Live Nativity

I was driving back to my hotel room in Murphy, North Carolina after a long day of visiting a relative in the local nursing home.  My take-out dinner was in tow on the front seat of my car – North Carolina mountain trout and Yukon gold potato mash and sautéed green beans and Caesar salad – I was almost there, to my hotel room, where a bottle of Pinot Noir awaited me too, when I spotted a sign on my way up Holiday Inn Drive -- and it pointed to a steep hill just past where I meant to go, the sign reading, Live Nativity, December 17, 18 and 19, 7 to 9 p.m. 

I felt the car make a sudden jerk to go up that steep gravel hill where the sign pointed, at the same time hearing a voice inside of me say, today is December 17 and it is just past 7 o’clock and it will take only a minute and the trout will be fine . . .

Once up there, I was not sure what to do, for another sign said to turn off my headlights – and mine have been on 'auto' ever since I’ve owned the car and I don’t know how to override the intelligence of my vehicle on this.   Besides, I did not know if I should park the car or where I should park it, for there was not a parking lot but only a few cars lined along the gravel road atop this hill which was really more like a ‘mountaintop’ than a hill.  I could see movement within a crude open hut over to the right of me, and there was a small group of people dressed in gowns and robes and head gear – and all was silent and very dark on that mountaintop.  I felt very intrusive and out of place, and I started to lament my decision – and so I kept driving forward, hoping the road would lead me down the other side of the hill and away from the embarrassment of having sharp headlights that I could not turn off only because I did not know how to.   But the road did not lead down the other side, and I was forced to turn around and repeat my intrusion with the glaring headlights past the live nativity scene. 

And as I did so, I saw three men come toward my car with waving flashlights.  I was sure I would be reprimanded by each of them, and so, as I approached the first man, I slid down my window and apologized for the headlights being on 'auto' and told him I would leave now – but he said, no, no, that’s alright honey, you just drive on through past the nativity – and that meant I was to take a slight left turn to get into the loop of the drive-by . . . and when I did that, the second man came up to my window and I slid it down again and said the same thing, apologizing for not knowing what to do with my car – and he looked in at the confusing headlight dial and said, you don’t worry about it, dear, some cars will do that way . . .  now you just follow around the circle and don’t you worry . . . and so I came to the third man who also approached the car to, no doubt, remind me of the headlights still on, and I said the same thing to him – that I was so sorry and that the other men had pointed me on anyways, and I felt really bad about blinding everyone's eyes and I didn’t know what to do – and he smiled and said, that’s OK, sweetheart, you just enjoy the nativity . . . and he waved me toward the crude open hut . . .

As I approached this solemn scene, I could see that Mary was holding a real live baby in one arm, but that she was having to lift the other forearm to block the glaring headlights of my car – and yet, she smiled at me as broadly as any new mother, and she also used that uplifted arm to wave at me energetically and joyfully.  I saw Joseph to her left side, proud as any new father, smiling broadly too.  He endured the headlights and did not block them, but only bowed his head slightly and tried intently to look toward my car window to wave at me.  As my vehicle inched forward, I saw that I was now blinding the three wise men to Mary’s right – for they were all lined up in a row and wearing colorful robes and carrying receptacles that were no doubt replete with gifts of frankincense and myrrh.  But they squinted and smiled at me and waved energetically as though eager to share their good news.  I noted also that there were live donkeys and goats and even dogs curled up on the ground near Mary.

It was a beautiful nativity scene, just the way I had set up under the family Christmas tree when I was a child, arranging and re-arranging the ceramic characters as though they were parts of a dollhouse that came down from the attic only once a year.  This one was life size, however – and it was alive – and it was more friendly and happy and kind than I had ever imagined one to be.  For even when I had circled the scene and was about to descend the hill toward my inn where I would have a silent and thought-provoked dinner, the first man I met that night came up to my car window to thank me, and I once again apologized for imposing my glaring headlights on this dark and silent night upon a steep hill in the North Carolina mountains – and he once again said to me, don’t you worry about that, honey, we are just so glad you could come to witness the nativity with us.

