Prayer Partner in Yellow

    I do not have faith. Never have. I am one of those never quite satisfied, relentless seekers. Oh I am a believer. I just seem to be short on faith.

  Perhaps that is why I have to watch Miracle on 34^th Street over and over, just to hear the line “Faith is believing when common sense tells you not to.”  Not that I have so much of that either.

  Another sacred cinema is The Wizard of Oz. Dorothy after overcoming many obstacles learns she was the greatest of all, managing to transport herself back to Kansas to by tapping her ruby slippers together, affirming her belief that “there is no place like home.”  She returns to that which her heart longs for a story of faith, seeking and belief.  Like these characters in make believe movies I forge on.

  My greatest belief has been in me. Yes the thinking of an addict.

  I am an addict. My lucky card is that drugs and alcohol skipped the in box of genes. But ice cream, cigarettes, work, security and other people are my addictions.

   Love and my perception of what they may need is my crack. I can put them in a pipe and just smoke them. Needing them happy to quell my own anxiety. I want, I want.  That is the think of an addict. I want, what I want, when I want it. I just roll up others lives’, inhale smoking in the “should” my drug of choice baby.

  I’m getting healthier or as they say I am recovering. (Notice present tense, as the prevailing wisdom is that I will never be healed only that I have a daily reprieve based on “my fit spiritual condition.”  Ha, that is just about the same conundrum as faith and believing and all. )

  You can probably tell my meanderings are one of my defenses. My protective armor is to baffle with brilliance. This serves me so well that I often dwell in a state of confusion.

  That is why I write, in effort to figure myself out of a hole I have gotten myself into.

  Last weeks hole was a canyon. I can tell you the details, but they are redundant. If you are a parent you comprehend.

  I have dwelt in a constant state of fret since the conception of my child, which can slip into agitation, anxiety, occasions of extreme powerlessness or into explosions of rage.  Perhaps this perseveration on others is a spectrum disorder, not contained, all murky in the boundaries.

  (When I have resolved my questions of faith/seeking /prayer etc. I will pray for a conversion experience, or at least pray to be an imploder rather than an exploder. )

  But I digress.

  My thinking is an issue, smoking my kid’s life like she was a narcotic leaves a taint. (Oh did I mention that she is a grown up, an adult who has lived internationally? Since her return to my neighborhood my momma radar is on a high alert.)

I was off point in my worry and cyclical thinking wishing I could check in for an intervention. I could go to the ER and bellow, “I am being crazy made by my kid.”  Yet I am certain there is no treatment for this ailment.

 I am an extra in the opera Aida or better said I am a human prop. I stand perfectly still for thirty minutes while the rock star vocalists voices reverberate the sumptuous stage with sound waves. This is way cool. It is meditation, a Zen practice of sorts.

   During the rehearsal with the cast of 100 with resplendent voices resonating I am still spinning my mom wheels. There is no quieting my mind.  Though I pray, the way my mom and dad did repetitively chanting the rosary and have spent all of a day immersed in the opera’s splendor, my mind continues going back to my crack house of fear. It was like the gallons of Cookies and Cream Ice Cream I used to engorge. Once I had taken that first bite another would call to me, “eat me, eat me.” Silence came only when the gallon was consumed.

 The ever-looming momma voices of fear would not be quelled.

Drugging on misguided love I am in some sort of relapse. (This is when I wish I were sex addict. At least then I would have guilty pleasure.)

  Not responding to prayer, music, talks with enlightened beings, my mind remains ensconced in a fog. A limbo purgatory of the mind I dwell in the if’s of someone else’s story.

OCD baby!

When I told my homeless brother of my fears, he chastised me that I had no faith. He told me how he had reprimanded our mother through the years when she worried after him.

   A man who lives on the streets reminds his mother, a daily communicant (in layman’s terms that meant she went to mass every day.) “You already prayed, so where is your faith?”

