giving thanks | pull up a chair

May 24, 2013

muddled at the end…

dispatch from 02139 (in which this year of thinking sumptuously is slipping through our fingertips, certificates of completion are now collecting dust atop the dresser, and we are due to turn back into pumpkins any minute now….)

so, at last it’s come, and now it’s gone.

may 22. that once-distant spot on the horizon, that date we magically hoped might never come near, the date when all the fellows and their co-vivants would gather one last ceremonial time, circle around the astounding historian and president of veritas U, drew faust gilpin.

she would stand behind the podium, all 5-foot-8 of towering intellect, and she’d sprinkle us with final words of wisdom and blessing, deal out certificates as if a deck of holy cards, and then we’d file out.

finished.

the year of thinking sumptuously come to a sorry close.

if no mortar boards were tossed in the air (the suggestion was nixed, opting instead for dignified closing benediction), there were exhales all around: sighs of relief, whoops of joy. and there were inhales: disbelief. oh-no-what-now? how’d that happen quite so swiftly?

i, for one, am clearly in the camp of the muddled.

so topsy turvy are my insides, are the thoughts rumbling through my brain, it’s a miracle these sentences aren’t flowing out in parabolas and circles.

i am one big gunny sack of contradiction.

i am deeply grateful — and i mean prostrate, belly-flopped, on the cobbled lanes, for crying out loud — for having had this wollop of a whirl drop into our laps in the first place. and i am oh-so-sick that i didn’t lick a few more morsels off my plate, didn’t break out of a few of the ties that bind me, always bind me.

i am more than sated, yes, but hungry for so much more — in the book department, for starters. i am lugging home a 10-pound box of syllabi that i intend to read my way through, even if i need to live to 210 to do so.

i ache for home, for the friends who know me through and through and who understand the hills and valleys of my soul. i ache to be back in my not-so-secret garden, perched on the birdhouse bench tucked along the bluestone path. i imagine tiptoeing down my creaky stairs, turning the corner into my farmhouse kitchen, letting the cat in from his midnight prowl.

and yet, last night at fenway (the final final outing of the year, a trek to the green monster, washed down with a belly-ache of cotton candy, cracker jack, and a triple cracked off the bat of the reigning mr. red sox, dave ortiz), i was looking a few rows down at my beloved friend from south africa and i thought i heard my own heart crack at the thought of being an ocean and a continent away from her.

and what about the great white clapboard clubhouse that’s been the beehive of this blessed bustling nieman year? every time i round the bend, come through that white picket gate (past the nostril-packing lilac and the korean spice viburnum in recent weeks), charge up the brick walk and bound through the brass-knockered front door, i’ve felt more embraced than a girl should be allowed to feel (by the old floorboards and colonial panes of glass, i mean, a place that echoes with three-quarters of a century of journalism heavyweights).

and leaving behind the curator — the great good friend who somehow believed in me this year, even when i was quivering with self-doubt — i cannot stand the thought of not having her in my every day.

can’t stand the thought of days not populated with seminars and masterclasses, with shoptalks and round tables, with spontaneous eruptions of big ideas and wacky antics down in the clubhouse basement where the computers always whir and the fridge is forever stocked with cranberry-lime fizzy water, my emblematic drink of the year.

one marvelous fellow-friend told me yesterday that she felt only one thing the other night, after the certificates and the lovely dinner and the curator’s jaw-dropping act of handing out, one at a time, the perfect book she had deeply picked for each and every one of the 24 fellows. she felt “complete,” my fellow-friend said.

how odd, i thought, that i feel quite the opposite. i feel rather incomplete.

is it some quirk in my wiring that has me looking at this whole thing upside down? or is it simply, as i’ve said all year, that i’ve been catapulted into a somewhere i always imagined was here, but i’d not tread before: i am learning my way through the landscape of slow-acquired wisdom, and i see so long and winding a trail ahead.

there are volumes to be inhaled and boundaries to be toppled. there are trapezes i aim to grab, and training wheels i might take off.

i am, in a million ways, so very much a beginner.

and it’s a slow road, mustering courage and backbone.

and there are miles and miles to go before i finally sleep.

and all along the way, i’ll be whispering my vespers of deep and everlasting thanks…for this most glorious and forever year of thinking so very sumptuously.

photo above is my mate, “the professor,” ambling into loeb house for the lovely and heartfelt final dinner. once the home of the president of veritas U, the brick colonial manse is now reserved for truly special occasions — when funders gather with their pocketbooks, or, in the case of the empty-pocketed nieman fellows, for the final push out of harvard yard.

all things nieman now have ended, but we’ll haunt cambridge for another month as little mr. sixth grader winds up his school year, and we slowly say goodbye to this city where a good chunk of our hearts will forever dwell.

do you often find endings a whirl of up, down and sideways?

7 Comments

May 17, 2013

morning prayer

dispatch from 02139 (in which we troop to the last morning prayer of this year of thinking sumptuously, moi and the long tall fellow who brought me here in the first place….)

he doesn’t often make requests, the tall bespectacled fellow now known around these parts as “the professor.”

but he did last night.

