or troublesome” parts of our lives.

Consider, for example, a broken ankle. Or, if you prefer, a sprained wrist. Nothing too terribly disabling, but definitely undesirable, and probably unattractive (my wrapped ankle looked twice its normal size), and thoroughly troublesome (hopping is a darned slow way to get anywhere).

Something less physical? Okay, how about a too-full calendar, making it difficult to find wiggle-room in your busy life?

Or an unexpected happening—emergency surgery for appendicitis, sudden death of someone you know well, storm damage to your school/church/home?

Weeds.

Mustard

Every community has a business that specializes in weed control or weed eradication. They come in, and, for a generous donation from your bank account, wave their poisonous wands, and your lawn is—or will become—weed-free.

Don’t get me wrong—I love seeing my green grass uncluttered by dandelions in various stages of undress or clover creeping from corner to corner. Beautiful as these weeds are, they attract bees, and bees seem to like me more than I like them.

But I do wish I could like weeds. Along the roadside as I drive to Fort Wayne, I see fields of mustard, long swaths of chicory, clumps of tiger lilies, trumpet vine doing its invasive thing on somebody’s old shed. I actually love Queen Anne’s Lace and wild purple coneflowers. And sunflowers, wild or domestic, always make me smile. Maybe their distance from my life as they flourish along the highway makes them more acceptable.

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I’m not crazy about the weed metaphor in my life. I can’t hire somebody to come in and spray chemicals on my life to remove all the physical, mental, emotional, and psychic problems and frustrations that assail me. But after all, I’ve learned, they’re part of Life.



Chicory--great in coffee

If we look at the upside of weeds (I assure you there is one, for at least some of the weeds), we can see they may have positive uses.

Did you know:

·         Wild mustard is edible?

·         Chicory root dried and ground makes a coffee substitute? Or added to ground coffee, makes the signature chicory-coffee of New Orleans?

·         Red clover can be extracted into an herbal remedy? (Also bees love red clover, and help themselves to the nectar for later transformation into honey.)

·         Queen Anne’s Lace is also called wild carrot, and parts of the plant are edible?

Queen Anne's Lace

·         Dandelion leaves, snipped early in spring and wilted in vinegar and bacon drippings, are tender and sweet?

·         Dandelion leaves after maturing making a wonderful salve to use for itching insect bites?

·         Sunflower seeds feed birds?

So far I’ve not found anything edible about wild tiger lilies or trumpet vine, though both are lovely to look at. Maybe that's their reason for being, to add beauty to our lives.

Red Clover

Consider the places where weeds literally grow: along the roadside, in abandoned fields and yards, in gardens (flower or vegetable). My Grandpa Jenkins must have spent a lot of time and energy keeping his humongous garden clear of weeds so the vegetables could grow and mature. As big as the garden was, he used a hand-plow, walking behind it and pushing it between the rows. His big straw hat kept his head cool. Weed control had to be a never-ending process.

Weeds in our lives may be less visible. Bad habits, neglect, lack of consideration for another . . . we don’t want these characteristics, but they may be lurking in an abandoned corner of our lives.

Too bad personal weeds aren’t as readily seen as roadside weeds.

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Do you have weeds in your life? Are they poisonous? Or merely irritating? Do they cause you to be less than the person you were meant to be?

Weeds. They’re everywhere.

Blessings,

Thursday's Child

Trumpet Vine - offering a sip to a
hummingbird

 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.

 

CELEBRATING INDEPENDENCE

I’ve never lived in an oppressed nation. Wars for independence from a government that restricts freedoms from its citizens have passed me by. Citizenship was granted me when I was born in Charleston, Illinois, USA.

Because of where I was born and grew up, I had freedoms that came naturally—were taken for granted by me, as well as by most of the people I knew—such as:

·         Freedom to worship – when, where, and if I wanted to

·         Freedom to learn – school was compulsory until age 16, but learning can take place anywhere, with anyone, on any subject

·         Freedom to be – the person I became might not appeal to everyone, nor even to a majority, but it’s the person I was allowed to be, or claimed the right to be, and so it is who I am

·         Freedom to change – here’s the one I like best (well, sort of best) – change comes to everyone; it’s inherent in our very being: we are born helpless and dependent, we grow and learn to separate ourselves from others, we become the adult on whom others depend, then we grow old and dependent (perhaps) once more, and then we die. If anyone claims not to change at all—I’d like to see that person. Actually, I’d rather not, because a person who doesn’t change is probably dead.

·         Freedom to express my opinion, if I want to – guaranteed by the First Amendment to the Bill of Rights of the United States of America. And we’ve all read or heard of instances where someone’s opinion was dangerous and caused untold misery; where claiming protection under the right to freedom of speech was used to ill purposes. But I, and you, all of us, have the right to express ourselves – with the caveat that we don’t hurt anyone else. Perhaps our forefathers assumed we’d know that, common sense being in greater supply back in the day.

These Freedoms are what today give us – all of us – the independence so many fought and died for in the 1700s, and continue to fight for in the 2000s. It doesn’t have to be a bloody battlefield fight; it can be as close as your local food bank – the free summer lunch program for school-age children – the rescue mission for men and women who have bottomed out and yet find a place where someone loves them and wants to help them come back from addiction, abuse, and a sense of futility and worthlessness. It can be in your own family – a child who needs a helping hand, a grandchild whose employment ends and who needs a place to live, a spouse who suffers from depression or a medical problem and who needs acceptance and the knowledge that someone cares enough to stand by them.

Independence isn’t just some high-flown, abstract concept – Independence is a sense of self-worth, which leads to a sense of being connected to others – and ultimately, Independence is trumped by our dependence on a divine being (whoever we acknowledge that to be).

Thank you for allowing me to express my opinion. Yours may be different, based on your experiences. But you still have Freedoms. Guaranteed. Give thanks for them. And--don’t forget them.