And the Word Is...

Yesterday I wrote about our church's Star Sunday tradition, and how eagerly I  was anticipating choosing my word for 2011.  Over the past ten years, here are some of the other words I've chosen at random from the large stack of stars, layered face down in the offering plate:

• Music (twice!)
• Stories
• Reading
• Imagination
• Practice

Today's word - letters - comes on the wake of this entry in my writing journal on December 31, 2010, as  I thought about the popularity of memoir writing, and contemplated writing out some of my own life story:

Gone are the days when people wrote letters in longhand, and saved their correspondence so at some point in the future their children and their children's children could read them.  Have memoirs become the letters of the future?  Our letters to the world about who we were, how we became the person we did, why we matter?

Letters have actually been on my mind for the past several weeks, and I started thinking about them when a fellow writer/blogger posted a Tweet to the effect that she was longing to get a handwritten letter in the mail.  It made me remember the days when Jim and I corresponded by hand on a daily basis - he was in college (all of 35 miles away!) and we faithfully wrote each other long epistles every single day.  Both sets of letters are in boxes in our basement, ordered chronologically (from September 1973 to January 1974).  They serve as a tangible reminder of a particular period in our lives, and it may be that one day our children (or our children's children) will read them and feel a tug of recognition in their hearts.

For a moment, I wondered why the word "letters" would appear in our Star Sunday collection.  But then I realized that letters were hugely important in the literary canon of the Christian church. The New Testament includes fourteen of Paul's epistles to the various towns and cities he visited, as well as seven other general epistles by other disciples such as James, Jude, and Peter.  These letters were crucial in keeping the new Christians informed about the progress of the faith, and reminding them to remain steadfast in their beliefs after the apostles had left their cities.

Letters have also played a huge part in literary relationships and history over the course of generations.  The correspondence between Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville West comes to mind, as does Emily Dickinson's epistolary romance with Thomas Higginson.

I've been musing about what this word means for me, a woman in the 21st century who dabbles in writing and uses the internet to tell her stories.  I no longer write "letters" in the ordinary use of the word.  But I wonder if my writing here can become a modern day epistle - a chronicle of life in general and my own in particular that stands over time and allows the world to know who I am, how I became the person I did, and why I matter.

Because we all matter in this great cosmic scheme of life, we all have a star to follow.

May yours shine brightly and illuminate your way.

The Word

One of the annual New Year's customs in the blogging world is choosing  a word for the year ahead.  People choose their words for all kinds of reasons - it could be something they hope will happen, a trait they'd like to adopt, a principle of life they wish to espouse. Whatever  word they choose, it's meant to be a harbinger of positive change in their life during the 12 months ahead of them. Following a Twitter link this morning led me to Ali Edwards blog and her Word Project.  She posted a list of alllll the words that bloggers have chosen as "one little word" for 2011, as wall as a link to the words being spoken aloud, resulting in a very beautiful litany of aspiration.

I've been itching to choose a word for myself this year, but I'm waiting until after tomorrow, which is Star Sunday.  I've written about this event before.  It's the way our church honors Epiphany each year, with the annual gift of stars.  The offering plates are passed through the congregation, each plate filled to the brim with paper stars piled face down.  Upon the face of each star is written a WORD - words like hope, health, prayer, creativity, practice, leadership, attention, music, stories, love, redemption, relationship, and hundreds of others.  Each person chooses a star in faith that this word will manifest itself for good in their life during the coming year.

I absolutely adore Star Sunday, and I'm not alone.  You have to get there early, because parking spots are hard to come by.  There are usually more people in the congregation than on any other day, with the possible exception of Easter Sunday (and maybe not even then!)  Our minister jokes that it's because Star Sunday is the only day you get to take something out of the offering plate, rather than put something in.

But that's not it.  It's the idea of being given something that just might change you or change your life, something that might give you the added incentive to work harder at being kind and loving, to pay more attention to people in your life, to cultivate a hidden talent.  It's the remarkable notion that God, or whatever higher power you believe in, can direct you to a word that may have meaning for you and you alone.

