Translating a World on the Edge

Our world today is busy with a certain concern  we might call  an interest in others. We spend hours on social networking, television, or movies. We sit in front of–or hold and finger–devices that feed our desire to know what others are doing.  And often we do this while someone we would surely  say we love more, is trying to get our attention. Do we give it? Or put them off?

The amount of time we spend with certain people says the most about how much we actually care about them. Quantity matters, especially to children, but also to a spouse.

What is the greatest gift a child wants from his parent?

What is the greatest gift a spouse wants from his wife, or her husband?

What is the greatest gift we can give a good friend?

Did you think I was going to say LOVE?

Well, in my opinion, the answer to all three questions is TIME.

When our time is called for, we may not want to cooperate. We may want to continue with what we are doing. Yet when we give away something so valuable to our child, spouse, or friend, we are giving them love in its purest form–love that involves sacrifice because time is one of the most valuable things in our lives.

The following is a great Josh Turner song, performed by a talented young man with a similar voice.

One week from today we’ll be at Andalusia Farm, the old home place of Flannery O’Connor in Milledgeville, Georgia. And here is your invitation.

   MISFITS, MISSION, AND MERCY  In Southern Fiction

                    Presented by The Flannery O’Connor-Andalusia Foundation, Inc.

    And Wiseblood Books 

                    Featuring Authors Kaye Park Hinckley and Charles McNair

              June 26, 2014 – Andalusia Farm, Milledgeville, Georgia

10 am – Noon

In the past few years Kaye Park Hinckley has emerged as a major talent in what Paul Elie calls “the literature of belief.” Hinckley translates grace in a world on edge, sees a double beginning and ending in everything, literally everything, including the unspeakably awful. Like her novel A Hunger in the Heart, the stories in Birds of a Feather—several of which have won substantive awards—take us to the heart of the matter.

Charles McNair released his first novel, Land O’ Goshen, to critical acclaim. Land O’ Goshen was a nominee for the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1994. His recent novel, Pickett’s Charge,reflects McNair’s incredible talent as a creative story teller, as well as an observer of and commentator on the human condition.

Both writers will give a brief talk on their perspectives and read from their works: Hinckley on Catholic Fiction, Catholic Imagination, and the influence of Flannery O’Connor on her writing, and McNair on southern fiction, fiction in general, and magical realism in his novels.

Afterwards, a tour of Andalusia Farm will be offered by the Foundation, with a suggested donation per person of five dollars.

Below is an actual recording of Flannery O’Connor reading “A Good Man is Hard to Find.”

Certain people are natural fixers—people who can fix anything, a broken drawer, a leaky radiator, a downed computer. Anything.  Except themselves.

These are people who sense nothing wrong with themselves,  until  catastrophe shakes their lives and they’re knocked to their knees. They look up and wonder what happened. They look for the screwdriver, or the hammer and nails.  But the situation they’re  in can’t be fixed with those sorts of tools.

These are the people who  have lost a child, or a spouse, or a parent. These are the people who  have been fired from a job, or  told they have cancer or some other disease. These are the people who go to fight wars and lose legs and arms, and more. These are the people who must care for someone with dementia, or have it themselves. These are the people with every sort of addiction they can’t get rid of.

These are the people who think one lie won’t matter–they’ll never get caught. These are the  people who  salivate over someone else’s good fortune to the point of  jealously that spins out of control.  These are the people who con others out of what is rightfully theirs. These are the people who cheat, murder, sell drugs to children for money to buy a pair of expensive shoes. These are the people with vendettas against those who have hurt them.  These are the people who kill, or abuse their own children, or terrifically wound them with poisonous words and language.  These are the people in fat positions who climb up the ladder on the slender backs of others.

These are the people. And those people are us.

We are, all of us, imperfect people in an imperfect world.  Our individual vices abound.  But also, within each of us there are virtues. The virtues of faith and hope and love. These are the spiritual tools we have been given by our Creator.

Can we use them to become different? Can we change?  Can we be fixed?

Absolutely. Ask for it.

