love | pull up a chair

February 17, 2023

foreverest friends and the incomparable lessons of the heart

my grandma lucille, me, and the Divine Ms M, easter circa 1977, in the house where i grew up

because this week paused to celebrate the glories of the ever-pulsing heart, and because i happened to board a jet plane and criss-cross the country, to land in the state of movie stars and swaying palms, where i am romping with my foreverest friend, i decided a love letter was the order of the day. . . and, besides, who ever grows old of lettres d’amour?

this is going to be a love letter to my very, very best forever-and-ever friend, yet it’s also a love letter to friends of the deepest-down sort. i call my forever-and-ever friend the Divine Ms M. and sometimes i call her Auntie M, because she is auntie to my bookends of boys. she lives 2,041 miles away, in sunny LA, which is far too far for afternoon mugs of tea, or long mornings side-by-side on a park bench, or those other indulgences of forever friendships. i’ve said that she saved my life. but what she really did was teach me how it feels to be loved in the deepest nooks and crannies of the heart, and she taught it in a way that felt so very very heavenly, so otherworldly, i’ve spent the rest of my life trying to love like she loves.

it was second semester of my sophomore year of college, and suddenly there was a willowy blond-haired beauty with big big eyes and an even bigger heart who had moved onto our wing of the second floor of a mostly-sophomore dorm, a dorm with clunky elevators and skanky carpet ribboned along long dark hallways, a dorm that looked out over nothing so scenic as endless parking lot. this new someone, a brand-new freshman among us second years, carried herself with an elegance i spied miles away. in the thick of downtown milwaukee, a california girl is a rarity.

right away i noticed her tender heart. maybe she noticed mine.

we’d both suffered a few tough knocks, knocks still raw for both of us. not the sorts of things you say much about till you’ve sniffed around, made sure the coast is clear and you’re in a safe heart zone.

it wasn’t long till we must have realized there was a certain pull that held us; it had been a long long time since i had a friend to whom i could safely hand my whole heart. but i knew she was just that friend. what i remember most emphatically is that, for a reason that long ago escaped me, she one day knocked on my dorm room door, and sat down beside me with a basket. every delicately-selected something in that basket was speaking to a different turn of the prism’s light. i seem to remember an apple. and a tea bag. but i don’t remember a single other thing. i do remember that little squares of folded-up paper explained each and every something. and i remember my breath was sucked away, because each and every something burrowed deeper and deeper into the heart of me. she had covered the whole expanse of a many-chambered heart with a few fine things tucked in a handled, wicker basket.

we’ve shared hard years, and a few sweet rejoicings, over all these years. the sorts of years lifelong friends inevitably share: deaths, disease, weddings, births, worries, worries, more worries.

and after almost 15 years of only phone calls, and emails, and brown paper packages mailed back and forth, and more recently the miracle of texting in real time (whether it be from an emergency room, or a surgical waiting room, or the children’s library where she enchants the kindergarteners), we have tumbled into each other’s real life arms. i hopped a plane and tagged along my bespectacled mate as he motors off to the california desert, and the oasis that is palm springs, to give a sunday talk. we decided to make it a hop, skip, and a jump trip. one that plopped us first in sunny LA, and then will find us out palm springs way.

for a million and one reasons, this visit is just what the doctor ordered. and it will upholster me (another word for plump me up, or cushion me) for the weeks to come.

i hope and pray we all have a Divine Ms M in our lives, that rare someone whose hearing is so high-grade she or he can hear the words we utter without sound. whose sight is keen to the faintest of subtle twitches, the ones we try to hide deep inside the smiles we sometimes wear. i am blessed with a glorious handful of such friends. some make me laugh so hard i nearly choke on whatever’s in my mug. some set me straight with unabashed, unfiltered truth talk. some hold my hand so tight it forgets to tremble.some bowl me over with a brilliance and a sheaf of wisdoms that leave me gobsmacked.but there’s no one who goes so far back to what might be my new beginning, not long out from a hellhole of a dark, dark chapter in my early days. my LA girl brought me sunshine, and all these 46 years later, she still holds the secret wand to chase away whatever big gray cloud dares to scuttle in.

in honor of friendship, and its miraculous healing powers that make us strongest in our broken places, here’s a beauty of a poem from jane hirschfield, a wunder poet and ordained practitioner of soto zen buddhism.

