lies

On jazz.

LLM

***

There is no better accompaniment for one’s despair than the lie of jazz. The beat so peppy and hopeful. The voices so enticing and smooth. The instruments so loud and playful. It overwhelms the listener with slow, sensual beats. The rhythm moves, emotes, evokes, and challenges. It is praise to the gift of feeling—the gift of being with another.

But the words. The words of jazz do not lie. Even the songs of love found are tinged with the knowledge of love lost. The lament simmers under the music. It is disguised by joy. It is hidden until it breaks forth unexpectedly—painfully. One is carried by the tune and is awakened slowly to the meaning of the words.

Perhaps I would have lived blissfully unaware of this quality of jazz had my uncle not committed suicide. I would have recognized the unrequited love—who can’t identify with that?—but I would not have noticed the deeper lament, the grief of jazz.

My first outing after I returned home from my uncle’s funeral was to a local wine bar to listen to a jazz group that plays there every week. I’ve been attending these jazz nights off and on for nearly two years. In the midst of grief I wanted the overwhelming noise to wash over me and cleanse me of grief. I wanted to be reminded of play and joy and goodness.

But what I found was lament. The songs of praise had become songs of cursing. What had been musical frolicking had become barely controlled chaos. I no longer heard the joyful shouting but rather the cries from the depths.

In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus tells his followers, “Those who have ears should hear.” In graduate school, one of my professors was fond of asking, “What do you hear when you hear?” Perhaps we hear what we need to hear. I needed lament, and so I heard it. Over the past few months I have gone to jazz night alone, with pen and paper, to write about the experience of living with grief. These nights have reminded me that there is not only lament in the midst of hope but also hope in the midst of lament. Sometimes lies are nothing but truth.

The Nutcracker

Hey, readers.

Yes, we do have a blog. Unfortunately, it's been insanely hard to write lately with my impending thesis defense.

Hopefully we'll be able to pick back up now that my defense is on the horizon.

***

Our theme for this week: Joy



Christmas has always been a big deal in my immediate family. When we were younger my father had the most amazing ability to pick the coldest, snowiest day of December to go for the Christmas tree, which was always a family affair. We'd ride around together looking for the tallest, thickest fraiser fir we could find and then would hall the behemoth back home to put it up in the living room and decorate it. Mom always hung popcorn strings on her Christmas tree as a kid, so we would start stringing in November. Pa loves lights and would do justice to Chevy Chase in National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation. Thankfully, I've always been afraid of heights and a klutz, so I've been excused from the treacherous rooftop decorating duties.

Christmas always brought cookies and fudge. Hot chocolate and brandy. Christmas hats and off-key sing-a-longs in the kitchen. Christmas day brought a mountain of presents in the living room in the morning and all of my Prosen family cousins in the afternoon. Grandma in her Christmas sweaters. Good things to eat and Trivial Pursuit or Taboo after dinner. When I was much, much younger, Christmas brought a new dress from my Grandmother.

My favorite Christmas tradition, however, began on a whim. My aunt (a physical therapist/athletic trainer, I think) was working with the Milwaukee Ballet Company and they offered her two tickets to annual performance of The Nutcracker. For some reason unknown to me, Kathy gave them to my mom. Because ballet was a girl thing, Mom took me to it rather than my brothers.

We went for many years after that first one. I loved it. I loved getting dressed up and the ballerinas. I loved the music (and still do.) I loved the fantastical story line and the belief that my toys really could come to life. I loved the ginger ale and the cookies we shared at intermission. I loved the the brief pause my mother and I both treasured from constant talk of football and hunting and whatever other manly conversations were happening at home.

What I loved most, though, was the time with my mom. I miss it tremendously now that we've stopped going. What I want for Christmas this year is the chance to get dressed up together in our fancy clothes and spend an evening watching the dance progress and sharing a ginger ale in the lobby.