Life jackets  come in all different shapes, sizes and colors. They are made to fit both adults and children. The main purpose of a lifejacket it to keep a person’s head above the water. They are designed to help us stay afloat even when unconscious. A life jacket is supposed to protect us.

Sometimes we think of another person as our life jacket: our spouse, our parents, our friends.. We’re not Supermen or Superwomen.   We need others. We need to be able to trust others. Husbands need to be able to trust their wives, and wives their husbands. And children surely need to be able to trust that their parents will protect them.

But in some circumstances,  the very ones we look to for protection are the ones who betray us. Rather than holding our heads above water, or helping us float when we need it, those so-called ‘life jackets’ leave the pool. They leave us alone to fend for ourselves.

So what do we do when we’re in deep water, and our life jacket unstraps itself and skitters away?

For a child, still unable to swim, it’s catastrophe. A child will cry for help, “Save me!”

If  we are a  husband or wife who has been betrayed, or if a close friend has left us in a less than safe position,  we might still say, “Come back. Save me.” But we are not children.

“Save me” is not a sensible,  adult response, to the one who’s left us in a lurch. Neither is, “I’ll get you back if it’s the last thing I do!”

The adult response is  not to whine, not to seek revenge, but to bolster ourselves by recognizing that we are created for dignity by God. Lean on Him. Listen to His words. He will teach us how to swim on our own.

Because this is what we must sometimes do–be on our own. Life is difficult. People are not always going to be there for us.

But God will always be there for us.  Call out to Him.

The phrase “having a good cry” suggests that crying can actually make you feel physically and emotionally better. Many people believe this, and some scientists agree. They assert that chemicals build up in the body during times of elevated stress, and  so emotional crying is the body’s way of ridding itself of these toxins and waste products.

Some scientists also say that crying has a signaling function–a signal to others that we need their help in fighting off an aggressor.  When we cry we convey the impression that we are innocent and weak – like children – and need the protection of another. Crying is  a way to send a social message.

But what good do tears do? We could vocally cry for help without shedding any tears, and yet our tears are so unique to our species, a way to let others know that we are in distress precisely through showing them only the tears in our eyes.

Children, especially babies,  shed many more tears than adults do which is what you expect if crying is about wanting protection. Women also cry a lot more – about four times more – than men do, and this again is what you expect because women tend to be physically weaker and more defenseless.  Crying means we need understanding. We need empathy.

And what do we normally do when we see someone being tearful in our presence, signaling for our help? Our automatic response is  to offer our support,  because we feel empathetic toward them.

Empathy is a distinctively human characteristic, but it was first a characteristic of God, in whose image we are made.  Because of His merciful empathy  our Creator actually took on our human nature in the person of Jesus Christ,  and for our sake submitted to a horrible and shameful death.  Jesus Christ knows pain and sorrow!  He relates.

When we go through terrifically hard circumstances and turn to prayer, it is often with tears that we plead for Jesus to help us.

Can we picture Jesus crying for us as well?

Why wouldn’t He—God made Man—cry when we cry?  Why wouldn’t He care when we fall, or lose someone, or mess up so badly we think we can’t be fixed. And when we turn to Him, our faces streaked with tears, why wouldn’t He— out of empathy— rain even more Grace and Love upon us ?

Happy Friday the Thirteenth! A good day for a ghost story.

Plus,  I’m experiencing  the  old adage of mishaps happening on this day.  I just counted again and discovered that there are TEN stories in my collection–not nine!!

So, here is the tenth, “The Pleasure of Company: A Ghost Story,” set in Tuscaloosa, Alabama in 1880,  when ghosts from the Civil War still roamed in the heads of some who served as soldiers.

And here is your last question, with multiple choice answers. Please comment below the video.

Do you believe in ghosts?
.yes
.no
.maybe

THE PLEASURE OF COMPANY: A Ghost Story

A year ago, when she could not bear to speak to a soul, when she did not comb her hair or wash her face or dab herself with lavender water, or wear her corset (because any underclothing cut off her breath), Julia began the night walks into the woods, taking off her gown and lying upon the ground beneath the ancient oak. But neither the cooling breeze upon her breasts nor the sparkle of stars kissing the leaves to silver against the dark sky lifted her melancholy. The night walks have become her futile attempt to make sense of meanness. Still Julia cannot fathom a reason for the death of her child; still she has no face for Hattie’s murderer.

