Truth or Consequences

Paradoxes and ironies.
Truth is never neat.

I finally understand
that there is no such thing as Truth with a capital "T."

There is only one's own truth,
and it is - or should be -
a developing concept,

a sort of Truth-in-Progress.

Gift of Fate

"I, with a deeper instinct, choose a man who compels my strength, who makes enormous demands on me, who does not doubt my courage or my toughness, who does not believe me naive or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman."

~ Anaïs Nin

Anaïs is right, you know. That’s just what I did. Well, I didn’t really do it consciously, but luckily that’s how it turned out.

After a lifetime of relationships I didn't understand, I’m finally loved by someone who loves me for the Me I Really Am, not as the Fantasy Me drifting around in a lover’s daydream.

I’ll (probably) get around to telling the story of our beginnings, but of course that doesn’t really matter. What matters is the rest. That it’s finally “enough.”

This man expects me to be strong, and never doubts that I am. Courage is something he sees behind my eyes, like a warm and steady fire, even when I don’t know it’s hiding there. He believes me brave and so I am. He sees courage in the simple act of rising to face each day’s thoughts and in the quickest beat of every heart.

Never let fear stop you.

His own bravery shines out of him like a bright knight's shining courage, joyfully alive. With him, for the first time, I feel safety, and his peace at last releases the clenched fist of my brain.

Life’s current brought me here by accident and happenstance, and I’m glad. To want more would be to say to the air, “Please. Give me more air.”

No one is promised happiness. When life goes well, it’s a sudden gift.

Freedom Flight - a Japanese proverb

A man watched as a chrysalis began to pulse with the violent struggle of the butterfly encased inside. She thrashed against the hard shell of her prison, and eventually exploded a tiny hole in the shell and began to slam her wings against the chrysalis walls.

The man saw the thrashing and worried the beautiful butterfly would be damaged by her struggle. He feared for her. Gently and carefully he incised the opening of her private cage and helped her out into the warm sunshine. She was radiant in his hand, and he felt pride, knowing he’d eased her path into the sparkling sun.

She tried to flex her wings and fly to freedom, but as hard as she tried, she could not. The fierce beating of butterfly wings against the hard chrysalis shell strengthens her muscles so the delicate wings support her body in flight. Without the struggle, the butterfly had no power to fly. There would be no fluttering in the morning sun, no slipstreaming in the afternoon breeze.

The man saw that by easing her struggle he doomed the butterfly to death, and so wept until he could weep no more.

Baby Blue Eyes

It's hard to realize
That the babies I still see in my dreams
Won't be born.

They have his eyes.
They have his smile.
They have his dimple.
But they don't have me for a mom.

Gemini

There were always in me, two women at least. One woman desperate and bewildered, who felt she was drowning and another who would leap into a scene, as upon a stage, conceal her true emotions because they were weaknesses, helplessness, despair, and present to the world only a smile, an eagerness, curiosity, enthusiasm, interest. ~Anaïs Nin

Air Brushed Love

I remember when you’d stare at me
The way mothers stare at sleeping babies.

You saw me through a magic lens
That airbrushed all my imperfections.

God, I was beautiful then,
Because you loved me…

Still Missing You

Dear Mom,

I was lonesome for you tonight.
Lonesome for the old house,
My old room,
My old covers.

How could you just go and die like that,
And leave me here,
With all these strangers?

Break a Leg

Mr. Fennyman, allow me to explain about the theatre business. The natural condition is one of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster.

So what do we do?

Nothing. Strangely enough, it all turns out well.

How?

I don't know. It's a mystery.

~Conversation between Hugh Fennyman & Philip Henslowe, Shakespeare in Love

The Gym

Persistence can (sometimes) make things last
But it doesn’t always
Make things
Work.

Muscle will harden
Wherever you
Give it
Exercise.

But.

Endurance isn’t always
Enough.

Practice makes anything
Perfect.
Even grief can become
An art.

Nuts

I'll admit I may have seen better days... but I'm still not to be had for the price of a cocktail, like a salted peanut.

~Margo Channing
"All About Eve"

Feeding the Hungry

Well, yes, I can cook, thanks for asking.

Once upon a time I actually had a modest career as a high-end caterer. Owned a catering company called Cooking from the Hearth. Was a chef for a wealthy family on Boston's North Shore for a while, cooking for weekly dinner parties, and stocking their fridge and freezer with meals they could reheat for themselves. Catered weddings and parties. Catered an insurance company’s monthly 35-person Board of Directors meetings. (What Board of Directors needs 35 people??) Food for the rich, food for the soul.

The idea that sparked the business into life was that real folks need decent daily food to stave off the onslaught of obesity, heart disease and diabetes that our American culture is gleefully and mindlessly running toward. No one usually has (or takes) the time to provide themselves with a proper meal, finding that take-out egg rolls, fast-food-hamburgers and Meat Lovers Pizza fits into busy schedules better than homemade roast chicken or vegetable soup. So I created a menu of healthy and homey food my clients could choose from every week, and tailored meals to suit their personal dietary needs. Most clients stocked up on frozen soups, casseroles, stews, side dishes, whatever. Oh. And chili. Lots of chili. When their freezers emptied, they'd order again.

It didn’t make me rich, but the whole business worked well enough, especially for the client who didn’t know you actually had to add chicken to the Chicken Helper she prepared one evening to impress a potential beau. She thought it “just formed itself” out of the ingredients in the box. And who can blame her – the box didn’t actually say she should also buy chicken. I’m sure her potential beau never forgot that date, and I suspect she achieved her goal of impressing him, one way or another. I cooked for her for a long time after that. Well, of course I was always cooking for somebody and always exhausted.

