From the archives: A Christmas Story

I first posted this story in November 2010. I needed to read it again, and thought others might enjoy the trip in the Wayback Machine.

There were two women waiting together for their order at a coffee shop on a sunny afternoon, just a couple of weeks after Halloween. The shop was already decorated for Christmas, with red ribbons and sparkling lights strung throughout the crowded space. Muzak-ed Christmas carols could be heard under the din of coffee grinding and espresso brewing.

One of the women complained about how annoying it was to be bombarded with Christmas music and Christmas decorations and all the Christmas marketing before Thanksgiving could even be thought about, let alone celebrated.

The other woman had lived in Spain for a time, where, she said, not so much was made of Christmas – it was a day, not a season. One of the things she said she missed the most, and most enjoyed when she returned to the States, was all the lights and decorations and music that is so much a part of Christmas here.

The first woman listened to this story and wondered, “Who said that Christmas decorations should wait until December? Who said that this season of joy and good will should be limited to a week before Christmas? When did sparkling Christmas lights and decorated doors and shop fronts lose their magic?”

She looked around her, really seeing the twinkling lights draping the menu boards and window frames, taking in the sight of the baristas in red Santa hats pulling espresso shots. She could hear the melody of an old carol under the noise of people ordering drinks and milk being steamed. She inhaled a deep breath of air spiced with coffee and gingerbread, and smiled as this little bit of Christmas magic entered her heart.

And still this Christmas season, the sights of houses outlined in colored lights, yards festooned with inflated snowmen and Santas, Christmas trees viewed through neighbors’ windows, and the sounds of Christmas music both old and new make her smile; make her happy that this season of joy, peace and goodwill begins earlier and earlier in the streets and storefronts and in her heart. All because of a 30-second conversation while waiting for two cups of coffee to be poured.

We rarely get to know how what we say influences a life, how our story helps rewrite the story of another, or what gifts our words may become. To my friend, waiting with me in the coffee shop, I say, “Thank you – for your story, and the warmth of that cup of coffee, and the delight in Christmas that returned to me on that November day.”

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Facing Another Goodbye

It’s magnolia time again. Walking through clouds of their heaven-sent aroma each morning tells me that the earth turned ’round the sun to another May.

Last May, I was at the coast on a rented pontoon boat, sifting Ruth Ann’s ashes through my fingers and into the ocean she loved. This May, I sit in a hospital room, watching another friend sleep after exhausting afternoons of leaking IV’s, painful turnings, disgusting lunches, and procedure after procedure as various doctors engaged in “the practice of medicine” attempt to find the cause of her downward spiral from vivacious, sparkling musician to bedridden invalid.

Calling her my “friend” isn’t exactly right. We are friends, but it’s more than that. But we’re not like sisters, and we’re not mother-daughter either, despite the difference in our ages. After days of sitting with her, I decide that she is as close as I’ll ever come to having a fairy-godmother. For she’s made my wish of being a musician come true.

I first met her at a concert that I attended solely because the advertisement said a harp trio would perform. I was looking for a harp teacher. After the concert I asked her if she taught harp. She quickly said, “Oh, heavens, no. But I have a wonderful teacher. Let me give you her name and phone number.” And so I found my teacher and started my harp journey.

I met her again a year later, when I started playing in the community college harp ensemble. Then, I could barely read and play two notes per measure with my two index fingers. She sat beside me, and counted out the measure numbers while she played so I would know where I was supposed to be in the music.

When rotator cuff surgery ended my African drumming days, I dusted off my 7th grade recorder and decided that I wanted to play in the community college recorder ensemble that she directs. I asked her if she could teach me enough basic recorder technique to be able to join the group. She took me on as a student that summer, and I joined the ensemble in the fall. She continued my lessons so that I could keep up with learning the ensemble repertoire. A couple of years later, she told me it was time for me to up my recorder skills and go to the Mountain Collegium, a week-long summer early music workshop. She then set to teaching me how to play the alto recorder, so that I would be ready for the intensive Collegium classes.

Sometime during those hours of sitting beside each other in lessons, playing our recorders together, we became more than just student and teacher – we became friends.

Three years ago, after one of my most disastrous performance experiences, she dragged my reluctant self to a Hospice volunteer recruitment lunch. While I was ready to never, ever play beyond the walls of my practice room again, she told me that I needed to play on the Hospice unit. As we walked through the doors of the Hospice offices, she told the Hospice staff that I played the harp. The volunteer coordinator grabbed an application and a clipboard and shoved them into my hands, and insisted that I complete my volunteer paperwork right then and there.

One of my favorite things since becoming a Hospice volunteer is playing with my friend at the hospital. We have a program of recorder duets, harp and recorder duets, and harp and viola de gamba duets, that we play both in the hospital lobby and on the Hospice unit.