“would you please come to morning prayer,” he asked. “it’s the last of the year.”

i had a million and one things i thought i needed to do this morning, but i (a.) either got them crossed off the list before eight bells, or (b.) shoved them aside till 10 bells.

we loped together, the professor and i, across the cobbled lanes, up the hill, across the fresh-mown yard and up the steps of memorial church, that great steepled block of faith and prayer that looks out over the huddled masses of harvard college.

morning prayer is one of veritas U’s golden secrets.

each day at quarter to 9, the prayer chapel tucked behind the altar, the one with steeped rows of well-worn wooden pews, the one where eastern light pours through a two-story stretch of panes and glass, fills with a hodge-podge of harvardians and everyday cantabridgians (the latin-derived name for cambridge locals).

as the bells way up high in the bell tower clang their final call to prayer, the choir files in, their black and crimson-edged robes flowing. a wise soul steps to the podium, and the prayerful bow their heads and wonder what faith tradition we might draw from on any particular morning.

oh, i’ve heard suni prayers, tibetan chant, and a short story by amy hempel (that would be from the great church of literary fiction). i’ve listened to anglican prayer, and hebrew scripture. i’ve absorbed leviticus and the lord’s prayer.

and, by nine bells when the last hymnal is tucked back into its perch, i always waft out, lifted.

i’ve started many a day at morning prayer, finding deep grace there in the dappled light of a cloudy cambridge morning. or, as this morning, nearly blinded by the blazing rising orb.

i am moved to know that the great minds all around me are humble enough — and enlightened enough — to turn to the pews for truer higher wisdom. i find it sweet that so many professor emeriti shuffle back, as backpacked undergrads stumble in.

there is God at harvard, indeed.

that the man i married — a man whose prayerfulness is not widely broadcast — chose morning prayer as one of the closing rituals of this year of thinking sumptuously was indeed a grace note i’d not let slip away.

as the rev. jonathan walton, a soulful professor of divinity and minister of the memorial church, stepped to the podium and began preaching with a story about his 9-year-old son’s obsessions with greek mythology, and his tendency to pretend he is one of his pantheon of heroes — one day zeus, one day hermes, another day apollo — i caught a glimmer of a tear well up in my professor’s eye.

he is finding this leave-taking among the toughest ever.

and the rev. walton’s words, and the prayers of petition, were precisely what we both needed.

“life comes at you fast,” the reverend reminded. “how will we equip ourselves for the insecurities and anxieties that surely blow with the winds of change?”

he spoke of courage to go forth and to be seen as we are. he encouraged us “not to navigate under a cloak of invisibility, not to pretend what we’re not,” but rather to “wear our vulnerability.” only then, he said, can we own “what God would have us be.”

and then we bowed our heads and prayed for “core courage,” to face whatever lies ahead. and “for hope, to hold our heads up with dignity even in the face of despair; for love, to strengthen and embolden us to love fearlessly even in our vulnerability.”

we all shuffled out, trailing behind the reverend onto the broad front porch, where urns of coffee and baskets of bagels awaited. under the chill breeze of this fine may morning, we huddled in conversation with the wise minister.

my professor, i do believe, had breathed in essential courage.

i know i had.

it’s a breathtaking dollop of wisdom, to hear that we needn’t be fearless to go forward. to look around and realize that all that is asked of us is that we embrace the whole of who we are, and take our humbled, unfinished selves out into the world, beyond the walls of the steepled church, beyond the gated yard and cobbled streets, and get on with the business of making our life’s work whole.

amen to that, and to this holy blessed year. and to “the professor” who brought me here in the first place, and who accompanies me home, forever deepened by what unfolded here….

and to all of you, who came along for the journey, humbling as it was, bless you and bless you. we are off to the berkshires for a weekend’s romp, the last as the class of 2013. and then, come wednesday, it’s closing ceremonies and words of wisdom imparted in one final blessing.

10 Comments

May 3, 2013

enter to grow in wisdom

dispatch from 02139 (in which, alas, classes at veritas U have come to an end, and we begin to ponder just how deeply what we’ve learned will forever inform our going forward…)

the words are simple, etched in limestone.

each letter, maybe three inches, top to bottom, but looming, soaring, some 12 feet up, for those who pause to crane their neck, or shift their eyeballs heavenward.

i nearly tripped the first time i spied them.

“enter to grow in wisdom.”

i swallowed, smiled. charmed that old harvard would deign to dollop this inscribed dose of aphorism into its citizens’ daily lives. how quaint, i thought, for such a stiff-collared institution.

but then i found myself traipsing out of my way to duck beneath the hallowed words, as if they’d waft down and dust me with magic powders.

(this curious — and intentional — ambulatory detour, of course, might be traced back to the ancient parts of me that were trained to believe, long long ago, that splashing one’s fingertips in the holy waters perched beside the door of any catholic church was sure to make your soul sparkle with good graces for the day. or until you next committed some venial sin — say, coveting your first-grade neighbor’s frilly toothpicks, and pocketing said pokers in the dark confines of your dungarees, whereupon you’d rediscover them once home and feign total loss as to how in the world they got there.)

“enter to grow in wisdom,” indeed.

the words span across the brick-and-limestone dexter gate, one of the 26 such thresholds that encircle harvard yard, defining the pastoral from the pedestrian, the hoi polloi from the highbrow.

built in 1901, designed by the architectural greats mckim, mead & white, the brick-striped pillars rise from the cobbled sidewalk as a monument from a bereft mother, josephine dexter, whose son, samuel, was president of harvard’s class of 1890, but who died in 1894, just two days after coming down with spinal meningitis.

it’s a two-sided prescriptive. as you sashay in from the honking, screeching cacophony of massachusetts avenue, you read: “enter to grow in wisdom,” and as you bustle out, looking up onto the inner-facing side of the limestone span, you mouth the words: “depart to serve better thy country and thy kind.”

i can’t shake the incoming directive, “to grow in wisdom.”

can’t decide, is it command or invitation?

and does it matter which?

for me, all i know as i look back on two semesters, tucked in lecture halls, squished in pop-up seats with wobbly writing slabs, is that the words, more than anything, are a beginning without end.

i wish i could inscribe them across the transom of every space through which the human race parades. on the wall of every birthing room: “enter to grow in wisdom.” in the dingy, dim-lit passageways of chicago’s famous “el,” or boston’s “T.” in churches, synagogues, mosques and temples, of course.

but why not, across the check-out aisles of the grocery stores, where too often i’ve seen squabbles erupt and nasty words exchanged?

and how about behind the dugout of the little league ballfield? or, above your own kitchen table?

wisdom, for me anyway, is holiness, is path to enlightenment, is how you begin to flush out deeper, broader, more fine-grained empathy, the gift that — when you pay attention, close careful attention — rises up from the pages of history and literature and humankind.

