My grandfather was a veteran of two wars. He very rarely spoke of his service, at least to me. He said those weren’t stories for little girls. However, once, he told me about taking a church in Germany.
He said that as he and his men were taking the building, he realized there was an attic, and the only way into it was through a trapdoor in the ceiling. In order to secure the church, someone had to go up through that little door, and whoever it was would be going in headfirst, without the ability to defend himself as he went. If enemy soldiers were waiting, then the man going through the door was as good as dead.
So, he went because he said, “You never ask your men to do something you’re afraid to do.” And he said he had never been more afraid in his life, but he went through the little hole in the ceiling, and was fortunate to find the attic space empty. He was safe, and he had kept his men safe.
For the whole of my growing up, wherever we went in my mother’s hometown, if we said we belonged to John Young, people would drop whatever they were doing and try to drag down the moon for us. Everywhere we went, someone knew my grandfather, either through the Army, or through the civilian job he held after leaving the military, or because he’d seen a need in them, and he’d filled it. Everyone who knew him, knew his honesty, his compassion, and they loved him for how he changed the little piece of the world around him through his genuine acts of service.
My grandfather was not a perfect man, but he was truly a good man. He helped everyone he could, and he helped anyone–no qualifiers.
When bad things happen, I think about him. I think about the example he set, the kindness he showed, how courageous, and good he was. He was meek. He didn’t raise his voice, or his fists (unless he had to), and he put others before himself, but he was the strongest person I’ve ever known, and made of more character than anyone I probably ever will know.
We’ve had a lot of bad things happening lately. I believe there are more John Youngs out there than there are Bad Guys. I believe that because I come from a family full of men and women like him. I married into a family of men and women like him. My friends and my tribe are made up of women and men who are like him. I’m raising a child who is already like him. My cousins are raising children like him.
The good outweighs the bad. We notice the bad more because it hurts so deeply, and because good people–compassionate people–empathize with those who have lost, and who grieve. But the good is there. The good is there.
I woke up this morning, and did as I always do: I woke up my son. I chased him around the house, getting him ready for his day, then out to the car where we usually settle into a routine patter. I opened my right hand, and he put in his left. I said, “I love this little paw.”
He said, “Paw, paw, paw.” And, he squeezed my hand and took his fingers back, so he could pick his nose.
I told him that was gross, and not to wipe his boogers on my car’s seat. He intimated that I was delusional, and had only imagined seeing him rolling snot between his fingers, to rub it on the side of the seat. I threatened to make him eat what I scraped off the side. He laughed and said, “THAT is what’s gross.”
We went to the orthodontist, and then I placed him very gently* at camp. Then, I drove away to work.
Yesterday, I sat with one of my sister-friends, and I held her newborn. We talked about how sturdy babies are, and about how easy it is to break one. There are words you don’t like to use when you talk about your children, so you try to make the words sound funny instead. You say them crouched down, and knocking wood, hoping you don’t anger some god who will punish you for feeling relief that you’ve made it X number of years without doing permanent damage.
While I was bouncing that boy, Rosalie Ramos was identifying hers.
You can do everything right as a parent. You can love your children, and accept them, and support them, and enjoy them, and appreciate them, and think ahead to be sure they have something good to eat when they come home from a night out with friends, and some other fool’s brokenness is all it takes to deliver you from relief into what has to be a relentless nightmare.
With my son, I try to leave every interaction on a note of love because I can’t be sure whether I’ll get another chance. I don’t know who is gearing up to pay a visit to his school, or the movie theater, or the marathon, or the federal building, or the club, or the office. All I can do is be sure his heart is full wherever he is. All I can do is try to be sure we have the kind of relationship where he feels happy to share video of himself singing and laughing. All I can do is try to build him up into a man who will be part of the solution.
I hate feeling like we live in a world where the opening of Bambi is an instructional video, but more than that, I hate that when Rosalie Ramos opens her refrigerator today, she’s going to see that tomato-and-cheese dip, and her heart is going to break again.
I wish love, and peace to Rosalie and the family, friends, and loved ones who woke up this morning without faces to kiss—be they in Orlando, or Omaha.
*When Thor was three-years-old, he asked me not to “drop him off” at school anymore. He said, “Mama, please, place me very gently.” And I have done so ever since.
I wanted to take a break from Facebook because I’ve focused so much on it that I started to feel like I had tunnel vision. My brain felt crowded. I wanted to back up, look around, and open up my focus. I wanted to play around with Instagram as a platform, and see if I could “curate” a little more art, or visual interest in my online presence.