***

The Nutcracker

When I was small, my mother took me to watch the Milwaukee ballet company dance The Nutcracker. I had a new Christmas dress, an early gift from my grandmother. It was taffeta and rustled when I walked and when I shifted in my seat. Mom wore a second-hand velvet dress and my great-grandmother's fur coat. I thought she was the prettiest lady there. During the intermission she bought me a ginger ale and we shared an ice cream sundae. She told me she was proud of how I was behaving myself--I barely fidgeted at all. Then she gave me the cherry on the top of the sundae. When she asked me what I liked best about the show I told her it was dresses and the way the ballerinas twirled. We kept going for years, and she always asked the same question over the same sundae. Some years I liked the Nutcracker Prince best. Other years it dressing up, or people watching at intermission, the Christmas decorations in the lobby or the music. Now, at twenty-six I still love all of those things. But this year, when she asks me, I'll tell her it's her second-hand velvet, inherited fur, and the cherry she still saves for me.

thin space

This one, oddly enough, came much easier.

LLM

***

The Irish talk of thin spaces—space where the sacred breaks into everyday life, space where the divine is felt. Thinness is not reserved to physical space exactly. Yes, I’ve been in churches where the divine drips from altar and ambo. But I’ve also met thin people whose gentleness and peace reflects the stillness of God. And I’ve experienced thin moments where I was attuned to the heartbeat of Christ—the most significant movement of the universe, as one of my college professors would say it.

This has been a summer of thinness. Grief is one of the thinnest spaces a person can experience; God is so abundantly present. At the same time, God is utterly absent. Somehow this absence is thin too. The emptiness is a chasm waiting to be filled, an opportunity for wholeness and grace.

It took three months for me to recognize how thin this summer has been. It was the day after my cousin Edyn’s baptism. My aunt and uncle’s house was full of people and the chaos that accompanies out-of-town guests. My other cousins—one six years old and the other four—were begging to play video games. My aunt was preparing the casserole that would be dinner. My grandparents were watching television. My mother and uncle were discussing cameras. A few other people were milling about. It was not a time for stillness. I stood in the kitchen with my aunt, watching her work, while I held Edyn for a rare moment when she wasn’t fussing as a result of being held by someone she didn’t know. Her eyes drooped and, amid the noise, she fell asleep. “I’m going to take her upstairs,” I told my aunt.

“Okay. Just put her in the crib. She may fuss, but she’ll put herself back to sleep.”

“No,” I said. “I just want to hold her.”

Edyn was a month old at this point. Tiny. Perfect. Her beautiful round head. Her sweet little newborn lips. Her delicate eyelashes. For two hours, I drank her in. I gently held her little hand. I rocked her and wished good things into her life.

And I knew that it was thin space—that we were not alone.

After my uncle died in May, I started building a stone wall, a protection against hurt. I have been living a season of stoniness. The prophet Ezekiel says that God will take the people’s stony hearts and give them hearts of flesh. I traded in my heart of flesh for one of stone. Stone hearts don’t hurt so much. They don’t beat either. What I’ve learned is that stone is not impervious to thinness. Somehow God sneaks in—while you’re gently rocking a baby or otherwise preoccupied—and reminds you that stones crumble.

beginning

Anne Lamott writes about shitty first drafts. Since I read about these drafts, I've found great comfort in them.

It's been a while since I've put down words. These ones have wrestled their way out, but for about a week I've not been able to make much of them. When I think about it, my brain freezes. Home is too close and yet too far. There's so much to say that I can't say much of anything. It's an interesting phenomenon--one I've noticed in my writing about my mom and dad as well: I could write volumes about my dad despite the fact that he's been dead for over twenty years, but writing about my mother is nearly impossible.

I feel like my musings here are beginnings; there's a world behind these words, but that world isn't quite visible. Yes, as the writer it's my responsibility to let you in to that world. But, I'm tired of sitting on these words so there you have it.

Soon...vulnerability.

LLM

***

“Home is a feeling I buried in you.” (“Breathe” by Greenwheel)

The places I call home have buried themselves in me. I, in turn, have buried myself in them. Home, like God, is love, support, challenge, hope, and comfort. Home is noun; it is people, places, and things.

Two years ago I moved to Minnesota. I had been here for two years before that while I got my master’s degree, but the second moving was real. It was a commitment to a place for longer than two or four years; it was indefinite. As a result, it was terrifying.

I do not generally think of myself as a person who has left home. Instead, I carry the homes I’ve had before with me. The somewhat simple act of creating a space for myself has forced me to weave together these disparate places; it has made me acknowledge their hold on me. My apartment is Kansas City, Atchison, and Saint John’s all rolled in to one. It is reminder of my mother, coffee bar, place of prayer, shrine to learning. The space I have created is a haven for stillness and peace. It is a place of blessedness.