Clara and I come.

We follow her home. The next morning, Clara and I watch as Joseph, Julia’s husband, instructs Esther to, “Restart the clocks, uncover the mirrors, and draw open the curtains in Miss Julia’s bedroom.”

Julia protests. “Joseph, it’s too soon.”

“It’s been a year, exactly,” Joseph says, motioning Esther to begin. He is a tall, thin man, with a once pleasant face, now pinched by sorrow and the worry of a much older man.

The old black woman, Julia’s childhood nurse, carefully lifts the customary black satin from the mirror on the dressing table. The light causes Julia to shut her eyes and lower her chin into the high-necked collar of her funeral dress, made from the same bolt of satin that covered the windows and mirrors. Every night, Esther washes and irons it for Julia because she’ll wear nothing else.

“What if Hattie’s spirit has been trapped behind the mirror?” Julia asks.

“The covering of mirrors is just superstition,” Joseph says. “Hattie has not been trapped. She has not been kept from Heaven.”

Clara and I hear and understand his thinking; that the only trapped spirit is Julia’s, and he desperately wants to help it escape.

He motions Esther out of the room so he can be alone with his wife. In the uncovered glass, her unkempt brown hair hangs about her oval-shaped face. Her narrow shoulders slump forward and her opaque eyes, once buoyantly blue with the promise of a happy life, are as tarnished as neglected silver. He has to do something meaningful soon, before he loses her forever.

Yesterday, he suggested a dinner party. Once, she loved celebrations. “The dinner party is what you need, Julia,” he reminds her. “You’ve not had the pleasure of company for more than a year.” He bends to kiss her cheek, but she shies away from him as she has come to do, giving a bitter wince at the touch of his fingers on the nape of her neck.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKXhIMgTsrE

We know that a new moon is born every 27 days. During that period  the moon progresses through certain stages or phases. Each phase has its on set of unique viewing characteristics, so that we on Earth see each phase as being different from another. We have phases in our lives too–each with varying characteristics. If some of the characteristics we see in our lives today are bothering us, we are empowered through God’s grace to change them. But what if we don’t— or think we can’t— change ourselves?

Here’s the first page of “Moon Dance: A Love Story,” the eighth story in my collection, Birds of a Feather.

Here is the question, with the multiple choice answers.
What is the promise of return that Anna speaks of in the story?
1. a return to her youth
2. that the nurse will come back to give her a pain pill
3. God’s promise to his people.: Eternal life

Moon Dance: A Love Story

Every night, when she makes her rounds, she finds us watching the Georgia moon. We lay together in a single bed to catch the first inkling of its light and nightly mark its swell from miniscule to magnificent. We tell her of its essence, that it is something much bigger and brighter than itself. She gives us a condescending, “Uh huh, Shugah;” then leans over to tuck the white sheet around our thighs, and brush a dark hand across our foreheads. She smells of honey.

In the darkness, we point out to her the way the moon takes center stage to a sparkle of dancing stars, how it soon becomes distorted, fades and passes, leaving only a promise of return. We tell her that return is certain—our covenant between nothing and everything, between life and death. But she only wrinkles her sweet, black face and smiles, a tall silhouette against the silver light from the window.

“Night, night, Miz Anna,” she says.

I expect her to give us a kiss goodnight, but instead she gives us a pill for pain. On her way out, she does not close the window. She does not shut our door. We do not allow her to do that, because we will not be fastened here forever.

The artificial light from the hall draws a triangular shape on the linoleum, pierces the soft splash of moonlight that spreads downward from the foot of our bed. The illumination of the hall is soon extinguished by a human hand, but we lie in a radiance the human hand does not control. In the night, we speak of the covenant, the promise in death. I see its purpose. Death is passage. Death is close.