and so, this year, i came to cambridge to spark a hundred thousand wicks of candlelight, of wisdom.

i came, greedily, to soak up all i’d never had a chance to learn, to understand, to know. i came to fill in blanks, connect dots. put words to too many empty pages.

i stayed up late, rose early, because there was so so much i didn’t know.

because i was being offered dorothy day and martin luther king, mahatma gandhi and thich nhat hanh as pathfinders and teachers — and a host of modern spiritual pioneers and religious revolutionaries, besides.

i swallowed whole the complete works of virginia woolf, of nabokov, of bellow, of zora neale hurston, w.e.b. du bois, frederick douglass, and that living writer-saint isabel wilkerson, whose “the warmth of other suns: the epic story of america’s great migration,” should be required reading across the land.

i listened hard when paul farmer and arthur kleinman, the godfathers of global health and modernday disciples of pure goodness, implored us to not leave behind, not forget, the shadows of the world where medicines don’t flow, and one toilet might be shared by 10,000 refugees.

i cried too often in a semester of african-american history — AAAS 118: from the slave trade to the great migration — as my stomach turned and my heart splintered into shards. i could not fathom lashings nor lynchings, but i was left gasping at the recountings of how these inhuman acts were headlined as spectacle, and thousands of white folk turned out to cheer charred black flesh dangling from a limb. and hoisted children to shoulders, so the little ones could get a closer look.

i could not even muster the ancient christian prayer, “father, forgive them, for they know not what they’re doing.” that prayer holds no merit here. there is no excuse, no feeble claim for not standing up to cruel injustice. no pretending you don’t know.

and so, with two fifths of my classes this semester spent studying the injustices of white to black, generation upon generation, century upon century, i kept asking myself why i could not tear myself away from the readings, why i was the sole tear-stained silver-hair, amid a sea of smart-as-a-whip undergrads, who filled notebook after notebook with names and dates and stories of those brave souls who rose up to try to stanch the hatred.

it felt as if the answer wasn’t meant to come to me, not yet anyway. and so i sat there, squirming at times, when kids shot hands in the air and spoke bracingly about white privilege, and great-grandparents begat from slavemasters’ rapes of enslaved great-great-grandmothers.

for most of the semester, i thought perhaps i was being readied for a spate of journalism back in chicago’s blood-splattered landscape of racial inequities.

but it’s dawned on me in recent days that — as i sat feeling powerless to turn back the clock and right the wrongs, and wanted to burst out of my (white) skin to stand up to oppression — the task is here and now: our every days are filled with injustice, are filled with small acts of hatefulness for which we can’t afford to turn our heads, to cower in the idleness of our kitchens or our gardens, our leafy enclaves.

maybe it’s the deep-veined jesuit framework upon which my early college days were founded. maybe it’s just the lens through which i’ve always seen the world. but the particular brand of wisdom that’s been birthed in all these months is the one that now springs from a few essential jottings from my notebook:

1.) beware the single story, preached professor kellie carter-jackson, a rising star among african-american historians. “the single story creates stereotype; it’s not untrue, but it’s always incomplete. it robs people of their dignity. we create a single story when we show a people as one thing, as only one thing, and repeat it over and over. the consequence of the single story is that it makes our recognition of our equal humanity difficult.”

2.) search out the voices that have been silenced through history. embrace bottom-up not top-down history; sift through the past to mine the stories of those who fought injustice, even when the price they paid was life itself.

my bookshelves are spilling. my pens, dried of ink. the margins of pages read like constellation guides, so stained with stars i’ve drawn to mark the wisdom there contained.

wisdom.

it all comes back to wisdom.

for me, that’s been a lifelong prayer. i’ve long pictured a frame from the far-end of my life, when i might become the wise old woman, bent and wrapped in shawl. when my kitchen table would be always set, and the teapot hot to pour. when there would be chairs, many chairs, filled with folk of every stripe and color, size and spot.

now, though, that might not be mere wisp of a storybook’s dream.

now, i’ve entered to grow in wisdom, and, for me, there is no departing from that holy sacred path.

thank you, All Knowing Light and Wonder, for this great and glorious school year, now winding to a close……

how do you, my chair friends, carry on in your chosen path of wisdom?

(photo credit “depart” arch: blair kamin)

and great and glorious thanks to my most amazing professors: harvey cox, stephanie paulsell, paul farmer, arthur kleinman, paige williams, the kooky “cooking & science” crew; henry louis gates, lawrence bobo, luke menand, helen vendler, james wood, kellie carter-jackson, and the amazing amazing harvard undergrads and grad students who so generously invited me into their privileged conversations, both in the classroom and beyond, at coffeeshops and lunch counters, in my living room and under shade trees in the yard….God bless you each and every one….

and, most of all, to ann marie lipinski, curator of the nieman foundation for journalism at harvard university, for picking my sweet blair for this year of thinking sumptuously. and, i suppose, to blair for picking me so long long ago…

9 Comments

November 15, 2012

tucked in for the night…

dispatch from 02139 (in which we come in from the cold, light the lamps, and await a river of great good company here in new england, on the brink of the feast of the pilgrim et al)…

already i’m whispering my thank you’s.

oh, of course, it’s not yet the great feast of turkey and brussels sprouts. though, come to think of it, i might be the only one in all the land who celebrates the lowly petit chou fleur, sometimes, oddly, translated not to “little cabbage,” but something more akin to “my little darling.”

and for the record: next time anyone puckers up and calls me a little cabbage, i just might up and pinch ’em in the behind. or the apple dumpling, as a dear kindergarten-teacher friend of mine insists one’s bum be called.

egad, here we are a mere three paragraphs in, and already we’re over-tumbling the market basket, spilling fruit-and-vegetable metaphors with no restraint. and while we’re at it, we’re demonstrating how very swiftly we disassemble our thoughts here, watch them scatter like thistle seed to the winds.

the point is, this year’s long list of merci beaucoups promises to pack quite a wallop. thus, i’ve been gathering steam, and preambling already.

