White Lightening

Miriam never, ever liked the color red. Not even on flowers, and especially lipstick.

Red lipstick meant you were an unsavory woman - up to no good.

“Only whores and robbers are out after midnight,” she always said. This was the advice she gave me when she set my curfew at 11:59pm.

At five foot eight, she was taller than I would be all of my life. She came up from nothing, leading a hardscrabble life with her husband who turned alcoholic after dodging bullets in World War II and in a cruel twist of fate, getting struck by lightning after coming home. The bolt shot straight through him and came out his feet. He had to go to the Veteran’s hospital to recover, leaving Miriam by herself with six kids to look after. When he returned nearly a year later, he seemed a completely different person. The lightning had poisoned his psyche, and Miriam never saw the man she married, the one she loved, again.

They owned a car, but every day he took it early in the morning when he woke up so sober he shook. It was good to get the kids up and fed and dressed and ready for school in peace. Some days she got a ride to the sewing plant where she worked, but that still required a mile walk up the dirt road to the intersection. Her friend Ethel owned a two-story farm house whose living room store served the small community with a smattering of the essentials available for purchase. Miriam often walked the mile home carrying grocery sacks of flour and eggs and bologna and potted meat for sandwiches. Right up the street from Ethel lived Miriam’s go-to source for milk fresh from the cow. All she had to do was bring the empty jug back, and Verbe would trade her for a full one. These two friends understood Miriam’s plight, respected her fortitude, and gave her things on credit. She was always good for it.

The little girls got handmade dresses; Miriam herself had worn flour sack dresses as a child. Just as her mother had been, Miriam was a good seamstress, so when she wasn’t working, cooking, cleaning, or raking the sparsely grassed yards, she enjoyed making her children’s clothes. The boys were easier than the girls; a pack of white tee shirts went a long way with them.

Sometimes the children heard when their father hit their mother. She took as many of his licks as she could, knowing that eventually he’d run out of steam and pass out drunk. Sometimes too, he’d piss right on the floor and demand she clean it up. And back before the Earth got so hot, Georgia used to get regular dustings of snow. In a fit of rage, he once sent her out in the snow without so much as a blanket. Miriam hid in the woods until she knew he was asleep and then pecked softly on the children’s bedroom window. The boys raised it as quietly as mice, and she crept back in, shivering for another hour. Another time, while she was preparing dinner, he walked into the kitchen and tossed the onion peels all over the floor.  Just to prove his false bravado, he’d made her crawl around on her hands and knees and pick up each paper-thin peel with her teeth.

It was like the Devil traded places with God and sent that lightning bolt at him. Or maybe God was trying to kill him and it just didn’t work because he had too much of the Devil in him already.

The onion peel situation sent Miriam over the edge. Years later, as she recounted the story for me, she explained it all.

“We didn’t have no shelters for women and children back then Honey. You understand? And it was legal too. Now men can get arrested when they beat their wives.”

There was only the sound of the ticking of the clock and the wood creaks as she slowly rocked back and forth in her chair. She sat warm-as-toast by the fire in a plush house coat given to her by her girls several years before. To her right in a small closet by the front door, were at least 4 more plush gowns of varying colors and patterns, save red of course. No red anywhere. She only wore the one, and intended to save the others either to be buried in or for someone who might need them more than she did. She pointed her toes into the wooden floor and thought while she rocked. I didn’t say a word. I knew that this was big stuff she was telling me, big in the way that I needed to hear so I would know how to live my life in a better way than she’d had to.

“It was one or two weeks later and Dorsey came in staggerin’ but he wasn’t like he usually was, like maybe he’d gotten a weak batch of the white lightening and so I knew I could say what I wanted to and he’d be too drunk to fight back and sober enough to hear it.”

“What did you say?”

“Well, I told him I wasn’t gonna take it no more. I had me a pot of water in a rolling boil on the stove. When he laid down on the bed in yonder, I let him get settled in and warm, and I took me a dipperful of the water back there, splashing some as I went, and I held it over his face.”

“Oh no. Granny?”

“Then I said to him, Dorsey, the very next time you lay a hand on me I’m gonna put me a pot of water on the stove like I got right now, and I’m gonna let it get to a scalding rolling boil and when you open your mouth and start that snorin,’ I’m gonna pour it right down your throat.”

“What did he say!?”

“He just laid there and looked at me and I knew that he knew I was serious. And then I turned around with my dipper of hot water and went back into the kitchen.”

“He would've died if you’d done that Granny.”