   Stuck in this mental prison I decided to walk and pray, hoping that movement would temper my anxieties. Three miles through Detroit’s skyscraper canyons; past decrepit buildings, and along the silver glimmering thread of the river I am not balmed. My faculties are compromised. I am in a hell of distress. Rubbing a my Buddha bead bracelet and imploring any and all named deities for assistance yet still I am tormented.

   I am chastising God. “Give my kid a break. Who took her bike? What will she do for transportation? She has looked for a job for a year. How can I help her? Is she safe? I will call my Yemini friend. They can call the store where her bike got stolen. I am in a vortex of past, present and future and “what ifs.”  Obsessing. I am an obsessive. If it were a ganja I was smoking I would have chilled. But I am gallons into to my drug and still using, verging on an overdose.

  Another rehearsal awaits me. The sun taunts me with its promise, making my dark thoughts gloomier.

  This is a spiritual emergency. I do not get struck off my horse like the non-believer Saul. Yet there in front of Louis the Hatter, a haberdashery that has been decking out locals in fine hats since Zoot suit days comes a man dressed in a bumblebee yellow fleece coat with a matching rosary. It matters not that he is Black except for the matter that I am a suburban Caucasian middle age babe in a primarily African American city with a divide so big that fear has been redlined into consciousness.

  His swaying beads match his jaunty walk.  His beads a clacking in a fervency in some fierce prayer of his own. He is my disciple, the answer to my intercessions. I stop him imploring him to pray for my daughter. (Sometimes I ponder whether God turns a deaf ear to we faithless whiners, weary of our droning prattle and lack of faith.)

  He proselytizes telling me he was just at an Alcoholic Anonymous meeting. He speaks of his addiction and his spotty recovery, of his girlfriend who he says “Is a chaos addict.” He will pray for my daughter and me. I will pray for him. We remind each other that the best prayer is behavior. We hug.  I feel absolved.

  I want to tell you I remain a holy soul full of peace.

   I do not.

    When my daughter arrives in in my borrowed car to transport me home she agitated. Like some contagious plague I am lost in my effort’s to temper her mind and to manage mine.

 There is a vehicular eruption. You know the kind where you feel trapped, no exit all is magnified. I threaten to bolt from the car, and great drama ensues.

   I feel that nasty feeling of a user who did too much of a bad good thing, like when I smoked two packs of cigarettes with pots of coffee or ate all the Elf’s in a bag of Keebler Cookies. I feel like my yellow prayer partner, Mac when he slipped and imbibed a bit of beer and then a bit more, oh that very slippery slope.

   I feel funky…yet…

  The encounter with that street disciple and our conversation keeps a glint in my own dark brain. I pray some more, not for my daughter but for the release from that ever-looming limbo of parenthood, where I feel tethered to someone else’s happiness, responsible for the world.  Trained by the years of burps and ouches’’ and night terrors, I cannot put down my call to quell someone else’s alarm and silence my own siren.

  I chip away at the stone in the door that blocks light. That is how faith is for me; it is effort, great effort. But seeking is not. I forge on.

   Though hung over from anger, I forgive me and release her. And just sort of believe that God gave me Mac the man of yellow beads and golden heart to steel me against my fear.

  And my daughter, well she got her miracle. First her momma let her be. Second while running through her neighborhood trying to forget the theft of her bike she encounters a man riding it. With those powerful legs and her indomitable spirit she catch’s him and retrieves it.  And now she rides, soars on. And me, I just resolve like Mac to try to pray with my behavior and try to be a “less” loving, perfect momma.

My Angel Aunt

  It seems that grandma’s kitchen was always yellow.  

   Whenever it was freshly painted it just became a brighter shade of yellow. “Painted by Oscar and the boys,’ as Gram would tell it.