One hundred and six years old, both of us, we’ve held many who passed before us, held them in our arms as they took a last breath—parents, children, grandchildren, others we loved. I tell Will, my beloved husband,  that God’s desires are greater than our own. He accepts the truth in that. Then we speak of our daughter, our first child.

A name–to give identity– is important. We even give identity to days of the week.  Today is Hump day? Or is it Winning Wednesday? Either way,  the meaning is that the cat is in the bag.

Here’s the first page in the seventh story in my collection, Birds of a Feather. One of my reviewers says he, “loves the heck out of Jimmy’s Cat.” But hey, so does Jimmy–and that might be a problem.

Which questions will be answered in this story? Answer in the comment section below the video.

. How do you keep a cat out of a heat fight?
. Does Jimmy’s Cat need to know its name?
. Will a redneck do ‘God-knows what’ to Jimmy’s Grandmamma?
. Everyone has an identity

JIMMY’S CAT

Jimmy’s cat wasn’t born one-eyed. I heard he lost it one night in a heat fight with a big, orange-striped tom when Jimmy was twelve years old. Jimmy’s twenty-seven, now, and the vet who sewed up the cat’s eye, sewed it so tight it looks like it was never meant to see in the first place.
Jimmy’s cat didn’t have a real name. Everybody just called it Jimmy’s Cat. Jimmy’s mama called it Jimmy’s Cat. Jimmy’s grandmamma called it Jimmy’s Cat. And Jimmy’s wife, when he got married, called it Jimmy’s Cat, too.

Jimmy’s mama and grandmamma never cared too much for Jimmy’s Cat. Jimmy’s mama didn’t like when it would creep out of Jimmy’s bed in the mornings and into the kitchen, rubbing itself up against her leg while she was pouring the beat eggs into the frying pan. She’d get a scrunched-up look on her face whenever it would butt the blind side of its head to her calf like it was trying to push her out. The little, brown mole on the side of her cheek would quiver whenever Jimmy’s cat did that. And when it slid around her ankle, like a fuzzy rope trying to snag her, she’d clinch her front teeth, and curl up her lips, and just about have a hissy fit. Because Jimmy’s mama didn’t allow herself to be tied to nobody, at least nobody but Jimmy. So, if Jimmy wasn’t in the kitchen, she’d take the broom to Jimmy’s Cat and swat it outside.

Jimmy’s grandmamma didn’t find Jimmy’s Cat tolerable, either, because it liked to sleep between the tire and the fender of her car—only her car, nobody else’s— not even Jimmy’s wife’s old jalopy. So Jimmy’s grandmamma always checked under the fender before she got in to drive it. Then she checked the inside of the car, because there was no doubt some redneck maniac might be hiding in the back seat waiting to do Godknows-what to her. Finally, she’d check the tires, because one time she had a flat one smack dab in the middle of the Interstate, and had to catch a ride to the nearest filling station with a sweaty, fat man who almost talked her ear off. She said she never in her life wanted to go through an ordeal like that again, so she made it a habit to inspect the car, inside and out, before each errand and departure. And sometimes she had to scoot off Jimmy’s Cat, curled up on top of the right front wheel under the fender where nobody could have seen it, not even somebody with good eyes.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UsSqDY2cf00

What are the biggest things in our lives, those that seem most important to us?  Are they truthfully the most important?

On this Tuesday,  I’m posting the seventh story in Birds of a Feather, with question and multiple choice answers. Comment below the video.

When something BIG  goes wrong in your life, how do you try to fix it?
.You don’t try to fix it.
.You go after the person who caused the problem with a hammer in your hand.
.You remove that canvas and paint a different picture

LITTLE THINGS, BIG THINGS

Late at night after the children are in bed and she’s certain Aaron is sleeping, Amelia takes her flashlight and climbs the back stairs into the attic of the century-old house, to paint. She climbs the wooden steps carefully, barely putting any weight at all on the top step, the one that creaks. In the corner of the attic where the support beam to the rafters makes a perfect right angle with the floor, is a square table with small brass lamp. When she pulls the lamp switch, the table and everything on it– canvas, tubes of oil paint, dry brushes in a glass jar—all come to light in a nearly perfect sphere. She clicks off the flashlight then. A lot of light is neither necessary nor wanted.

