It was a sweet wedding. The weather was perfect; Clay and Amy were both joyful. Sherod was eloquent and the Episcopal Church knows how to do liturgy, helps us say beautiful, meaning-laden words that take something sweet and make it more than that.
I got to be barefoot at a wedding for the first time ever!
And the children were beautiful…
This morning, the weather has changed; it is cold, windy and overcast. We head to Selma next.
The Wedding Rehearsal
Last night was the rehearsal for Clay’s wedding. I have never particularly enjoyed big social events but Cosby, the father of the groom, is Sherod’s oldest, dearest friend and I get to watch my husband be himself with these folks in ways that just delight me. I first met Cosby in the summer of 1988.
On our way down to Selma, right after we got married, we stopped at a big university hospital in Birmingham. Harriet, Cosby’s wife, had been diagnosed with liver cancer and was there getting some experimental chemo. We walked in the hospital room where Cosby was lying on the bed, holding his wife and talking quietly with her. She was obviously so sick. There were layers of awkwardness. The Carmichaels had been good friends with Sherod and his first wife, Harriet was so sick. Very active, devout members of the Church of Christ with it’s biblical literalism and strict piety, Harriet and Cosby were daunting to me. I felt so out of place. And they could not have been more gracious.
We made small talk for a few minutes and then Harriet asked Cosby about the presents. First, he handed me a wedding present and asked me to open it so I did. It was a handsome knife block that still sits by my stove in the kitchen of our house. Then, with a somewhat sly grin, he handed Sherod an equally nicely wrapped present. Sherod didn’t want to accept it. In fact, it was the first time ever I saw Sherod blush. It started on his neck and climbed its way up his face till he was beet red. Still, Cosby, and Harriet, with her soft and weak voice, insisted he open the present. He finally did. And when I saw what it was, I wanted to die. Gotta call it for what it was: the biggest, most obscene and awful looking dildo imaginable. I was so embarrassed I wanted to climb into my chair.
Turns out this was a storied gift. One year, Cosby’s family invited his close friends to join them at the Tally-Ho restaurant for Cosby’s birthday. His mama, aunt, children and cousins, everyone was going to be there. The Tally-Ho was (and still is) the only nice restaurant in town and this was also a special occasion. So of course, the buddies with nicknames like Bubba, Skeeter and Greasy, decided to make it even more special. One of them found this nasty piece of plastic and they decided to wrap it up nice, deliver it to the restaurant earlier in the day, and have the maitre d’ give it to Cosby during the dinner. This collection of bubbas thought an anonymous gift would be just the thing to make it a real classy occasion.
During the day of the party, one by one, each of his buddies realized they weren’t going to be able to make it to Cosby’s birthday dinner. All their reasons were legitimate—and then there was the moment of panic when they realized the gift was already at the Tally Ho along with instructions for delivering it right after the cake, that the serious and devout Mama G and Big Martha (matriarchs of the family), and little children, would all watch Cosby open this gift and none of his friends would be there to ensure this didn’t become a friendship-ending offense. Those boys had to scramble to rectify the situation and if I remember correctly, they delivered it while they had their regular breakfast at their favorite truck stop before going out duck hunting sometime after that. Cosby saved his gift because what goes around, comes around.
So there we sat, in this hospital room in Birmingham, Sherod, Cosby and Harriet laughing their heads off, I learning something more about my brand new husband, both delighted and horrified, with this enormous thing sitting there on the bed like another honored guest.
When we got back home, Sherod hid his gift in the farthest corner of the closet he could possibly find. Soon after, we had the Senior Warden and his wife to dinner and Sherod made a point of showing Walter where it was and instructed him that if we were killed in an auto accident, Walter was to come in and dispose of that box immediately. Still a new priest as well as a new husband, Sherod couldn’t make himself get rid of it but was scared to death of what others would think if they found it. Just that makes me laugh all over again.
By Christmas of that year, Harriet had died and Cosby was the heart-broken daddy of three lovely little boys, Ken, Pierson and Clay. Right after the holidays, the four of them came and spent time with us in Huntsville and I got to find out some more about just what a wonderful friendship existed between these two guys. And about 18 months later, Cosby married Marsha, as a good a person as I know, devoted to Cosby, those boys and the Alabama Crimson Tide. (Last night as people came in to the rehearsal party, they all greeted Marsha by saying, “Roooollll Tide” and she answered in kind).