As a writer, I also love Star Sunday because it's a day when everyone acknowledges the power of words.  All of us are there for the same reason - because we want a WORD, one little WORD.  With our desire, we invest that word with all kinds of power.  Of course, those of us who write (and read) know that words have immense power.  It's just very cool for me to see all the people in my church suddenly announcing that they believe that too.

So I'll be back tomorrow to tell you about my word for 2011, and to see what star I'm steering by.

Just Like the Good Old Days

For the past couple of days, the alarm clock has gone off extremely early, and my husband has dragged himself out of bed, into the shower, and off to the office before the sun even had a chance to peek through the clouds.  Last night at 6:00 p.m., I got a text message saying he'd probably be working for another 30-40 minutes.  At 7:30 he texted  to say he'd just left the office. Hmm..."Just like the good old days," I texted back.

For the first 30 years of our marriage, my husband worked long, long hours.  As a newlywed I found this quite difficult. The first summer after we were married, he worked seven days a week, 10-12 hours per day.  I was lonely.  I sat on the floor in our bedroom and cried a lot.

His heavy work schedule continued, and started to include traveling for days, weeks, even months at a time.  First it was to places like Newark, New Jersey, or Scranton, Pennsylvania.  Then he was sent to England, and China.  I was a young mother by then, and being alone with a baby and toddler was scary and lonely.  I walked the floor carrying the baby and cried a lot.

But then Brian got older and became more independent.  I made some new friends and started working part time myself.  I became accustomed to having the house to myself, to eating meals when I felt like it, to watching whatever I wanted on television.  I was still lonely sometimes, but I wasn't crying about it anymore.

By the time our nest was empty, I was working more and had lots of friends and activities. Jim got a different job, and worked normal hours.  With internet capabilities, he was able to telecommute, and had a much more flexible schedule, giving us the ability to travel more and spend more time together.  I wasn't lonely at all, and never needed to cry.

July 2009.  The manufacturing sector of the economy imploded.  What had been a flexible schedule turned into no schedule at all when he lost his job.  He was home every day, all day long.  Naturally he was depressed and angry, he felt lost and unsure where to turn.  We  both cried - a lot.

It was a big change having him home all the time, and it wasn't always for the better.  I'm sure any of you with retired spouses can attest to this.  There is definitely a learning curve involved.  It seemed like we were always tripping over one another - literally, and figuratively.  I like a quiet house, but everything he does seemed to require some kind of accompanying noise-either television, or music.  I like to do all the house cleaning at once, but he hated the smell of all the cleaning fluid, so I tried to divide it into small sessions, one room at a time.  Our dining room became the "home office," and so any work he was doing was smack dab in the middle of the house, which severely curtailed my ability to play the piano, or mess around in the kitchen, or even have a game of fetch with the dogs.

I admit it - I yearned to have my house/life back.  On the rare occasions when he would go out without me, I found myself running to the piano to play for an hour,  scrub the countertops with bleach.  Being with your spouse 24/7 after years of being mostly apart is something akin to the feelings we occasionally have about our children.  We love them.  But we hate them.  But we love them.

Things in his corner of the business world have steadily improved in the last few months, and now he's suddenly finding himself with more than enough contract work to keep busy.  There are a plethora of opportunities on several fronts. His phone is ringing.  He has meetings to attend and projects to manage.  He's a happy camper.

But I'm suddenly feeling a little lonely.  I think I'd grown accustomed to the idiosyncrasies and inconveniences, and found they were outweighed by the companionship and camaraderie.  I liked taking walks together in the morning, and then going out for coffee.  I enjoyed meeting for lunch at the last minute.  I felt comforted knowing he was available if I needed a hand.   And I loved being able to count on having dinner together at regular time.

