God Bless Us Everyone

Our world has been made better by our diversity. Lord knows where we would be without the contributions made by people of different ethnicity, different faiths, varied backgrounds. 

Our Jewish culture gave us Sigmund Freud, the founding father of psychoanalysis. Ann Frank left us a diary and showed the world that courage can endure even under unspeakable conditions. Albert Einstein, famous for the theory of relativity, laid the basis for the release of atomic energy. Jonas Salk, whose parents were Jewish immigrants, invented the polio vaccine and saved untold lives. Their gifts to the world are beyond words. 

And what would we, as teenage girls, have done if we had not had Paul Newman to salivate over, or Cid Caesar, born of Jewish immigrants, to tickle our funny bones? Not satisfied to pad his bank account with movie money, Paul Newman used much of it to make the world better for kids who had no hope of a bright future. In 1988, he opened The Hole in the Wall Gang Camp in Connecticut so that children coping with serious illnesses would have a special hideout where they could simply be kids. 

Think of Oprah and what all she has done to make a difference and, given how her life began and what she was forced to endure while growing up, it is incredible that she emerged with such an enormous generosity of spirit. The Met would not have been nearly as wonderful without the voices of African Americans. When I hear the voice of Leontyne Price, I am brought to my knees.

The world of people is like a big bang of multi-colored confetti and each one of us has a chance to contribute. It is not about always being perfect, or always being right. It is about being. Just being. And it’s about getting up when we fall down and trying again when we fall short, even when failure dogs us to the brink.

 I would like to think I will live long enough to see the end of bigotry, but sadly I know that will not happen. My grandchildren may have a shot at living in a world that is better than what I see today but it means they will have to work at it, and it will take time. Lots of time. I hope they will not lose hope.

I recently read a story from my Christmas book, High Cotton Christmas. It was “That’s the Spirit!” It was just a story, one I made up. The Christmas season lends itself to storytelling. Did it matter that my story was make believe? Nope. When we welcome the spirit of this special time, before long, good things begin to happen. We are nicer to others; we smile at strangers; we renew our spirit by giving generously; we forgive past hurts and we look toward happier times. We are reminded of Dicken’s favorite last line in A Christmas Carol and that ain’t such a bad thing. 

My reading went well and I sold a ton of books and I have people who were in the Christmas spirit to thank for that. We all become more generous during this time of year ... but even so, I’ll stick with Dickens. “I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year. I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future. The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me. I will not shut out the lessons that they teach!”

So here’s to all of you ... “God bless us every one.”

Anniversary Waltz

“How do you keep the music playing? How do you make it last? How do you keep the song from fading too fast? ~Alan and Marilyn Bergman

“You’re cooking snails for our anniversary dinner?” Babe’s face is a mask of terror. 

I close my eyes and count to ten. “Not snails. Escargot. The first course.”

He rolls his eyes. “Whatcha fixing for the second course? Grilled Geckos?”

My plan for a romantic anniversary dinner at home with just the two of us is going south faster than snowbirds in January.

Our years together are passing too quickly and we seldom have alone time these days. I miss that. I hope that on our anniversary we will sit across a candlelit table recalling our years together. I’ll laugh at his bad jokes and he’ll say, “Yum” to the escargot.

I picture him pouring champagne and saying, “Remember the priest that married us? He looked like ‘Radar’ on M.A.S.H.”

I’ll reply, “I remember you staring at him and laughing, and him bouncing on his heels like a slinky until you said, ‘I do’.” 

Babe will roll his eyes. “Well, unlike you, I didn’t giggle when he asked the Richer or Poorer question.”

I’ll give him a point for that.

The table will be set with good china, good silver and the champagne flutes saved from our wedding twenty-five years ago. The tapers will dwindle down to soft, waxy puddles while music wafts through the room and poetic breezes snuff out the world beyond our little nest.

I’ll wear the dress I wore on our wedding day ifI can still get in it. He’ll say I look better now than when I walked down the aisle. Getting him to change from sweaty golf clothes into something decent will be a stretch. I’ll just put some jeans and clean underwear out for him. I’ll tell him he’s more handsome than ever and he’ll believe me because the truth will shine in my eyes. 

I picture the two of us alone and content for a few precious hours. Joining us at some point will be our memories needing no prelude, no clarification.

While he pours more champagne to toast our days, weeks, months and years together, he’ll say he thinks often of the day we met, at which point I’ll hum, The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face. He won’t frown or beg me not to sing. 

