The Circle Opens Too Much?

Sometimes the circle might open a little too much.

It had to happen, of course. And there it was, staring me right in the face. A name I hadn't thought of in, well, how long?

This would be one of those people so significant in your young life for so long you gave up resisting, fretting, struggling. You surrendered. And then suddenly, that person was gone.

What can I call her now? I don't want to use initials. I'm still full of superstition. I'm being silly I know.

How about Lady Macbeth? No, Lady Macbeth suffered regrets and killed herself. I'll have to refer to her as Her Highness (HH) for a bit. Until I figure it out.

I saw her name on Facebook, when we were all talking about Cyn passing away. I had been posting some old pictures, and suddenly I was getting notices, suggestions that I should "friend" HH. A chill took over me.

Then I was talking on the phone to J. and morphed into a child again, emotionally, my tone shrill, strident. "I saw her name on Facebook. She can forget about me friending her. That is NOT going to happen. Never. Ever. Nada." J. and I started laughing. How old was I anyway? Getting into a tizzy about HH, still.

HH was the cutest girl in the school, starting in first grade. One of those tiny little people who send boys around the bend. She also was the bossiest person in the school. Smart as a whip, teachers adored her. Girls worshipped and feared her. She reveled in the power. And she was relentless.

She manipulated, schemed, declared a girl "in" her good graces one day and cut her dead the next. And the victim never knew why. Her minions executed her orders with such ruthless brutality, it took our breaths away. She never had to lift a finger.

Although I don't remember this, at one point HH required actual payment to be her friend: 10 cents a week. J. reminded me of this. She says I paid. J. refused -- "I'm too cheap." I couldn't have paid very long, because I barely recall being in HH's good graces.

Except for Cyn, my companions in elementary school were boys, mostly. For a while, T., who lived there only a year before her dad moved them closer to the airport where he worked. J. and I were friends too, visiting each others' houses, but not best friends until high school. When I put away the black satin cape, the bull whip and the hunting knife. The running in the woods, stealing honey, climbing trees. When I stopped thinking boys were good for sending on chores, racing on foot and throwing rocks at and not much else.

I remember making forays into the world of girl friendships in middle school. And she was still in command, HH, steely beneath her cold smile. A cute new boy had come to town and she wanted him for herself. But he liked another girl. HH was furious. She talked me into doing her bidding, saying mean things to the other girl to try to wear her down and keep her away from the sought-after love object. I hated myself after that. And I hated HH for her role in that scheme. I spent the rest of our school years trying to make up for those couple of minutes.

I realized then I was on my own. I decided I didn't belong in the world of girls. And I no longer cared.

Then, other students showed up after eighth grade because my high school was a feeder school. The schools also were being slowly desegregated and the black high school finally was shuttered. So my class was the largest on record.

HH's power was suddenly diluted. She seemed quite small. People no longer fluttered around her in those huge hallways in the high school.

I felt liberated in a larger sense too. I had an older brother who was a sports star at the school. Although he had ignored me for years, his teammates recognized and teased me in the halls. They offered a measure of protection I'd never had. Free at last, I thought.

And then, after a couple of years of not noticing her much, we heard HH was getting married to someone from another school. No one I knew went to a shower or the wedding. She was only 16. She was marrying a beautiful boy, the blue-eyed son of a prosperous farmer. And she was leaving to go to his school. That announcement didn't affect us. We didn't care. Suddenly, she was gone.

And then, after Cyn died, the request did come. On Facebook. She sent it. I stared at it awhile. And despite my bravado to J., I clicked confirm. Later I saw her picture. So harmless looking.

She had a baby at 17, I think. And years later divorced the prosperous farmer. And then I heard several years ago that tragedy had struck that family. The beautiful boy she married so long ago, the one with the glowing blue eyes I remember well, was dead. He had been working in the barn. And somehow, he had been electrocuted.

I heard through the hometown gravevine that HH had been completely devastated.

So with my grownup eyes I look at her picture and think back, way back, to those early years. About her ruthlessness as a child. And I think about how we were never invited to her house. I remember sitting in a car outside that house once. I was surprised. HH was always dressed so beautifully, in frilly lace and lovely shoes and clothes and many accessories. Her house was tiny, plain. Not the kind of house one would associate with the regal HH.