Ain't Misbehavin'

Before the beginning of this week's post, a brief aside.

Perhaps one of my favorite aspects about this blog is the way the themes bring to the surface topics about which I've always wanted to write, but have never been able to find the words. On a personal level, it has helped me sift through the debris of everyday life and focus on those things which are important to me. Most notably, my family and the impact they've had on me. It is very difficult to be removed from their daily lives. The writing I have posted here has helped me realize that.

It has also served as a connection to my scattered, extended family. When I post an updated link about one of the family posts I've done, I can count on comments from cousins and siblings from New York to Denver to Milwaukee. This connection--however tenuous and dependent on virtual communication--is one I cherish.

***

Our theme for this week: Jazz.

Grandmother Prosen is a force to be reckoned with. When my mother, her daughter-in-law, is feeling sassy she refers to Gram as Rose Kennedy--the matriarch of the family. It makes my grandmother crazy, but I think is an apt description. She keeps the family together: she stuffs the turkeys at Thanksgiving; makes us all laugh over Christmas; catches and fries all of the fish for the Good Friday fish fry at my auntie's; cares for her great-grandbabies. Most of the family still takes part of their summer vacation with her at the family cabin.

The stories from my grandmother's childhood are complicated, full of relatives and sort-of relatives. She was raised by extended family after her mother died in childbirth, so I had myriad great-uncles, great-aunts, and an truly daunting network of second-cousins-twice removed populating family stories and family gatherings when I was growing up. I loved to listen to her tell stories about my Aunt Dorothy, who made beer in her basement during Prohibition or how she met my grandfather though her family ties to the railroad.

There are two aspects of my grandmother's early life that stick with me most. The first is her love of prize-fighting. It was a strange revelation, one that Dad told me when I was still in high school. Apparently Gram's adopted mother ("Ma") loved boxing, and would take grandma to neighborhood fights when she was a little girl. I love the image of my grandmother in a dressed up and sitting ringside at a fight.

The second is Gram's love for jazz. I've written here before about Grandma Baker's love of bluegrass, country, and hymns. Grandma Prosen loved jazz equally, and was responsible for my first exposure to it. She tended more toward the vocal/lounge variety of music, perhaps not what most people would consider jazz. But through her, I was introduced to Billie Holliday, Etta James, Dinah Washington, and Ella Fitgerald. I first fell in love with the the song "Ain't Misbehavin'" on a rainy afternoon in high school. Pirating music was easier then, and I had made a CD for the two of us to listen to in the kitchen. She was drinking coffee and keeping and eye on the meatloaf. I was probably reading or doing homework. I still remember Ella's smooth voice giving me pause, drawing my attention from parsing sentences or Fitzgerald's short stories.

Gram didn't say much, aside from small comments of approval when one of her favorite songs came on. She said nothing during this song. When the CD restarted, she pulled the meatloaf from the oven, wiped her hands on a towel, and hugged me goodbye.

"Thanks for the walk down memory lane, kid."

To this day "Ain't Misbehavin'" is a song I have to hear from beginning to end. It makes the breath catch in my throat and makes my chest tighten. I can't hear it without remembering that rainy afternoon and the smell of my grandmother's cooking.

***

Ain't Misbehavin'

When I hear Ella Fiztgerald's smooth voice

I do not think of falling into love;

slow-dancing in the arms of some well-dressed man;

or even the bar, where, while in graduate school

I would drink Scotch and listen to a jazz on Mondays.

I think instead of my grandmother

in the kitchen in the house where I grew up.

Casually making a meatloaf and boiled potatoes,

helping me understand the meaning of a gerund,

or translate my school edition of Virgil.

I remember her little sigh of pleasure

when I had finished with my questions,

when it was time to put dinner in the oven

and sit down to a cup of coffee and songs she loved.

when it's personal

I am a memoirist. Or I like to think I am. I write about myself, about what’s personal, about my thoughts.

But I do not write everything about those things. (Nor do I think I really should.) There are certain parts of me that are under lock and key, that I don’t allow into my public writing.

I am a memoirist who doesn’t really want to reveal too much about herself.