might be simply that this week is supremely better than the blurry one that came just before it, the one when at any minute i was aiming to hoist a battle-worn white flag, dial t-i-c-k-e-t-2-h-o-m-e and hightail it out of this intellectual — and virus-riddled — hotbed.

ah, but the flu flew away, the fever broke. the twisty knot of sinew and sore in my down-low back, well, it up and dissolved (er, mostly it did), and i found myself skipping along the cobbled cambridge lanes counting the days till the end of the academic semester, which astonishingly is just round the bend. (meaning i’ll soon be able to roll out of bed, and steal a book from the shelf, for no reason other than its title — or heck, the juicy splash on its cover — intrigues me.)

but even better than that, i’ve been eyeing this weekend with flat-out delight, for a river of great good folk are due to arrive in round after round of cars, buses, aeroplanes and trains.

first up is the boy who’s riding a mere two hours home from his down-the-road college, for at least a few days holed up here with his doting mama and papa and wee little brother. (then he’ll skedaddle down to NYC, and live it up with his aunt, uncle and cousins, till the back-to-school hour beckons). he’ll buzz the buzzer some time round mid-afternoon on the morrow, and from then on in, it’s non-stop company.

dear friends of the newspaper ilk from back in chicago are flying in for a whirl of a weekend, and some poking around of my new favorite haunts. my best friend from when i was little is coming in from california, for cryin’ out loud, by way of connecticut. an adorable fellow whose mother i love way back home is spending the night, sprawled on our couch. saturday morn, we’re due to rendez-vous under a tent with yet another family we’ve loved since the dawn of time, or so it seems. and i’m sure i’m forgetting someone or something.

no wonder the deep-down thank you’s are rumbling and rolling.

and no wonder this week (thanks also to an all-day friday seminar on “negotiations,” no less, one which commences at 8 bells sharp, and stretches till 3 in the afternoon), i am forced to forgo my early-morning habit of writing here at the table. instead, tis now, with dark of night cloaked round my shoulders. all alone at the kitchen butcher block. just me and my tap-tap-tap. the only sound is the hiss of the heat pipes (hallelujah), and from the room just behind me, the occasional but regular turning of a page.

which reminds me: one of my most lasting gratitudes goes out to ms. j.k. rowling who, with her pen and her brooms and her wands, has lit one whoppin’ bonfire under the reading twigs of my sweet little sixth-grader, who has been known in recent weeks to flick on the reading lamp (when he thinks we’re not looking) at 2 in the gosh-darn morning. that child, once a reluctant reader, has in the last four weeks sucked down — at last count — no fewer than 2,425 pages, like some sorta super-sweet kool-aid.

and yes, even after all these weeks, there are still moments in days when i all but pinch myself, wondering how in the world we got here, in this magical place for this gosh-darn-miraculous interlude.

as i walk along the parade of sycamore trees, those mottled soldiers, that line the bend in the river. as i find in the mailbox a hand-penned letter, page after page, from one of my new contemplative friends, the monks, at saint john the evangelist monastery, a place with the gift of hushing the soul.

or, late most tuesday nights, as i say goodnight to the babysitter who’s become a treasured constant in the whir of our weeks, and whose capacity for kindness gives me faith all over again. as i sit in a circle with some firebrand or thinker i’ve never known before, and find my head swarming with ideas i could chew on forever — and probably will.

as i curl up for hours on end with an afghan under my toes, and virginia woolf in my lap. or dorothy day. or mohandas gandhi. as i soak up first-person accounts, over foamy cups of cappuccino or peppermint tea, of long-ago dinners and late-night phone calls with martin luther king.

for all of these things, i am so deeply, blessedly grateful.

and that’s just the beginning…

i know, oh i know, that these days are not without bumps, not without heartache. and these nights are not stripped of the tossing and turning that comes with old-fashioned worry. but because thanks can never go on too long, i don’t think it’s a chore to begin the compiling. so if you’ve stopped by the table, and if you’ve something to add to the list of deep, down thanksgiving (and, yes, gassy little cabbage-ettes are more than welcome), please feel free to scribble your thoughts…..

and before i go, on this eve of the eve of my mama’s birthday, happy blessed day — and year — to the blessed soul who has taught us all volumes and volumes. so sorry we’re not home for this one, but know we hold you close to our hearts……xoxoxoxo

14 Comments

November 25, 2011

bountiful

welcome to the fourth annual marking of steering-clear-of-commerce, the day after that great feast of thanks when most of western civilization seems to crank up the greedy and run, grab and dash for the nearest big-box extravaganza.

why, news reports already tell us of the lovely southern california woman who hauled out her red pepper spray last night at a wal-mart, while crushing in lines for an x-box, and let rip on the shoppers and children huddled around her.

makes me want to run to the woods and holler.

but then, running to the woods is the whole point of the chair’s annual backs-to-the-mall celebration, as we attempt in our collective ways to battle the rampant commercialism and turn instead to the contemplative powers of very full bellies, and very deep thanks.

and so, we begin.

my long list of bounties this year, the sumptuous morsels that stuff full my heart, begins but does not end with the simple fact that there are two boys asleep in beds not far over my head.

there is a long and muscular fellow who these past delicious days has been showering me with the through-and-through sense that he is the very same fellow we dropped at the college gate. only perhaps he’s been thinking harder than in a very long time. perhaps, too, he’s traveled landscapes far livelier than the ones he traveled when anchored here in the leafy little town we call home.

no small feat, this reunion of hearts, discovering the boy who’s been gone, who’s been decidedly far-off in miles and minimal emails, is in fact still deeply connected, seamless, and, yes, he still makes me laugh so hard i am gasping for air.

right up with that blessing, come the ones that spring from the little fellow who has not left the roost. the one who leads with his heart. the one who leapt right into the lap of his big brother the other eve, thought nothing of plopping himself like a second scoop of ice cream into the very same chair, a kid who cannot stop oozing a rare brand of tenderness. it’s as if he knows as deeply as i do that the simple act of his being here is nothing short of answered prayer, science-defying miracle.

