New parents, in Russia, in what was, meeting the challenge of a system doomed. No opulence. No basics (as I consider basic, anyway). Cloth diapers. (Well, I did that, pride insists.) But no washer, no dryer, no Mr. Appliance, no laundromat. A husband’s nightly chore, washing for the baby for the next day.

The gift of city life: the underground. Before the baby, at university, acquiring a contraband Bible. Curiosity turns to immersion turns to joy. Belief. In America, years later, there would be laundry appliances aplenty and the house of God. But beneath the strongholds of the U.S.S.R. the one thing necessary blesses the soul, contains in meekness the beauty of the universe.

At 8:00 we headed south. My music played, and Kimi in the back seat said she liked it. That’s something an old gal loves to hear, even while navigating a road nearly dis-graded by winter’s length and breadth. Not to be run down by pickups of insatiable power-lust, that was my prime directive. Steer in the clear around those curves, past the barriers. Catch glimpses of shining water, in Odell Lake, on faces of rock rising. Sense the solemness of trees.

Snow Zone signs abounded. Larger ones appeared regarding fines for unintended vehicles. At least, my eye first caught those words, and I grinned. Of course the signs actually warned against leaving unattended vehicles.

I drove an Escape I hadn’t intended. The car and the trip matched my recent notions of life as an unexpected avenue. No safety guaranteed. But surprises. Those always approaching, just the other side of a bumpity curve.

Grasp for barren treasure, the
hard outline against bright space.
Promise me
a difficult beauty.

The year is waning, and the music is deep. Well, we don’t have snow, so I’m glad there can be depth of sound, rather than some of the kitsch I’ve sampled in search of the holiday.

For years my husband has sought tunes to listen to while he drives. Because the green world around here grows tall between cities, Tim carries out broadcast engineering on long, four-wheel-drive enhanced trips to transmitter sites and home again. He likes the New Age genre. I especially love it come December.

While I listen, I’m still filling my little Moleskine. The writing notebook’s almost ready to put to bed with the year. So I’m back with more random bits from a writer’s mind.

You’ll judge between kitsch and depth better than I:

6/7: Observe and consider. There’s elegance in the unmown grass.

6/14: If I forget to turn decorated t-shirts inside out before washing, will the laundry police come after me?

6/19: The startling sound behind me was a flapping of wings. A crow’s. Only an old crow. But a friend in the stillness wrapped in cloud on Mary’s Peak.

6/24: I like summer coming in under the door.

7/3: I’ve learned that the life of an engineer’s pants is not a pretty one.

7/12: Some writers write directly, and not explicitly. I think I write indirectly and explicitly.

7/15: Clever email spam: Cassanova’s Caplets

7/18: (daughter) Victoria: Our country’s present leaders were all raised on Sesame Street. That explains a few things.
Me: Wow, you’re right. A bit scary.

8/2: My first manuscript mailed to The Sun. Wow, that is far, far away.

8/13: Victoria: I am a multi-syllabic kind of person.

8/26: Our neighbor Harry: The difference between being involved and being committed is like ham and eggs. The chicken’s involved; the pig is committed.

9/12: Christian writing and teaching is overwhelmingly top-down, and the educated world wants, mostly, bottoms up.

9/14: There are books and books and books to be written close to home.

9/27: When a “broadminded” person reacts against an established group/ideal by calling it anti-(whatever), that implies “you are negative,” which implies “I am positive,” which implies “I am right and you are wrong.”

10/3: As opposed to listening in on many forms of conversation, I prefer the noise of a book.

10/6: It’s okay to just keep working in the wasteland of a first draft.

10/8: “It is much better to be tied to one wonderful thing than to allow a mere catalogue of wonderful things deprive you of the capacity to wonder.” ~G.K. Chesterton, “Lamp-posts,” from The Pedestrian, No. 1.

10/25: Man, it’s a wild, hot-flashy life.

10/31: “Why do I get the impression my generation will be known for its witty comebacks?” ~Victoria, after viewing photos by Sarah Culver of the Sanity/Fear rally in Washington D.C. (view here; they’re cool)

11/7: Sometimes when I keep quiet about something, I’m withholding permission from myself to grieve.

11/11: Yesterday I drove Highway 99 home inside an IMax sky.

11/21: Christians are going to be on the losing side of culture wars. Whenever they’re not, things get very bizarre.

11/22: The sacred. Hm. So close to the scared.

11/29: Out the window, nearsighted, at 4:30 a.m. — a little, winking planet or the moon.

She sat on the kitchen stool. Dishes remained piled at the sink. I leaned against the refrigerator–though it was late–still too wound up. We both were. Talk mingled with tears, as we processed more of the day.

I had tried to weave a relaxed plan. Tried to make things flow smoothly before the drive north about 70 miles for the memorial service. Not all of us could go. Though Victoria tried to get out of working, Saturday morning is a hard shift to cover.