She was my chief cheerleader and practice coach when I played in the Early Music Consort. Eating our lunch together after Consort rehearsals, she would always tell me the things I did well in my playing that day. She was my antidote to the overall negative experience of playing in that ensemble.

All of my adventures in music trace their paths back to her. In addition to connecting me to all these opportunities, she taught me about being a musician: how to listen, how to hear the music inside my head before playing, how to use my breath to create a flowing musical line, how to play well with others, how to keep moving forward in the music despite my inevitable train-wrecks, and most of all, how to share my love for the music and the instruments I play with whoever might be my audience.

Now she’s facing her biggest challenge, far worse and more difficult than anything she’s ever faced on her music stand. The result of all her tortuous medical procedures is a Stage IV cancer diagnosis. The chemotherapy she began this week has only a 50-50 chance of bringing about a remission. And that is only if she has the strength to endure the four different poisons that will kill the cancer cells.

The treatment pretty much destroys her immune system, so she is in a specialized hospital chemotherapy unit that is designed to reduce the risk of contracting what would be fatal infections. She’s not allowed visitors outside of her immediate family. Fairy-godchild does not meet the hospital definition of “immediate family,” so my time spent sitting at her bedside is over.

I don’t know how this story is going to end. Ten days ago, when she didn’t recognize me, when playing my harp in her hospital room failed to spark any response, I thought Music had left her heart and her time was over. This week, she wishes that there was a piano in her hospital room so she could “just play something.” Music remains her dearest friend and strongest ally. I don’t know if Music can keep her heart and spirit safe enough for her to survive this assault on her body. But today I believe in her spunk, and in Music’s potential to save her. Today, I do not have to say another goodbye.

To Everything There Is A Season

The season of tulips is over:

 

The season of irises begins:

 

March’s wood hyacinths are fading away:

While the Dianthus burst forth into the heat of May:

The airy clouds of dogwood blossoms brown and fade:

Becoming litter on the ground:

While maple leaves unfurl into summer, creating welcome shade:

The gifts of each season pass, but are unerringly replaced by the gifts of the next season. Every morning walk tells me this is so. Every morning walk should assure me that the passing of the season of Ruth Ann in my life will be followed by gifts of the next season, gifts as yet unimagined and unknown.

But the shape and weight of the emptiness left by her death continue to confound me. My meager tendrils of faith in the turning world struggle to take root and grow. Trusting that a new season will quietly tiptoe into my life and astound me with its beauty requires moment-by-moment suspension of disbelief.

My favorite television show is Call the Midwife. Last Sunday’s episode closed with these words:

Invisible wounds are the hardest to heal, for their closure depends upon the love of others, and patience, understanding and the tender gift of time.

I am blessed with the love of others. My own patience and understanding for my hurting heart are in short supply. But the tender gift of time arrives of its own accord, without requirements of belief, faith or consent.  And so, I act “as if” the passing of grief and the return of joy are inevitable, even while faith and trust remain out of reach. And every morning I step out the door, and keep walking.

By Way of Sorrow

I’ve avoided writing this post since four days into my trip to London, and for the last two months. I landed in London on Tuesday, February 18th. On Friday, just after visiting Hampton Court Palace, I read the e-mail my friend Jeanette said was the hardest she ever had to write, the one telling me that our friend and my soul-sister Ruth Ann died early Thursday morning.

Ruth Ann had lung surgery two weeks earlier. She told me not to come see her in the hospital – she didn’t want me picking up some nasty illness before my trip. She came through surgery like a champ, and was home recuperating and doing well. I thought the time for any potential problems was over, and that her only challenge was to slowly and steadily regain her strength and stamina. I thought that I would see her and tell her all about my trip once I was home. Some unseen, unknown, undiagnosed complication caused her to hemorrhage, and changed everything.

It was easy to do blog posts while I was in London. It was the last thing I wanted to do, but I made myself leave the house every day and go see at least one of the sites on my London list. Getting to and spending time in interesting places was a much-needed distraction. Picking out which photos to post and writing some breezy description of where I’d been that day helped fill up what had become long, grief-filled evenings and sleepless nights.

But once home, there was only one thing that I could possibly write about. And to write about Ruth Ann’s death would make it far too real, and more than I could bear. This grief has been so physical, so heavy to carry. Breathing takes such an expenditure of energy, energy that seems lost and gone forever, just like Ruth Ann. It’s taken every bit of this time to believe and accept that my soul-sister no longer lives on this Earth and that I will never again gaze into her eyes and heart. It’s taken every bit of this time to wrap my heart around this emptiness.