“Well, God saw fit to take him another way.”

And God had. When my father was only 17, Dorsey took a handful of tranquilizers given to him by the Veteran’s hospital doctor. That combined with his usual pint of white lightening had taken him straight from this world into what I could only imagine then was a fiery burning hell. Frankly, I was glad I never met him. I might’ve killed him too.

In the 21 years that had passed between his death and our talk, Granny hadn’t even entertained the thought of letting another man into her life.

“Best thing you can do Honey is this: just stay away from boys. Don’t even let them know you’re interested in them.”

The last 35 years of Miriam’s life did go much better than the first 52. When she died, we buried her in a steel blue casket, a brighter steel than her eyes had been, and instead of choosing one of those old unworn gowns to bury her in, we found a brand new rosy pink gown and housecoat. The undertaker even put some pink lipstick on.

We gave him strict instructions – no red lipstick, no red flowers, nothing red at all.

Dear Lindsey Buckingham (A Story about a Letter)

I had an uncle who absolutely loved Fleetwood Mac, and on one very brisk March weekend in 1989, he coerced me into listening to their new Greatest Hits album even though I wanted very much to pop my New Kids on the Block cassette into my radio. I lost that battle, but because I fell asleep that night to the intense and brilliant guitar picking of Big Love, I awoke the next morning with a different perspective.

That Saturday morning, my Uncle and I cranked up the music again.  My small cassette player speaker was no match for his truck’s audio system, so it wasn’t long before we were outside washing his truck, the sun peeking through the trees to warm us up just enough to not shiver. We made our way through the album again, stopping to press the rewind button a few times, and singing loud enough that my grandmother popped her head out of the front door yelling, “Y’all are gonna wake the dead buried all the way over at Erastus Church!” As she scuffed back into the kitchen in her robe and house slippers, we laughed and kept singing. And because Keith had charge of the water hose, he didn’t forget to soak me to the bone once the truck was sparkling clean. I ran up the concrete steps to the front door screaming, water streaming in behind me, much to my grandmother’s chagrin. She spun around from the stove, mouth wide open, exclaiming “Keeeeiiithh! You’re gettin’ my floors all wet!” Granny was never one to cuss much, but I know she definitely thought about it in that moment. This made the whole thing even funnier, really. She had to turn back towards the stove to keep me from seeing her grin.

Six days later, Keith was gone, victim to an unrelenting epileptic seizure and a pre-911 ambulance staff who couldn’t find our house so deep in the woods. In the shock and horror of the days following his death, I held onto the green cassette tape we’d worn out the Saturday before, my last gift from my uncle. Eventually I gave it back to Granny, whose long slender fingers curled around it as she wept.  At the funeral, my aunts had to hold onto each of her arms to keep her from falling down, not because she was a weak woman, but because losing her youngest son took the breath right out of her lungs.

Keith was only 28 years old, the baby of six children, and he still lived at home. Since my mother had long ago left for Florida, I spent most every weekend there and Keith felt much more like a big brother to me than an uncle. It didn’t hurt that he was funny as hell. Once, on a Saturday, he shaved exactly one half of his thick brown beard off his face. He walked around all day like that. He watched television with his feet propped up on the ottoman, he helped make dinner, singing so loud, “Tell me lies, tell me sweet little lies! Tell me tell me tell me liiiiieeees! Oh no no no you can’t disguise, you can’t disguiiiisssee!”  We barely heard the biscuit timer go off and later after dinner when he read the newspaper, he held it up but not so high as to cover his face. I giggled all day long that day and the thought of it all these years later still makes me smile.

When I was still small enough to fit in his lap, Keith and I had a game we played with feathers. Since the house was situated in a small clearing in the North Georgia woods, there was usually a loose feather, a fallen leaf, or worst case, a dried pine needle, that would work. The game went like this: we stared at each other as straight faced as possible and took turns barely touching the feather along the outline of each other’s lips. Whoever cracked up laughing or itching first lost. It was a game of mental toughness that ended in fits of laughter and shouts of “rematch!” again and again. I often laughed until my belly cramped. Looking back on those moments now, I feel a pure and unconditional love.

I also remember a time one hot summer when I was sunk in and side sleeping on the super soft brown plaid couch that I think probably every middle-class home had in their living rooms in the eighties. Keith decided that pouring ice water into my ear would be a great way to wake me from my afternoon slumber. I woke with a start, of course, and when I realized what happened, chased him out the back door and all the way down our long driveway, with him laughing so hard he could barely breathe let alone run fast.