“Well, you would have missed the service either way,” I told her when we got home.

The reader board above the freeway just past Albany warned us an accident had happened ahead. I was driving Mom and Dad’s car, so I had Mom call Tim right away. I wished to hold back the shudder, the immediate mental pictures. Tim and James had left early with his parents. Surely they were already well past the tragic place in the road, but I needed to know.

All was well with our loved ones. They were nearly to the church, where so many were soon to gather to remember Tim’s aunt. Rosie had made her best effort to live well despite the cancer that messed with her body and now has made a family smaller.

Mom, Dad, and I tried to think of alternate routes, while hoping the road would be clear when we got there. It wasn’t. We crept along with everyone else, six miles from our exit. The clock showed we could still make it if…there, moving now we’d have ten minutes still…no, now we’ll only be twenty minutes late…oh, well, we’re going to miss it.

Finally, down to one lane, we passed the emergency workers. Two cars, in tatters. The people were already taken.

The freeway opened up again, three lanes across. Freedom. My heart lingered behind, still seeing the wreckage.

People die on tropical islands from coconuts falling on their heads. I almost said that into our hushed space, but I didn’t.

At the reception they gave us grace, though how it’s mustered in such moments I don’t yet understand. Still I needed to receive. I stood near people I don’t make the effort to see often enough, and I pictured such a crowd after my own service someday. May they, especially those on the periphery, enjoy themselves a little. Remember with stories, like my mother-in-law telling them at the table to my son. Embrace the untidy moment.

There were pictures in the morning of a spider in the sunshine building her web. Later I noticed that the strands were not perfect. The orb is gaping in some places, where the breeze blew the spider off-course, and she had to hang on, head-down, and just continue working.

That day we put one foot before the next to find each piece in the puzzle. Lots of meaning, somehow, in going from morning til far past dusk.

I tried to write a story of inspiration about my anxiety and your kindness that day. But it was a top-down sort of thing, as I’ve tended to do. See, I was in Paris. See, I’m married to a considerate person. See, we walked along the Seine and did the Eiffel Tower. It was nice. But just that.

I would have been yawning had it not been about me.

What I’m finally finding, perhaps, is a way of expressing the quieter, the closer to home. It’s not all about me and trumpets blaring what I’ve concluded. It’s a less directly lit idea, a crafting, hopefully, on the path to finding.

I wrote this morning about how when I was six, grasshoppers went off before me in the field like small cannons announcing my procession. Church pews presented a lovely temptation to get beneath and slide, stomach-down, while dressy frills scooped dust.

You knew those same sorts of things, but differently. We would meet along a path to Paris, not knowing a lot of river would flow under those bridges before our illumination, before our day. The story is simply like that, in its small, full fashion. It’s waiting in the shadows to be seen.

You make a living by what you get, but you make a life by what you give.
~Sir Winston Churchill

“Oh, I’m calm,” she said. “I’ve helped him practice so often, I know this will be wonderful.”

She indeed looked composed, while I sat like a loaded arrow, my fingers twisting in my lap. Fortunately, Tim had found his seat on the other side of James, our son. When Tim is beside me and lights go down, he tends to tickle my knee. Shrieking and launching five feet in the air wouldn’t be the way I hoped to support Dad at his concert.

The room looked nearly full.

Mom said, “In all these years, I don’t think your dad or I ever spoke in a church this large.”

I swallowed and continued aiming for composure. The lights dimmed. Someone up front introduced the spring concert of the Gleemen, a local all-male singing group Dad joined some months ago. For several seasons Tim’s dad urged my dad to be part of their choir, and finally Dad agreed to try it. Watching all the men file onto the stage, I couldn’t decide if I should thank or scold my father-in-law.

Now Dad was up there, in his black tuxedo in the back row. There was Tim’s dad, smiling, across the risers. I was glad Tim’s dad had brought this about, though no one had foreseen that my father would end up trying out for the solo now scheduled at the concert’s end.

How would I survive through all the tunes on the program until then?

Strangely, a week before I had managed fine at the production my son was in of Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors. A little tense beforehand, I had waited for the show’s beginning in confidence that seeing James on stage expressing his art would relax me. At every one of his plays I have reacted the same way. This one last week proved no exception. The players took frenetic inspiration from the Marx Brothers in Duck Soup.

(Photos courtesy of Jessamyn VandenElzen. Click on them to “embiggen.”)

They were masterful. I had fun.

But this night watching Dad on stage, I wasn’t doing so well. Even while the concert opened with upbeat numbers from America’s past, and even while appreciating the informative introductions to each song, my nerves continued skittering the same way James’s troupe had acted out their characters.

What was my problem? Why did I feel like I held Dad up with my stomach muscles? He’s doing great, I told myself. But, my brain responded, what if he slips stepping down for his solo? What if his voice cracks? What if the sound guy messes up and the choir drowns him out?