this old house is a blessing, too. the way it reaches out and wraps me in its sun-streaming windows, creaky old floor boards. the clouds of heat that come from the firehouse stove, the one that simply and solidly cooks up whatever i ask.

and then there is the garden that wraps this house, that nestles it into its place on the planet. the grove of old pines, the branches that each and every spring welcome the wren, and in winter harbor the hawk, the hawk who makes me shudder, afraid as i am to watch him swoop down and capture his lunch.

of all the gifts that garden brings, and it brings many, it’s being home and feast for the birds that i count as its most sacred calling. for there is something about the flutterings of the birds, the way that scarlet banner, the cardinal, posts himself just beyond the window, the way the blue jay rattles the bush, and the sparrows keep up their chatter, that sings to the depth of my soul.

i might be among the few who salute the cloudy skies of november on my long list of blessings. ah, but those angora gray skies, they comfort me, hold me solidly, harbor me.

yes, sunlight streaming in is a beautiful thing, but it’s almost too awake for me. i’ll take the somnolence, the introspection of a gray day any day.

and i’d be amiss if i did not mention how grateful i am for hearts that continue to tick, day in and day out, despite the trials we toss their way, as we worry and fret, then, without notice, shriek in deep joy and excitement. poor ol’ heart, the one that landed in me, might not have realized it was signed on for a roller-coaster ride of significant proportion.

i am deeply grateful for the creature comforts that await me each morn when i rise from my bed. for the coffee beans that sit on the shelf of the freezer. for the cranberry-studded corn bread that fuels most of my mornings. for the old blue calico pitcher that charms me. and the coffee mug that fits snug in my palm.

i am grateful for the schoolhouse clock that ticks on the wall.

and the smiles that greet me along my way, from the security guard who sits in the lobby of the tall gothic tower where i go to work each tuesday through thursday, to the checkers at my grocery store, the ones who know the names of my boys and who can tell who’s home for dinner by the plenty i toss on the checkout line.

i am grateful for a mama who comes two times each week to cook up a dinner, and tend to the boy who walks home from the bus stop.

i am grateful for faraway family, the ones who keep watch from afar, and who relentlessly believe in us, most especially the ones in new jersey.

i am grateful for a brother and sister in maine who seamlessly weave themselves into our every day, despite the thousand-plus miles. i am so deeply grateful that the woman my brother married is now, in every way, my sister. i am grateful for each one of my four beautiful brothers. and, too, for my new york city sister who regales me with tales from the front and keeps me in stitches.

i am eternally grateful for friends, most especially for the ones who pull up their chairs, and offer up words of wisdom, and unfading love.

i am grateful for the chorus of saints in my life, the ones i turn to when i don’t understand the ways of the world, or need to talk through some nettling worry. i am grateful for strangers who dish up kindness. i am grateful for neighbors who come to my door with platters of cookies and tubs of tomatoes.

i am grateful for anyone who loves words, and most especially for anyone who tells a great tale. i am grateful for old friends, and ones i discovered as recently as just last week.

i am grateful for editors who dollop careful consideration.

i’m not supposed to write about him here, but i am mighty grateful for that tall fellow i married, the one who’s stuck by my side on our considerable journey, the one who helps me steer this sometimes teetering ship. the one who has taught our boys to be very fine men. the one i still love to listen to, across any dinner table. but most especially one filled with great minds, and great hearts.

i am grateful, come to think of it, for all the old tables in this house. the ones where i set out the plates, the banged-up hand-me-down blue willows, or the lipstick-red diner china.

of all the treasures in my life, most often it’s the spread at the table that captures the deepest richest deliciousness. it’s where bellies are filled, but far more so, where lessons are learned, and laughter is launched.

if there is a birthplace for bounty, it’s right at the table, the one rung with so many chairs.

happy day of bountiful blessings, my chair friends, so many blessings and marvels they spill straight from thanksgiving onto the glorious annual day after. no discounts allowed.

what’s on your list of bountiful blessings?
and, before i sign off, happy blessed birthday to our sweet sweet azk, a father-in-law for the ages, a wise man, a good man, a gentle man. big big hug, and many wishes for yet another bountiful year. love, bam xoxox

p.s. that spread up above, that was turkey day brunch at my house yesterday, while the tv blared football, and my sweet baby bro from toledo with his beautiful wife drove in for a day of feasting. i was mighty grateful to get to do that spread, my one dollop of turkey-day cooking and baking….

8 Comments

November 23, 2011

welcome home, college freshman xoxo

* as published in the Chicago Tribune
(here’s a tale you all know, you who come to the table, pull up a chair. i could barely wait last week to see that boy, now asleep in the room up over my head as i type. so i wrote the essay below. it ran in the newspages. but it belongs here, most of all. you see the boy, trying to sleep, and the little one, who could not pull himself away from that bed. he just stood beside his big brother, soaking it in. so did i.

and, now as we all get ready to crank the stoves, set the table, open the door and welcome the ones we love, here is the welcome home essay, just for you. xoxo)

By Barbara Mahany

I’ve been imagining the sound for months: his footsteps.

The house has been hollow without them, the thud I came to know as his as he stumbled out of the bed, the gallop as he loped down the stairs.

I can almost feel the gust of the wind as the front door swings open and in pops that curly haired mop I last buried my nose in on a hot August day when I left him on a leafy college quad, 1,000 miles away.

But any day now — I could tell you the hours and minutes — we are about to fall into the sweetest of homecomings, the freshman in college coming home for the very first time.

It’s a film loop I’ve played in my mind over and over. Since way back before he was gone. It was, in many ways, a salve to the wound that was growing, deepening as the day of his leaving finally arrived. Nearly swallowed me whole, that widening gash.

I’ve long savored the romance of November, when the light turns molasses, the air crisp, and planes fill the sky, the crisscrossing of hearts headed home. But never before had I felt it so deeply.