For What Binds Us

There are names for what binds us:
strong forces, weak forces.
Look around, you can see them:
the skin that forms in a half-empty cup,
nails rusting into the places they join,
joints dovetailed on their own weight.
The way things stay so solidly
wherever they’ve been set down —
and gravity, scientists say, is weak.

And see how the flesh grows back
across a wound, with a great vehemence,
more strong
than the simple, untested surface before.
There’s a name for it on horses,
when it comes back darker and raised: proud flesh,

as all flesh
is proud of its wounds, wears them
as honors given out after battle,
small triumphs pinned to the chest —

And when two people have loved each other
see how it is like a
scar between their bodies,
stronger, darker, and proud;
how the black cord makes of them a single fabric
that nothing can tear or mend.

~ Jane Hirschfield ~
(Of Gravity & Angels)

what are some of the ways you learned to love from someone you happened to tumble into in the hollows of your holy blessed life?

auntie m + me + our babies, her sweet girl and my beloved firstborn in sunny LA a long time ago…i think 1999, cuz we went to the not-yet-opened Legoland and i just checked when it opened, and voila march ’99.

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May 7, 2021

“Your love is a verb.”

the letter was addressed: “Dear Wise Matriarch.”

it was written inside a mother’s day card, the sort that might be plucked from a slot in the greeting card aisle of a corner drug store. if you were lucky enough to get to a drug store. or it might have been all that was left in a heap on a metal cart with rickety wheels that rolled past the cell of the north kern state prison where kerry baxter senior, who is serving 66 years to life in prison, convicted of second-degree murder, spends his days and his nights and his years. he never forgets mother’s day, or her birthday, says his mother, anita wills, who spends her life missing him fiercely, who waits for his every 60-second pre-paid collect phone call, and who has devoted her life to proclaiming and proving his innocence.

here’s what kerry wrote in his mother’s day card:

What God has intended for our mothers to embody, you have personified. I’m humbled by your examples of leadership, time after time. Your energy is a wellspring of endeavors to be carried to their accomplishments for the benefit of we who are in compromising conditions. I can attest firsthand that you have demonstrated how a love that is truly unconditional translates in this physical world. Your love is a verb. How precious you are. Thank you, profoundly, for the many lessons you have and do teach.

“that’s from my son. who’s in prison.” says anita looking up from the card, adding that when he was was sentenced in 2003 to 66 years to life that meant “i would never have seen my son as a free man.“ she goes on to say, in a new yorker documentary titled “On Mother’s Day,” that until kerry was sent to prison, family used to come every weekend. “he was our barbecue person. we spent the holidays together, thanksgiving, christmas, birthdays. after he was gone, it seemed like everybody stopped coming. everybody stopped coming after kerry went to jail.” in 2011, when kerry’s own son — anita’s grandson — was murdered, kerry couldn’t go to the funeral, so anita brought new urgencies to her exoneration efforts.

i can’t stop thinking about five words in kerry’s card: “Your love is a verb.”

when love is a verb. isn’t that the point? isn’t that — really — why we live? isn’t that the thing that just might make the difference between taking up oxygen during our stint here — however long that lasts — and bending the arc toward the love we all deep down dream of?

haven’t there been a hundred hundred days when our eyelids fluttered open in the morning and right away the lead ball in our belly pounded hard against the walls of us, and before we wiggled a toe we were washed over in the weight of whatever it was that worried us, and weren’t the worries twice as heavy when they weren’t about us but rather someone we loved, maybe even someone we birthed, or have loved since right after birth, someone whose time on this great blue marble we’ve felt was ours to protect, to guide, to keep from falling into pitfalls, but when they stumbled or bloodied their knees we might have raced to reach out our hand, to be right there to let them know they didn’t need to climb out or up all alone, but that we’d bear as much of the weight, of the pulling from the depths, as we could bear. however much they were willing to let us pull.

isn’t love — unfettered, unconstrained by our own agendas, selfless as selfless can be — isn’t love the thing we’re aiming for? the thing we keep trying to get right? like turning the mothership some days.