A Few Steps

It was just happenstance, when I pulled into the parking lot for my yoga class, that I found a spot next to a van of which the side door was open and a man was standing next to it while two young boys were waiting with an old red wagon at the rear of the van and a woman was just beginning to walk around from the driver’s side . . . and I somehow already sensed what was to come out of that van door.

Once outside of my car, I saw the man, supposedly the father, reach into the back seat to lift out the family dog and place him carefully/tenderly in the wagon which the two boys held steady – and by then I had already retrieved my yoga mat from the rear of my car, and I saw the sunglassed face of the woman, the supposed mother – the boys and the father wore sunglasses too – but the mother’s grief could not be disguised by her sunglasses, for her lips trembled and she could not look toward me. 

  

It just so happened, without any contrivance, that I was to walk in step with them toward the building where we both went – they, toward the veterinary clinic on the right; and me, to the yoga studio on the left – but before we diverged, in those few steps, I instinctively wanted to place my arm around the mother – but I held back, since no words or acquaintance or eye contact had been made between us – and perhaps it is my imagination, but I almost think she had leaned toward me in the way I wanted to lean toward her, but that she also held back as I did . . .

Instead, with no thought as to the appropriateness or inappropriateness of the authentic emotion I held, I said to her, “I’m sorry” – and that is when her emotion poured forth; and the boys too, betrayed by the purpose of those sunglasses on them, they too began to cry; and the father, stoic as he tried to be, could not deny what he was feeling and began to melt in the face . . .

The few steps we shared in the parking lot ended as quickly as they began, and I veered to the left while they veered to the right – and my parting words, not wanting to leave them in that condition but all I could say in the short space of time and distance we still shared, my last words to them were, “I understand” – and just as I said those two words, the lame dog, who looked more like a very kind red wolf than a dog, that lame dog brightened up in the eyes and put one leg out of the wagon to escape it, perhaps to go to my side of the building – all the strength it could muster – and the two boys jumped to put its leg back in, and the mother yelped softly as though this were all a mistake after all, and the father slowed his pull of the wagon and turned around just to be sure, but the dog submitted . . . or had used up its strength. 

As I continued my solitary walk to the yoga studio door, I felt the tears well in my eyes and my head naturally bow.  Once inside, I kept my sunglasses on, for the tears were escaping from both corners of both eyes – a betrayal to myself and to all the giddy noise making women inside the yoga studio lobby.  I shook off my flip flops and found the room I was to go in, my sunglasses still on, while I greeted the instructor and briefly noted what I had just seen – “Ohhhh . . .  I had to do that,” she whispered with such emotion that I bent down to unfurl my yoga mat without looking at her.   

Once the room was darkened and the drone of the instructor’s voice had begun and I was alone on my mat, I took off the sunglasses and lay on the mat with my eyes closed, a few burning tears making a path down each temple and pooling uncomfortably at each inner corner – my sleeve dabbing at them over and over, only to be replaced by more – an inconsolable dabbing – and all through yoga class I could only think of those few steps that carried so much weight between us – people and a dog I don’t even know – and of those few words that were so inadequate but all I had to give – I’m sorry and I understand – no solution, no excuse, no stay of execution, no escape from the red wagon – how powerless we are to quell the most obvious and natural and universal of pains – nothing I could say or do to make anything different for them. 

I’m sorry and I understand – the only words this non-angel could muster in those few steps she took with a grieving family and their dog.  I repeated them over and over in my mind, as though they were a mantra, all through class, each time imagining the loving arms of some real angel or goddess or invisible being that could hear me from my yoga mat in the darkened room and go to the clinic next door and somehow do the thing that I could not.  