Clearly, I could have used some form of psychological counseling. Someone to tell me how these extreme feelings might stem from growing up a preacher’s kid, watching Dad “perform” behind the pulpit every Sunday for critical congregants. Maybe that was the problem.

I knew, however, that Mom beside me was a preacher’s daughter, too. She was okay with this. Of course, her dad answered the ministerial call later in life. Grandpa wasn’t even assigned a usual, preaching pastorate until he neared retirement. And then, well, duh, Dad is her husband. She’s been a preacher’s wife all these years. She found her methods of separating from him. She dealt with these things as an adult.

But I’m still a child when I see Dad on stage. The kid in me worries. Maybe, a psychologist might counsel, I took on too much those years ago, imagining I needed to alleviate stress for my parents in their chosen religious service. Now I need to find ways to separate more: me from them, past from present, church from art.

The moment came, finally, for the last concert number. The presenter explained how this song, Ol’ Man River, became an expression of hardship not just for African Americans, but for all of us living life that can be tragic and confusing. Circumstances can be like a river, continually rolling along, not seeming to care. But life keeps happening.

I thought about Dad, growing up poor. He’s had experiences I can’t understand. He is a good singer, as each church he served learned, but moreso Dad is an individual with depth because of what he has been through. He was the perfect choice for this solo about the ol’ man river.

And then, Dad sang it. On and on the arrangement flowed, the choir behind him. Dad belted out the rich notes, from low to high, over and over. The lyrics were his, for the moment. He knew how to deliver.

My vision obscured by tears, I watched and listened in awe. At the end, I turned to Mom. Applause resounded. “Look behind us,” I whispered. “People are standing.”

On the way out, I listened to strangers saying the last song gave them chills. I told a few people, “That’s my daddy.”

I don’t know why, but to say so felt like something more. As if there had been a slight shift. I’m going to see how it goes from here. While I turn into whatever I will be these golden years, maybe a more healthy daughterhood will begin. It might just keep rolling along.

What has been most significant? While still in process about everything, I would start with

• growing up in a loving family
• finding my love, getting to keep him
• receiving my children, letting them go.

***

The most important thing involving my inner life happened when I stopped fearing my death.

For a decade I have not feared dying. This you would know is very significant, if you could only know the grip its terror held on me, before.

I’m not saying I don’t fear anymore the process of dying, the uncertainty about how it will happen, the lack of control. Put me on a cliff with slippery stones underfoot, I’m still going to freeze and wail like a treed kitten.

What I stopped fearing was the end of living. The end of my story here. I used to be terrified of what it would mean

• if I hadn’t gotten the details right
• if I let everyone down
• if (here’s the biggie, I suppose) nobody really noticed.

***

I couldn’t escape the conclusion that 20 years past my demise no one would notice, because that’s what we experience with others who’ve passed on. The world moves forward.

What changed was a new sense of the story that maybe, just maybe, we’re all part of (a.k.a. the meta-narrative). I recognized the possibility, and began to believe, that this existence is not the main event. The one who made possible this living we do is not, anymore, in my mind

• just a construct
• a limited being like me
• a hand-wringer over the way events turn out.

Instead, this one, this other, is

• responsible for everything in reality
• the cause
• the great artist
• the author of the story being played out, of which I am only a small character, albeit a character as significant as any other in terms of being created magnificently by the one.

***

Ten years ago, when my thinking started making its shift, I grasped this thought about myself: Even if I was caused by the creator I believe in to be dark, to reject the one and go against the coming grand narrative conclusion — even if that turns out to be true sometime after I croak — this story is still a good one. The shadows will only enhance the light. There would be exquisite meaning even in my role as one destined for destruction.

I think that’s when I started seeing how much I truly loved the story and its author, and I began to grasp morsels of hope. Because the creator, so it’s been revealed, will not punish or destroy a single one who embraces the story. These beings are drawn to truth, though it slay them.

***

And so for a decade I’ve lived here. Not afraid to die, to be gone. No longer worried about what’s marked on my tombstone. Sorry that people will grieve, but hoping they will not despair. I’m really looking forward to finding out what comes next. I’m believing it’ll be good. Such belief defines “faith” for me.

I’m embracing the next stage of the adventure, the actual symphony or story. This part, though good in its way, has been only a prelude or prologue.

I like it here, most days. I really do. But the main event is coming, and I think I’ll like that, too.

And tears.

Individuals know pieces of truth. Moments arrive that reveal what I know I know I know. A sense of reality. And yet nothing can be true without four little words: I could be wrong.

Science is a study of static things. This, on the other hand, is narrative.

If living is more than physical, science as we know it can’t speak to everything. But methods like science can provide a basis for idea-testing with respect to a moral understanding.

At least, I’ve been trying on that idea for a while. And making decisions that could be right, could be wrong, in light of it.