A couple of months after Cosby and Marsha got married, another Selma friend hosted a group of us at their lake home for a weekend of merriment and celebration in honor of the newlyweds. And don’t you know that the awful ‘toy’ got all wrapped up, and brought out to be presented with much fanfare when we were all gathered toasting the new couple. Cosby blushed as much as Sherod had.
Today, my spouseman is officiating at the wedding of a little boy I met 24 years ago, who was five and lost and heart broken without his mama and who’s grown up to become another pretty cool bubba, just like his daddy and his Uncle Sherod. I wonder when that gift will show back up because I know it’s around somewhere…
Sherod’s celebrating at something as close to a redneck wedding as it gets so we are at Gulf Shores, AL. One could get lost in in all this….
Last night I had grown weary taking the same old path I follow on my walks. I’ve also been wanting to do something–anything–approximating climbing a hill. On impulse, I jumped in my car and drove to All Saints, Sherod’s church in downtown Fort Lauderdale. After I parked my car, I started walking east, towards the beach. It’s been so overcast around here that I hadn’t realized how close to a full moon we were.
Dusk was slipping into the night and the colors were amazing
Walk far enough east on Las Olas and you start up a drawbridge–the closest you’ll come to a hill around here.
Walk a little further and there you are: on A1A, with the Atlantic stretching out forever in front of you. The path of moonlight on the water is so seductive–a way to a tomorrow that’s right there, if you’ll just follow along a little further.
It was incredibly fun to walk across the street from all the beach places that were so alive with music and people talking and eating and enjoying themselves by the water. Close enough to enjoy the energy of so much life but not claustrophobic because of the crowds. I discovered that to get my 6 miles in, I had to walk from All Saints to Sunrise Blvd and back.
The best moment came close to the end of my walk. I was on the downward slant of the Las Olas drawbridge, listening to Equinoxe by Jean Michel Jarre when what felt like a river of light flooded by me–a bike club, it must have been, with what must have been close to a hundred riders, buzzing by me.
For a few moments I felt like I was being carried along by that river of light and also of joy. There you have it. A Friday night in Fort Lauderdale.
Yeah, I am back sooner than I thought I’d be. These past few weeks have been a time of intensely reconsidering about my vocation, the work I am doing and that complicated, confusing institution we call the Church, which Karl Rahner describes as always redeemed and always groaning for redemption. I stepped away from this blog because I needed to regain perspective that I was quickly losing and didn’t need to do it in a public forum. The next few postings are an effort to retrace some of the steps and maybe, reinterpret why it is that I am an Episcopal priest.
Michael was the first person I ever fell deeply in love with. I met him in 1980. I had dropped out of college and returned home so depressed, my life hung only from the gossamer thread of a new-found faith. After moping around my parents’ home and fighting with my mom for several months in Cali, I moved to Bogotá and went back to school. I also found my way to the small Episcopal Church, St. Alban’s, that still functioned as an expat haven in those years. The rector, Fr Patrick Hurley, took me under his wing and I found there a community that mediated the grace and hope I needed to start saying yes to life again. It was Fr Patrick who introduced me to Michael.
I was bedazzled. Michael lived and worked In Cali but came to Bogotá fairly frequently because he was in the process of becoming a postulant for Holy Orders. He was brilliant–a theologian, a poet, an accomplished musician. I got to know T.S. Eliot through Michael, especially T.S. Eliot’s plays which are not as well known as his poetry. One of his visits to Bogotá coincided with an excellent exhibit of the work of Paul Klee at the local modern art museum. We were both mesmerized and I remember walking and talking with Michael about the quote we’d read next to the piece we’d both been most drawn to. Describing his experience painting under the Northern African sun, the sign on the wall said that at one point, Klee exclaimed “¡Yo y el color somos uno!” (I and color are one). We had an hours-long discussion that ranged from mysticism to art theory.
During that year we drew closer and closer and there was also always this small and infinite distance between what I wanted in that relationship and what it actually was. We were both in transition (it didn’t take me long to figure out that I wanted to come back to the USA to finish college and Michael was headed to seminary out in Berkeley, CA) and at first I decided we were both cautious because life would soon be changing dramatically for us. There was also something I couldn’t quite name though and finally, I scrunched up what little self-confidence I had at that time and wrote Michael a letter asking him very directly about the nature of our relationship. His response came several days later, written in his wonderfully distinct and beautiful handwriting. In the gentlest and kindest way possible, he explained that he was gay and that some of what I so much wanted in our relationship simply wasn’t going to happen.