I use IFTTT, so anything I post to Instagram goes to my Twitter, and anything posted on my Twitter goes to my Facebook. What this means, when I back away from Facebook, is that I don’t know when people are commenting on my posts. If you’ve been commenting, I’m not ignoring you out of spite.
Facebook had just started to feel like this for me:
I think it probably has to do with the election cycle. It’s hard because we all want the same things. We all want to know that our way of life is secure. We all want our children to grow up in greater safety, with access to health care, fairly educated, and with some chance of getting to go on to higher education if they choose. We all want to know that we can retire one day, and not spend twenty years eating cat food.
The greater divide seems to be over whether we also want these things for our neighbors, and once you’ve decided where you stand on that, who is going to be the best person to steer us toward the goal.
So, here we are, all on the same side of the table, pointing, and demanding, and whispering, and griping, and elbowing for room while something big is going down. And we all feel the pressure. And we all feel the importance. And it just makes us that much more anxious to be heard. Me included. Especially me. I am very anxious about being heard.
I love Facebook because it allows me to reconnect and stay in touch with people from across the span of my life. But it’s also like sitting at a crowded table. I can’t even hear the friends I want because of Facebook’s metrics shoving something else into my face. I can’t see the friends I want because Facebook’s metrics push them down to the end of the table.
Anyway. I’m trying something new for me. We’ll see what happens with it.
My Granny’s living room was straight out of a 60s JC Penney catalog. The sofa was a stiff, unforgiving goldenrod. The ottomans were goldenrod and avocado sushi-roll shaped furniture. The recliner was burgundy pleather. The stereo was six feet long, nestled in a mahogany buffet, the top covered in Sears portraits of the family.
Her walled-up, brick fireplace and mantle had been painted white, and she decorated with avocado colored glass swans. The lamps were gold, with cream colored shades. But, the best thing in the room was the massive television set. It was the biggest television in our family, so when I was able to watch Felix the Cat, Sinbad the Sailor, Mighty Mouse, and Underdog it was as they were meant to be seen. And I was able to watch soap operas—the forbidden passion of my pre-school days.
My mother forbade my watching soaps because the actors said “swear words”. I wasn’t sure what swear words were, but I figured watching soap operas would be a good way to find out. There was something else about the actors taking the Lord’s name in vain, and that made even less sense, since I thought they were taking the Lord’s name in vein. Ah, English.
Granny, who only sat still in the evenings, after all the housework had been done, and it had cooled off enough for the porch, would leave me to the honor system. “Baby, Granny’s going to go [insert a chore]. Be good. You know your mother doesn’t want you watching The Stories.”
I would say, “Yes, ma’am,” and settle in.
The best way to watch soap operas was to sit in the recliner, but in the hot, Alabama summers, I’d get stuck to the seat. So, I would usually just flip an ottoman over onto its side, and belly roll myself back and forth while the Buchanans, and the Quartermaines, and Erica Cane did their things.
The goldenrod sushi roll ottoman with the avocado roll peeking out from behind my polyester pants legs, and a fraction of what was then the biggest television I’d ever seen. Also, a puppy. And me.
I fantasized about how much better my life could have been, were I named Silver, or Eden, or Priscilla, and wondered why everyone was always so upset. No one ever just watched TV on a soap opera. I reasoned that Silver, Eden, and Priscilla would have been much less unhappy, had they just belly rolled themselves over to the UHF dial, and found an episode of The Little Rascals.
Why am I thinking about this? I was scrolling through comments on a story about yoga-con-artist, identical twin sisters (one twin drove both twins over a cliff, killing the passenger twin, and driving twin was charged with murder) and saw the Days of our Lives hourglass, and suddenly, I was in Granny’s living room again.
As a pre-schooler, I loved watching that hourglass. It reminded me of the Wizard of Oz. As an adult, the hourglass…that’s maudlin…as is the Wizard of Oz.
Now that I’m thinking about it, maybe it’s time to buy a couple of sushi roll ottomans for my own living room. I’ll bet Game of Thrones is even more fun to watch, rocking back and forth.
Two days before high school graduation, I was in the school cafeteria looking over my cap and gown with the rest of the Senior class. My friend, Jason, was talking about what he planned to do after walking. I remember kind of muttering something, and trying to swallow back the lump coming up in my throat.
I knew I could pass off the tears as being sad about leaving high school behind, but the irony was that I had started to cry because I was afraid I wasn’t going to get to leave at all.
