Expectantly

No matter what age we are, we all have really high expectations for Christmas,don’t we? Those expectations are what’s behind our frantic searches for the perfect gifts, the detailed meal planning and baking extravaganzas, the ever-more spectacular displays of lights that brighten dark December skies in our otherwise quiet neighborhoods. We have so many hopes and dreams for this holiday we’ve come to think of as magical. When we’re young, those dreams are as simple as shiny toy cars or pretty baby dolls. But as we age, the hopes for the holidays become more complex. We hope to mend a torn relationship, we dream about better health for ourselves, we wish for more fulfilling jobs or more time to pursue our passions. We wonder which of our aging loved ones might be celebrating their last Christmas this very year.

Joy isn't always easy for me to find, even (maybe especially) during this season. It’s cold outside, the stores are crowded and confusing, I’m tired from rehearsals and concerts. Plus, I’m always missing somebody - when I’m in Michigan, I miss my son and his family. When I’m in Texas, I miss my mother and my friends. This year I will be missing my Dad in a permanent way that will never change.

Still, tonight as I sit in my little upstairs office and look out over the colorful twinkling lights scattered down our street, I wonder. Maybe I expect too much of this whole Christmas thing. Maybe joy would come more readily if I adjusted my expectations. It’s so easy to get swept away by media hype and commercialism, by the stories we hear from friends and co-workers about their holiday plans and parties, by happy memories of Christmases gone by that can never be re-created. We feel as if we must have those things, do those things in order to truly experience the holiday in all its glory.

The truth is, if we’re living and breathing, if we have a warm home that we love, if everyone in our family is at least relatively healthy, than why shouldn’t we be joyful? I don’t need to have an extravagant, over the top kind of celebration filled with comings and goings and events and parties and gifts and fancy clothes. I like my quiet days and nights, I like curling up with books and movies and puppy dogs at my feet. In fact, I get giddy with excitement about all those things. I won’t apologize for that to anyone, especially not to myself.

My little tabletop Christmas tree with its golden bows and lights brightens a dark corner of my living room and makes me smile each time I pass by. I have a collection of angel ornaments and figurines placed carefully on the mantel and scattered around the rooms. We have a tall pine tree outside strung with strands of big, colorful lights.

It is enough. In fact, it’s beautiful.

Because if we expect material things and events or even the behavior of other people to fulfill our hopes and dreams for the holidays - and for the rest of life - than we will always be disappointed. The kind of spiritual satisfaction each one of us longs for never comes from anywhere but within.

Adjust your expectations. Don’t be plagued by the worries of what might come or disheartened by what might have been. Let memories of holidays past warm your heart rather than allowing them to hurt it. Discover the beauty in everything you already have - your family, your pets, your home, the world around you. It is all there if you allow yourself to see it.

And it will be enough.

Adventageous

One year when Brian was about six years old, a friend gave him an Advent Calendar. Printed on a background of dark blue designed to resemble the moonlit sky, it was a picture of a colorful gingerbread house trimmed with fluffy white frosting and sprinkled with candy canes, festooned with lights and garlands. Behind each window and door, under every candy ornament and festive decoration, was a picture or a saying or a snippet of poem. The idea was that the child could open one door every day in the four weeks leading up to The Big Day, and thus stave off a bit of the excited anticipation that can completely derail small children from their daily routines. It didn’t work that well with my son. Maybe he was too old for it at the time, or it simply wasn’t exciting enough to hold his interest. After the third or fourth day, those tiny cardboard windows weren’t enough diversion from his perseveration about the Hot Wheels cars or Lego playsets that might (or might not) be his on Christmas morning.

This year I found myself more excited than usual about preparations for Christmas. Perhaps in the darkness of grief, I was more eager than usual to shed light on the dark corners of life. As I rummaged through the bags and boxes of beloved Christmas decorations I found myself smiling at each and every one. The paper machie angel my high school students gave me the year they nicknamed me “Angel of the Keys,” stands sentinel in her familiar place on the corner of the piano. A wicker basket trimmed with pine cones, ribbons and bells that my son made in middle school sits on the counter waiting to be filled with bright colored Christmas cards and letters from friends. Large, egg shaped colored lights have been wrapped around the tall pine tree on the corner of our yard, beckoning me home when I’m out after dark as I wend my way down the shadowy street. The huge lighted wreath that hung for many years on the front of our old house on MacArthur Street now shines just as brightly here on Brookwood Court.