It’s still hard to remember that letter and at the same time, I’m fiercely glad I kept it and could go out to my garage right now and pull it out if I wanted to. For quite a while, I lacked words to respond. I felt so stupid and so exposed and so alone. Having just clawed my way out of that deep gully called clinical depression, where it seemed like morning hardly ever came, with my sense of myself and my self-confidence just beginning to return, I battled the sense that I was unlovable, that I would never find love. Until one morning, I woke up with a sense of crystal clarity. I had fallen in love with Michael because he was an extraordinarily lovable man. There was nothing to be ashamed of in my attraction to him and in fact, the opposite was true. It actually told me something about myself and about life that this was whom I had come to love. Whatever the terms of our relationship, I was so very blessed to have this person in my life. I was almost giddy as I wrote Michael that morning, knowing that if there had been loss, it was not the loss of our relationship.
Michael went on to Berkeley at the end of the summer of 81 and I went to college at Loyola in New Orleans. Our lives intersected many times, sometimes in unexpected ways. I got to visit him and his lover in San Francisco one year when I attended an HR conference out there during my time working in Memphis with FedEx. He stayed with Sherod and me a couple of other times. Whenever we talked, it didn’t take more than a few moments before we were engaged in these incredibly intense conversations that called me deeper into myself, that challenged me to think and be my best.
Michael was the preacher at my ordination to the priesthood. I am more than a little heartbroken right now, because the copy of his sermon was on a computer we had a while back now, and apparently, when Sherod dismantled it after it’s half-life was over, he did not keep backups, so the sermon is more than likely lost now. But the sermon was incredibly powerful and beautiful. I remember that.
It is a custom that your ordination sermon includes a charge. Michael and I were fortunate to be fluently bilingual and when it came time for the charge, he had me stand up and spoke to me as we had always spoken to each other, in Spanglish. He understood the fractures and ways in which my life is made up of bits and pieces of very different cultures that find their place in who I am. In a very real sense, his sermon gave me permission to take all those disparate pieces of myself and offer them to an Episcopal Church that didn’t quite know what to do with someone with an awkward and messy identity like mine.
In the busy-ness of the next few years, Michael moved from Washington DC to Minnesota and I started El Centro. We corresponded, now by email, occasionally, and on Christmas Eve of 2008, as I was driving to our first-ever bilingual Midnight Mass at All Saints, I called him bubbling over with excitement. I only got to leave a message on his answering machine to tell him about the bilingual service and to thank him again for his charge at my ordination. In August of the following year, a friend was moving to Minnesota and I went online to give her the information to contact Michael. To my absolute horror, instead of his church information, I found an online obituary. Michael had contracted liver cancer and had died in April of that year.
It was the nature of our friendship that though intense, it was always part of a far larger, more complicated pair lives. I’d gotten pretty isolated starting my new ministry and dealing with stuff with Maria. I simply cannot allow myself to dwell on the fact that I didn’t get to say good bye. But his death, more than any, was what led me to remind myself and my congregation, every Sunday, at the final blessing, that we are lent to each other for a very short time. Part of becoming a priest was learning how to love and how to forgive. Michael taught me much of what I know about both.
In the ebb and flow these days, I’m mindful that the balance between a public and private life when you’re a clergy person shifts a lot. The poetry class I am taking is very engaging (and demanding), life in the New River Regional Ministry continues to unfold in the constant tension between fear and grace. As I prepared for my sermon this week, I stumbled upon an image of my life that feels pretty accurate for now: I am on a tightrope that extends into the horizon, with poles at regular intervals where I can stop and take a breath before going on. It takes quite a lot of attention and care to negotiate from one pole to the next; that means focusing less on writing and more on simply putting one foot down in front of the other. So I’m taking a break from the blogging. I’ll check back in about a month–I am not ready to say I’m letting go of the writing altogether. Just saying I need to pay attention in other ways
For those of you who stop in regularly–thank you. It is always both excruciatingly awkward to think of people, especially people I know, reading what I write and yet, essential to this effort having any meaning at all. WordPress provides information about the general location of one’s readers and people from as far as Malaysia, Russia and Brazil read my blog–go figure! It’s quite lovely to have a sense of connection in such a broad, if silent, world.
