Who Would You Invite...

Heavy sigh.

I am responding to a post on Thanksgiving by my friend, Mamalicious. For starters, the party would be small enough that everyone would fit around one 10- to 12-person round table. Better yet, make it an odd number. I remember what it felt like to be the one among the couples at parties. I was ok by myself, but invariably, someone would comment on the empty chair, with the suggestive wink, you know, "we'll have to work on getting someone in that chair beside you." For sure, there would be child-care, I'll pay, maybe at Mamalicious' house, just down the street.

Then, I would have my partner, Rachel, my friend Mary from Yellow Springs, Victor from Nashville, Mike and Kendall from Dayton, and Rachel's choice of four people. I would bring in Laurel and Cindy from Chicago, because they always have news of the Spirit that brings smiles, reflection, and a challenge to keep thinking.

Mike and Kendall would insure that the conversation would be witty. Mary would be sure there would be good dinner music and a long walk before and after the meal. With all of those people at the table, I don't think there would be a poet, writer, or philosopher whose contributions would add much more to the conversation. Besides, I know all of those people, and I don't get to see them enough. I can meet interesting strangers at Mamalicious's party. :-)

I love the big family parties, seeing the people you don't ever get to see except once or twice a year, and eating food you would not normally prepare at home. But, I have to confess, I get overwhelmed with the bigness and the manyness and the noisiness. I like it up to a certain point, and -- who knows what brings that point into being or when? -- then it is time to go.

I think the combination of not enough sleep the night before, and the third glass of wine, and realizing that I hardly saw a snap of the Packers game finally brought the point early in the evening for me. Back at home, I turned on the Jets/Cowboys game and immediately fell asleep on the sofa with Henry, Zen, and Caty piled around me. That nap was delicious. Later on, the Colts game (yea!) interrupted the nap, but not for long.

Thanksgiving this year was good, sweet people, my new family. We put out a tablecloth and permanent markers, had everyone sign the cloth. One of the parents drew her daughter's handprint, a great idea! The idea is that we will throw the tablecloth onto the table at future gatherings, and as more friends and children are added, the cloth represents all of the memories of all of those present, all of the meals, all the stories, all of the years. It's so sentimental, I'm sure I'll be out looking for a clear cover for it for the next occasion, to keep it from getting too soiled meal after meal.

Feast of St. Andrew

A few years ago, I started a practice that lasted just about three years, but it was great fun: celebrating the Feast Day of St. Andrew, the patron saint of Scotland. The holiday sometimes falls on Thanksgiving or that week, and sometimes, as this year, later. November 30 is the annual date. In the "for what it's worth" department, this feast day determines the beginning of Advent; the Sunday closest to November 30 is the first. Why I think of it in terms of Thanksgiving and not so much in relation to Advent, I am not sure. Maybe I'll figure it out by the end of this reflection.

I love Scotland. My heritage is some part Scots, but mostly Irish, and who cares, because I'm thoroughly a Southern American. Being from the South means that many families tell stories of origins. I know that most of my family told stories of County Cork, and ports of entry in the 19th century, not the 17th or 18th (no Pilgrims in our orchard, just Irish Protestants). So, my love for Scotland was learned, not a cradle birthright. I guess I have to credit Rachel B., her bagpipes, and that trip we took back in 1993, touring the Highlands and Western Islands. Then, in 1999, another stay with Rachel B. and Scott in Edinburgh, with another Western to Southern Islands (Islay, Kilmartin Glen, and fly fishing in the hills around the city), firmly situated my sense of familiarity with certain features of Scotland that I continue to love: single malt very peaty Scotch whiskey, folk music, the pipes, and pub food.

I have these friends, a colleague in a former job, and his partner, whom I associate with Scotland. They also have vacationed there. One went to graduate school there. I bounced off of this friendship with my first St. Andrews feast day celebration. They brought haggis, I cooked lamb and winter vegetables, 'nip and tatties, and, of course, a selection of Scotches that led us on a tour of memories of lochs, glens, distilleries, and favorite pubs. We concluded the meal with a fine selection of cheeses and a selection of ports. Port has some "rules" of obscure origin, having to do with bishops.

There are many traditions associated with St. Andrews Day. I must admit, my parties were selective in honoring traditions, but some, like a reading of the Selkirk Grace with the proper brogue does stand out in my memory.

