For years now, I’ve known in a general way what I wanted to write. You know from this blog, the idea has involved my life, my history, my faith. Trying to capture something that might offer valuable bits to others, in a compelling way. A pleasing, entertaining way would be nice. This can be hard, when you’re a melancholy, prone-to-melodrama sort like me. Lately I have felt a nearness to some sort of passage through the log jam in my mind. But I have begun to wonder if it will take decades longer to discover what resource I might provide, what blessing, if you will, I might give.
I’m going to share a page from a little diary. Written in pencil, the entry is dated Saturday, August 3, 1974.
On Monday evening some friends from Illinois, the Hershisers, came to visit. There are four in their family; the parents, LeRoy and Gwen, and the kids Tim, 18 and Stephanie, 15. We had a great time with them on Tuesday, when we went to Pt. Defiance park for the day. Stephanie and Tim are funny and neat. Tim is great in electronics and knows all about electrical stuff. He fixed about everything that needed repairing around here, from our TV to our casset tape recorder. I’m afraid I sort of like him a little too much but he has a girlfriend back in Sterling, Illinois and I won’t be seeing him for probably many years, so I think I’ll get over him.
I was 14. A later entry that summer found me meeting a boy named Mike at a campground, talking with him late into the night (with my brother there. “Unfortunately,” I said), and then searching in vain for Mike the next day. Ah, those years. Amazing, still, to me, is how one piece of my continuing adolescent adventures returned in a meaningful way a few years later.
Tim came back to Tacoma. We started dating (his old girlfriend a bittersweet memory) when I was 17, my senior year.
I recall his sister saying, sometime after we married, that ours had been a fairy tale love story. Lately I jotted something related into my Moleskine writing notebook:
I’ve been a main character in a fractured fairy tale. I’ve also been the wife in a stable, committed relationship. Both my stories have played out with the same man.
Here’s the strange part: in both cases we have lived a broken love.
Although we find ourselves on a healing journey, the two of us remain morally tattered beings. And yet we have seen ourselves striving for better, wanting goodness.
If only God would give it to us.
The Bible’s word “depraved” brings up questions for me. Why, for one thing, doesn’t God give us moral “pravity”? Make us “praved”?
Is depravity like being declawed? Defenestrated?
Why don’t we get secondary pravity, like some say we get secondary virginity?
How can the command, “Go and sin no more” fit, if I’m to be ever depraved while walking this planet, while going?
I jotted these thoughts along with glimpses of answers I’ve been forming over the decades since I was that 14-year-old girl. Since that first glimmer of my fractured fairy tale. I had some fun with possibilities. Maybe I’m discovering the channel I can write in, on, betwixt.
Yesterday I received a gift in the mail from Fresca. Thanks, bloggy buddy! It’s a book of quotes titled A Writer’s Commonplace Book (British, eh, what?).
Leafing through pages this morning, I was reading aloud to Tim. Here’s something we both found interesting, by Margaret Mead:
Three different types of marriage. One for young people who just want to live together and have sex…another for couples who want to raise children. A third is for older people who want companionship.
Mead was married three times, and her sexual orientation apparently “evolved” later in life. Her fractured fairy tales obviously look different than my own, hetero-oriented, stormy story. But I like these ideas to explore, especially when thinking about writing for people, in marriage type 1, 2, or 3 (maybe with the same person), living along that vast and varied avenue of our reality which is characterized by believing in God and Jesus.
Plenty of us are fractured. How many sigh and groan, thinking most of the others they see are living happily ever after?
And what, pray tell, old chap, might it be like to climb back in the window, fenestrated, wearing a sprig of pravity in one’s hair?
There is so much here.
I don’t know anything .
We are all just stumbling along. Human. Hoping. Fractured indeed.
Human and hoping, Deb. Thanks.
Deanna, you are the most “praved” person I know. Twice during this past week, I have been driven to my knees bargaining with God that if only he will keep things fine and wonderful for me as they have been for so long, I promise, I promise, I promise to start doing all those things I should do but don’t do. Selfish, but true. (I’ve been pretty much past sins of commission for some time; it’s the sins of omission that are going to do me in, I fear.) Like Deb said, you touched on many “close to the bone” things here. I appreciate you.