Because I believe in reaching beyond limits and breaking all manner of ceilings, I’m not going to limit my links this week to five. I believe we can all benefit from going beyond our limits today (and also tomorrow…and for the next four years…). Going beyond our limits and doing and being more is something it would be good for us all to learn to practice.
Things I saved from the Internet this week:
Happy birthday to Michelle Obama on Tuesday. BookBub lists five books she has mentioned loving, because reading and knowledge are power. And I love people who read to kids. This year, I want to follow her example. Reading to children is the only thing I miss from working daycare.
Off the Shelf compiled a similar list of what has been on Barack Obama’s bookshelf.
Edited to add – my friend Jamie Wright Bagley has a poetry e-course that is up on her website. It’s free, but it’s only available for a limited time. You want to do it!
In no particular order, here are the highlights of my December.
1. Advent –
Quite possibly my favorite season of the liturgical year. Or maybe it’s just the only one I’m good at. I understand what it’s like to wait. Oh, how I understand waiting and all the complications that go with it. I put journal prompts in the pockets of my Advent calendar, and I got to go to mid-week services this year, which at least made the waiting less lonely.
2. A lesson in carols –
Our choir prepared extra songs for one of the services. It reminded me of being part of Christmas cantatas when I was younger. I didn’t even know I had missed doing that until this month.
3. Person of Interest –
I LOVE THIS SHOW. I have watched through Season 4. If I cave and get cable, this show might be the reason.
4. Holiday snacks –
Another great thing about this time of year is the delicious snacking. I have had a ridiculous amount of sugar this month.
5. A finals week without finals –
Finals week was pretty much just another week at work. It was a little busier with people handing in their keys before they left for the break, but no classes meant no grading, no constant barrage of emails from students who waited until the last possible moment to care about their grades, and no voice messages from the department secretary telling me that a student called because I hadn’t answered their email (that they sent an hour ago) and could I please call them back. It was such a peaceful week. I could get used to that.
My friend Steph got married! I am so happy for her and thrilled that I could be there for her special day.
8. Spending time with family –
Growing up, the picture you see above never would have happened at my parents’ house. Animals belonged outside, and if you wanted to play with them, you would just have to go outside, too. Now, Lola has her own special spots in the house where she likes to sit. Dad’s lap is one such spot.
I went shopping with Tammy yesterday and found all sorts of treasures (Christmas tree – $20!). Then we spent the evening watching Once Upon a Time. We’re almost through season three. I cannot handle how much I like this show.
9. Two weeks of vacation
I’ve had a restful (well…more restful. My neighborhood is loud and obnoxious) two weeks. Monday, I go back to work and have a little over a week to ease back into being there before the residents return.
10. Not putting up a Christmas tree –
Apparently, I used all my decorating energy on the Advent calendar, because I could not get motivated to put up a Christmas tree this year. About a week before Christmas, I finally admitted that it wasn’t going to happen. The candy canes on the curtain rods would just have to do.
This is going to be short and sweet. I’m not that into July. Because OMG hot. I’m into July being over.
Y’all. Y’ALL. You know how much I love Nina Simone.
Well. WELL:
Here, there was originally a great video of Lauryn Hill singing Feelin’ Good on the Tonight Show, but it has been taken down. If you haven’t seen it, you’re going to want to Google it. If you have seen it, you know you’re going to want to Google it again.
God bless Lauryn Hill. I need that album. NEED.
(I will make real sentences soon.)
To watch (other than that video, of course):
My sister and I have been watching White Collar. I just love this show. My heart cannot accept that it was canceled.
I blame the charm of Neal Caffrey for my sudden need to watch old Robert Redford/Paul Newman movies (think The Sting and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid) this month.
To read:
My favorite thing I’ve read this month is Tiny, Beautiful Things by Cheryl Strayed. If I were to be an advice columnist, this is exactly the advice I would give. I have never agreed so fully and adamantly with pretty much everything someone said in a book as I did with this one.