Peace.
Today, my mom would have been 79 years old. Most, if not all, the major life choices I made for myself were unfathomable to her. Some of them were harder and took longer to accept but she raised me to be independent enough to make them, and she never quit trying to understand. All the ways she loved me, how hard she worked to love me, become clearer now, from a distance. Like my mom, I sit alone, drinking my coffee in a home as quiet and still in the early morning as hers used to be; as I think about her, it doesn’t seem possible she’s gone. Happy Birthday, Mom.
This is what the new normal is like. You start getting in the groove, getting some sense of rhythm, purpose and horizon that extends beyond the next day and then it crumbles. We made good plans for Sherod, María and I to go to Selma. I didn’t know how much I was looking forward to that time. We’d be staying at a hotel, and for the first time in over three months, I’d get to see my girl’s face right after she’s woken up, those big dark eyes of hers, the way she has, when I bend over and sing the “good morning song” to her, of wrapping her arm around my neck so I stand there with my cheek against hers, the warm sleepy smell and total trust of a tiny child. We were going to stop at Julia’s Kitchen, in Troy, Alabama for lunch. Now Julia’s kitchen is a miracle of southern cooking so these days, mainly I get to look and smell and fight temptation while I pick at wilted iceberg. More than anything, I am tickled watching my Mexican child eat fried okra and green beans and catfish. I am infinitely amused watching her talk to the waitresses with their molasses accent and big hair.
I love how Sherod goes quiet when the pine trees and red dirt and gentle hills and homes with those sweeping “sharecropper house” roofs start dotting the landscape, and the cotton is all around, and the first invitations to “See Rock City” compete with bottle trees for attention. You can tell the boy is home, that he is as much a part of that as it belongs in his heart and he is content driving his truck through those back country roads in a way I never get to see elsewhere.
All those things and more filled me with anticipation and then it all fell apart. Our girl has been getting into a pile of trouble. I imagine some of it has to do with the transition back to school, a new teacher, a new structure to her days now that she’s in high school. Some of it is the failure to make the connection between action and consequence. Some of it is just how it is when you are teenager. The bottom line was simple: a trip with her wasn’t possible and then the rest sort-of unraveled so I just dropped Sherod off at the airport and came back home to clean and prepare for an awfully busy week. Every time I slow down, though, the sadness returns.
In the cycle of readings we use in the Episcopal Church, today we heard the story from the Gospel of Mark about the Syrophoenician woman who pleaded with Jesus for help for “her little daughter who had an unclean spirit”. Last night I found myself walking along my well-worn path and realized that woman could be me. I desperately want my daughter “fixed”—not that I believe she is possessed, not that I ever take the wonder of her being for granted. But I want to plan a road trip to say goodbye to someone who is so precious to María and get to take it. I still ache because I want my daughter in her room when I turn out the light at the end of the day and to tiptoe into her room and snuggle with her for a bit as the next one begins. I want her to have friends and to never have to go to isolation time out again. There is so much I want for her.
Like the Syrophoenician woman, I wouldn’t have cared that I didn’t know this man. If I had run into him I would have asked him for help. I am not sure I would have been as gracious as the woman in today’s reading; I suspect I would have earned and deserved the title of b—- if Jesus had answered me like he answered her. But I would have been tenacious, that’s for sure. Even though I am a priest, even though I am capable of fairly sophisticated theological reasoning and find plenty of comfort in the midst of ambiguity, for just a little bit, I allow myself to wish I could find that man Jesus so I could ask him to heal my girl.
“I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them as their God; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them; he will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away.” And the one who was seated on the throne said, “See, I am making all things new.”” (Revelations 21:3-5)
A few months ago, when I was overwhelmed by the pain of having to place Maria in BARC Housing, I wrote in this blog that it was terribly strange to find that now I defined myself more by subtraction than by addition. Since then, there have been more losses to face into and probably others I am not yet aware of. But here’s what I know now: the losses opened spaces in my life to renew friendships I’d neglected and conversations that constantly challenge me to dig deeper and explore further. I’ve had to tend to myself in mind, body and spirit more kindly than ever before. Now, I am about to start engaging in the kind of learning I put aside the day I dropped out of graduate school to marry Sherod. On the 10th, I am starting an online course called “Modern and Contemporary American Poetry” taught by a UPenn professor through coursera.org.