It is in these early days of the season, these Advent Days when we’re lying in wait for something wonderful to come, that I find the most pleasure. It’s when my expectations for The Big Event to come haven’t yet been tarnished or shattered by the reality of life in the real world. It’s when every day still holds a surprise, and I still have the kind of excitement about them that the Advent Calendar was supposed to engender for my little boy. Each night when I take Magic and Molly outside for their last potty trip of the day, I stand in the driveway and bask in the reflected glow of those lights, grateful for the blessings of the day gone by, hopeful about the joys tomorrow might bring.

Brian used to ask us “Do you think I’ll get the (Hot Wheels, Lego’s, bicycle, book, video game) I asked for? Do you?"

My reply was always “You’ll have to wait and see."

Of course, the waiting is the hardest part.

But the advantage to waiting is the time in between, the time to rest, reflect, the time to hope and dream. While we still have those hopes, the dreams are still alive and we can nourish them in our imaginations. Perhaps we can even find ways to make them come true.

My wish for you during this Advent season, is that you’ll take the time to enjoy opening all the doors of these days leading up to Christmas and that you’ll find the answers to fulfilling your hopes and dreams behind each one.

Reading Life: This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage

Long before Ann Patchett’s imaginative novels (Patron Saint of Liars, Bel Canto, State of Wonder) were bestsellers, she was making a living as a writer - but as a writer of nonfiction for magazines.  Patchett cut her writing teeth as a journalist/essayist in the 1970’s, beginning with a book review for Seventeen magazine (for which she was paid $250). She spent eight years writing almost exclusively for Seventeen, until she herself was thirty years old when she moved on to “grown up” publications such as Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue, The New York Times Magazine, and Gourmet. While she was writing freelance articles, Patchett was honing her craft as a fiction writer, with short stories and eventually novels. She credits her training in journalism - the intense editing, the research, the deadlines - with teaching her the kind of skills and endurance necessary to persevere as a novelist. “All those years of writing articles…made me a workhouse, and that in turn was a skill I brought back to my novels."

And while Patchett started writing nonfiction as a way to literally support her fiction writing (“The tricky thing about being a writer or any kind of artist is that in addition to marking art you also have to make a living”) she was surprised to find her work as a journalist supporting her fiction in other ways as well. When she was working on Bel Canto, her novel about an opera singer, the editors at Gourmet magazine sent her to Italy on assignment to write an article about famous opera houses. Later, they fronted a trip into the Peruvian jungle while she was working on State of Wonder, her book about scientists in the Amazon. In fact, there have been so many benefits to this “day job” of nonfiction writing that even when her novels were successful enough to provide a living wage, Patchett has continued to write nonfiction, just more selectively than when it was the mainstay of her livelihood.

This is the Story of  Happy Marriage collects a variety of Patchett’s essays and articles into one volume. It’s an interesting look at her life through essays that are well written and evocative of the writers time, place, and personality. We learn about her childhood, her love for her grandmother, her first marriage and divorce. We meet her dog Rosy as a puppy and then, 16 years later, as Patchett says goodbye to this beloved pet. We cheer her on when she writes about the success of her new bookstore in Nashville.

And we hear The Story of a Happy Marriage, with her husband Karl. “I  can tell you how I came to have a happy marriage,” Patchett writes in the title essay, “but I’m not so sure my results can be reproduced. I continue to think back to (my friend) Edra, standing in that swimming pool on a bright day in summer. ‘Does he make you a better person?’ was what she asked me, and I want to tell her, Yes, with the full force of his life, with the example of his kindness and vigilance, his good sense and equanimity, me makes me a better person. And that is what I aspire to be, better, and no, it really isn’t more complicated than that.”

This collection is an irresistible blend of memoir and journalism - the kind of writing I really love, probably because it’s the kind of writing toward which I have aspirations of my own. Whether you’re a fan of Patchett’s novels or not, these pieces form a portrait of a real life, lived with thoughtfulness, compassion, and love.

Direct Your Gaze

Early this morning, coffee in hand, I stood in front of the sliding doors that lead onto our deck and listened to the birds thronging happily around the feeder. One of the things I love most about our new house are all the different birds – who knew that moving eight miles down the road would put me in completely new ornithological territory. I’m learning to identify them now – the bright golden finch, cuddly tufted titmouse, chickadees and wrens – all scrabbling for territory on the perches.  But when the red-bellied woodpecker makes his appearance, they hover reverently on the surrounding bushes, allowing him to sup in regal splendor.