To do:
It’s been a busy month, but I’ve been into the usual things – book clubs, supper club, random outings with friends. I did make time to enjoy this glorious thing:
It’s a cold brew from Harvest House with a little vanilla bourbon tucked inside. HAPPY.
(Sunday Kind of Love – sung by the incomparable Etta James)
Music was my first art. Of course, I toyed with crafts and drawing and stories from the time I first learned to hold a pencil, but no more so than anyone else did. Music was the first art that was mine. I didn’t choose it – it was important to my mom that both my sister and I learn to play piano – but it was the first one that I wept over. I remember struggling through a difficult section, tears running down my face in frustration. I remember having sore fingers from playing harder and louder, not because the sheet music called for it, but because I was throwing all that angst into the piece. I remember the unfiltered joy at getting it right. I remember watching the timer that kept track of my hour of practice, willing it to move faster, when inspiration was dry. I remember leaping to quiet the timer before Mom heard it when it rang before I was finished telling my life to the keys.
Some days, music is the thing that leaves me in need of therapy. Other days, music is therapy. Either way, it drives me to create.
It’s no surprise to anyone who knows me that I have a playlist for everything. If something is important – if it’s going to be real to me – it will have a soundtrack. This week, I’ve been working on my playlist for Feast. It’s a compilation of my favorite songs to hear when I’m cooking, particularly when I’m cooking for other people.
It’s no coincidence that I’ve cooked more this week than I cooked all of last month.
Whenever I hear Sunday Kind of Love, I think of the same thing everyone else thinks of – finding a lasting love. That’s what the song is about. But I also think of the moments I already have in my life that are Sunday kinds of love. Friends. Feeding people. Welcoming others into my home. Inviting others to the table. Being connected by common experience and interests. Being captivated and challenged by differences. These things are eternal.
They’re love that lasts forever.
(Another one of my favorite renditions – Beth Rowley)
Dissonance is the what-should-be bucking against the what-is.
Dissonance is both sobering and stirring up.
Dissonance seems to be a way of life for me. I have two pictures – the life I want, and the life I have – and they are often in discord with one another. The former crashes into the latter, like waves pounding the sand and slowly, steadily changing the shoreline.
I have learned to sit in the dissonance of this existence. I have also learned that sitting in it is not the complacency I once thought it was. It’s honesty. It’s listening. It’s inspiring.
I love it in your room at night You’re the only one who gets through to me.
My sister and I grew up with a family friend (we’ll call her G). She was a few years older than I, and we both looked up to her. She taught us how to put on makeup the cool way (glitter shadow, shiny lip gloss – basically everything sparkly). She kept us informed on who the hottest heartthrobs were.
(There are many performances of this piece online. This one lights that third movement on fire, the way it was meant to be.)
“The girls we once were are coming back to us now.” – Brandy Walker
I was a Renaissance girl.
That girl did everything. Even when it was hard. Even when people tried to tell her that she couldn’t.
At holiday, the girl I once was shaped homemade candies and learned how to get them to turn out right. When she was shooed out of the kitchen because her help became a frustration, she went outside, formed a kitchen of her own, and made mud pies.
She learned cross stitch. She made intricate gifts and Christmas ornaments that are still cherished and hung on Mom’s tree every year.
The girl I once was shelled peas and was taught to make jam. She grew up understanding the connection of sustenance to the land She unraveled mysteries of the universe over the pings of Cream Crowder peas in a metal bowl.
She walked out of the backyard and sat down at the piano with bits of dried mud pie still under her fingernails. She heard the beauty of the trills and the thunder of the bass. She began formal training at the age of eight, and she practiced an hour a day, even when she didn’t want to. In early junior high, when she played a simplified snippet of Liszt’s Second Hungarian Rhapsody at recital, the winner of the top performer award told their teacher, “She should have won this.” The comment was reward enough.
The girl I once was worked hard at gymnastics, and although no one who knows me now will believe it, the balance beam was her best event. She took ballet, tap, and jazz dance lessons. For the first time in her life, she had to work twice as hard as everyone else just to be average. She loved it.