Thank God happy memories don’t fade very well. Especially when they have a soundtrack.

Through the years, I turned to the music of Fleetwood Mac and the solo music of my favorite member, their guitarist Lindsey Buckingham, to help me in my life. When I felt scared for my future, their song “Don’t Stop” gave me comfort. When I felt lost in the headwinds of change, the music represented stability, because it always gave me exactly the words I needed to hear. When I was pregnant and searching for just the right name for my daughter to be, I heard Fleetwood Mac play “Sara” live in concert, and in a matter of a couple weeks, when I couldn’t stop referring to the baby as Sarah, that became her name. “Down on Rodeo,” one of Lindsey’s solo hits, reminds me of all the times I was too afraid to make the leap, or spent too much time hanging in limbo before making major decisions. That song is a sad call to action. “Shut Us Down” is a piercing look into the past fabric of a long-term relationship, and provided me with some valuable insight years later when I was going through my divorce. It takes pain to know pain, after all.  And every single time I found myself paralyzed with fear over anything, like passing my comprehensive exams as a graduate student, “I’m So Afraid” became my elixir, soothing me into an understanding that sometimes it’s okay to just sit with the fear rather than run from it.

On October 24th, I finally had the chance to meet Lindsey Buckingham, a true rock-n-roll god. As I held his hands and told him that I was grateful for the VIP opportunity since I’d been waiting so long to meet him, he quietly whispered “Awwwww” and leaned in to kiss me on the cheek. We took a photo together and I gave him a carefully written letter that I spent three days agonizing over.  He needs to know how much Keith loved his music, and I how much I loved my Uncle Keith. Some stories just must be told, and as the letter hit Lindsey’s hand, I had a split-second vision of Keith, beard half shaved, smiling down at me in excited approval. 

Don’t Tell Me You’re Fine

Tonight I spent SIX hours straight having some real talk with my daughter who is 14.

We hit on some big, deep stuff. Life lessons and whys and hows and whats of life. There’s no way I could even list it all. We covered the gamut of the beautiful and devastating things a human soul encounters during an Earthly journey. She was engaged and listening and as usual I am amazed at all she already understands, even though she’s just beginning in this life.

At one point I asked her, “Sarah, what do you say when a stranger asks you ‘How are you doing today?’”

Her reply: “Fine.”

I then asked, “Who taught you that? Did I ever teach you to mask your feelings? To tell people that you’re fine all the time when maybe you’re not?”

“No mom, but that’s just what everyone expects.”

—-

Why is this? Why have we all collectively decided as a society that it’s acceptable to put a false-always-happy portrayal of our lives out on social media and even when someone asks us directly, face to face, how we are, we fake it?

I know that everyone reading this has answered FINE when things were *not* fine. When you were stuck in the middle of a relationship crisis, or worried about money, or someone at work was making you miserable, or maybe your whole life had just been saturated with the gasoline fire that is grief-a close love had died and you were being swallowed up by the abyss.

I’ve done it. I’ve said I’m fine probably thousands of times when I definitely wasn’t.

—-

Next question is for you (and me): Why do we secretly want the other person, whom we’ve just asked how they are, to tell us this insincere but oh-so-socially-acceptable lie?

Do we really want to believe that everything and everyone is fine all the time?

It’s always snowing in the snow globe! Look at the happy faces on the townsfolk!

—-

And yet, we are now in the midst of a most critical time in our country. Our lives are all being affected by turmoil.

Enough us enough.

Tell me HOW YOU ARE. Really. The truth.

Say it:

I am worried.
I am afraid.
I miss my loved one.
My car broke down.
I might lose my home.
My kid won’t speak to me anymore.
My aunt was diagnosed with a terminal illness.
The divorce is unavoidable.

Whatever it is, just say it.

Healing begins when we are authentic. Empathy can happen if we understand each other fully. Compassion deserves a chance to show itself and make us all stronger for its efforts.

If I don’t know your struggle, how can I love you, as a fellow human being, through it?

We MUST do this on a micro-level before we can begin to connect all the dots and do it together on a macro-level. The human-kind level.

If I’ve never almost been homeless or never heard the story of a friend who’s been homeless then how can I empathize with the homeless person?

For every one of us struggling, and all of us do, there’s another one of us wishing we knew whether or not a single other person out there could understand what we’re going through.

Do it. Say your truth. I’ll say mine. We will hug and love can spread.

We are ALL in this together.