Then friend Don took me to Italy for 3 weeks and I had a little epiphany. (Italy is a terrific place for an epiphany to strike. Just ask the Catholic Church.) Of course while I was basking in Italian sun, my stock pots and my coffers were empty. No cooking, no income. More importantly, when I broke a bone in my foot on the rocky beach on the sun-drenched Amalfi coast, I realized I wouldn't have any income for most of the time my foot was in a cast. I stood (barely) at the crossroads of either growing my business larger so that I wouldn't have to be on my feet foot so much, or climbing down off the food carousel. So I sold the business to another local caterer at a small profit, sat down, and stopped cooking for about 5 years. Well, of course, I didn't really stop all the every day stuff, just stopped the fantastical. Became queen of the take-out and delivery restaurants, just like all the clients I started with. I've only recently started cooking in earnest again. I used to be able to Really Cook. Now my skills are a bit rusty, lurking below the surface of the simmering pot. But I had to stop for a while until I could find the joy in it again.

As I think about this, typing to you now, I suddenly realize it's much like the way I dealt with relationships past. After frenzy, exhaustion and pain, I jumped off the relationship carousel entirely until I was sure I could find the joy again. Then, with rusty skills simmering below the surface, I found you, wanting to be nourished.

Huh. Whadda ya know? Another little epiphany.

Bloom

There came a time when the risk to remain tight in the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom. ~Anaïs Nin

Op 31, No. 2

I envy your visit to the steamy gray mists of Scottish winter. Conjures up wonderful, spirit-memories and wanderlust. No, no, I've never been. The memories are only ghosting in my genetic code – perhaps placed there by generations of Scots before me.

My mom certainly read me many book stories. I think she started reading to me before I actually arrived on the earth, and later, as I grew into a Real Live Girl, we cuddled in her rocker for hours as she read me tales of shoes and ships and sealing wax, introducing me to the world outside my pink painted room.

But her favorite thing (and of course mine, too) was to play me piano stories. (I've told you she had 2% hearing, haven't I? The closest thing to deaf-as-a-doornail.) Her passion was piano – classical and jazz – the bolder and more dramatic, the better. Sensible, I suppose, since her lack of hearing must have been like putting a soft pedal on everything. I learned the meaning of allegro tempestoso at a very tender age. She'd practice for as many hours as she could carve out of her abundantly busy life, but when frustration hit over a difficult passage, her fingers would invariably find a minor key and slide into a jazz riff – an all-out, stripper-hot version of “St. Louis Blues” her particular favorite.

As I sat on the mahogany piano bench with her, wrapped in her love and songs, she’d play, making up stories to fit the music's heat or fancy. Some pieces, like Cole Porter's, didn't need any new stories, just to be (perhaps) cleaned up a bit for a 10-year-old daughter. (I was in my late teens before I finally understood the real context of “It’s Too Darned Hot,” “Why Can't You Behave?” and “My Heart Belongs to Daddy.”) Other tunes got stories of castles and kings.

My particular favorite was a piece by Edward MacDowell, Op 31, No. 2. It's thundering and tumultuous music that changes mid-stream into an ethereal and tender air, then rolls back again to the boiling crescendo of a crashing sea. The story (which is printed on the sheet music) is:

Far and away on the rock coast of Scotland,
Where the old gray castle projecteth Over the wild raging sea,
There, at the lofty and arch-ed window,
Standeth a woman, beauteous, but ill,
Softly transparent and marble pale;
And she's playing her harp and she's singing,
And the wind through her long locks forceth its way,
And beareth her gloomy song Over the wide and tempest-tossed sea.

Well, as you know, the Scots are not usually overly cheerful people, so naturally when I was a child I thought this was the most beautiful thing I'd ever heard.



The piece remains my favorite, and is wholly responsible for my love both of mists and of boiling seas. Perhaps, too, it was also the first seed of my melancholy acceptance of life’s wounds – and of my sure knowledge that nothing is so dire that a good musical soundtrack can’t help.

I hope you get the mists and the boiling seas while you're gone, and I hope you have a lyrical soundtrack crashing around in the distance.

One Version of Family

Alas, I am a half-breed.

Her fair-skinned, black-haired, twinkling blue-eyed Scottish gentility was attracted to his swarthy, roguish, black-haired, bedroom-green-eyed Sicilian intensity. Their 2 children reflect their genetic melding.

My brother and I both have dark brown hair and pale green eyes, are both Scottish-tall, are both intense but with (mostly) lovely manners that allow us to behave in public – although we share little else. My softly curling hair is lit with red, his is sleek and nearly black. I am light with freckles that don’t protect me from the burning sun, while he is dark and tans deeply on the first sunny day of spring. I grew up to be my mother’s politically and socially liberal shoot, while he became my dad’s conservative sprout with immovable roots. I moved from city slick to city slicker; he left the city behind for the farm-quiet of country life.

We are only now in the process of repairing a seven-year rift during which we have had very little contact. September 11, 2001 gave him the desire to call me, and me the desire to answer. We’ve both mellowed a bit through our seven-year silence – he seems willing to acknowledge that my world will always be filled with people and cultures of color, homosexuality, and a freedom I think he envies. I am willing to understand that all he probably wants is to pull the wagons around his family, guarding them from whatever attack on them he fears.

Can’t wait to see what happens next.