  When the Thibodeau’s  (Oscar and Terese and the kids) moved to Florida the kitchen seemed to fade, never to be quite as cheery again. Yet in a sacred realm tucked away under the oilcloth table cover were grandma’s most cherished correspondences. After a coffee, some cheese and crackers, after she had tended to the visitor troubles grandma would reach underneath her tablecloth to pull out the most recent letter from her far away daughter, Terese. It was all newsy, full of tales of her children, Jeanne, Marie, Peter, Joe, Andrew, Paul, Tom, Phillip and Mary Louise.

 “Mary Lou has traveled to Italy to study piano, Jeanne and I are taking nurses training together.” On went the chipper narrative.

Grandma bound us all and rekindled her heart to her far away girl and the kitchen came happy again.

We are a big old Irish Catholic family and these letters from Aunt Terese sealed us to our aunt and our far away family.  

 Aunt Terese a woman of such heart that when speaking of her it is natural for many to use the possessive pronoun of “My”.  My Aunt Terese.

 Before she died she left one more story that has already brought tears and hope to others. As it was told to me,

she was on many machines that were keeping her alive.

She was a woman who loved her man, a woman who showed how to love unabashedly. Unable to speak due to the tube down her throat she wrote on a piece of paper “I have a date with Oscar and I would like to keep it.”

 Perhaps he waited her under the “Kern’s Clock”, just like he waited for her under it all those years ago on Woodward Avenue in Detroit.

 She died shortly after the tubes were removed.

Now she is gone, on her date and we here on earth must grapple with how to go forward without the glow of her love radar.

 She had this light that just seemed to envelope us when we were in her presence that she kept glowing in prayers for us.

 Terese Cullen Thibobdeau had this quality where she beheld the best in people. I was never really who she believed me to be. But she believed in my goodness. She believed until I began to believe it about myself. To be held in her heart to my mind was like being held in God’s heart where we are seen as his perfect children.

My dear cousins,

  I so wish I could have been there for you mothers funeral. I shadowboxed with myself on what to do. I found peace when I reflected on what would Aunt Terese want for me. I could hear her clear as a bell “ Take care of yourself Lettie”. She was always urging that for me. My last conversation with her was two weeks ago. she rang to check on me after I had a hospital stay. She offered that I come down there to convalesce. Just hearing her voice was a curative.

  All sorts memories of your mom and dad (I liked to just call him Uncle), our shared Detroit cousin chapters and my visits to Florida have been filling my mind for days.

I vividly remember Marion’s funeral, her little white first communion dress. All of us chasing about at Sullivan’s Funeral Home playing hide and go seek. I remember later at the wake all the little girl cousins putting on one of our musical reviews. Peggy Cullen stole the show with her version of Love and Marriage.

 During that very sorrowful time, what I remember is your mom’s twinkly loving demeanor while we rambunctious little ones ran around. That funeral and your mom have stayed in my heart forever. Your mom in her faith and understanding of children made death and loss less scary. She let us know even at the darkest of times we must allow for light and laughter. And still at this time of loss I will hold to what she showed me with her expansive heart.

  I want to write a cheery letter to you mom. I want you to put it under your tablecloth and know the part of her she shared with me through the years.

It would read like this…

Dear Aunt Terese.

Just want to go on record about a couple of things with you.

 I want to thank you for many things,

Thank you for rubbing my head that time I came to visit and had the migraine. (And for sending me off to nap the year I was a young mom who came to you exhausted after the family Disney trip)

Thanks for inviting me for sleepovers back when I was a little kid when nobody would have me because I peed the bed.

Thanks for helping me love my dad, helping me to forgive by telling me stories of his boyhood that allowed for me to understand, know him better.

Thanks for introducing my folks to each other. (Both of my parent’s eyes shone with love whenever they mentioned you or Oscar.)

Thanks for praying my babies in and praying onmy friend’s who seemed to conceive by the power of your prayer.

Thanks for continuing to call me Lettie, reminding me somehow of the little girl I once was.