Tonight she is working on a portrait of Aaron, an eight-by-ten canvas, as all of them are. Portraits of the children are finished, for now anyway; she will come back to them later when she finds a flaw, or when some new characteristic needs to be added. The children’s faces, four of them, hang from nails hammered into the pine walls like pictures in a beloved, private gallery. Below, stacked against the wall, are more canvases of each of the children from years past, babyhood onward. But this is the first time she’s painted Aaron. Aaron’s unfinished face sits on an easel, looking back at her through deep brown eyes. The eyes are still flat. No highlights yet. Amelia hasn’t determined whether the light in his eyes will come from the right, or the left.

She pours varnish into a small metal cup, and turpentine into the glass jar, then swishes the brushes around to be sure they are clean, wiping each of them with a stained cotton cloth, pouring out the old, dirtied turpentine, and refilling the jar with the new. On a glass plate, she squeezes out the oil paint, beginning with cadmium yellow light and titanium white. Highlights for Aaron’s eyes. The light will come from the right, she thinks, wondering why she hesitated last night when she began his portrait; the light in each of her portraits always comes from the right, from the only natural light possible in the attic–through one round window that looks like the porthole of a ship. Through that window, occasional moonbeams compete with the lamp, and if the beams are bright enough, as they sometimes are, Amelia turns off the lamp, and paints by moonlight.

Tonight there is no moon, so the lamp stays on. She paints for an hour or so, until Aaron’s face is just like she wants it, charged with an expression of love and faithfulness accented by the meticulous highlights in his eyes. Then she takes the canvas and hangs it on a waiting nail, beside the portrait of their last child, Aaron Junior.

Merry Monday!

Here is the first page of the sixth story in Birds of a Feather, the question of the day, and the multiple choice answers for the comment box below.

Guess the story theme. Is it…..?

1. A day at the beach
2. Bluebird calls
3. Resurrection

Blue Bird of Happiness

Halloween. Old Florida Highway 98. Right turn toward the Gulf, a procedural deviation from integrity. Procedure is programmed into the mind of a physician. Even some deaths are scheduled.

The sun roof is open and the windows down. I turn the Lexus into the parking lot of The Boat Dock Bar, crushing primeval oyster shells beneath Michelin Energy tires while triangular flags slap plastic, carrot-colored polka dots against a hallowed, sapphire sky, and an incongruent blast of music shuts out the pious breath of waves.

There are lots of bars in Destin, but this one is set apart. The Boat Dock Bar claimed her Gulf-front spot when the town was just another Florida fishing hole, and then held to it, regenerating like the tail of a lizard after Hurricane Dennis. When the hurricane hit, my wife, Felicia, heard about The Boat Dock’s fate and called from her law office to tell me. Four people in plastic masks, drunk enough to think they could ride out the hurricane on a walkway with weak railings, were swallowed by the sea.

The walkway was the bar’s first renovation. Crossing the wood planks, I pass a memorial sign that reads: ‘To the Flawed and Fallen,’ and I’m envious of the bar’s resurrection.An outside voice enters in. Envy is normal  and shouldn’t be suppressed. It simply needs to be properly channeled. A lesson I learned in Group Therapy. Never mind the maternal negation in my head —that envy is a cardinal sin opening the soul to greater vices.

I didn’t have time for a change of clothes, so I’m still dressed in a pair of new khaki shorts I paid eighty-five dollars for at the outlet two weekends ago, the last time I was down here. I wear no socks with my loafers, no underwear for easy disrobing, and no shave since I left Birmingham. A wealthy woman I met here once—a woman with hungry eyes, but too old for me—summed me up by saying I had a neat, charmingly passive, appearance. I doubt she would say the same today; there’s a salsa splatter on my expensive Polo shirt from a drive-in lunch on the way down, and then a swerve of the Lexus to avoid the unavoidable.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mjOv6Nb6a4