I don't think I ever had more than a dozen people at the table. The order of lamb shanks, Frenched, always raised an eyebrow at the market, but this was a cost I gladly spent for an evening of brilliant story-telling, toasts of such eloquence and humor that bring a smile to my face even now.

What ended the tradition? I'm not sure, probably many factors, most of all, moving away from Dayton! I would love to try it again, or something like it, a holiday celebration that served as an antidote for the excesses of Thanksgiving, and opened the gate for the coming Advent season, which is loaded with parties. I guess I like a break, a threshold between one party season and another. The marketing of Christmas, after all, starts immediately after Halloween. It's just too much. Something there is that doesn't love the red-and-green onslaught so early. Like a betwixt-and-between transition, the Feast Day of St. Andrew marks the shift from all the over-burdened busy-ness of Thanksgiving.

Without the Feast of St. Andrew, Halloween, Presidents' Day, Veterans' Day, and Thanksgiving are all on the same avalanche to Christmas. St. Andrew stops the slide. The lamb, the haggis, the Scotch, they interrupt the insipid white potatoes, white meat (including pork, the other white meat), white gravy, white pasta much more effectively than the prodromal introduction of Christmas food onto the Thanksgiving sideboard, the cranberries, the deep winter cruciforms of Brussels sprouts, broccoli rabe, and kale. Before Thanksgiving slides into Christmas, give me the gamey chop or leg of lamb, the earthy parsnips mashed into that helpless potato. Give me Stilton on a Honeycrisp apple slice and an oakey Cabernet Sauvignon.

Those of us gathered for the St. Andrew feast were mostly transplanted to that city. Everyone at the table was there because they had returned from Home to this home away from Home, back to this chosen place, back from the travel-bound obligations. They could come from home and go back home with the distance of a pleasant errand. Work would resume. We would see each other on Monday, or in the coming week. The last of Ordinary Time would be over.

In order to celebrate like those few St. Andrews Day feasts, here in this new chosen place, the ingredients would have to be similar. All local friends and colleagues, a special menu unrelated to the Pilgrim feast, a long evening of stories and songs, the cozy familiarity, and then settling back into the mundane while shifting into a new season of life.

Are these ingredients close at hand? I would like to find out. Let Thanksgiving be Thanksgiving, and keep it from the inexorable slide into Christmas. I need something else, an evening so different, such an interruption of the same, to draw up the wooly blanket of the coming winter and to set the candle's glow against Advent's dying light.

How much can you love a place?

No, I don't love it here, but I love you. Do I have to love it here, the Midwest, to love you?

I choose to be here because I love you. I didn't keep going, I stopped here.

I like it fine here. It's a nice city, lots going on. Weather is ok, too cold for too long, but I can manage.

As long as I can travel to places I do love, I can live here.

I love our family, your family, our house, our home, our life together that is growing in this place.

I will probably learn to love it here. That's the way love is sometimes, a long slow growth into familiarity and easy living, after a long time of learning and allowing the rough edges to smooth out from frequent use, plowing over and over again the familiar terrain.

After lots of loss (the lessons of the past), I have loosened my grasp on Place. I'm a Southerner, so Place is supposed to be my Destiny, but that myth is over for me. That myth, grounded in some kind of nostalgia for an old aristocracy, of blood and land -- it's a powerful myth. I hold 80 acres as a security for the future, but it's a loose holding.

The 80 acres are all that's left of 160 acres of land grant to an ancestor in the Jackson era, Trail of Tears corridor, settlement of whites in North Alabama, the old Nashville territory, the old frontier. Dad sold 80 in my childhood to buy a house. Wise use, I think, but he sold the easier 80. My 80, I bought from them when my Mom was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease, to secure the land against catastrophic health care, Medicaid, in case something happened to Dad, and she had to go into a nursing home. All that "what if" never came true.

So, I hold on to 80 acres, just clear-cut the scrub pines, poplars, and red cedars that grew up in fallow pasture. Next comes reforestation, intentional this time, in pines, then every ten years, a thinning, pulpwood (more paper!). Eventually, if I live long enough, another clear-cut, reforestation, and on, and on.

Only, the city limit has gradually moved out closer and closer to the property. Cousins want to buy it. With this land, they could link their surrounding inherited properties in the middle of which my 80 acres sits like the puzzle piece that got lost under the sofa at the Thanksgiving party. Only it's a very neat puzzle piece, a rectangle of perpendicular lines and right triangles.