Thank you for the way cool cousins you gave me. I love all the Thibs and have many memories of great moments with all.

(There was even the year Andy transferred to St Greg’s’ with his ever so handsome self making me a briefly  “popular”) 

Thanks for loving Oscar so, making me dream for such devotion in my own life.

Thanks for praying for me to know such great love. (Now that you are in Heaven and can work on my behalf and I am ever hopeful that that Italian cello player you know I crushed on will come a courting,)

Thanks for my last trip to Eustis. I came right after Uncle had died. I came on Marion’s birthday. We looked at picture of her smiling under the blossoming tree. WE talked about your girl, we went to church. I wanted to get to the ocean. You drove me. Any other time we had gone to the sea uncle drove us and sat in the car while we walked barefoot in the surf. But you bravely and boldly drove. We walked the beach enjoyed the Atlantic and waved to our girls  (my Tess and your Mary Lou who lived across her in Europe)

What I remember most of that day was the return trip. The car had inched on empty. Uncle had always managed the car. You were not sure how to fuel up the car but you were determined to learn. There were more chapters for you to live, you needed to keep going. You figured it out, how to put gas in the car. I watched you. Again I was learning how to live how to carry on after loss. You move foreword, you go to the ocean, and you persevere. You fill that tank and go on with life. At his time with this big heart hole that you leave for me (and so many others) the way you lived will illumine and uplift me as I forge on during this most tender of times.

 Thank you …dear one…thanks.

 Love,

 Lettie 

The Christmas Story 2012

A flash narrative of the Christmas Nativity story:

            Mom with child carries baby, flees her homeland enduring arduous experiences to birth her him in the squalor of a stable. Baby becomes man, leaves mother and assisted by apostles to testify to a message of hope and love.  Naysayers try to silence him in his intention of goodness. He is a savior, here to redeem and heal the world. He must pick up the cross and carry it. His mothers and apostles cannot assume this burden. He is persecuted, tormented and dies. Yet there is a resurrection. He pushes away stone to defy darkness and death. He is resolute. Love and hope reign.

The Modern Day Equivalent Parable:

The local paper ran the following article. It seems to me a Christmas narrative. This man Victor is a family friend. He was born on the same continent as Jesus. He was ostracized, thought possessed by Satan. He languished on the burlap mat in his hut. His mother carried him from village to village begging for help. The boy child had this rare disfiguring disease.  When he was ten she gave him to the nuns who agreed to bring him to America for medical intervention.

Many wise men tended to him assisting him with his medical issues, gifts were given to support his pursuit of learning. He had a vision of hope and love. He wanted to be a doctor, work with children, and alleviate suffering. A dream so lofty it was a star in the sky. He wanted to go to medical school. It defied reason. He persisted; rules and government would thwart him. He carried this cross, his intent bigger than any barriers. This is not yet a story of resurrection but it is indeed a story of redemption. His will and dreams prevail. His story speaks to me. As a mother, I will carry my child; she may have crosses, the world may assist her, yet in the end she must push back against any and all stones to her resurrection. It is my hope and prayer. And on this Christmas it is Victor who brings me the message of good cheer from the realms of angels.

http://www.freep.com/article/20121219/NEWS06/312190124/Congress-action-puts-Nigerian-closer-to-medical-school-dream?odyssey=mod|newswell|text|FRONTPAG

The Holy Landscape

Loss has many windows.

Parents, pets, and aunts all endings give a different perspective.   

The first death, the first funeral we attend lingers, a vaporous cloud that floats a mind movie memory the shades future loss.

My first loss was that of an eight-year-old girl cousin who was my same age. She was buried in her first communion dress.   She had a veil on her head and an amused smile to her sealed lips.

The kids all played hide and go seek in the funeral home. Our rambunctious natures not restrained by death. Her parents more comforted by laughter than tears.

At the wake we put on a musical review.  Our Irish ancestry fusing through our young souls as we sang and the old ones clapped resoundingly, grief’s’ dirge was somehow melodious.