She rushed out and jumped into our car and acted embarrassed. I know now she was. Although she shouldn't have been. My hometown was a modest farming village with a sprinkling of government workers who commuted into the city like my father. We had maybe two families considered part of the landed gentry.

Maybe the Roman Goddess Invidia took over the heart of HH at an early age. That's the goddess of envy. Who knows why that happens, how jealousy can spoil a very bright, lovely child, cause raging fires inside. A grownup can reason envy away. Or force it down, douse the fires into harmless thoughts and no actions.

But a child? A smart, pretty girl child way back when, in the rural Deep South, who maybe was told she had no other future than the one she was living? What if she quickly did her homework, none of it challenging enough for her quick mind, and then turned her considerable talents elsewhere? That girl was a force, I promise you.

She's a grownup now, at the very least a grandmother. And has suffered tempering loss along with the rest of us. She looks sweet, harmless. Someone who would be fun to get to know again. We'll see how that goes. I've made some terrible mistakes and am certainly no angel. I'm happy to give just about anyone a second chance.

But I'm not paying one red cent for the privilege.

She Left Us Stories

Cyn had reason to be skeptical of my schemes. When we were little, the small, blue-eyed blonde was the no-nonsense one, fierce. And I was full of fancy.

In fifth grade, R. tore up my class picture and handed it back to me, announcing he "liked" Cyn instead. He then asked for her photo. Forget it, she said, get lost. Plus, she told the stringbean boy, "I hate your fat guts and always will." Then, she jumped on the playground swing, leaving him standing literally in the dust, speechless.

So I remember preparing carefully when she came to my house not long after that. We had been spending most of our time together at Cyn's, where we were free to roam. But sometimes Mother insisted.

I decided we would go fishing in one of the ponds in the woods. I had seen Miss A., who babysat us and did a bit of ironing for Mother, carrying a huge terrapin down the old road along the woods line. She and her husband smiled and laughed as they told my father about their catch from the pond that day. They said they were making turtle soup that night.

Mother wouldn't let Daddy give me any gear. I was 10 or so and prone to drama, excessive grieving over dead bait in fishing pails. And during my one and only fishing trip, I screamed every time I caught a fish, which was frequently. I don't know why the fish were ignoring my uncle and father, who were in the same boat. They spent the day baiting my hooks and taking off the fish because I would go limp and refuse.

But seeing Miss A. and the terrapin had seized my imagination. Cyn had been peevish. So I asked for fish hooks and bait because Cyn had talked about fishing. Mother gave us things she and her brothers used when they were children. I was unsure, but she was adamant, so I packed everything up and inserted bullwhip and hunting knife into my elastic waistband, hand-me-downs from my brother. Then I tied a black satin cape around my neck. This last item was, well, fashion.

So, off we went, jumping over the grassy ditch spanned by my father's wooden footbridges, running past the huge oak with the rope swings and the barking bird dogs. We ran past their pens with bamboo poles flailing, a black-haired girl and a blonde, and one black cape floating in our loud, laughing wake.

I will never forget the path to that pond. Through the clearing with the old tree houses, we moved past the gnarled tree where we stole honeycomb when the bees were quiet. Then a quick bounding run through the strange bright light and eerie quiet in the middle of the woods. The spooky place that didn't make sense because the leaves were so thick overhead that I never understood where that light was coming from. But soon we were out of the ghostly light, climbing the old fence, careful of the rusting barbed wire with traces of old blood left by the careless, the unsuspecting, the clumsy.

Because at the top of the barbed wire, stretching high and balancing, we could see the water of that pond flashing in the sun, the touchstone of my childhood. Yes! Just there! And I would run for that pond, fast, feet nearly soundless on the dirt banks, taking me to the tree with the big long limb that soared over the water.

With Cyn that day, we set up our fishing gear. It looked strange. My mother had given us safety pins to tie on the end of string for the bamboo poles. And for the bait? Raw bacon. Mother insisted she and her brothers had actually caught fish using these. And I believed her.

Cyn didn't. She had three brothers and knew if there were fish in that pond they weren't going to be snagged by bacon and safety pins. But we climbed into that tree and threw the lines in anyway. I stretched out on my favorite limb, the black cape fluttering in the breeze.

Cyn was irritated, argumentative. She thought she was going to be bringing home fish. But she was stuck in the woods with an idiot who thought safety pins were fish hooks. She made fun of them. I defended. I made up stories about the buckets of fish my uncles had caught.