This year, one of those jets is carrying home my firstborn.

Now, all these months later, I can only imagine the boy who’s more of a man now. Calls home just once a week, Sundays, after 5 p.m. “Circa 1975,” I call it, just like when I was a freshman in college and had to wait for the rates to go down to report in to the folks back home.

It took me the better part of a month to get used to the missing sounds in our house. To not wince each night when I laid down three forks, not four. To not leave on the porch light as I climbed up to bed.

Over the months, I’ve learned to steer clear of particular shelves in the grocery store, because they hold his favorites — the turkey jerky, the sharp cheddar, stuff I used to grab without thinking, his stuff.

Curiously, I haven’t spent much time in his room. Except once, when I tackled the closet, folded every last T-shirt, rolled up loose socks, rubbing my hand over the cloth, absorbing the altered equation, that I was now the mother of a faraway child.

And so, I’m looking forward to when the place at the kitchen table will be ours again, the place where we talked until the wee hours, poring over the landscape of his life, refining the art of listening, asking just the right questions.

I leapt out of bed days ago, scribbled a list of all the foods I wanted to buy, to tuck on the pantry shelves, to pack in the fridge. I flipped open a cookbook to a much splattered page, the recipe for one his favorites. It’s as if the alchemy of the kitchen will fill places that words cannot.

I can barely contain the tingling that comes with knowing that, any day, he’ll be boarding a plane, crossing the sky, putting his hand on the knob on our door.

My beautiful boy, the boy I’ve missed more than I will ever let on, he’s coming home to the house that’s been aching to hear him again.

Barbara Mahany is a Tribune reporter.

(in case my editors want the link to be floating here…)

4 Comments

October 28, 2011

old friend, home

looking back, it seems i always fall hard.

once it was the glimpse of the gingerbread moulding, peeking out from over the sidewalk. another time, the hardwood floors that stretched down the long narrow hallway. years later, it was an upstairs window, and the glow from inside on a moonlit night, and the outline of a woman bent over, painting the sill, a woman who called out to me and practically sealed the deal before i’d walked up the stoop. after that came the victorian, with the sunlight pouring in from wall-to-wall windows and skylights, with flying staircases, and leafy full branches that brushed by the glass, making it feel like you lived in the trees.

those are the places i’ve loved, the apartments and houses, the homes. places that held me for particular passages of the story that is my sweet life.

this old house, it called to me from the front walk, the way the bluestone meandered up to the stoop, did not take the straight route, the direct route. then, there’s the pause, the two steps up, the tucked-in cove where the sunbeams pour down, where sparrows, for years now, have made their fine home. seems i loved this old place before i even got to the door.

we’ve been here nearly nine years, and it’s come to be one of my dearest soulmates, an ally, a friend. a house needn’t speak words to speak to your heart. sometimes, it whispers. it beckons with light. it pulses with ticking and tocks, and creaks in the floorboards.

i’ve come to know and love all of its quirks. the way the back middle burner stubbornly takes its sweet time, when i try to crank up the flame. the way the upstairs hall light flickers and dims, as if there’s a hand at the switch that no one can see.

this is the place, no matter the hour, that nourishes, that sustains, that refuels me.

it is my quiet place, a cove for prayer and meditations. it is the launchpad for dreams, whether those dreams are spun staring out the window, finding myself charmed by a finch or a cardinal. or, tiptoeing down in the dark, somehow stumbling into the courage it takes to bravely and boldly hatch some new plan.

this old house holds the chairs and the nooks that call to me, come curl up here. too often, i ignore all those pleas. i run and i scurry most of the time.

but i like that the offering is there; i promise those places that some day the hour will come when i will find time for pausing, for sitting and thinking. instead of dashing and thinking.

but even mid-stride, as i bound up the stairs, my old house catches my attention, soothes on the run. i notice the way the morning light makes rainbows on the wall. i watch the leaf shadows dance on the pillow, there on the comfy old armchair.

i know it’s just walls and wood, slapped with layers of paint, but a house has a soul, i’m convinced. a house is a friend, an old friend, a knowing friend. one that welcomes your cold bare feet slapping against its planks. one that drenches you in sunlight, even on a bitter cold day. one whose windows let in the wind. let in the cool night’s breeze.

what other friend offers a bath, a good long soak in the tub, complete with bubbles?

what other friend begs you to fill up its rooms, with your friends and your dreams and your candlelit dinners?

where else can you plop on the bed for a good solid cry, and the walls won’t ever let on? won’t share your secret, your sorrow?

and that same old house, the very next morning, it’s the very place where the dawn’s pink glow pours back in, gives you the air, and the spark, that you need to try all over again.

this old house, among the great good souls who populate my most blessed life, it is among the most deeply essential.

tell me how your dwelling place has seeped into your soul…..
and before we go, time to whisper deep blessings for our very own beloved slj who birthed her sweet baby girl, night before last. she has been a brilliant light here at this table through the years, and longed to taste and to relish the calling of motherhood. she is now among us, the blessed who mother…….a lifetime of blessings, sweet friend.

