(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.
A friend posted this on my Facebook page a week or so ago. She likes it because it’s “a happy song in a minor key,” which I think is the perfect description for my temperament. I suspect this is why she likes me, too.
I really want to just bitch about the top ten most annoying things people do on the intrawebs, but I’m Southern, so I am going to sandwich it between two nice lists. You can drink sweet tea or lemonade (or both! Mix those suckers up for a delicious treat!) while you read, if you want.
Today, I’ll start with my top ten favorite things people do on the Internet:
10. Links to their fundraising pages on social media sites
Okay, I’m probably in the minority here, but I really like this. It serves three purposes for me. It lets me know what they’re up to, which is the point of social media. It gives me a tangible way to support what they’re doing but with fairly minimal effort, which reinforces my laziness. And it’s just nice to see people getting involved in something beyond themselves. Kudos all around!
9. Funny animal videos
To be clear – funny means adorable animals doing adorable things. Not “I trapped my cat in the washer – watch it struggle to breathe. Isn’t that hilarious?” No. It is not hilarious. It’s abuse, and those people need to be shot. Not killed, necessarily, because then how do they learn and warn others? They definitely could use a little light injury, though. Nothing educates like a mild maiming.
But things like this –
make my LIFE.
8. Suggestions of blogs that they enjoy reading
Almost all of my favorite bloggers were found through links sent to me by other people, and they have inspired me and made me laugh. Sharing is caring!
7. Theme Tweets
Most people who use Twitter use it as a glorified Facebook status. I have no problem with that, mainly because that’s exactly how I use Twitter. But there are some inspired individuals who tweet in themes, and of all the people I follow, the Theme Tweeters are my favorite (no offense to Nathan Fillion. Or, you know, my actual friends whom I follow). Little gems like omgthatspunny (pun tweets), ronswansoncats (cats who look like Ron Swanson – also found on Tumblr), shitmydadsays (also a book and a short-lived TV show), and my favorite – charliemcdowell (who tweets to the girls who live in the apartment above his – soon to be a book and OMG I’M SO EXCITED ABOUT THAT!!!) – are the main reasons I didn’t dump Twitter long ago.
6. Music suggestions
I love music, but I tend to find something I like and listen to it twenty dozen times until I just can’t stand it any longer. Then I wistfully glance through my friends’ posts on all my social media outlets, and I am rewarded with various selections of things that I never would have even thought to give a listen until they suggested it. As an added bonus, that song or artist will also serve as a pleasant reminder of my good friend Whats-His/Her-Face.
5. People helping others through their own life experiences
Life is hard, but people still manage to go through it. People make mistakes and learn from those mistakes. Now, all these people could just keep the treasure of their experiences to themselves, or they could just share it with the people who are lucky enough to know them in person, but the Internet lets them share it with a potential million strangers who are going through similar things but might not have a good support system face-to-face (or they do, and online support is still welcome). That’s so nice.
4. Admission of failure, social awkwardness, or clumsiness (particularly of the Autocorrect variety)
I love omg-you-will-not-believe-what-I-just-did stories. I tell these stories often, so hearing them from others indicates that I have found a friend or further cements said friendship, if it already exists. Blogs, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, the company website – no matter where they post them, I will read them and look at pictorial proof (bonus points), and I will laugh and be really happy that, for once, the story wasn’t mine.
I have banned myself from reading this website at the front desk, because it makes me laugh until I cry, and it’s hard to provide quality customer service when I am gasping for breath and generally looking like I might need medical attention. I love it when technology makes us look foolish by being foolish itself, and that is the joy of http://www.damnyouautocorrect.com/. The fouler, the better, as far as I’m concerned.
3. Social network pages or memes for fictional characters/inanimate objects/pets
This is one of the greatest indications that someone has way too much time on their hands, and I love how they have chosen to use that extra time. Going to the trouble to create an online profile for someone or something else who does not have the ability to speak for themselves (on account-a they are not real and/or aren’t supposed to talk in the real world) shows creativity and provides hours of entertainment for others (i.e., me). Pet profiles make me laugh and laugh. Pets have attitude, y’all.
There is one key exception. I do not – and I cannot stress this enough – DO NOT enjoy it when people make Facebook profiles for their children. I am going to discuss this more on my next post (Top Ten Least Favorite Things People Do On the Internet), but suffice it to say that I think speaking for another actual human being, even ones who cannot yet speak for themselves, is weird (the bad kind) and creepy. I dislike it so much that, if you are a friend who has done this and are now reading about how much I dislike it and are offended by my dislike, I don’t even care. I am not even sorry.
You know what else I’m not sorry about? My fond memories of the summer when Magnolia Blossom was born. If you’re ever bored on Facebook, look her up and say, “Hi.”
2. Personal attention
I don’t require a lot of personal attention in real life, but on the Internet? I am an attention whore. I mean, I don’t *NEED* attention. I’m not THAT person (and I hope that I don’t come across that way). But I really, really, really love it. I keep Facebook up all day at the desk, just so I can go back once every few hours or so and see how many likes or comments my posts have gotten (your student fees at work, UNT). I love how many people are following me on Pinterest; it makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside. You know, the way real affection is supposed to make you feel. And when people tell me that the video I posted made their day, it makes my day right back. Instant pay-it-forward.
So if you should feel the need to respond to this post, I wouldn’t mind. In fact, I would love it.
No pressure, though. Live your life.
And my number one, most favorite thing that people do on the Internet?
1. FOOD BLOGS.
I love food blogs. I love trying new recipes. I also love reading people’s stories about things that have gone terribly wrong, because they’re humorous, and they make me feel better about things that go terribly wrong in my own kitchen. Stayed tuned, and in a couple of days, I’ll tell you where I find almost all of the amazing food blogs I read.
M. Suzanne Terry 