Putting Down Roots

Most days lately have been good: full, exhausting, and good. Every now and then, though, there are days which, without having any real right to be, are excruciating. Today should have been a fabulous sort of day off. I envisioned a bunch of letter writing, maybe sitting in a cafe working on poems, certainly some ukulele playing and lounging and leisurely reading. Sounds easy enough, right, and pleasant? Somehow everything becomes so much more difficult when Feelings creep in. Holly Golightly comes the closest to descrbing what I mean (Breakfast at Tiffany’s, but you knew that, right?):

Holly Golightly: You know those days when you get the mean reds?
Paul Varjak: The mean reds. You mean like the blues?
Holly Golightly: No. The blues are because you’re getting fat, and maybe it’s been raining too long. You’re just sad, that’s all. The mean reds are horrible. Suddenly you’re afraid, and you don’t know what you’re afraid of. Do you ever get that feeling?

And so, I present to you, an incomplete list of

Things To Do When You’ve Got the Mean Reds
-mom talks: call mom back and listen to her tell stories about her new boyfriend’s extended family with whom she spent Thanksgiving. Actually, just listen to her talk about anything.
-public parks: find that nice little spot in the woods by the creek and bust out that ukulele
-ukuleles, in general: anywhere. Specifically focus on pop songs or songs from childhood.
-housekeeping: make several vague attempts at cleaning up various rooms
-greens: Nathan maintains that dark leafy greens are an instant mind-focuser and mood-booster.
-redecoration: hang up that new shower curtain, put some things on your walls, and realize that the shelves in the bathroom are actually a perfect place for a collection of poetry books (there aren’t any shelves in the bedroom)
-letter writing: nothing says “you’ve been productive today” like a nice stack of stamped envelopes
-knitting: even if it’s still warm enough in Florida for a sundress and sandals (yes, even on November 25), New England has two feet of snow. Knitting is best done while watching trashy TV.
-bike maintenance: attach that pump to the bike frame so you’re always prepared for a flat tire, fix the wobbly bike rack, adjust the tail light
-borrow from the neighbors: give up quickly on looking for a screwdriver and opt to ask the industrious-looking man hanging Christmas lights. Engage in pleasant small talk.
-hydration: can’t have a good day unless you’re properly hydrated. A few glasses of water won’t fix everything, but hey, you gotta start somewhere.

Last Sunday, I stuck around Quaker meeting past my usual 15 minutes of eat-hummus-and-pita-chips-while-making-pleasant-small-talk and stayed for the “second hour,” which is what Quakers call the thing they’ve got that most closely approaches Sunday school. I’d never been to a second hour before, but I’ve gathered that they often involve a fair amount of discussion, usually around topics like “non-violence and my spiritual testimony” or other appropriately Quaker things. For a few weeks, I had been hearing talk of getting a piano into the meeting room so that Phyllis could “do a second hour.” Everyone else seemed to know what was going on, so I went along with it, assuming, perhaps, that Phyllis played the piano, and thus the Quakers would spend “second hour” listening to her play, or else, maybe, that she sang, and so someone else would play the piano, and she would sing songs, maybe even songs about “non-violence and my spiritual testimony,” or something else appropriately Quaker. I hoped that it would be nothing like the last time I had heard a Quaker sing: a man opening up for a really quite wonderful singing group that the Meeting had brought to town. He was backed by a badly-balanced midi-track, and had absolutely no sense of tone, and though he meant well, the entire audience was cringing with that gut-wrenching feeling of vicarious embarrassment.

What I knew of Phyllis was that she was kind, and that she helped her son sell Boy Scout popcorn even though you could tell she hated it, and that the week before last she had spent three hours making cookies with her kids out of hickory nuts. As she passed around the music for “Here I Am, Lord” and apologized for the cold she’d been battling, I tried to imagine what I was in for.

And then she opened her mouth. My goodness.

One night in college, a friend had borrowed Cella and Emmet’s hand-crank ice cream churn to make some vegan “ice-cream” that was heavily cashew-based and which, obviously, was going to taste weird and nutty and not-actually-delicious-you-just-think-it’s-good-because-you’re-a-vegan-and-that-skews-your-perspective.