She was heavily involved in her church. Every time the door was open, she was there. Everything she could do – youth group, choir, VBS teacher, children’s music camp assistant, handbell choir, sorting clothes and food for the mission – she did. Her yes was always yes, and her no was rare.
In high school, the girl I once was was told that she couldn’t do everything – that she had to eliminate some things. So she did. She crossed off athletics and Future Farmers of America. Everything else – she did, and she did it well. National Honors Society, the speech and drama team, Texas Association of Future Educators, marching band, flag corp, jazz pianist for stage band, concert band, Future Homemakers of America, UIL, the gifted and talented program, and probably a few others that I have forgotten. And she graduated second in her class. Because she could.
Her senior year, she played Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata – the whole thing. She played it so often that she memorized it. She played it so often that even now, twenty years later, my fingers still move whenever I hear it. At her senior recital, she won that top performer award. She also won the award of awed silence between the final note and the first applause.
One day, the girl I once was forgot what she could do. Someone else told her that she had to choose, and this time, she believed it. She believed the lie that she couldn’t do all the things that she’d always done, and because she couldn’t possibly choose, she stopped doing it all. She grew up and became good at waiting. She grew up and became good at watching the whole world go on without her. She grew up and learned the lie that things just don’t work out for her and that expecting them to do so would only make her a fool.
But this girl? She’s not done growing. She has learned to set healthy boundaries and has embraced the luxurious freedom of no.
And that girl I once was? She is coming back.
In every verse I read in shaky voice, she is coming back.
In every meal I make and share with others, she is coming back.
In every coconut nougat dipped in chocolate that I taught myself to temper, she is coming back.
In every pie I bake in this kitchen of my own, she is coming back.
In every blanket I knit, she is coming back.
In every story I write, she is coming back.
In every song I sing and every move I dance, she is coming back.
In every “Our Father,” and “Lord, in Your mercy,” I pray, she is coming back.
And if I have to eat Ramen noodles for six months and sell everything but my books, I will get a good keyboard this year, because she is coming back, and she’s going to need one.
“That day I consciously picked up his Renaissance attitude to life and decided that if I couldn’t decide between theology and art and music, then perhaps I would just do them all.” Maggi Dawn in Giving It Up
Let’s take a little trip back in time to when it was actually November. November has two big things going for it:
– Thanksgiving month! My favorite holiday with my favorite holiday traditions.
– NaNoWriMo! I didn’t finish this year, but I’ve got a new character whom I love.
The weather could have been cooler. We had way too many days that made it up to 80 for my taste, but so far, Icetember is making up for it.
Here’s what I was into in November:
To write:
My NaNo piece this year started to be YA fiction about a group of five friends (because nobody has done that before /sarcasm). I am a proud pantser, but having nothing other than names and costuming in mind before starting is not much to work with. So about ten days in, I decided to start over with stories about Uncle Wallace the Christmas Mouse.
Uncle Wallace is this fellow:
He lives under my Christmas tree. He holds a bell in one hand, and a random basket of apples in the other.
I want to believe that there is a deep, meaningful reason for the person who created this masterpiece of holiday decoration to put a basket of apples into his hand. Clearly, Uncle Wallace has stories to tell. He’s just letting me write them down.
So I didn’t make it to 50,000 words, but Uncle Wallace does have a Facebook page. So there’s that.
I finally made it through The Unbearable Lightness of Being. There were many lines in the book that I liked. Unfortunately, there were several pages to wade through between each of those lines. I’m happy I read it. I’m happier that I’m through reading it.
My book club read Bill O’Reilly’s Killing Kennedy. The book was fine, but I don’t like his writing style. I would read some of it out loud and imagine it in his voice, and that made it a little better. I would watch it as a documentary. I also read Dad is Fat and imagined it in Jim Gaffigan’s voice, but that just made it funnier.
I jumped on the Divergentbandwagon, and I am hooked. I finished book one, and I’ll be buying the other two (or, let’s face it – all three – I can’t have an incomplete trilogy on the shelf) to read over holiday break, because the wait at the library is looooong, and I am impatient.