Neither of us will bring up past disagreements like the dented fender or the coffee stains on the carpet. Gone will be the notion that I don’t appreciate him taking out the garbage. I won’t nag him about his favorite meals I’ve cooked that went unacknowledged.

On second thought, maybe I’ll slip it in. We can’t focus all night long on those wonderful can’t-live-another-minute-without-you-days or we won’t get to the second course.

We will dance. We’ll kick up our heels because we love dancing with each other. I’ll play romantic CD’s programmed for a magical evening. Between courses, we’ll waltz to the refrains of poignant ballads, though not always with our feet. At times, we’ll glide together with a look designed to keep our inner music playing. (Sigh)

If things go as I hope, the evening will evolve in layers, one course following another. After sipping champagne and eating too much food, when I’m convinced that he is sufficiently mellow, I will suggest a trip to Paris.

“Why not go to Austria, too,” he’ll ask mockingly because he’ll think I’ve had too much bubbly.

Without a moment’s pause, I will counter with Australia, and he’ll grin knowing, as I do, that it is all pretend.

We are old, Babe and me, although we don’t feel it since we’ve always found new things to love about each other. Okay, so he won’t wear his Tux on our big night. In fact, he may not even change into clean jeans. He might even fall asleep while I’m tossing the salad.

None of it will negate the way we feel about each other after all these years. Those feelings are still as young as first love. What we have may not be as fresh or as filled with dreams as when we walked down the aisle a quarter of a century ago, but some of it might surface with good wine, candles and slow dancing.

We will do the dance before his bad knee begins to give out and my bad back steals the slow shuffle from our anniversary waltz.

Crossing the Line

The first time Tim beat Julie she was seven months pregnant and terrified of losing her life and that of her unborn child. He took pleasure in punching her in the face that day, and when she tried to get away from him, he grabbed her and threw her to the floor.

She had the presence of mind to roll over in time to protect her stomach and the baby within, but her actions provided an opportunity for him to kick her with his new six-hundred-dollar western style boots. When he tired of hurting her, he grabbed a beer, sat down and watched a baseball game on television while she writhed in pain on the floor.

Sober the next day, Tim saw the damage he had done to his beautiful wife and he sobbed like a child who just saw his favorite dog get run over by a Mack truck.

Julie believed him when he swore it would never happen again and she forgave him because she needed to believe in him. It happened again, of course, and before long a pattern of abuse developed, one that lasted throughout their marriage.

You might ask how and why Julie allowed the battering of her size-six body to continue for all those years. You might even question why any sane person would choose to remain someone's punching bag day after day.

Julie's inner voice, her mangled self-image, successfully convinced her that she deserved to be punished. Tim had no trouble persuading her that she was lucky to be married to him and if he was unable to control his anger, it was not his fault, it was hers. She stayed with him because on some level, she believed his irrational lies.

Perhaps the other reason she remained married to him was because Julie had a need to fix broken things, and that included relationships. Her dream of a happily ever after never wavered even when her own body was broken and bleeding.

I am livid today. I wish I could hire an oversized thug to beat Tim to a bloody pulp so that he could experience a taste of what his size-six wife endured for too long. In addition, I feel enormous anger at myself. Why had I not moved heaven and earth in order to spirit my friend away from that monster?

Just after her first beating, she came to me with a black eye, swollen nose and cracked ribs. She was brokenhearted. Not knowing what else to do, I sympathized. I put my arms around her and cradled her, soothed her as best I could. Why did I not try to talk some sense into her? Why had I not given her a safe harbor in my own home?

There were other times when I sensed that she was being abused but, afraid of overstepping the boundaries of friendship, I kept quiet. I wish I had a nickel for every time I told myself that it was none of my business and that the best thing I could do for Julie was pray for her. I didn't know how to determine the delicate but defining point when it becomes acceptable, even crucial, to cross the line. I made myself believe that sooner or later she would turn to me for help and I would be there for her.

Julie and I met when we were much younger and we spent years of mutual moments in each other's lives. Girl stuff; wife stuff and mother stuff. We exchanged recipes, saw "Beaches" together twice and cried together both times. We even created short stories together, exploring different philosophies as we wrote. We shared hairdressers, housekeepers and hundreds of snapshots. I have lost count, if I ever knew, of the hours we spent discussing the ups and downs and kid-sized problems relative to our children.

Before either of us realized it, our conversations took a turn; our grandkids, not our children, became the center of our exchanges. Lord, how we laughed at the antics of those little ones. Julie was my constant friend for all those years, and I was hers.