Then she started in on the pond. She didn't see any fish. "This is an old cow pond," I think she said. And then the cape. Why was I wearing that thing? What if people saw us? They would think we were stupid. They would think WE WERE JUST GIRLS!!! A frequent argument.

I dismissed her claims. Cyn and I were not easy-going children. But she got me, finally, on one point. I was lying on the tree limb with the black cape tied tightly around my neck. It was flowing down toward the ground. The sun was beating down. She kept talking to me, but I acted like I was about to fall asleep.

"You are going to fall off that tree limb and that cape is going to break your neck, Glimmer." I remember her words, clearly, to this day.

She was afraid. It took me years to comprehend that. But I remember taking the cape off and dropping from the limb. The girl who told off my young heart's first assassin was uncomfortable. So, forget the cape.

For the rest of the day, we played in and around the pond like the children we were, little wiggling snakes and all. Cyn's unease dissolved in the sun and the water.

Because she had been an ordinary girl, like me, just one year before. Then catastrophe struck. Her father took her brothers to a football game and never came home. His heart failed him.

Cyn understood, in a way I did not, that disaster unspools in the blink of an eye. That even a child must watch and be careful. Or those you love will vanish. So Cyn watched and controlled and fretted. Because she could not bear another hard loss.

But her good nature won out over the years. She turned the hard and the fanciful into stories. She worked with flowers and lightened her tales with laughter, drawing people to her along the way, so many people. Through her illness, we returned to the stories time and time again, the fishing, her "Tromper" in the woods, flaming boats sent down the creek into luminous southern nights.

And now she's gone on ahead. So I am the holder of the stories. I do not have her deep voice or the bright smile that framed the words lilting from her lips like a song. But I know them, nearly word for word. They glow like the candle I light when I put down the tales and pass them on.

She watched over us for nearly half a century. So the words are something. They are something.

Lightening Up, For Now

No more somber posts for the rest of the month. That's how I am getting myself out of trouble. If anyone is strong enough to penetrate the veil from the other side, it would be Cyn. I can hear her. Sort of. She is saying, "Okay, you stop that right now. I mean it. Lighten up, dude."

So, I have a candle burning beside me. And I'm ready to chat.

I want to tell you that after I heard Cyn was terribly ill, I talked to an old friend, LC, a doctor of naturopathic medicine. We had just gotten back in touch after years of not hearing from each other. Naturopaths treat by utilizing the body's inherent ability to heal. They go to medical schools just like doctors, but study ways to tap the body's immunity using alternative methods instead of drugs.

LC immediately offered to present Cyn's situation to his naturopathic medical school, have the institution take her on as a case. Cyn was polite. But she declined. I had left her information, printouts, etc., on alternative healing. But she was hard-headed.

Or maybe she just remembered some of the things she heard me say about the people I ran around with after I moved to D.C. from Alabama, back in the day. When I worked for a company that pretended to hire actual grownups to work there.

I met LC back then, when he was just a boy, really. He was in college, a friend of a man I worked with I'll call V. V. wore black suits and had a stern expression that made him seem as though he was glaring at everyone all the time. He worked with the company's Latin American desk, it was called. After I got to know him, he said he didn't like to take vacations because "we are Latins, you know, if we leave the country, we will be overthrown."

And he wasn't stern at all. He was the least stern man I've ever known. Someone introduced me to V. one day and told me he covered the Lima, Peru nightclub scene when he was so young he wasn't even supposed to be in the clubs. He simply bluffed his way into them.

He continued that style when he went to college, in Boston. One holiday season, he was trying to rent a car with a couple of other Peruvian students and didn't possess something they needed (a credit card, I think). So V. decided to tell the rental agency clerks that the female student with them was "Miss Peru. And we urgently need to drive her to California for the Miss Universe pageant."

V. and his cohorts stomped around the office, going outside to pretend to use the pay phone, conferring in Spanish and calling each other fake names like "Che" in fake deep voices. They thought somehow this would help their case. The bluff didn't work. They never made it to California.

The kidding continued past college. After I had known him for a while, I heard V. was telling people I was a "black widow." That I claimed to be married, but no one had actually met my husband. I ignored this. I hadn't been an editor on the foreign desk long and still was laboring under the misinformation that I was to help save the world.