1 Comment

July 22, 2011

the gift of ahhhhh….

the morning around me, at last, is gray. like an old cashmere blanket pulled from a chest, it wraps me.

the dirt in the garden is dark again. puddles pool at the curb. the leaves, nearly every last one of ’em, are beaded, are shimmering, what’s left of the wee-hour rain.

holy respite this morning. as if the whole globe let out a sigh. started to breathe again.

too many days in a row here, even at dawn, it’s been bright white when you awake. the sun, working overtime. as if someone shuffled off to bed, forgot to turn down the thermostat. ol’ sun, just cranked through the night.

when you start out the day dodging the heat, plopping ice in your coffee, mapping your walk to the train by tracing the shadow, sticking close to the side of the street where the shade falls, you know it’s an uphill of a climb.

and now, as with so many sieges, it’s taken a pause. given all of us mortals, or at least the ones who get prickly in heat, a chance to inhale, to shake off the sense we’d entered inferno.

i’ve been holding my breath all week, knowing, trusting, the end would come.

all day yesterday i was tracking the cold front. so much so that the people who type all around me found themselves wholly amused by my weather refrain.

thing is, i grew up with a mama who lived and breathed for that cold front, when the winds took a hook, made a drastic, resuscitating U turn. stopped their unrelenting howl from the south and the west, where, fueled by the desert and infinite dry, dusty plains, they’d reached insufferable digits, and then, without flutter or warning, they’d turn right around, come off the lake, that long lean ever-cool lake that is chicago’s cooling station.

why, my mama would yell, closest thing to a hallelujah i ever heard, “cold front! cold front! open the north windows!”
and we’d all start the cold-front dance, all of her hot little chickadees. we’d bang up the stairs, shove open the double-hung panes on the side of the house nearest the wind-change, then we’d whirl into the yard where we’d stick out our arms, making like bi-wings parked at an airfield, and we’d spin and laugh till the last drop of sweat was absorbed.

then, to polish it off, we might troop back to the kitchen, where we’d plop the last of the frozen kool-aid cubes, the ones poured as bright-colored potion into the clanky old metal ice-cube tray, the ones we had to wait for for hours, the ones that made your tongue and your lips and your chin and your knees (if they dribbled that far) an odd shade of red. a red that wouldn’t go away without scrubbing.

seems me and my brothers just grew up believing in the cold-front refrain. we knew it was coming, sooner or later.
and once it came, all frolic came out.

our house growing up wasn’t necessarily filled with frolic, but that cold off-the-lake air, it made my mama dance. and we leapt right along.

not a bad lesson, when you think about it. knowing full well that the hot air will end. that if you endure it long enough, that sense that someone’s kicking your head, and you’re about to buckle right at the knees, that odd knowing your poor heart is trying so hard to keep ticking, it all up and evaporates.

once the cold front comes. once the winds turn around.

and so it’s been this week. we put up with hell to get here to the reprieve. where gray, and not bright, is a beautiful color.

hey, someone open the windows.

how did you survive the heat siege, which seems to have swept the whole country, ‘cept for marquette michigan where the weathermap tells me, they clocked a measly 78 degrees?
and, speaking of lessons, was there one particular lesson you learned over and over, one drummed in your head when you were a kid, one that comes in handy now that you’re all grown up, and the one now charged with deep understandings of the rhythms of life?

2 Comments

December 10, 2010

ho-ho-holiday nods

most every friday, i carve out an hour. or maybe more than one.

it’s the hour when i pull up a chair, and sit for a moment. wait for the bubbling up to begin. it’s when i sift through the landscape of the week, see where my heart trips up. where it wants to play a frame over and over again. it’s the hour when i capture some scene of my children’s lives, as that life rolls on. it’s where i stop and pause and stare at some God-given miracle, the flight of a bird, the droop of a bloom. it’s where i wonder out loud.

and so it comes today. at the far side of the day, instead of the start. a field trip pulled me away. and the bus broke down on the long ride home. but, on fridays, i never feel settled till i’ve pulled up a chair.

so here i am, just me and my words and my bubbling-up heart.

it’s quiet here, the way i like it best of all, the way that lets me breathe. deep in, and deep out.

the clock ticks. the tea kettle is almost to whistling. the back yard, where all my flocks come, where they chitter and squawk, it’s silver-blue light out there. the sun has slipped from the afternoon sky. there’s barely the barest tinge of pink-fingered sky off to the west.

oh, there’s the kettle.

and there goes the last of the light. all i see now is black against gray. the limbs of the trees stretched like veins against sky.

my night’s work will be filled with elf sorts of tasks. i’ve holiday bread, 10 loaves, to deliver. each one tied with a cord, pulled on a sled perhaps. depends when the snow comes.

i’ve decided this year that i am making all of december a month for quietly giving. none of this mad-dash rush at the end. i’ve made the stretch from the first through till christmas a time to turn to those who’ve made a difference, to say, with a loaf, or a word, thank you for all you bring to me on the unlikeliest of days.

thank you to the neighbor who left a basket of tomatoes at my back stoop.

thank you to the one who lets my boy play in her basement for hours on end.

thank you mister bus driver, for marking each ride with a wave and a smile. for giving me reason, each blessed morning we manage to get there, for walking home with my own smile inside.

thank you to the soulful women who type beside me, tuesday through thursday. thank you for giving me reason to want to come to work.

thank you to the principal who made sure my little one was safe at heart during his days in the woods (and typed out a furtive email to let me know that he was).

thank you, deeply and truly, to each of you who come here during the days of the year when, somehow, you carve out the minutes it takes to come and see what’s out on the table. maybe you nibble, maybe you pass. but back and again, you come and you come.

nearly four years it’s been (12.12.06, the very first entry). and here we are on the brink of that marker, and too, the brink of the eve when a boy who’s grown up here will find out the news about college.

it’s a big december, as always.

bigger than most because of the latter.

how did we get here, so many are asking? how did we get to this place where our just-born children were finding out about college–where they would go, where they would dream, where they’d spread wings and fly from our nest?

it’s a good time for quiet, this brink of so much. so quiet i’ve stitched. in a card typed and cut and pasted and stamped. in bread studded with almond paste and golden raisins and cranberries too. wrapped in bakery paper, the white waxy kind.

it’s a quiet i’ve carved in tiptoeing down the stairs early and all alone. it’s a quiet i find in feeding my birds.

it’s a quiet inside that comes when you learn, at last, to whisper, this is enough. this says it all.

and so you pull a sled through the ridges of snow. you knock at a door, and hand over bread and a card and a merry, merry that says in so many ways: thank you for making my days as rich as they are.

merry merry to each and every one of you. those who still come here, and those who’ve not been in a very long while. i never forget a one of you.

may your december days be blessed through and through.

what’s on your thank you list this december?