don’t we all dream of love the verb? if it’s simply a noun it has no real distinctions, no muscle, no bone. the love that might change things is the love that doesn’t hang out in armchairs (not unless it makes room for someone to snuggle right beside), doesn’t hang out in corners idly hoping its fumes will get the job done.

it’s a verb in its truest form. it’s the verb that picks up the call. at the oddest of hours, and snaps to attention, full attention soon as your ear canal opens. it’s the verb that grabs the car keys and leaps behind the wheel, and drives as many hours or miles as it takes. to get the job done. the job is being there: being there in heart, in the flesh. at the bedside. when the elevator door glides open. when the curtain of the ER cubicle is pulled back. when eyelids flutter open after emergency surgery.

that’s love at full attention. love when it asks the next question. and the hard question. and the hardest question of all.

it’s what i try to think about not just on mother’s day. but every day. love is a verb. and it dies without practice.

i’ve long declared that this day set aside for “mothers” is really a day that should be devoted to “mothering,” another action verb. a synonym for love when it’s a verb. a verb that belongs to no pre-specified quadrant of the population; a verb for all who practice. who day in and day out practice, try to get it right. admit to the fumbles and stumbles, shake the dirt off their knees, get back up and try it again. to mother is to love defiantly, urgently, sometimes as if there’s no tomorrow. to mother is to lavish the golden glorious rule: “love as you would be loved.” whatever it takes. however deep, however hard, however exhausted.

here’s to every someone who puts the verb in “to love.” and especially to those who mother me with all their hearts: to my mama, my mother-in-heart in new jersey, to my best friend who long ago taught me what love can feel like, and to those rare few who let me practice day after day, hour by hour. i love you. happy love-is-a-verb day.

define or describe “your love is a verb” from the person or people who taught you….

here are the two mamas i’m especially loving this day…both have had especially bumpy months and we are loving them dearly….

my mama, with four of her eventual five-person brood. plus her mama.

11 Comments

February 15, 2019

love story of unlikely plot line

it all started when the dishwasher broke. well, not the whole story. but this latest installment in the look-back machine.

the little green light on the old reliable dishwasher, the one that’s scrubbed up after graduations (grade school, high school, college) and christmas and bar mitzvahs (twice), the one that’s worked monday through sunday for a good 13 years, it started to blink incessantly. i tried every trick in the book but could not get the blinking to cease. so i looked it up in that all-purpose answer box, the internet, and discovered the blink that won’t stop is short for “call the repairman.” so i did.

when he arrived in the depth of the latest cold snap, the kind man with the toolbox asked for the instruction manual (not so sure it’s a very good sign when the repairman wants to check the manual). that’s what led me to the cobwebby corner of the basement, where one creaky file drawer led to another and suddenly i was staring at a row of neatly filed manila envelopes, each one bearing my scribble. each one with a label of sorts: “bk beginning,” “+BDK msgs,” “memories — BAM/BK.”

this certainly wasn’t the clue to how to work the dishwasher, but i was decidedly sidetracked there in the dark in the basement. i reached for the stash titled “memories,” and out slid a slice of my long-ago past.

the very first thing i found, in a crisply typed envelope addressed to me at the chicago tribune, was a letter from one of the loveliest priests that ever there was. a long lean gray-bearded runner with the gentlest dark-blue eyes, an irishman who walked about the neighborhood in his irish cable-knit sweater, doffing his irish-wool cap and pausing to listen to all sorts of sidewalk confessions. father fahey was his name, father john fahey, and the letter i held in my hands, the letter he’d typed in april of 1989, it literally, was a letter that would change my life.

not too many weeks before he’d written the letter, that gentle-souled priest had answered the door of the rectory, and ushered in me and the tall bespectacled fellow i’d fallen in love with. the one who was decidedly jewish, and not at all sure what to do with an irish catholic — this one, in particular. we’d knocked on the rectory door because we were looking for answers, looking for a way for a jew and a catholic to begin a journey we never wanted to end. we had an inkling that we’d found in each other something we might have always been looking for. except for the part where i was catholic and he was jewish. that twist in the narrative plot was making it tangled.