For the most part, I was a good kid. I didn’t drink, or do drugs, or run around—that’s old fogey speak for “slut it up”—and while I was absolutely a normal teenager, I wasn’t too disrespectful of my parents, or my teachers. That is, I wasn’t disrespectful of my teachers when I decided to show up to school.
Three days before graduation, I’d been invited to the attendance office to discuss the fact that I had missed more than a third of my school year. I’d already done In School Suspension that Fall, for getting caught forging my mother’s signature on a tardy notice, so it was hardly a surprise that I had an issue.
I had been smart enough not to miss full days, though, and devious enough to have pocketed a signed pad of excuse notes my orthodontist had left out on his practice counter, expecting his patients to use the honor system in taking only one at a time. You’d think someone would have noticed that my braces had gone missing in January, and I was still going to see the orthodontist in May.
That same day, I had been invited to the Counselor’s office because I had failed Algebra II by two points. That was the class I skipped most often, and while I had solid Bs on the tests, I never turned in homework. I had factored the extremely low homework grade against my quiz and test scores, and figured that I would be fine. I made an A on my final, so I should have just skimmed on out of the class. What I did not factor in was the grade for attendance. That was probably covered on a day I hadn’t bothered to show up.
So, I stood there in the cafeteria, brimming tears because the school administration was meeting to discuss whether, or not to excuse my attendance record, and the math teacher was deciding whether, or not to let me eek out of her class.
By the end of that day, I was wreck. I still had to go home and tell my parents. I had to go home and tell my grandparents, who had driven from Georgia to attend my graduation. All kinds of things ran through my head, including extreme solutions that would mean never having to tell anyone anything at all. I was afraid to disappoint everyone. Angry at myself for having gotten caught—not for having skipped school, or not done my homework, mind you*.
Before I went home, the Counselor called me in again. She told me I was going to be allowed to take a comprehensive exam to test out of Algebra II. I had to score an 80 on the full year’s worth of material, but if I could do that, the teacher was willing to pass me. As for the attendance issues…well, that had not yet been decided. The exam would be administered the morning of graduation, so I had to cool my jets (and study) until then.
I also had to go through the Senior Walk, the Senior Talent Show, and Senior Skip Day pretending I was just as happy as every other kid to be graduating, and was only upset at the prospect of missing my friends. I didn’t tell any of them. I was too embarrassed. I was supposed to be one of the smart kids, one of the good kids, not one of the questionable ones.
I don’t even remember telling my family. What I do remember is my grandfather putting a hand on my shoulder as I left the house to take the exam the next morning. He said, “It’s not the end of the world,” and he sent me on my way.
I passed the exam with plenty of time to spare, but couldn’t get a straight answer about whether, or not the attendance issue was going to be excused. The Counselor told me the administration was having a really hard time reaching a decision because while my absences were grossly excessive, my grades were fine. Some of my grades were even excellent.
She told me to show up for the graduation ceremony, and they’d let me know then if I could walk.
Me? I was just holding out hope that they were only punishing me with psychological torment, and wouldn’t really be cruel enough to make me show up in my graduation duds, only to be turned away at the gate.
I don’t remember ever getting a straight answer. I did run into the math teacher who said, “Are you a Senior? If I’d known that, I’d have just passed you!” She told me she’d thought I was a sophomore. I mean, I was short…
So, while I kept trying to ask adults if I could graduate, without letting my friends know I might not be graduating, I was ushered into line, and marched off across the football field, where I sat in a daze, watching gnats circle the tassel button on the mortarboard of the girl in front of me. My name was called. I collected my handshake, and diploma place-holder, and walked back to my seat hoping it was for real.
I wasn’t sure it really was for real until I passed my first semester at college. I still have nightmares that my undergraduate degree is predicated on an administrative error, and I have to go back to high school, and redo all of college.
All that to say, “Congratulations, Graduates!” May your days be happy, and may you have a better graduation story than mine. (And also, if you don’t get to graduate with your class, or if you have a terrible few days like I did, know that in 10 years—even in a single year—it won’t matter at all. It will be a blip on your radar. You’ll be okay. You don’t need to consider the extremes. And you should feel free to email me if you need someone to say that to you personally.)
My grandfather, who promised me that my world wasn’t ending. He was right.
*Truth be told, I’d probably do it all over again, but this time I would do enough homework to pad my grade. My thought was that if I could do well enough on a test to prove I knew the material, I shouldn’t have to do the freaking homework. I still feel that way. I’m lazy. I’d rather have a B with no busywork, than an A with lots of extra practice. Or, maybe not lazy, but busy. I have a lot of things to do! I’d rather have a B and get it all done, than an A and only get into half of what interests me.
The Outside Lane 