1 Comment

November 24, 2010

a kettle full of thank you

if i were to pick just one day of the year, one day that has my head swirling to faraway places and faraway times, this would be the one.

it is a day stuffed like a fat november bird, with pure anticipation.

when i was little, it was the day we hopped in the station wagon and drove straight through to ohio, to the ivy-covered house on the hill, the one with the yellow-spackled kitchen floors that gave just a bit under your shoes, the one with the aluminum tin on the counter, stuffed with layer upon layer of cut-out turkey cookies, my grandma’s first nod to the weekend of feasting, each brown-edged beauty nestled on a bed of wax paper, stacked clear to the rim. so quickly, we got to the crumbs on the bottom.

in college, it was the day i got to go home, leave behind the loneliness that seeped in somehow by end of semester. back to my growing-up room with the windows up in the trees. back to the sounds of my papa typing, and my mama making a fuss in the kitchen.

it’s the day you don’t want to find yourself in the grocery store. it’s the day you want to be nestled in the kitchen, or at least thinking about kitchens. it’s the day i yearn to be settling in, not far from the stove, making a clatter with pots and pans and mixing bowls. even a roaster, with lid, the sort that could shatter your foot if it dropped there.

one of these years that fat bird will be in my oven, but not yet. i am still waiting. my mama’s not ready to give up the bird.

so this year, i got up early to stir pumpkin into the sifted mound of flour and sugar and cinnamon. to crack eggs, dollop oil, fold in cranberries. one lonely loaf is all i am making this year. we’re flying tomorrow. to new york city, as apt a place to spend thanksgiving as just about any. save for the woods of vermont, maybe, where i wouldn’t mind tromping through crunching trails of leaves fallen, up to an old creaking house where windows glow from the inside, where cider and bird await, where i could make like a pilgrim and feast.

new york, the antithesis of the woods, calls me too, though. the shop windows frosted with november’s chill breath. the hustling and bustling. the armloads of boxes, loaves wrapped in red bows.

oh, i’ll take a new york thanksgiving.

but before i throw a few things in the one bag we’re allowed, i thought i’d pull up a chair and tick off the things for which i am sooo deeply grateful, so thankful. the things that fill me with grace, that offer promise and hope, the things that each and every day make me thank God i’m alive.

in no particular order, other than the way they hum from my head:

thank you, Maker of All, for the winged blessings that hop on my sill, that tuck their shivering selves into the branches that brush up against my windows. thank you for catching my breath, stopping me, carrying a wisp of my heart off on the wings that lift up each flight.

thank you, Mother of Mothers, for making me one–a woman who knows what it is to carry within the whole story of two children who, over the years, have bored deep and through my heart, have stretched me and filled me in ways i never ever could have imagined, have prayed for. thank you for catching my breath, for filling my arms, for the tousled heads that are mine to kiss as long and as often as i wish (long as no one’s around to witness said kisses, to make the still-round cheeks of those boys blush deep rose to red).

thank you for fires that roar and logs that crackle. thank you for the one that’s turning the so-called sleeping room, across from the kitchen, into a chamber of flickering gold.

thank you for the two lumps under blankets, snoozing by the fire as i sit here, now typing.

thank you for the gray-striped cat that’s delighted and charmed us all these many years. the one that now meows by the door, not yet figuring out that it’s 40-some degrees outside. and drizzly with rain. hardly weather for cats with finicky paws.

thank you for the great good souls i discovered this year, the ones i fell in love with, the ones whose stories i now know, whose burdens i wear like a heavy thick coat.

thank you, Lighter of Night, for the cloak of darkness that comes early now, velvety backdrop for twinkling of stars, and moon that holds me, most every eve, in its trance.

thank you for the gorgeous women who type beside me each and every day i troop into the office, those great good souls whose laughter is balm for all that stings and threatens to strangle, whose wide-eyed indignation at all the right twists in the story is sure cure for temptation to leap.

thank you for sister-in-laws, closest thing i know to a blood sister. thank you for the one who cooks today so we can feast tomorrow. thank you for the ones faraway who i will miss tomorrow.

thank you for 9-year-old boys and 17-year-old ones, and the eight-year gap in between that allows me this most spicy soup that is my two-track life–on one hand teaching the little one how to tie laces on basketball shoes, on the other listening deep into the night to whatever fills a thinking teenager’s heart.

thank you for brothers, ones who fill in my gaps, and share the same flashlight into the past. ones who grew up in the same house as me, heard the same sounds, knew of the rooster next door, and the bend in the road that hid the way to the pond.

thank you for a mother who turned 80 last week and still cooks for us two nights a week.

thank you for jim, the builder, who just today was here digging holes in the garden, putting in posts for my old gothic birdhouse, the one right beyond the kitchen door, and the old country mailbox, the one that holds my garden gloves and clippers so i needn’t shuffle too far when the urge strikes to get muddy.

thank you for hands that never mind mud, hands for which gloves are a farce, a thin-skinned charade, and so rarely worn. even if they are housed in an old country mailbox. good excuse for the box.

thank you for cranberries and brussels sprouts (yes) and white meat of turkey. thank you for wine by the splash, and the way it makes the room go just a wee bit more glow-y, and the laughter and stories unspool not just a wee bit more heartily. thank you too for corn bread stuffing. and friends who make it the way their mamas did, and grandmamas before that.

thank you for that grandma of mine, the one who made turkey cut-outs, and the other one, i never met, but who i’m told, proudly, “could wring a chicken’s neck.”

thank you for dawn, and dusk, dear Lighter of Light, those edges of the night and the day, when the first and the last seeds of illumination are scattered, are rosy.

thank you God for the trees and the gnarly limbs, and the hummingbird now buried deep in my garden.

thank you for candlelight.

thank you for words.

thank you, God, for all of this. and more. so, so much more.

to be continued…..by all of those who wander by, who pull up a chair, and leave just a swatch of their heart….

for each of whom i am so deeply thankful….

1 Comment

Category: giving thanks