Today, every aspect of me is numb. I walk from one room to the other not knowing how or why I got there. Tears spring from my eyes with no preamble. I wear black, not because it is my best color, but because it is the definitive color of death.

How I wish I could go back and do things differently. If I had only given credence to my intuition, Julie and I could be sitting at my kitchen table right now drinking coffee, laughing at a joke or engaged in a lively discussion over a NYT Best Seller.

If only I had reached out instead of waiting for her to come to me, things might have ended differently. Tim might not have beaten my friend unconscious. He might not have dragged her inert body to the sink or held her head under dirty dishwater until her soul left this world forever.

Battered and bruised was not what Julie wanted to be when she grew up.

~ Cappy Hall Rearick

Idol Thoughts

One time long after I was grown, Mama said, “The other day somebody told me that you were her idol when she was a kid.”

“Who on earth would say a thing like that,” I asked, clearly thinking Mama was cranking up on a joke. It turned out, however, that she was dead serious. The idol person was Julia, my third cousin, five years my junior. I remembered her only as a little girl who showed up occasionally at our family reunions — a virtual stranger, really.

Mama said, “She’s grown now, same as you. Came by to see me the other day and wanted to know where you were living and what you had been up to since you left town.”

“Dear Lord,” I muttered. “When you filled her in on my crazy life, I bet her idol world wilted faster than Strawberry Jell-O at a July picnic!”

As it turned out, Julia had made it her business to keep up with me through the years, only losing track after her mother died. She came to visit Mama with the sole purpose of catching up.

My mother told her that I was living at that time in Hollywood, married to a studio executive. I was writing a newspaper column and doing pretty well, but that she didn’t get to see me as often as she would like.

According to Mama, Julia’s comments about me were, “I remember the first time I ever saw her. She was sitting high up on a float in the Christmas parade wearing a red evening dress and a black velvet cape. Her blonde hair was long and tucked under in a pageboy style. She smiled and waved at people who waved back at her, and she had the whitest teeth I ever saw,” she exclaimed. “When I asked my mother who that girl was, she said, ‘Why, that’s your cousin,’ and I was so proud. It was the day your daughter became my ideal. I wanted to grow up and be exactly like her.”

As I listened to Mama tell this tale it occurred to me that, to my knowledge, I had never been anyone’s idol before and I wasn’t sure how I felt about that. Flattered? Well, yes, I was a little bit. How could I not be? But I had another emotion, too, one that crept like silent footsteps into my consciousness and stuck. 

Accountability.

In the course of only a few minutes, I had become answerable to a distant cousin I could barely remember, had known briefly. Not only had she patterned her hairstyle and clothes after a young girl perched on top of a parade float, she had gone on to model a portion of her life with me in mind. In doing so, whether she realized it or not, she made me accountable to her for my actions. I felt very strongly that I had to do right by her, if not in the past, then certainly now. 

When I voiced my newly born concerns to Mama, she smiled knowingly and quipped, “I always told you to keep your nose clean, didn’t I? You never know who’s watching you.”

I’m ashamed to say that today I don’t know what happened to my cousin Julia. Like me, she is probably a grandmother or at the very least, a grand-aunt. All the same, I can’t help but wonder if she, also like me, ever found herself alone, completely cut off from the people she loved passionately. I wonder if she ever felt that she had not made much of a difference in the world. 

Now that the years are winding down more quickly than I ever thought they would, I also wonder if Julia ever thought to question what was behind the cardboard character she so easily made out of me. Did she keep that first vision of a smiling young gracing a Christmas float, all decked out in a red formal gown and over-the-elbow white gloves? Or did she see beyond the fru-fru to the real mewho was just as scared, excited, happy, tearful and wonderment as any other fifties teenager? 

If so, did I survive her scrutiny? Would I still be her idol today?

Mama, who always insisted on having the last word, was right. It’s always best to keep your nose clean, because you just never, never know …

WORSE THAN DYING

We’re really a composite of our life experiences ~ memory layered upon memory. 

Alheimer’s steals that away. 

My friend has Alzheimer’s Disease, God and her dear husband is charged with taking care of her. He told me that he lives with a sense of the Other, both divine and human. He is learning that it is through the human that we learn of the divine. 

For him, the primary human “Other” is his wife who, over time, has evaporated. The disappearance was slow but constant. She was in denial for a long time and resistant to change, especially when it involved her living facilities. And she was angry — especially toward her husband, even as loving and patient as he has been throughout. 