I took the GRE in 1981 and when I applied to Sewanee and Vanderbilt for my MDiv and PhD, those scores still counted. Now they don’t. I am seriously considering the notion that I’ll take a year to prepare to retake it. Probably, I should consider something more like 2 years for the math part :-/. Be that as it may, the tug of academics is pretty strong these days. I’ve got two books by Merleau-Ponty on my bedside table; at night when I start reading, I don’t get sleepy. In fact, the opposite happens. I wish I had the stamina I once had to stay up reading all night. The possibilities that have opened with online learning are just too thrilling to pass up; I get a little giddy considering “the places I could go”.
I won’t pretend the loss is diminished. Yesterday morning, I picked up Maria at BARC and as we drove down I-595, belting out Set Fire to the Rain with Adele, I was beyond happy. After I dropped her back off yesterday evening, I wept. All of that grief is still a part of me. But at least right now, it is true that in small and wondrous ways, tears are wiped away and things are being made new.
The first night I ever spent in Selma, I cried myself to sleep. Sherod and I had been married for about 2 weeks when we drove from Huntsville to Selma for a few days. That night we slept in Sherod’s old room. If I swallowed, the bed creaked and groaned. Not that it mattered since I felt like there was a stranger in bed with me, more concerned about not offending his mama than showing his endless, passionate devotion to me. Disney was decades from appropriating the term “princess” for the proletarian masses to hugely profitable advantage. But already, Sherod called me his SAP—short for South American Princess—and this little imperial self was not the least bit pleased about having to compete for attention. If my lips were pouty, Juanita was thin-lipped, too gracious to be ugly, but clearly none too happy to be around this foreigner who was decidedly not the first wife, not the mother of her beloved grandbabies, not a lot of things important to her. We got through that first visit in August of 1988.
Sherod, Maria and I drove to Selma to spend Thanksgiving with Juanita in 2001, just months after María’s adoption was finalized. My mother and I had not spoken to each other for a couple of years. We had had an awful falling out when my mother made a stunningly racist and disparaging comment about María while we were still waiting to bring our girl home. In the summer of 2001, while Sherod was going through the worst of radiation treatment, we almost lost María after she had a very bad seizure that the doctors suspected was related to a terminal illness. They were both so sick and I was so alone. It still hurts, all these years later, that my mom was not there to help me. In fact, she would not meet my daughter for another 3 years. She didn’t put up a picture of María in her home for more time than that. But while Maria was in the hospital that summer, I got a lovely note of encouragement from Juanita and our girl a whole stream of “get well” cards from her “Annaw”.
It had been that way from the first day we could finally call María ours. I’ve kept the letters and little things Juanita so lovingly sent her, year in and year out. She, who was and is a child of the South, with all those prejudices and awful stories, was so generous in her welcome of my beautiful, dark honey-skinned daughter. I have never felt that Juanita saw her as anything other than one of her own. That Thanksgiving, Sherod and I slept on that creaky old, horribly uncomfortable bed with María on a pad on the floor on my side of the bed, where I could reach out and reassure myself that she was OK during the night. Even the peach-pecan-coolwhip-jello mold salad tasted good that year. My little one had the time of her life with all that family, all those hugs and kisses. Home was where my daughter was welcome so I was home.
The three of us are heading back up to Selma in a little over a week. Juanita is losing ground quickly. When my mom reached the end in Panama, I got a little booklet from the hospice team that described the dying process. This afternoon, during the regular phone calls we’re having with Sherod’s sister who’s in Selma, I also got to hear Juanita speaking to her son. The passage has begun. She’s always been tough with Sherod, so quick to criticize and complain, often so cranky. In recent years she’s also been more and more self-absorbed which always upset me for him. That was gone today, replaced by what I can only describe as her essential sweetness, that core of maternal love and delight in her boy that is left when everything else is slowly but surely being stripped away.
I listened to a dying mama talk to her son and I wanted to stop both Sherod and time, so he could savor the exquisite joy of getting to say to his mom, “I love you”. Months and years from now, he will remember the times he got to say those “I loves you’s” during this time of passage and he will feel gratitude and relief down to the very molecules of his being that he got to say each and every one of them. He will wish he could have squeezed a few more in, but he will know that what he did get to say was enough, a bit of eternity right here, right now.
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