Since coming home I’ve tried to keep showing up for all the things that fill my life, if only because I know that Ruth Ann would not want me to lose one moment of life or connection or music in my grieving for her. And so, I walk. I knit. I practice. I show up for yoga class and the Hospice unit and harp lessons and ensemble rehearsals. I spend time with still-living friends who love me and care for my aching heart. But I’ve not written a word, in either my private journal or my blog.

In the two months since Ruth Ann died, the Earth turned towards the Sun. The hours of darkness shrink, and light beckons. The oaks and maples unfurl new green leaves against a china-blue sky. Shade returns to the world. White and pink clouds of dogwood blossoms arch over the neighborhood streets. The scent of confederate jasmine hangs in the air. White azalea blossoms mound like snowdrifts, and offer backdrop for the crimson, lavender and pink azaleas that compete for attention. A sudden burst of red on green bursts into song as the cardinal perches in the cedar tree beside my driveway.

It’s Easter Sunday, the day to celebrate resurrection and redemption. Easter does not erase the pain of Ruth Ann’s passing, but it reminds me that life emerges from darkness, and that we are all offered resurrection. I breathe out gratitude for beauty that still fills this world, and for the hope that is promised this day. And that’s a start.

Knitting Sanctuary

Handcrafts belong to an earlier world, the slower pace of preindustrial life where one had the leisure to sink deeply and profoundly into the rhythms of nature within and without and to feel a connection with the earth as a living spiritual entity. We make things by hand to express who we are, our identity as individuals as well as our affiliation to our tribe or our clan. Handcrafts throughout history have often been fashioned with the aid of prayer, one prayer for each bead or each stitch, while keeping good thoughts to enhance the spiritual purpose of the object. . . . The motions of needlework are singularly well suited to the practice of contemplation.

-Susan Gordon Lydon –The Knitting Sūtra: Craft as a Spiritual Practice

I’m back from a knitting retreat with my Wednesday night knitting group. I spent the weekend ensconced on a screened porch under sheltering trees, overlooking a lake, knitting and talking and living outside of normal time.

A weekend with no schedule, no agenda, no list of things to get done, allowed me to hear the approaching whir of tiny wings, allowed me to watch the hummingbirds defend their claims to red plastic flowers as they darted between the feeders. A bald eagle screeched and landed in the tall pine beside the house, and I watched in wonder for a small eternity before he silently beat outstretched wings and glided deeper into the forest. Titmice and chickadees cracked open sunflower seeds one by one. A green lizard sunbathed on the porch railing until warm enough to advertise his prowess by inflating his cantaloupe-colored neck pouches.

The quiet clicking of our knitting needles and our quiet attention to our stitches and to each other created safety, created a place to speak the history of our hearts, created sanctuary. Our deep listening created sacred space, and a place where we all belonged. In our circle, we spoke the horrors we survived, we honored our courage and strength, and we celebrated who we’ve become: incredible, creative women who drink deeply from life; courageous women who share our strength with those who cannot yet find their own; fiercely loving women who decide every day to turn bad to good, and so love this sweet old world and the people in it a little bit more.

And in our sanctuary, every stitch, every word, every breath, was a prayer.

The Transformative Power Of Snow And Friendship

Sunday Morning Snow

“A friend is someone who knows the song in your heart and can sing it back to you when you have forgotten the words.” – Author unknown

I thought we were done with winter. Daffodils began blooming in January. The star magnolias and tulip magnolias burst their buds this week and are in full flower. Migratory robins are dining daily on the worms that rain drives to the surface in my soggy back yard, and chickadees are already gathering sticks for their nests. Friday I walked the neighborhood in shirt sleeves, under long-awaited crystal blue skies.

Yesterday I awoke to snow showers, to saucer-sized flakes drifting past my upstairs window. Snow soon turned to another day of the gray, drizzly rain that is the hallmark of this winter, and I thought we were done with the excitement and beauty that snow promises in the South.

About five in the afternoon Charley ran downstairs to where I was practicing recorder. She rarely takes the stairs on her own, but the first flashes of lightning and rolling booms of thunder explained why she sought me out. She hates storms, and usually predicts their arrival several minutes before I am aware of a change in the weather.

With another explosion of lightning and thunder, snow poured out of the sky. An hour later an inch clung to the fence posts and daffodils. By the end of the storm there was almost three inches covering the ground and outlining each tree branch.

This morning I awoke to a crystalline wonderland. The morning sun lit the top branches of the crape myrtle and cedar, making them sparkle with fairy dust. My back yard was transformed from mud and mire to a white canvas that captured the beauty of the snowy night.