we knew father john to be wise, the sort of soft-spoken fellow to whom you could bring your worries and woes. so we climbed the grand winding staircase behind him, and sat ourselves down across from his armchair, up in his study at the top of the stairs. father john listened. and spoke only three words: “follow your bliss,” he told us, as if a buddhist koan we were to decipher. we’d climbed to the top of the priestly stairs to be handed a three-word instruction.

well, then.

we tucked those words snugly into our pockets and chit-chatted just a little bit longer. then we left and, some weeks later, the letter arrived. paper-clipped to the letter was the “business card” of another priest (do priests have business cards? well, in this case, in the case of a priest who always claims “i’m in the god business,” a business card it was).

gentle john the priest wrote that i should “take [my] love for Blair, and [my] search for God into [my] heart, and patiently, prayerfully wait for the answer to come.”

and then, in the very next paragraph, he typed: “God may be responding immediately.”

holy cow! that is some service!

father john then proceeded to tell me that he’d just bumped into a priest who happened to mention that he’d pulled together a group, “jews and catholics, who are living through the religious test which their love presents.”

“i think that some are married,” father john wrote, “some are thinking of marriage. i immediately thought of you, and so i asked for the priest’s card.” call him, he tells me.

and so i do, i do call the priest with the business card, and the tall bespectacled one and i knock on his rectory door. and he, too, ushers us in, and sits us down in chairs, and tells us words we’ll never forget: “i’m in the god business. god is love. you’re in love, so how can i help you?”

we explain; he responds: “there’s one God. you both pray to the same God, but you pray in two different languages.” he paused long enough to shoot us a look that meant he meant business. in short order, he shooshed out the door: “go with God and go in love.”

so we did. the priest with the business card has been there all along the way. and so was a rabbi, the one who two years later would marry us (along with another priest, an old friend of the family). they were both there in our tiny back garden, in the days just after 9-11 when the whole world shuddered, but we cradled a newborn baby, and it was the day for the baby’s blessing, which is like a baptism, but it comes in two religions. they were there at two first communions, and two bar mitzvahs. they’ve been there again and again.

and that was 30 years ago. and 31 years ago tonight, the tall bespectacled one walked into my apartment for the very first time. i can still see him rolling up the sleeves of his white brooks brothers button-down. can still see him taking a seat at my tiny circle of a kitchen table, can remember how while i pulled foil-wrapped salmon packets from out of the oven, he told me of a thai soup he’d eaten the night before and how it “was a symphony of flavors.” i remember my ears perked at the description. i remember how something else perked at the rolling up of the sleeves.

i can’t say i’d spent much time before then considering the notion of love at first sight, but i know i felt a thump in my chest that night, almost the minute he walked in the door. and sitting here now at this old, scratched maple table, listening to him pull the carton of milk from the fridge and the special K from the pantry, i can conjure that thump in a heartbeat.

and i gaze over at that letter, the one father john typed, sealed, and slipped into the mail chute all those years ago. and father john is gone now. (by the way, he too followed his bliss, left the priesthood, married a widow (his best friend’s widow), moved to northern california, and died a few years ago…) but his letter, unearthed just this week from the dark of a drawer in the basement, it’s a treasure.

no wonder i saved it.

it saved me. and us.

happy 31 years to the bespectacled one, though this day does not mark the day that you fell for me. that would come later, months later. i’m the one who counts this day as the very beginning. i knew what i knew when i knew it. in time, you knew it too.

the old maple table dressed up for the day of hearts

will you tell a love story?

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November 3, 2017

the sharp edge of vulnerability: a hard look at love

OR waiting room

once those double doors swing open, and the last thing you see is the back of the head of the someone you love, flat on a surgical cart, a bag of clear fluids flowing into a tube into a vein in the arm you’ve held a thousand thousand times, it’s impossible not to feel your knees go a little bit weak. as if the wind has just been whooshed out of them.

so it happened this week. when someone i love, someone i will always love and have loved for more than half of my life, was wheeled off to a surgery that would take less than an hour — though time barely enters the equation when love and goodbye and surgical blades are stirred in the mix.