Then one day I accepted an invite to have coffee with E., who had just transferred to the foreign desk. He was a Tennessee gentleman who had an impressive background as a foreign correspondent. We went down to the deli in the first floor of the building, run by some very intense men, one of whom had barked forcefully at me when I asked him where he was from: "Palestine!"

E. sat with his back to the Deli counter, across from me. We sipped coffee and chatted. E. was telling me about his time in South America when I looked up and saw Mr. "Palestine" holding up a knife with a huge, scary blade, glittering in the sun through the plate glass window.

He pointed to the murderous looking weapon, then mouthed, "You want?" I frowned. What in the world? He gestured to the knife again. This time, he pointed the tip of the blade in the direction of E.'s back. Then he used his free hand to make a quick slashing motion across his neck. "You want to borrow?" he mouthed again, with emphasis. Oh. My. God. I remembered V.'s craziness about the black widow thing. He was obviously bored and had been down there acting up.

And then, E., the lovely man I had just met, saw that I was no longer paying attention to him. So he started turning around to see why. And "Palestine" pretended to be filing his nails with the saber. I had to tell him what V. was up to, and E. laughed like the good sport he was and is, but I swear he was nervous around me for a good long while.

And "Palestine" continued to offer me murder weapon loaners whenever I went in, which ended up being not such a bad thing. Because I always was waited on tout de suite, and given extra items, no charge, after being identified as a possible serial husband killer. I mean, respect in the big city is hard to come by. I had to take mine where I could get it. I was, after all, very busy pretending to believe I was saving the world.

It was V. who introduced me to LC and his brother, French-Nicaraguan college students in D.C. They had worked with their mother, a network television news fixer in Managua and that's how V knew them. LC was funny and sweet and fell in with our group of friends immediately.

LC and I were such good friends that he was one of the first people I told when I split up with the husband no one ever much saw. Yes, readers, I allowed him to live. But LC graduated and went to medical school in the upper northwest. I remarried and had a child and we simply lost touch. When I heard about Cyn I had just found LC on Facebook. When I told him about her plight in passing, he immediately wanted to help.

We talked on the phone. It was wonderful to hear his voice. It was as though only a few weeks had gone by instead of years. We laughed and caught up and conspired to "fix" Cyn. It would be hard. She would need to change everything. Lifestyle, diet, emotional, spiritual, everything would need to be tapped.

But she couldn't be persuaded to try that route. She didn't say why and I knew I couldn't make her. Especially a Cyn, whose will was mammoth.

I don't understand why she had to leave. But I am learning to look at what she brought to us. As Spellbound said in a comment, "I have to believe she accomplished what she came here for."

So I am looking at what she did manage, at least in my life, the micro view I guess. She brought LC back into my life, for one. And I am hearing from people from my hometown I've been out of touch with for decades. I mean, my classmates have always been quick to plan a reunion. If no one was interested in a big one, we had a small gathering, at a restaurant or a home. Cyn was a big part of that, she loved a get-together, wouldn't miss one. But I am amazed at the people I am hearing from now.

Because each day brings another person, someone I knew as a little girl or met as I edged toward womanhood. All of them I thought had been lost to time.

So one by one we open the circle, extending a hand and bringing in another person here, another one there. Then we grasp hands again, making a larger circle, holding on tight and closing in and moving toward and around a tiny figure in the middle, someone we can no longer see but know is there. Because she is drawing us in, her pull unfathomable but, now, seemingly without limit.

A Big, Great Heart, Gone

Cyn, my wild tomboy friend, died at 8 a.m. Wednesday.

Her body gave out. The body that made so many childhood journeys with mine. The ones I was fortunate to have and knew it even then.

Slipping from our houses into the glowing summer nights of the deep south. Sinking, knees first, into grass and mud to launch burning shoebox boats from the creek bank, watching them float in flames into tree-lined blackness, with only stars to light the way. All for the simple joy of it (August entry, Wild Gratitude).

Later, we were spirited young teenagers who had the idea that we were the physical equals of our athletic older brothers. So we played pickup football and baseball with them. Then we fished and played tennis nearly everyday in the summer. In our minds, we were excellent natural athletes in no need of lessons. Or tennis shoes even. An old Polaroid shows Cyn in loafers on the tennis court. All we needed, we felt, were old rackets. And cute outfits.

We knew we would live forever.