The mud and mire of my heart’s distress is also transformed by the comments and emails I received in response to my post The Yawning Gulf Between Where I Am And Where I Want To Be. You helped me regain both perspective and faith that sight-reading skills do not make one a musician, and that I am a musician whether I ever sight-read another note. You helped me remember what I have accomplished with the harp, and helped me refocus on what I can do instead of seeing only what is still beyond where I am today. You assured me that I will find my way back to the joy that is Music. You held onto the song in my heart when I could not hear it, and sang it back to me when I needed it most. Thank you for your caring, your kindness and your support, and for being my companions on this journey.

 

What Would You Do If I Knit Out Of Tune?

Would you screech, put down your knitting needles, and not knit another stitch?  If I knit instead of purled, would you roll your eyes at me? If I miscounted and knit an extra stitch, would you huff under your breath? If I didn’t read the stitch pattern correctly, would you care?

NO, I didn’t think so. Neither do my knitting friends, which is why my Wednesday evening knitting group is the perfect balance for my Wednesday morning ensemble. There is no judgement, no measuring up to how another woman knits. Every new and every ongoing project is oohed-and-ahhed over. Stepping out to try something new – a new technique, or a new pattern – is cheered on. We mutually groan about having to “tink” (knit spelled backwards) and laugh at our mistakes. And the experienced knitters help us newbies figure out whatever new thing we are trying to do, or whatever old thing we have thoroughly screwed up.

The Early Music Consort met yesterday for the first time this semester. It was not an auspicious beginning. My recorder was cold, my fingers were stiff, my ears had not played with another recorder player since the beginning of December, and we were sight-reading new music. So I didn’t blow a high “G” in tune, I played B-flat instead of B-natural, I didn’t count correctly and got ahead of everyone, and my fingers and eyes did not work fast enough to get to a lot of the notes on music I’d not seen before. This was all too much for the normally calm recorder player sitting next to me, who screeched about my tuning, put down her recorder, and stopped playing.

It’s easy for me to become upset and panicked over how badly I am playing when someone is reacting to what I am not doing correctly. But through some measure of grace, I kept calm and carried on. I breathed slowly. My tuning improved and my fingers loosened up. I remembered what my recorder teacher said the previous night about sight-reading: skip the notes you are not going to play and direct your attention to the notes that you are going to play. And the recorder player on my other side pointed out that I could play one of the impossible tunes at the written pitch, so my fingers got all the notes the second time we played it.

This moment of grace, where I could detach both from another’s reaction and from my own too easily triggered panic, crystallized my goal for this semester. I could work on any number of musical skills that need improvement. But what I need most in my playing and in my life is equanimity.

equa·nim·i·ty  – noun \ˌē-kwə-ˈni-mə-tē, ˌe-kwə-\1: steadiness of mind especially under stress <nothing could disturb his equanimity> 2: right disposition : balance <physical equanimity> (Miriam-Webster online dictionary)

My knitting friends make equanimity easy to find and practice. Sitting around the table sipping wine and eating chocolate while we knit and laugh, or laugh and knit, it’s easy to feel calm, to be steady, to have both right disposition and balance. Yarn won’t hurt you.

And neither will an out-of-tune note, a misplaced fingering, a miscounted measure, or a disgruntled fellow recorder player.

A Sweet Day

It’s nearly eleven p.m., and I should be turning off the light and settling into bed with Willow cat on my hip. But today was such a sweet day, I’m reluctant to tell it goodnight and tumble through sleep to tomorrow.

Our Early Music Consort concert, take one, was today. (We’ll do it again on Saturday at the university campus uptown.) Mistakes were made, but not all by me, and no one had a musical wipe-out on stage. I forgot to raise my harp lever in time to play an F-sharp instead of an F-natural, but another string player got it correctly, so it wasn’t as obvious as some of my other creative notes. And Trickster tapped someone else for the one-note solo, for which I am very grateful.

After the concert we walked up the street to the Malaysian restaurant and had lunch together. Our ensemble time is focused on rehearsing our music, and afterwards people rush back to work, or to their next rehearsal. Getting to share a meal together, having time to talk and enjoy being with each other, and laughing together over our performance’s more interesting moments was a delightful way to end the concert.

This evening I joined my new knitting friends at our Wednesday evening gathering at the neighborhood yarn shop. We work on projects, drink wine, eat chocolate, talk and laugh, all accompanied by the soft clicks of knitting needles and the low rumbling snores of Lola the terrier, who really runs the store.

On the way home a red light stopped me at a shopping center corner where all the trees are covered in twinkling white lights. Every branch was outlined in sparkles. My favorite Christmas CD, Winterfall, got to the track with my favorite Christmas song, No Candle Was There, just as the trees appeared through my car windows.

It was a moment of magic, of Christmas peace delivered unexpected on a nothing-special Wednesday night made extraordinary by music, friends, and connection. Tonight I am grateful for all these moments of grace, when my often fearful heart knows all is as it should be, and all is well.

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