you surrender. submit to the forces of medicine. pray the surgeon had a good night’s sleep, and a sturdy bowl of oatmeal besides. but mostly, i was washed over in a sense of how precious is every last filament and fiber that is the substance of that someone whose voice, whose story, whose dreams and heartaches i know by heart. i was washed over in knowing i would stand in the way of anything — any thing — that stood to hurt that sweet blessed soul. i found myself picturing him as a young child, how tenderly i would have cared for him, long before knowing he’d become the man to whom i’d wed my life. i leapt forward through time, pictured the thousand frames of moments as he and i have carved this long path that is ours now. pictured the hard choices we’ve made. the moments we’ve wept in pure joy. the hours when silence marked the hard negotiation of the heart and the soul, when humility and a willingness to soften might have been the only thing that saved us, allowed us to move forward again, the pas de deux of a promise made, and promise kept, over and over.

surgery does that. the sharp edge of the scalpel soon to be put to this person you love. waiting rooms too. you sit, fueled on old coffee and cable TV, absorbing snippets of anguish and blessed relief all around you. “fatty growth, totally benign,” you hear from two seats away. the surgeon pulling off his blue paper surgical cap, the son — or the husband, or merely a very close friend; biographies are absent here and don’t much matter, not really — collapsing into the not-so-plush back of his chair. “we’re worried,” someone else whispers, loudly enough that you all but nod in unison, a whole chorus of we’re-worried communion. and when at last you get your own good news, the news that it’s over and all is well, a woman with a wrinkled face and tight-curled hair, hollers across the room, “hallelujah!” she beams, rejoicing right with you. then, as you stand up to unlock your knees, grab your coat and your cold coffee, she closes the moment with this benediction, “have a blessed rest of your day.” and so you stop to kneel down beside her. to echo her prayer in your very own whisper.

love is the thing that saturates every cell of who you are, especially when long cold corridors and locked double doors stand between you and the someone you love. you think hard about the fragile hold you have on this thing called your life. you begin to scan the hours, consider how deeply you take it for granted that morning will come, sheets will be thrown back and the rhythms of day after day will begin all over again.

the sharp edge of love is worth pausing to consider. just yesterday, as i was turning pages in a book, i came across this one declarative sentence: “what she did best was love people.” it prompted me to ask, without pause, in our one simple life is it enough to love and love well?

candlelight dinner i thought of that question the whole rest of the day — as i put drops in the eye of the someone i love. as we turned out the lights, and kindled the wicks when dinnertime came, because lights were too bright, lights made it hurt. i thought of that question as i tucked him under the covers, slow-cooked a fine dinner, and snipped and gathered red-berried stems into the old cracked pitcher on the kitchen table. because yesterday i was reminded sharply and in no uncertain terms what a treasure it is to love someone your whole life long, and to love that someone as well as you possibly can.

what does it mean to you to love well? and how did you learn?

16 Comments

February 14, 2015

special edition: love that colors outside the lines

because this day of love just tiptoed in, and caught me breathless, i decided i need to post a love note today. to say thank you to all of you who have so lavished my heart — all our hearts — with so much tender hearted care. because you’ve illuminated otherwise shadowed nooks and crannies. because you’ve allowed this to be a carefully-curated corner of the world (cyber turned real) where what we practice is a love that colors outside the lines. that allows for the unorthodox. that sees no divisions, no divisions of hard-heartedness anyway. that invites the unfurling of our most tucked-away places, the places that are only just beginning to find a voice, a stammered whisper, as we put breath to words for the very first time. that ever ever holds up our hearts — our wobbly, not-so-certain, sometimes scared hearts — and declares, “you got this.”

because through the mysteries and miracles of time and wonder we’ve found our way to this place, this place we’ve carved out, like rivulets of stream to a river rock, it’s one place i’ve come to count on for sustenance of heart and soul. i put words out on the table. and, in holy communion, you lift them up, sift through, search for some nugget that speaks to you, and you in turn, in kind, lay down your wisdoms, your poetry, your bits and your snippets of radiance and grace. and by and by, we’ve got wisdom stew bubbling away. we’ve got love that colors outside the lines. we’ve got that little squeeze of the hand, of the shoulders, that chases away the cold. that propels us on. even on days when we’d otherwise crumble.

happy blessed day of uncanniest love. of all of us finding our way, here where love comes fierce and comes gentle, but always always washes over us, and bathes us in deepest-down holy.

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Category: love