Speckles

Inspired by a quote from Gary Snyder’s book, “The Practice of the Wild”

Back when I had time to write only

poems, I’d spend the speckled parts of

one day reading the thing that was penned

by inspiration in the shower – changing

a word or letter or comma, here or there – till

the thing was quite fixed over by day’s end, and it was

all done in those flecks of time, for I had all

the daily vacuuming to do, the black and white

kitchen tiles to mop – and many full meals –

and much washing and bed making too, for

nothing was short changed or skipped – and  

yet I wrote the poems – about housewifery, most

of all, for that was my vantage, and the seeing of

speckles and dapples and shine even when

the dull tedium added up to nothing, everyone knows

housework has that reputation, must be

shined and polished daily, and even then, it’s at

best a pot or pan, window, mirror – face it . . .

to most.  I’ve never had the authority

to call it more or make it sound

like a way to polish one’s life, or to live in the

present moment, or to say it was the

“highest calling of my 24 hours,”

which I read in a book the other day – the highest calling

of the 24 hours, and so I laughed to think that   

herding children into a carpool van, or shifting numbers in

major business plans, or directing people in the role of

boss or dictator – that it’s all the same, the most important

work of the hour, he said. 

I have struggled to think the same, make myself feel

more than I was, all in the practice of making dull shine;

I have made the black squares blacker

and the white squares . . . whiter.  It’s the practice of the

kitchen floor shine, albeit bent over, and

knowing dullness and routine and the hour.

It is not lofty work, not even to me, the one writing

this poem at the hour – and I have no authority

to make it sound so, not from this inner vantage, still bent

over this or that – it is a practice, to stay alert,

a path of sorts, to walk or skip or drag the feet

along black and white kitchen tiles – everyday, the hours . . .

in spite of dingy

windows and carpets and walls – days when

everything is cast as shadow and blur – always the practice of

finding speckles and sparkles to keep one stepping,

one more day, another chance

to practice it, to get it right, to make the

black tiles blacker, a comma act brighter, or white tiles  

whiter.

Fully Workable Hands

Coming home for breaks from college in the 70s, I would sometimes ride with a young man from a neighboring small town.  I knew he liked me-liked me, and I felt so uncomfortable with him that I often, I’m sure, said nothing at all on the six-hour drive home, except to answer his endless questions as succinctly as possible so as not to encourage him.  I knew he was searching for a date with me because of the types of questions he asked, such as, “What do you do for fun?” and “Do you like movies?” and “What kind of music do you listen to?” and “Do you like to dance?”  There were other signs too, of which young girls are acutely aware. 

I don’t remember his first name, but I remember his last name started with a G, because at one point he said, “We have that in common, both our last names start with G!”  That made me laugh.  G was friendly and outgoing and smart, and he is what people called back then a “thalidomide baby.”  He had very short arms that stopped somewhere up around the biceps, and small hardworking hands that emerged from the short-sleeved shirts that he always wore.  His chest was folded forward and his upper back was stooped from a lifetime (19 or 20 years) of having to function with arms that never reached a school desk, or a tabletop on which his fork and plate were placed, or, in this case, the steering wheel.  As he drove, his chest was nearly lying upon the steering wheel and his chin was touching the top of it, while his hands grasped each side at 10 and 2 as we’d been taught to drive back then.

He showed no self-consciousness of his condition; this was simply the way he knew his own life – just as I am accustomed to arms my own length with the relative “handicap” of not being able to reach across the room.  But I was young and extremely self-conscious at the time, and I tried always to avoid looking at him in the driver’s seat as he talked endlessly and asked questions to draw me into the whirlwind that he seemed to create with his hands as he drove and gestured.  I’ve always known better than to say this, but G’s hands were disturbing to me, poking out of his short sleeves as they did, like heavy wings that were trying to fly away.  They were small and somewhat deformed, and they worked so fast and independently of the rest of his body, that it seemed like two additional people were there in the car talking to me.  His hands did all the work of pointing and waving and gesturing and alternately steering the wheel.  Once he asked me what kind of car I liked.  I had no knowledge of cars back then, and no anticipation of owning a car, and no opinion about cars – but he kept pointing at cars, every one that passed us, lifting his hands and pointing and calling out the make and model and even the year, until finally I said, “I like that one.”  It was a Karmen Ghia, he told me, and that kept him silent for one minute.  Many years later when I owned my first car, that is the car I owned.  G was that kind of person, always working hard to engage the world around him – a whirlwind – and I suppose he influenced many people with that manner of his.               