Life is perverse, isn't it?  As the song goes, "we don't know what we've got 'til it's gone."  Now that things are feeling more and more like the old days, I'm thinking there were some pretty good days during the past year after all.

Snowflakes

We've had big white flakes of snow drifting gently to the ground all day today, and they reminded me of the snowflakes that were falling on my blog during the holiday season. Thanks for those snowflakes, Wordpress. But I miss them.

Planting Seeds

Last weekend, during my annual effort to organize my life, I was cleaning out some desk drawers and came across a very old TV remote control.  It was for a Sony television we had back in the late 1970's and early 1980's.  It absolutely pales in comparison to the complicated remotes we use today - the ones that have at least as many functions as an airplane cockpit and look almost as dangerous.  This one is amazingly simple...it has a power button, two volume and two channel controls, and that's it.  Nevertheless, it's called the "Remote Commander," because it does everything the viewer needs it to do - at least it did back in 1980 when we only had five channels. When I found the remote, I burst into tears.  You see, when my son was an infant, this remote control was his favorite object.  It was the only thing that kept him still and quiet during diaper changes, getting dressed, or if I was on the phone.  It's covered with scratches from his sharp baby teeth (yes, I let him put it in his mouth - I was desperate) and dents from banging it against the side of the crib.  He would push the power button and turn the television on and off and on again.  Between the ages of 7 and 13 months, he loved this remote more than any other object in the house.   So I got sad when I looked at it, remembering a time that seemed hectic and crazy then, but in retrospect was really quite idyllic -as hindsight always is.

Anyway, after I got over my little hormonal outburst, I started thinking about this remote in a different way.  From the very beginning of our son's life, it was clear to us that he was completely in love with technology and computers.  By the time he was two years old, I could ask him to program the VCR for me, and he would toddle out to the family room, pick up the remote  ( already a slightly more complicated version) and set it up to record anything I wanted.

In the early 1980's home computers were just becoming available.  He was not quite three years old when we purchased his first computer, a Texas Instruments model that was little more than a game station.   He was six when we bought the huge IBM personal computer where he really cut his teeth on computing.  I've lost count of the number of computers he's had in his lifetime (although I'm sure he could tell me in the blink of an eye, including makes and model numbers.)  Now, 30 years later, computers are an integral part of how he makes his living, and also how he spends much of his free time.

It seems to me that the seeds of our passions are planted in us at birth.  My son's affinity for the remote control, for anything with buttons or anything that controlled some electronic gadget, seemed to emerge around the age of five months, along with his milk teeth.  My love of music, particularly the piano, manifested itself when I was a toddler.   I clearly recall sitting in the baby seat of a grocery cart,  dancing my fingers along  the handle and singing, pretending I was playing the piano.  We didn't have a piano in our house, and to my knowledge I had never heard or seen one except perhaps on television. Nevertheless, I was manic for one and pestered my parents  about it as soon as I could talk, until on my sixth birthday one miraculously appeared in our living room.  I breathed a sigh of relief, as if someone had given water to a thirsty soul.

The scary thing about these seeds is correctly discerning what they are and cultivating them. I'm not around children very often, but if I were I would probably spend a fair amount of time observing them and trying to discover what their passions were and how they could be turned into something meaningful later in life.  I'm fascinated by the whole prospect.

Luckily for me, my parents acknowledged my desire and helped me fulfill it.  I'm hopeful that we did all we could in encouraging our son's obvious passion.  But sometimes I wonder - what if there were other seeds lying dormant that we never knew about?  If we had scratched the surface a little bit, was there perhaps a painter or a doctor or a carpenter buried deep beneath the layers?  My thoughts turn inward, and I wonder about seeds that might have lain fallow in my soul for the last 50 years.  Is it too late to unearth them, start nourishing them, and see if they'll grow?

I'm not much of a gardener - this I know for sure - but it might be interesting to root around in my deepest desires, and see if anything starts blooming.

How about you?  Were the seeds of your passions evident from an early age?  Can you see the seeds of the future in your children?