Which is why I did not write in August about Cyn being sick. My husband says we knew this was coming. But I didn't, really I didn't, despite everything.

At Christmas two years ago, Cyn came to my son's birthday dinner in Alabama. We were hosting it there during a holiday visit. Already thin, Cyn was losing weight and doctors couldn't say why. "Stress," they suggested. A few months later we caught up at my niece's Alabama wedding, where Cyn, a self-employed florist, had done the flowers. No expense was spared on this wedding. My sister-in-law wanted Cyn and nobody else would do. As usual, the arrangements were the most striking thing in the rooms. Cyn, who taught herself to play the piano by ear as a child, was, simply put, an artist.

At the reception, we sat outside on a wall ledge and Cyn talked. She was still losing weight and exhausted, drawn. Doctors still said they couldn't find anything wrong. "I just feel there is something wrong. I know it somehow." But then she put on her usual cheerful facade. She would not fret for very long in front of others.

A short time later, she had a medical crisis. She was diagnosed in the E.R. as having this, then that. After a series of unnecessary treatments they removed her gallbladder. Then they decided none of that was the matter. That she had a faulty heart valve and COPD -- inherited. The same thing that killed her father before he was 40 and her older brother, my brother's friend. They sent her home with portable oxygen tanks.

Even more horrifying was the fact she did not have health insurance. Pre-existing health issues, a husband who left her, etc. The lung doctor kept telling her she was the heart doctor's problem and the heart doctor repeatedly shuffled her off to the lung man, saying surgery was impossible with her lungs in such poor shape. Cyn wasn't supposed to live this long. But the last time I saw her she looked so good I was amazed. She sounded good. She stuck around, defying the odds. She even went several times to Tunica, Miss., to gamble with friends and family. I thought she was going to make it.

But the past few weeks, she went downhill. Something happened during the weekend. Another crisis, then a seizure. And her body gave out.

She was a fighter. Although she would give away her last quarter if someone asked.
And although her life seemed straight out of Jerry Springer at times, with two marriages and some nightmarish betrayals, she stayed one of the most optimistic people I've ever known. That's what people loved most about her.

Which is why I cried on and off most of the day. And why my oldest friend J., who unfortunately got the call at school where she teaches, broke down too. J. is an Auburn graduate who has pulled for Alabama for two years because the Crimson Tide's bid for a national championship was giving Cyn such joy during her bad times. If you know anything at all about Auburn-Alabama football rivalry, you will understand this sacrifice J. made out of love.

Because Cyn turned her sadness into laughter, even after being told repeatedly by doctors that they couldn't help her. "You won't believe what happened next..." and then she would laugh a deep-throated laugh and start the tale. What others cried about, Cyn turned into material to laugh at.

She was one of a kind.

So I'm distraught. And I'm angry. I'm wondering what could have been done to change this outcome even though that is futile now. I can't focus on that right now.

I'm thinking instead about something an Irish musician/artist/poet told me a few months ago, Lucy, www.myspace.com/the2train. Lucy has a knack for words that take the heart and flood them with light. So it wasn't a surprise when she suggested a radio program that talked about an experiment by a Massachusetts area doctor who sought to measure the mass purportedly lost by a human body when the soul departed the body upon death (Radiolab, Sept. 18, 2009).

In 1907, Dr. Duncan MacDougall weighed six patients while they were in the process of dying. The entire bed was placed on an industrial-sized scale. And when the patients died, MacDougall found that the bodies lost on average of 21 grams within a short time. He suggested this was the weight of the soul.

So I am sitting here, not 24 hours after Cyn's soul left her body, and I'm looking out the window at the cold, dark, rainy night. And I keep wondering, "Where is she?" Because a soul that big, that generous, someone that expansive and full of life cannot just be gone.

I really do want to know. Cyn and I were friends for half a century -- little girls who were already friends when her father died much too early, partners in a foursome of girls who sang in talent shows. We refused to enroll in home economics in high school, taking science instead with a classroom of boys. After I graduated from college and took a newspaper job in a new town, Cyn showed up at my empty apartment on move-in day with my mother, having filled the truck bed with second-hand furnishings and the like from her home and shop. She knew I wouldn't bother.

And now I can't accept that she's gone. I need more time. There are journeys ahead and where is she? We thought we'd live forever. I need a little more time. With my bare feet in the mud of that creek bank beside Cyn's house. Little wild girls streaked with mud, twirling and dancing by the water under the moon, cheering the fire we had set in makeshift boats and in our hearts.