While I understand that every critical disease has the ability to destroy relationships and connections, it seems to me that Alzheimer's has its unique method. In its deliberate assault, it brings about an ending that has no end. 

God, we know there are no happy endings with Alzheimer’s at this time. Not for the one with the disease and not for the caregivers. For the patient, forgetting where they put their keys is nothing compared to forgetting who they are and who they were. 

It breaks my heart to think that my friend can no longer dress herself, bathe or use a fork. She sees people and talks to people who are not there. She struggles with trying to figure things out but she no longer has any memory of relationships. The struggle goes on all day and all night. Every day. Every night. In so many ways, God, my friend’s battle with this disease is worse than dying. 

Please help us find a cure for this insatiable monster. Amen.

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Cappy Hall Rearick

Porch Sitting

“I believe that what we become depends on

what our fathers teach us at odd moments,

when they aren’t trying to teach us.” — Umberto Eco

A friend said to me once, “If you could sit on your porch and visit with anybody living or dead, who would it be?” 

Flannery O’Connor crossed my mind, as did Eudora Welty and Anne Morrow Lindbergh. How I would love to pick their brains! 

Yet, if I had a choice, the person I would choose was not famous. He never wrote a book or cure a disease. He didn’t do anything to distinguish himself outside of the small town in which he was born. Given what he had to work with, however, he accomplished a lot. 

That person was my daddy whose life ended much too soon. 

 “There are two things you should always remember,” he said to me when I had been married for almost a month. “Number one,” he held up his index finger, “never buy packaged hamburger meat in the store.”

“Why is that, Daddy?”

He sighed. “Butchers grind up the unmentionables, add some fat and call it hamburger. Trust me; don’t eat it.”

When Mama and Daddy were newlyweds, long before he got into law enforcement, Daddy was a salesman for a meat packing plant. It was after the Great Depression, before the FDA began cracking the whip. Visions of cow parts prepared for human consumption was burned onto the walls of his brain. I never saw my Daddy eat a hamburger.

 “Okay, the second thing you need to remember,” he said, “is about coffee. It tastes better when you drink it out of a thin cup.”

I was a young bride at the time and needed practical advice: hints on balancing the budget or how to keep love alive in a new marriage. What did I get? My Daddy, serious as a heart attack, enlightened me with a complete list of stomach-churning ingredients in hamburger meat.

After that, he counseled me to drink coffee in a thin cup. I didn’t get it. I kept on drinking Folgers Instant in my thickest mugs, ones that wouldn’t break when I threw it at my husband because Daddy had not told me how to keep love alive. 

Many years would pass before I discovered coffee brewed with fresh ground beans imported from Colombia and enjoyed when sipped from a thin china cup.

So, what might we talk about today if we were sitting, as my friend suggested, together on my porch? What would we say as we watched egrets fly overhead and listened to barking dogs somewhere in the distance? 

Before I said the first thing, I would pour freshly brewed, steaming Starbucks French Roast into two bone china cups. I’d add a splash of cream to mine while Daddy, being a coffee purist, would shake his head in disapproval. 

“I thought you had better sense than to ruin a good cup of java with cream,” he would surely admonish.

Then I would take Daddy’s hand in mine and hold it for a little while. I would try to memorize the shape of his long fingers while running my own over his knuckles, nails and his FBI Academy ring. I would examine both sides of his hands to determine whether either of my sons had inherited those hands. 

After a few minutes of quiet time, I might say, “Daddy, what do you regret not doing when you were alive?” Secretly, I’d hope to hear him say, “I’m real sorry I didn’t take the time to hug you more often.” Most likely he would reply, “I regret not catching the SOB that robbed the First National Bank!” 

I would want to tell Daddy that, in spite of everything, all the missed opportunities that lingered between us, I had loved him deeply and respected him for all that he accomplished with so little formal education. I would tell him how much I admired him for taking responsibility for our town’s safety, even though our family was too often shortchanged in the process. 

Maybe I would ask him to put his arms around me and hold me for a few precious minutes. Wanting him to be my daddy again for a while I’d say, “Let’s pretend that the years have not gone by and that I’m still your little girl.” 

I would try to tell him all the things I never got the chance to say, like that he had been a good man and that his family was proud of the difference he made.

“You were important to me, Daddy, and I wish we had been closer.” 

With the hope of making him laugh, I would attempt to say something funny. If I succeeded, then I would burn the vision of his smiling face onto the walls of my brain and carry it with me until I go to that all-you-can-eat, artery-clogging hamburger buffet in the sky.