But I was the person that I was, very introspective, self-conscious, and content to be quiet.  With G or not, I would much rather have looked out the window for six hours, thinking about the books we had been reading in literature classes I was taking – or any number of things I liked.  My favorite author at that time was Sherwood Anderson, and my favorite book of his was a collection of interconnected stories about the characters in a small town, called Winesburg, Ohio – and my favorite story in that collection was called “Hands.”  It’s about a man named Wings Biddlebaum whose hands are always nervously fiddling about as he talks.  In hindsight, I don’t know if I noticed G’s hardworking hands because of that being my favorite story, or if “Hands” became my favorite story because of noticing G’s hardworking hands.  It was all related.

G was studying pharmacy at UNC where we both attended, and he would one day take over his father’s drug store business in the small town near mine – that was his plan.  His father had provided his mother the thalidomide when she was pregnant with him – my mother told me this, for people in small towns, even neighboring ones, know these things – for her nausea, and of course no one knew at the time what the effects would be.  My mother said this one time after G dropped me off at our house and politely came inside to greet my mother and to shake my father’s hand. 

One Red Button

The place for supplies 

Funny, we all think, how on a pre-snow day the grocery stores always empty out of essential foods – but, to be in JoAnn Fabrics and Crafts, as big and well-stocked as any grocery store, and to see the women there in throngs, buying 12 yards of interlining; or 7 yards of interfacing; or one yard each of 12 patterned fabrics; or enough black and white thread to last till the end of time . . . that is funny.  One woman, her cart full of supplies, said, “Now I’m ready for the snow day tomorrow – watch it not get here!”  She laughed, as did other women nearby who were most likely thinking the same thing and similarly gathering supplies for the arrival of snow.     

I had gone there to get one big red button and some cording for a small project of my own.  I have only recently put my hand to sewing after a 30-year hiatus, and I find it to be much like bread baking in the way it can jog one part of the brain in order to open up the other part of the brain that often gets stuck in non-writing mode.  As I stitch, words fall into place, order becomes apparent, and a pattern emerges!  Anyway . . .

Like in a candy store . . . 

I stood in line nearly 30 minutes for my $12 purchase.  These are not the same faces I saw in the grocery store earlier today, I thought.  No one here was complaining about the long lines or the lack of supplies on the shelves or the understaffed store. These women were happy to have obtained their goods for an anticipated play day.

The woman in front of me looked back at my few meager items which I held in my left hand (other women had carts, real grocery carts, full of sequins and glue and threads and bolts of fabrics and rolls of batting and such) – she looked back at me and said, “Got a coo-pon?”  She might have said, “Got Milk?” as on that television ad – so firmly and surely did she say it to me.

I looked down at the one red button and three one-yard-length cords I held, and said, “No.”  I realized I was the only woman in line without a grocery cart or booklet full of coo-pons.  She didn’t say anything, just proceeded to scroll at her smart phone, then turned back, handed me a paper coo-pon for 40% off one item, and said, “I’ve got this one on my phone, so you can have it . . .”   I was very grateful, calculating I’d use it for the pricey $5 button I held, and that it  would save me $2 or so.  She inched forward in line, saying, “Ever’ little bit helps, right?”

In the parking lot, one woman loaded her car with a cart full of fabrics and supplies – all in her trunk. She looked up as I squeezed by, and gave me some kind of “knowing smile” – it was a little sheepish too, as though admitting the trick of putting bags in the trunk in order to hide it from one's husband.  I’m not sure if that’s what the sheepish smile meant, but I smiled back in a knowing fashion and nodded to her, just as I had gratefully accepted the coo-pon from the other woman.

I needed one perfectly red button

I put my button and cords in the car, and suddenly thought that chocolate chip cookies would be fun to bake on a snowy day, and so I walked up the sidewalk to a grocery store.  I passed by a liquor store on the way and saw throngs of men inside, standing in lines equally long as at the crafts store.  I hovered nearby, pretending to read signs in the window, all the while noting the men walking in with hands in their pockets and heads to the ground, not browsing in the store but going directly to the aisle of their intention – and men walking out, holding a black plastic bag in each arm, heads still down.  There were no bonds or “knowing smiles” amongst them – and I wondered if one of them might open the trunk of his car to find a cache of hidden craft supplies . . .