I want her back. I need a little more time. Please. I need her back.

What I See in His Blue Eyes

No lectures, please, about going overboard during the holidays. I won't listen. I'm not going on a spending binge. But there are times to live large. And this is one of them.

Growing up, the moods brightened at my house perceptibly around Thanksgiving. My father, initials JC, took off work at least a month at the end of the year to spend time with family and to go quail hunting. Except for Sundays, he would be gone by the time we got up.

I remember hovering near the back door, watching for a glimpse of his green-clad figure as the shadows grew from gray to black in the woods behind the house. Then profound relief, as warm as the sun, would claim me when I heard his pointers rustling and barking. JC had whistled and waved them home. And in a few minutes he was there too, game bags full of Christmas quail.

JC was happiest out in the wilds. He was born on a large farm in a remote section of Tennessee, part of a big extended family living along a river bend that still bears our last name.

The parents lived in the "big house," the grown children and their families in smaller homes scattered nearby. They were prosperous farmers who celebrated holidays together, gathered for a main meal around a large table. On these days, the matriarch, Miss Becky they called her, brought out a bottle of whiskey and poured shots for her sons to enjoy, a reward for their hard work. This horrified my grandmother, a hard-line Methodist not used to these ways.

Then, tragedy struck. A horse threw my grandfather, a handsome man with thick, coal black hair and big, luminous blue eyes. He started being plagued by seizures. One day, at home alone with his little blue-eyed middle child, my father, he began to seize. It was over quickly. My grandfather, W., was dead. He left three little boys and a wife, who quickly packed up and whisked her boys away from the river to live with her own family.

These were kind people, stalwarts, profoundly religious. They were also poor and fiercely proud. The large, festive holiday celebrations were over. Holidays, in fact, were very simple. The boys were loved and taken care of, JC had nothing but good things to say about this side of his family. But I know now his days faded from bright to gray after his father died.

Yet, life goes on. He grew up and went to war in Europe, where he survived terrible things. He married and became a father. His wife was a teetotaller, too, so the holiday toasts he had revived for a short time as a grownup ended again. But still, with JC, holidays were times of celebrations.

On the Saturday before Easter, for example, he would disappear for hours. Then he would return, proud of himself, producing a box from the car with a flourish. Inside were exquisite corsages. I remember perfectly formed, quivering orchids for Mother. For my sister and me, tiny red roses clustered in dainty, artistic nests of greenery, secured by long pearled hat pins.

We tried to imagine the florist who made such inspired treasures in the middle of the Alabama sticks where we lived. These were not ordinary corsages. JC was mysterious. "Oh, a friend of mine makes these," he would say, mentioning a community by the river near my hometown. Mother's Day yielded similar surprises.

JC cared little for furnishings, accessories, trappings, embellishments. He wanted to be gardening if he couldn't be out hunting, trudging through woods and fields with those sleek bird dogs he raised and trained with chickens bartered from farmers with promises of quail.

But as Christmas approached, he rummaged through boxes in storage and pulled out lights, stringing them over bushes in front of our house back when they were costly and easily broken, before decorating in this way was popular.

Then, on Christmas Eve, he would vanish again. Through dinner and the opening of presents, JC was the happiest person at the table, especially when the grandchildren started arriving. Then, with the evening over, JC would finish the boiled custard he asked Mother to make every year, his mother's recipe. And this normally tight-fisted man would fish out a bank envelope and distribute $100 bills. To everyone, little children included. Even Mother got one.

One Christmas Eve something even more amazing happened. I was quite small. I heard sleigh bells ringing outside my bedroom window. I got up and looked, but couldn't see anything. I wasn't asleep, I had just gone to bed. No one heard the bells but me, or claimed them, which was unusual. Mother didn't believe in "telling lies" to children, Santa and the tooth fairy included. So anything along the lines had to originate with JC.

I can see him now. Hidden behind the bushes, dressed in hunting camouflage after a long day in the wilds with the dogs, crouched low, knees brushing the browning grass, shaking a rack of sleigh bells borrowed from a farmer over by the river.

Ringing sleigh bells, steaming dishes of Christmas quail, colored lights gleaming on a dark night. Trembling orchids and roses that left us speechless. Golden custard from an old recipe and $100 bills, all of it, held in hands that bequeathed not just material goods but layers of wonder, mystery, peals of laughter.