Imagine: a Jeffersonian engineer sent down from Nashville to draw out the parcels in neat horizontal and vertical lines, quadrants, townships; then, imagine, Andrew Jackson and the Cherokee inhabitants, farmers, lined up to march West. Something about this land stirs up enough trouble to loosen my grasp. (I think of CJD and her ancestors over on the western edge of the state). Hold on loosely.

I hold on to it like an ace up my sleeve. I think it's more like a jack, or maybe a queen. It's not that great, a couple of hills, a deep hollow, no access road. Not good for much, other than hunting and growing trees, maybe grazing cattle. Someday, it will be a nice feature in a housing development. Maybe a lake would fill in almost a third of the space, and around the lake, maybe a theme: log homes, an adjacent golf course, an improved road to the Elk River for early spring trout, summer bass and sauger, canoeing, kayaking.

I used to really love those 80 acres. I rode horses through it, sat in the log house window and daydreamed about living there.

Dad counted on my love for that property, to keep it in the family. He was so hurt when I clear-cut, wouldn't speak to me for months. But, then he needed something and now we're speaking again. So, his hold was tight, then it loosened, too.

Now, I wait, invest a bit in improvements, and wait. Someday, I may need to sell it. That's a bit of reality that cuts through the veneer of Place and reminds me that dirt and rocks and trees are not Destiny, they are not magical, but they are materials to be cultivated, tended, cared for, and, if necessary, traded for something of value.

So, I embrace you, but I loosen my grasp on Place. Here is home, where we are.

Croning

More about turning 50.

Some women have marked their passages into 50s with ceremonies of croning. Maybe without giving it very much thought (i.e., unconsciously), I had the idea in mind when I had the tattoo painted on my arm. Even as modern psychology recognizes stages of human development, so the ancient triple-goddess symbol of the triskele signifies a woman's development: child/child-bearer/crone. There would be much richness to draw upon from my own life and study.

I was born into a world populated by matriarchs, and I only knew my matriarchs, because the patriarchs died young, except for my father, currently residing in Alabama. My earliest memories are of, on my mother's side, my great-grandmother, whose husband was long out of the picture, my grandmother, whose husband died in battle in Germany in 1944, and my mother. On my father's side, I only knew my great-grandmother, whose husband died long before I was born. My father's mother died very early in my life, so I never knew her. Her husband abandoned the family when my father was 8 years old; he reappeared in death, by way of a life insurance check shared with my father by his estranged aunt, my grandfather's sister. So, if I drew a genogram, there would be symbols of death or estrangement attached to my male progenitors.

I am the first-born child in my immediate family of birth, and have two brothers (one is deceased), both, of course, younger than me in intervals of three and six years. With such a heritage, how could I not be a strong woman? Somehow, I became the adventurer, the risk-taker, and the tradition-smasher in my family.

There were other women in my family orchard who did not marry and/or bear children. By standards of small-town Southern mores, we were/are "eccentric." A student once jokingly called me eccentric one day, and I immediately recognized that he was right. I am not in the center of anyone's expectations, not even my own.

I recall having many late-night, wine-infused discussions with my mother about my not having children -- no, wait, start with not getting married -- and choosing to pursue a life of the mind. My heart would crack with guilt, I would cry myself to sleep, but I kept on choosing, making in the traveling a path that has become my life. Marrying into my family now, with an eight-year-old in the mix, does not really count, although I think there is something to be said for the exposure to the energy, the adjustment to, as a said previously, a much noisier and busier life.

Some say Chiclette will keep me young. Maybe that means I will not have the extent of eccentricity that comes with the kind of isolation and independence that some have after the child-bearing years have passed. No, Chiclette will not keep me young, but she will have an effect on the nature of my aging, that's for sure.

I think Chiclette's mom is the one who affects my aging the most. I'm sure I could fill another post with the benefits of exposure to her (Oh, yeah.).

The typical understanding of women in my orchard was that we who did not marry or bear children would stick around and care for the elders. So far, my elders have succumbed to disease, or, as with my Dad, remain healthy and independent. In the olde days, I would be expected to drop everything, build a room onto the family house, and take up nursing and housekeeping. This expectation is true in many communities here in the US, still, and everywhere. The extent of my compliance, so far, has been to reassure my father that if he should need me closer, I will always have room for him wherever I am living, and would not leave him to the kindness of strangers.