Today, something caught my eye and directed my gaze upward into the soaring branches of an oak tree. Maybe it was the shimmer of that tree’s last golden leaves, or the piercing blue of winter sky. What might have been a passing glance turned into a stare of wide-eyed wonder. For every bird gathered around my feeder, there were at least a dozen flying in and out among the branches of that tree. I had to crane my neck to see them, those flecks of gold and brown as they swooped and dived in and among the uppermost branches. It struck me at once that they lived SO high in the sky, like high rise apartment dwellers, and must be constantly looking down on my, pitying me for my groundedness.

And I knew then that I’ve been walking through life with my head down, my eyes in the wrong place. There are entire other worlds to see if we just look up once in a while.

Direct your gaze and see the world differently.

I know I will be doing that more often after today.

Where Were You When

Yesterday was a day for remembering - where were you when? When Kennedy was shot.

Of course I know where I was - I was seven years old, so I was in elementary school, struggling to put my chair upside down on top of the desk as we always did at the end of the day. It was hard for me - I was short and chubby and not particularly good with physical things. So I was probably hot and sweaty, because it was a warmish humid day, even though it was late November in the midwest. I imagine the classroom smelled fusty with end-of-the day body odor from 30 second graders.

Our teacher was  called out of the classroom. She was my favorite teacher of all time, Miss Trudy Strale, one of those dedicated spinsterish teachers who was warm and appreciative and understanding.

Yes, I was her pet. I readily admit it.

So when she came back into the room with tears streaming down her pretty face, I was alarmed. What had happened to hurt my favorite teacher so? And then she said: "Boys and girls, a terrible thing has happened to our country. President Kennedy has been killed."

The scope of a 7 year old's understanding was revealed by my reaction. I turned around and said to the boy behind me (Mark Gardner, aka "Mouse") - "I don't care. I will just go to Kentucky and live with my cousins."

Believe it or not, I was considered one of the "smart kids" in those days.

Obviously I had no idea of the ramifications of that moment, didn't even understand what had happened. Over the course of the next few days, with schools and businesses closed out of respect, with our parents crying and glued to the television for all the latest news and then the long state funeral, I finally came to grasp the import of the situation.

Yesterday, my mother talked about where she was on that day, and I realized I'd never asked her about what she was doing when she heard the fateful news. "I was shopping," she said, "at the Federal's store on Plymouth Road." I could picture that store immediately, because it was a place we often shopped. I could even smell the particular combination of dusty carpet and new clothing that permeated the old building.

"I went looking for Dad right away. 'They've killed the President,' I told him. 'I've got to get home to my baby, because who knows what will happen next.'" Of course, I was the "baby" in question, and it made perfect sense that her first impulse would be to find me and protect me at a time when the world around her seemed so uncertain and vulnerable.

That was a sensation I knew very well. Because the morning of September 11, 2001, another day when the world as we knew it was shaken to the core,  I was on an airplane that got grounded half-way between Michigan and Florida and I too had an overwhelming need to be with my family. I was stuck midway between my mother and my son, unable to get to either one of them. We waited, not knowing what would happen next.

"This country was never the same after that day," my mother said yesterday, referring to the day Kennedy was killed. "I don't think we knew how evil people could be until that happened, and people have been getting meaner and meaner ever since."

Every nation has pivotal moments that change them. Every generation lives those moments in a different way. They all involve a loss of innocence that alters the way you live your life - for good or ill - from that day forward. Assassinations, acts of terrorism, those are the events that can make us draw inward, make us want to protect ourselves and our families. They make us edgy and distrustful. We run. We hide.

Even as a seven year old child, my first thought was to flee, to leave the country (even if it was only for the perceived safety of my aunt and uncle's farmhouse in the blue grassy hills of Kentucky). But in the 38 years between 1963 and 2001, I learned that any attempt to escape is futile. All you can do is gather your courage, circle the wagons, and hope for the best.

Evil didn't start on that November day in Dallas. There has always been evil in the world, and there always will be. It visits each nation, each generation, even each family and person in some degree.

One thing that is certain - you never forget what you were doing the moment you meet it.