Because in the giving JC opened an airway for life's breath, which flowed into cold, dark shadows that had been still and silent around a large table for nearly half a century.

So don't pity me the tangled lights, the cinnamon roll baking, the wrapping and mailings, the long drive I insist we make through Virginia and Tennessee into Alabama, which is still home to me after 30 years of living elsewhere. The endless details that exhaust me to the point that sometimes I have to take a nap halfway through the Christmas Eve celebration.

And when I rouse myself long enough to hand over a $100 bill to my son, after all the gifts have been opened and put away, I see more than just his luminous blue eyes.

Because the holidays give us permission to celebrate life with all the surprise and wonder it deserves. We should throw everything we have at it, energy-wise anyway. Because I am not just doing this for myself, for presents, or for my immediate family. I am recovering what was lost, long ago. Filling those blue eyes with light again. I am living for the many, around that big table, JC right in the middle of them.

This one's for you, especially, all month long. Merry Christmas, Daddy.

Just Living

(For S.B. -- "cat hoarder")

Some of the posts about my childhood have been called gothic. B. at www.playalittleguitar.com is mainly the one who says that. But the tall Texan loves a scary story no matter how much he pretends otherwise.

However, nothing in this blog is as gothic as the first weeks of life endured by an odd, fascinating creature I still know in Alabama. And I often think about the lesson he brought to me.

I'm not an animal person, really. I admire them from afar. Too many early heartaches with the cats in my life and then with dogs a mixed bag of that and the toddler experience of being dragged by a collie who did not understand that its leash had gotten caught around my neck and that is why people were chasing and screaming at him. Then there was the cocker that bit me in the face when I bent down to say hello.

But this story is about Buddy the cat.



We had made the long drive from northern Virginia to Alabama for Christmas. The stress of urban life falls from me in distinct layers with every 25 miles or so covered. Once we cross the border of Tennessee into Alabama, I am always struck by the utter darkness, penetrated only by distant Christmas lights, that time of year.

And then finally I'm home.

Within minutes my sister generally comes through my mother's back door. And that year she held something in her arms. It was Buddy. My son went straight for him. Then my husband started arguing for a "turn" holding the cat. They bickered. I was in my cat ignoring mode as usual, trying to best him at his game.

This was Buddy's story.

Buddy and several siblings had been owned by a woman who had a dog, a Jack Russell terrier. Maybe several dogs. But pretty quickly the Jack Russell killed a couple of her cat's new kittens. The owner had the animals separated, the cats in the fenced back yard and the dogs inside the house. But the Jack Russell was determined. He was, after all, a terrier. He kept getting out. Eventually, he had killed the mother and most of the kittens.

My niece, who was doing her medical residency at a hospital, had heard about the first killings. She was the dog owner's neighbor. She was working long hours and had a dog of her own. When she found out the back yard next door had continued to be a killing field, she had had all she could take.

She asked for the remaining kittens. She had no idea how she was going to save them, she couldn't keep them, her resident manager had made an exception for her dog and anyway he was not the kind of animal to accept tiny kittens either.

She arranged time off, swapped, cajoled, begged. She got the two kittens, put them in her car and headed for north Alabama after a long shift caring for humans. She had precious little time. She called her family, asking for mercy for these kittens. She would not take no for an answer. Two of her aunts couldn't say no either, after hearing the story.

My sister took a look at them. The little gray and white one crouched down low, staring at her. His eyes appeared to be crossed. Was he traumatized by all he had been through? Would he be difficult and hard to handle? She moved a bit closer. He jumped at her, held up a tiny paw and swatted her gently, eager to play. She picked him up and he cuddled, purred loudly and fell asleep in her arms.

This was the one. Perfect.

He behaved the same way with everyone he met. He mesmerized and charmed. He was the most curious cat I've ever seen, even for a cat. My sister's other cat would snarl and beat him up and Buddy would enjoy it, come back for more. It was as though he was happy for the attention, any attention, as long as he made it through alive.

My husband fell hard for him too:



My mother even fell for him. My mother doesn't even like animals. She would go to my sister's house "to see what Buddy is doing."

I did my best to ignore him. Someone recorded how well I succeeded.