The embrace of the crone is, for me, a poetic venture. Do I see myself, as captured in my Wikipedia search on the term, crone, the hag, the scary old woman whose chief diet is small children (Hansel and Gretel), or the wise, beautiful elder woman, captured in this site? I would choose the latter, I think, although eventually, I think the former would be powerful, to carry eccentricity around the bend to a place understood by most people as somehow normal by the time a woman attains a certain age.

Croning is understood as a pagan ritual by most. So, what is pagan? Turning again to Wikipedia, I find that pagan, in its least value-laden meaning, obtains to the rural, the rustic, and the folkways of simple people. The negative meaning obtains to the uncivilized, religiously and socially backward, even hostile and anti-Christian.

Now, let's get real. My Christ-haunted life is really, honestly paganistic. I mean, I regularly take part in these kinds of rituals: worshipping a God who is actually three, celebrating feast days of beings who might be less than divine but who have, in death, gained elevated super-human status, and partaking regularly in a ritual of flesh-and-blood eating memorial to a ritual slaughter, complete with an epic mob scene probably more shocking than the public murders of Mussolini and Tito.

I do not kid myself. I live very close to paganism. What is there to prevent having a croning ceremony? I need to think this over. Maybe some will have suggestions?

On Turning 50

Considering that the alternative to turning 50 is pretty bleak, at least on this side of that mystery called "Life," but it's also still shocking to look in the mirror sometimes, I am searching for a way to sustain a sense of deliberate and mindful intent about reaching this age. Actually, I started celebrating turning 50 ever since I turned 49.

The age of 48 was a milestone for the simple reason that Nancy died at 48, and I immediately began to feel as if I were in my 80s, as if I could know what it felt like to be in my 80s. I'm told that is a common feeling, when one outlives a spouse, especially when the death is so sudden and the illness was not known fully until it was all over. And, in a strange symmetry, another important person also died within the year, but my age, so when I turned 48, I realized that not only had I survived, but he did not. Then, in 2001, my mother died too young. I hate Alzheimer's Disease. Then, my brother died at 44, he would have been 45 in September, in June 2005. So, when I reached 48, in 2005, fairly healthy and still standing up, I was sort of surprised. In 1998, and pretty much through 2006, I had very complicated grief.

I did not fear dying or wish for death at 48. Rather, I just had this burden of that age in mind the whole dang year. I made some very difficult decisions in that same year, like leaving a toxic relationship and a toxic workplace. So, after some good work on grief (Thanks to some good therapy and good meds, and in huge credit to PeerSpirit), I went into my 49th year with true rejoicing.

For my 49th birthday, as if to say, "I'm still standing!" I went out and got myself a tattoo, a triskele from my pre-Christian Irish heritage (lots of Irish in my background).

I also bought my vintage Airstream travel trailer (on another post). I went to Michigan to pick it up on a Wednesday, left it in the parking lot at my job, and left on Friday for a week-long retreat for "Isolated Activists" where I met Rachel.

This time last year, Rachel and I were courting and sparking, and I was wrestling with my determination to leave the Midwest and go to Seattle, in the Airstream, after sifting through all of my possessions, finishing my year of teaching, and letting go of tons of baggage of all kinds. But, by Thanksgiving, I think, I knew my move west would be far shorter distance than I had planned.

Let me just say, I made the right decision, to come home to Rachel. I also must admit that, at times, I do wonder "what if" about that cross-country plan to move to Seattle, but those are fleeting thoughts that have mostly to do with my own "stuff" related to my new role as a "woman of maternal influence" and having a suddenly much more noisy and busy life. My wishful thinking about going into my fifties with some gravitas? Forget about it.

Becoming 50 also brings the focus more sharply on the real health concerns that, addressed now, will make for a better body in which to live this noisy and busy life. I get the baseline colonoscopy on Friday. I've had some other tests, routine stuff, and it all looks good, except for the cholesterol. I really want to control that with diet and exercise and not the meds, so I'm going out to the market for dinner and staying away from my nemesis, fast food and having dinner out in restaurants.

Turning 50 needs to be a milestone for me. I am focusing in on it because there is so much good living to continue, so much to look forward to, and I do love my life so much I could shout! I just shouted!