My favorite book of the month was Pastrix by Nadia Bolz-Weber. I tried to find my favorite quote, but I’d just end up quoting half the book. I have narrowed it down that much. This book made me snort-laugh and ugly-cry, sometimes in the same sentence. That’s pretty much what I look for in any book I read about God.
To watch:
I’ve been into Burn Notice this month. His accents are sometimes good, but usually terrible. Just awful. But he’s so adorable (and sure, also badass) that I just don’t care.
I haven’t watched much else, unless you count the ridiculous number of hours I spent watching made-for-TV Christmas movies with Mom and the Psych marathon of Christmas episodes over Thanksgiving.
To hear:
November was a weird soundtrack of industrial music (…I don’t know), Memphis Blues (I blame Uncle Wallace), and classical music (because that’s what I listen to when I write).
To taste:
November means homemade candy. It’s my favorite holiday tradition. Every year, on Black Friday, we do not shop. We put up Christmas decorations and make candy to share with friends and take to parties. This year, we made five different candies – Martha Washingtons (coconut and pecan nougat, covered in chocolate – my favorite), Texas Millionaires (caramel and pecan nougat, covered in chocolate), peanut butter bon bons (peanut butter nougat – you guessed it – covered in chocolate), dark chocolate fudge with peanut butter, and buttermilk pecan pralines. Can you tell my parents have pecan trees?
My dad made my favorite meal this month. He made enchiladas with flour tortillas (instead of the traditional corn), and he made them special for me by substituting goat cheese for the cheese he normally uses. I am not ashamed to admit that I ate five in one setting. I also do not recommend doing that.
This little beauty is a thing that exists at my house right now. But not for long, for it is tasty. If one were to promise not to judge the terrifying state of my kitchen, one could come over for a slice.
It was a community effort. I put hands to it, but I couldn’t have done it without the contributions of several others. The pie crust and strawberry-rhubarb recipe are from Smitten Kitchen. The suggestion of replacing the vodka in the crust with gin, which complemented this filling beautifully, came from Preston Yancey (if you aren’t already reading his blog and counting the months until his book comes out, go on and check it out. I’ll still be here when you get back.). The rhubarb was a contribution of my sister and brother-in-law, because although I hear the word in a southern accent in my head, the plant apparently does not grow in our intense southern heat. So they helped me search far and wide. The wisdom of my mother, my go-to expert on all things pie, reverberated in my mind, telling me the exact moment to stop fooling with the dough, which always comes sooner than I anticipate. Maggie fielded all my skeptical texts of “this looks too much like celery” and “this looks like the greasy crust we didn’t like that one time” and encouraged me to press on anyway.
All this help, swirling together against Beth Rowley’s rendition ofSunday Kind of Love and You’ve Got Me Wrapped Around Your Little Finger, which I’m convinced is how butter and sugar sound when you put them to music (especially if there’s also gin involved), produced one of the best things I’ve tasted this year.
I like doing things alone. I prefer not to need others. I prefer to go into a task, only depending on me, even when that doesn’t work out so well, because then at least I can chalk any bumps or ridges up to “Oh, well, I did my best – it was a lot for one person to handle,” rather than the ache of disappointment that I didn’t get the help I wanted – that I would have had “if only ____.” I prefer not to be reminded of the “if only.”
I was told that I avoid community out of a fear of abandonment. I admitted to a fear of being left, which sounded like agreement to me when I said it, but apparently it was not, as it inspired a rather spirited defense. I suppose I downplayed the avoidance aspect, when that’s what they meant to be the theme of the conversation. Anyway, it was an exhausting exchange.
Then pie happened. And it took a whole lot of not-just-me to make it so.
It also took a measure of solitude.
It took both. Both had value. One did not take anything away from the other. In fact, both were necessary.
I know that this post is disjointed. I know that I’ve been quiet, but I’m starting to put to practice the idea of solitude and its value to community. More later.
M. Suzanne Terry 