He's all grown up now. But he acts like a wild thing, not really a domestic. He's huge. He lurks and sneaks around the house and ambushes anything that moves. But then you grab him and the purring starts and he's asleep on a lap, out cold, soft and warm.

He's one of a kind. He just got on with it. He lives life fully, hard, to the max, without as much as a glance back at those horrible times. I think about that. I remember that. He is telling us all something.

And yes, those eyes look to definitely be crossed.

There Is Still More To Say

Late at night, absorbed in writing, something wrenches me into a sharp alert. I smell smoke. I'm certain of it. But no one smokes in this house. Still, I look around, peer from the window, get up and sniff the hallways.

The smoke is only in my mind. It is attached to a decades-old memory so resolute that I not only smell smoke, but seem to catch in the corner of my eye an ephemeral outline of a tiny woman balancing a long black cigarette holder, tendrils of smoke curling into the air. Professor H. Relaxed, sweater thrown over her shoulders. With a diamond ring glittering on her smallest finger, she holds forth in the large, high-ceiling old room.

"God that's it," she would say, in a deep, distinctive, gravelled voice that gave the impression of stage more than manuscript. "You've got something there. Go deeper. Write that."

Professor H. taught expository writing. I needed a senior year elective and V. recommended her. She told us to write our non-fiction essays on subjects that moved us. Go for the simple, she said. Forget lofty, that's artificial. Comb your memories. "Give me you."

I had scribbled diaries forever, journals, I had boxes of them. I brought a few back to school from home. They were from the early years. Growing up "like a wolf in the woods." Stealing honey from the gnarled tree with bamboo sticks. Hiding in a tree under the cover of black night. All the early hurts. Watching. Listening. Taking all those notes. I was bursting with essays.

But I also loved to listen to her. She had been friends for years with Scottie Fitzgerald, the daughter of F. Scott and Zelda. She had been in the Navy and traveled the world. She loved to talk, but more than that was an excellent listener.

The Alabama she knew through Scottie's tales, channeled through the southern aristocracy of Zelda's Montgomery, was a different universe from the northern part of the state. I grew up in the Tennessee River valley, surrounded by the Appalachian foothills. Our speech patterns, mannerisms, cultures, mores, all of it, worlds apart.

And Professor H. loved that. She wanted to hear more. Always.

And I had plenty of material to work from. Faded pictures, yellowed journals, scrapbooks. Mementoes from my time working in the mental institution as a volunteer. The wooden planks patient J. drew and colored on:



So many things. Boxes my husband in years since has tried to get me to throw away. "Let's clear away the clutter," he implores. What? The clutter?

This is my life. I've winnowed and thrown away and ditched so much. I have a few small boxes, still. Precious things. I can't lose them, not yet. They still need to be remembered, written about, witnessed. These pieces of paper and wood and written word are the reasons I can conjure up the detail that brings the visions to life here. Why I still remember.

Pictures, for instance. Uncle H's farm. Where the fox hunts started out. They're gone, H., my father, and recently their younger brother died in his 90s. The dogs they raised are long gone. But here, on these pages, they are waiting for their chance to bolt into that sweet fine night, blood and hearts pumping, strong, young, free.



Because when I write their stories, those who have vanished into the ether coalesce into vibrant life one more time. For mere moments, yes. Only for moments. But in that time, their memories take on the glow of flesh and blood and life. Like the black-haired boy R.G., who a couple of years ago drove to the river where we all used to go growing up. He got out, moved around, got back into the car. He did this for several hours. And then he took a gun and killed himself. What happened? Why? I ask and no one can tell me. Because they just don't know.



So I put away the few boxes I have left. And bring them out now and then and smell smoke that isn't there and hear Professor H. who isn't really there but still she is whispering, "Yes, that's it, that is exactly it."

Because there is more to say, still. Chances for resurrection through the careful ministrations of a few who help to reconstitute them, in a manner, for a few precious moments. Through an act so simple yet spiritual when it occurs. Which snaps the lost in those moments back into the sun and wind and rain. Into the fullness like a patchwork quilt long folded and gathering dust in the shadows. Allowing them breath and the full measure of their absolute vibrance.

It is happening now. You are making it so. Because you are here, reading these words, devoting your time and your care.

These are last portraits. And sometimes, through the long missing of the lost, they are finally what they should have been all along and us with them.

Shimmering, exquisite, cherished. Loved.

And through it all, ever remembered.