 You think after many funerals you would have an expert status, sort of like a skill set you could post on LinkedIn.

But it is never the same. Grief’s Rolodex may reveal unshed tears when one hears a church hymn, but it is like a famous song covered by a different performer. Familiar, but it is it’s own.

The view is markedly altered when we loose one of our own. I had no reference point when brothers ex wife died. In the heart there are no exes. Chapters lived back in time when all were young is what stays in the heart at a funeral.

She had a name that announced her preciousness, Julie.

She had dimples and tawny untamed curls. She was a woman who liked the earth, who asked for little and asked for little.

But she had asked for a degree and a house and against the fierce current of life she created these. She found a little ramshackle house and made it a home, for her son and daughter. She made pots of soup and memories. She brought them smiles until their dimples matched hers.

One’s life narrative alters at death; the golden threads weave with the dark times until the fabric becomes a gilded tapestry.

There was much that could have encumbered her, life events that were soul scars. Familial addiction that left a cloud on her young life, a mom who died too soon, leaving her no place to burrow for love, the ex spouse who lived in the woods and liked to take the children on walk abouts, money only enough for needs.

But she was fierce, and not a complainer.

She forged on.

Until the work truck slipped into reverse and shattered her beneath it. An assault so traumatic that it is likely her deceased mom called to her from the other realm. She did not heed that call. Instead she heeded the voice of her own heart. She defied death, stayed to live more moment’s, to walk with her children a little closer to being grown ups than her own mother had managed.

Twelve years later she died, still too young at fifty-two.

When people survive deaths first knocking they seek the purpose of their survival. Why did I live? What shall God have me do?

Living twelve more years, too short, yet for what purpose?

 Julie’s memorial was held at the church next door, the one whose resounding praising and hallelujah’s had been her Sunday soundtrack while she lolled in bed after a long workweek. After the service we all went next door to gather with her children at her home.

It was not the staged sanitized environment of a funeral home. In the home of the deceased we could peek into her world, ponder her last moments. It was a montage of her life and memorial to her journey. The ivory Victorian wedding dress that hung on her bedroom wall to swayed, her dreams in the fabric.

A golden hue came from the small room with wrap around windows. It seemed a sacristy developed for meditation. The only item in the room was a gong used by Tibetans in their call to prayer. The paned windows seemed miniature frames to the splendor of the garden. It was a fantasy garden, a mystical place lifted from a dreamy celluloid fairy tale. Perhaps the bloom-covered trellises were fairy habitats.

Her son had labored on this garden after her accident. He cut stone, moved earth and constructed arbors. He wanted his mom to have a paradise, he gave heaven on earth.

Paradise right there in her own yard, his callouses from labors to create a beauty to enchant his mother to tarry in life.

Now she has departed to another garden. He had given her vision of the holy landscape in all the beauty he created. She was fearless, undaunted in life. He perhaps emboldened her to seek a paradise more lovely than floating frocks and lush earthly landscapes. From the earth she came to return and he was the souls tiller easing her on.

Remedial Learning in the School of Life

Ducking life and some brushes with the relentless tide of bureaucracy takes energy. Lately I feel sucker punched. Seems as if I am in the Christmas classic It’s a Wonderful Life in the part before any angel rings the bell. Not saying that I would jump off the bridge to the rushing waters below, but my stamina is off. My belief in magic is tainted by the tarnish of how the government is taxing the investment I made with the state after promising not to do so. I am disturbed that my house payment went up 200 dollars per a month.  I am more than angry that the banking industry preyed on their naïve hopes of youth has scathed my son and his peers, who dreamed of a better world and academia, with a debt and an interest rate so relentless that they can only dream of a good cup of coffee and may never know freedom from the tethers of the financial monoliths.