But the poem I wrote for this theme is not that way. It cuts deep into where I’ve been this year. And sharing it with you is, well, hard. I’ve sat on this poem for about a week, debating about posting it or writing something else. And I’ve settled on posting it not because it’s a stellar poem (far from it) but because it makes me uncomfortable.

Writing is not about safety. Writing is about sharing a world with the reader, and that sharing leads to vulnerability, as is the case in any relationship.

So, dear reader, here—my heart.

LLM

***


Moments of Yes

The gentle pressure
of your hand
on the small of my back—
the steadiness
of your blue-grey eyes—
as you pull me toward you
to dance
to embrace
to move into a moment
we both know won’t last

The utter desperation
of the sun as it sets
leaving blues and oranges
gasping for breath
before they’re turned
into dark
and I step out of your
embrace
and into
no

Crash

"You're not crying are you?"

There's an edge to my voice that isn't coming from the pain of road rash or my bruised and potentially broken ribs.

"No. No. I'm just pushing up my glasses!"

"Good." I pause to spit some blood and another tooth chip into the waist high grass and then resume my ponderous, limping walk. "I hate criers."

***

"Kel, hon, it's Dad."

"Hey, Pa. What's up?"

"Mom and I wanted to see if you needed us to come up and take care of you for a few days. Mom broke her ribs a few years ago and knows how hard it is to take care of yourself."

"Really, Daddy. I'm fine. I promise."

"All right. How'd the CT scan go?"

"Laying down hurt so badly I wanted to cry."

"Did you?"

"No."

"That's my girl."

***

"After this is all over, you and I can't be friends anymore."

"What? Why?"

"Last night when you came in to check on me, not only was I in my PJs, not wearing a bra, but I was asleep with my mouth open."

"And you looked like an angel."

"Oh, go to hell."

***

If our family had a coat of arms, our motto would be "We don't raise sissies." My mom in particular is one tough lady. When she fractured her ribs she didn't cry, she cussed a blue streak. A few years later, on bed rest after minor surgery she kept getting up and driving herself to the grocery store and trying to wash the windows. Dad joked that we were going to have to put her in a strait-jacket just to keep her from hurting herself. Nothing, it seemed, could make Mom drop her guard for long enough to ask for help.

This is a trait she's passed on to me. Despite being, on occasion, a very girly-girl I am decidedly not a sissy. I clean out my own mousetraps, wrestle with my brothers, drink and cuss like a seventy-five year old sailor on shore leave. I project, I've been told, an image of invulnerability augmented by the fact that I don't cry when I've hurt myself; talk about my feelings; or let other people do things for me.

During the past five days I've had to give up the illusion of invulnerability. On Saturday I crashed my bike on the Wobegone trail. I ended up in the E.R. with a chipped tooth, myriad cuts in my mouth, road rash and bruising on my arms and legs, and bruised and potentially fractured ribs. My tooth has been repaired and the various bruises and scrapes are healing nicely, but my ribs remain problematic. Deep breaths hurt. So does sitting up, laughing, getting into/out of a chair, dressing myself, shampooing my hair, or a number of other daily tasks. Laying down to sleep is out of the question. Sneezing is excruciating.

As I am unable to do a number of tasks on my own, I've been reduced to asking for help for everything from zipping up my dresses in the morning to taking out the trash. I've been utterly self-sufficient since I was eighteen, so this is slightly problematic. In the past week, I've had to learn to both ask for and rely on others. I've had to look at my construction of myself as invulnerable.

I've found it lacking.

***

What The Palm-Reader Told Me

At twenty-one I had my palm read by a Romani gypsy. She did not have scarves or bangles, but eyes so dark they terrified me. After one look at me she asked: "You are also a gypsy?" It was a secret my grandmother had told me years before, after too much dancing to and too much wine at a wedding. I never told a soul. "It's in the way you hold yourself." She said, and smiled and resumed with my palm. I would be, she told me, prosperous in business and fiercely independent, but unlucky in love, among other things. For years, I forgot everything that she said, recalling it only after a bad break-up or a good job interview. I thought of it again this morning when you caught my eye in the mirror and laughed. I was struggling to zip up my dress and my contortions caught your attention. You came up behind me, ran the zipper smoothly to the top and kissed my shoulder. When you left the bathroom to butter my toast and make my coffee I couldn't help but wonder if she had gotten something wrong.