I have been in the arena with banks for sometime now; shadow boxing, wearing myself out trying to take down this apparition of finances

It is a is a Kafkaian circle of madness, “We kept your mortgage, no Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac for you as you are a good credit risk, you are not entitled to any government programs. Yes we will give you a lower rate but first you must give us ten thousand cash dollars.”

And on goes the circle, and me I spin with it. I forget myself to it. I forget the heart of my story.

A land mine blew up while I was in my computer class. Checking my online statement I was stunned to see my payment had increased dramatically. Two hundred dollars more a month being enough reason for drama.

Being proactive or more honestly reactive and dramatic I immediately left class called the “Member’s First” mortgage company.  (Gotta love the name.) If they had not been three hours across the sate I would have driven to their office.

 Instead I did what I hate to do, I became the me I do not like. First I made snarky noise, lots of it. Then I became the real me, the powerless kid who had to hide her candy and pennies for fear of them being stolen. It became a jag, one of those cry’s the one I always saved for my momma, the litany of troubles with me crying the , “no body loves me everybody hates me I’m going to eat some worms blues.”.

 I am not old but my immune system is compromised by age. It is compromised by vision. Many around me are weary from the burden. Sometimes it is my own belief that burdens me. I can do this, I can get through college, I can climb a mountain, I can reinvent myself post divorce, post forty year teaching career, post 150 pound weight loss. I am the original begin again girl. I had to do it all myself, I will not ask for help. We see where this got Scarlett in Gone With the Wind.

Oh the dam of tears when they open and come spilling out are like the dykes of Holland.  I just carried on and cried telling Pam the loan officer (the name itself describes the relationship, I always feel as I am in the wrong, pulled over for some obscure infraction that I did not know existed).

 I wept, ranted until spent then returned to class where my age of fifty nine seemed youthful in comparisons to my classmates who were festively garbed in sweatshirt with Halloween icons.

 School behaviors are constant. I had returned with no hall pass or note from my parent and comment was made of my long absence from class.

 Their queries are the invitation to my soapbox about money, banks, systems of oppression. Misery loves company and I wanted all to know of my righteous anger. With the kids raised, the partner an ex and the sibs more like an ancient history I only have big demons to oppress me. I rage on about powerlessness. My instructor acquiesces to my opinions as much in kindness as in experience.

 I have commandeered the airwaves. Until …

The snowy haired woman who was learning photo shop in our independent study computer calls out to me.

Gently she nudges her way in. “ You must be careful what you say…

Words and thoughts create reality.”

 This is not a new idea for me.  I know all the good that has been manifested with a dream given voice. But I am a very slow learner (That is why I am in old lady computer school, all comes slow to me.) She gently reminds that we are in complete control of our thoughts, complete control of our finances. Really in control of all of our experiences.

 When I was a little girl and felt stymied by the grown up world I thought what I would do when I was a grown up. I would be a kind and loving teacher, I would wear cute clothes with icons on them, and I would always tell my kids they could be what they dreamed.

 I would have pretty nighties that coordinated with my satin slippers and many kisses and I would star in a movie. All these had come true. I was Jimmy Stewart when he first fell in love, but time passes and I forget I forgot to forge new dreams and I turn my attention to night sweats and bad dreams.

This classmate becomes my Clarence, my angel. She has her own name which I do not remember but so remember that had a friend who decided to call her Angie. Angie, my Clarence, my angel. A miracle is a change in perception.

She is the bell on the Christmas tree.

 I walk in this realm. I navigate through the earth landscape. This human existence, but my mind and my beliefs and my world manifest my thoughts.

I did not move Goliath, the bank yet I am a little awake. There is a twinkling. Little gifts come, a hug, Angie peers deeply into my eyes. She is out of seat as she has great purpose, to put me on point. I have not yet changed my thoughts or words, but I see love, love in her faded blue eyes, in her hope for me. And my seeking heart returns and I silence my cacophony and try to use my words to change my heart, just like Angie did with her kindness.