The feeling I felt when I ate that ice cream is the closest I can come to an analogy for how I felt when Phyllis started singing: I was expecting something mediocre, maybe embarrassing, maybe passably good. I was expecting something that you enjoy because it’s the work of someone you care about. I was expecting something kind of normal and unexciting.

Turns out, the woman whose hair is always flyaway messy and who is remarkably patient with her children is also some world-famous opera singer, and her voice was powerfully filling a room that is usually full of so much intentional silence.

There is so much to say about her, about opera, about her thoughts on art and calling and humor and music and our place in the world, but two things have stuck with me this week: the sound of her voice when I first heard a familiar song belted out as an opera, and an illustration from a favorite picture book in which a caterpillar finally realizes that he can become a butterfly, and then sees, inside of all of the caterpillars he passes, a tiny imprint of a fluttering butterfly.

What I mean is, you can think you know someone. You can think you know what to expect, what is within the realm of possibility. And then it turns out that there’s a huge and beautiful and powerful voice inside of someone who just looked like a mom. All week long, I’ve been looking a little closer at people, trying to figure out what their fabulous secret is. It makes the grocery store more exciting, and the hours spent holding tiny children, and the glimpses I see through car windows when I’m stopped on my bike at a red light. Who are these folks? What am I not seeing? If vegan cashew ice cream can be startling delicious, well then, almost anything is possible.

At least once a day on my 10-mile round-trip bike commute to work, as cars zip past me on a road that only occassionally has a bike lane, or as I muscle my way up any of the several hills, or as the wind blows my toes (still sandalled, because it still feels approximately as warm as Maine’s late summer) red and cold, I ask myself, “Lindsay, do you want to get a car?”

And so, at least once I day, I get to remind myself of my answer to that question: nope, not really.

Some days, what I love is the consistent physical exertion, the fact that I don’t have to drag myself to a gym to be able to clock about 14 half-hour exercise sessions every week. Other days, as I breathe deeply in the exhaust of trucks, I’m glad that I’m being environmentally gentle. To and from work, I’m mostly biking along with rush hour traffic, and few things in life give me more joy than getting to pass by a line of twenty cars waiting at a red light and move myself to the head of the line.

Mostly, though, I wouldn’t give up my compulsory biking because I like that it keeps me close to the ground. Every single day, I not only know what the weather’s doing, I feel it. I get to wave at the city workers cleaning up the flower beds and the gullies. I’m moving slow enough to look for egrets and herons in the little patch of wildness I pass midway through the ride. When there’s roadkill in the bike lane–squirrels, turtles, possums, armadillos, and, one awful time, a collarless but well-fed soft grey cat–I can pick it up and lay it down in the brush lining the street. I get to feel the changes in elevation, get to push against them with my feet and then feel the wind blow back my skirt and hair when I get to coast fast downhill.

When I’m on a bike, I’m moving at just the right speed to pay attention to what’s going on around me, and that’s a sort of mindfulness that I don’t want to give up.

There was a song we used to listen to at my mother’s house on a tape when I was little. The main gist of it was this: “four hugs a day: that’s the minimum. Four hugs a day: not the maximum!” There may have been other words, but they’ve long since been forgotten. The rule, though, has stuck with me. When I work at camp, I get way more than my four-a-day; these days, unless you count the snuggles of the kids I take care of, I’m lucky to get one or two.

Any day, that is, except Sundays. If you can bank hugs, I get enough on Sunday to make up for the whole week. I’ve fallen into a pattern where I regularly attend three wildly different religious services almost every Sunday.

At United Church, I can count on Cynthia, with her twangy drawl, catching me in the minutes between band practice and the service with a, “hey there, sunshine,” before she pulls me into a hug. This morning, Gail wrapped her arms around me while I was looking for my nametag, and then Currie grabbed me on my way to fill up my teacup before the service started, squeezing me tight and planting several quick kisses on my cheek.

At Quaker meeting, the silent worship ends when one Friend shakes hands with another, and this morning I turned to Greg–whose mother just died a month ago, who is still wearing only black shirts, and whose sadness was palpable the whole length of meeting even though we didn’t speak to each other until afterwards–and offered a hug instead of a handshake. While I was talking during the fellowship (read: snack) time, LaRaela interrupted to give me a quick squeeze and check up on my week. When I had already swung one leg over my bike to head on home, Elizabeth ran out the doors and threw her arms around me, reminding me that she loved me and was glad I was still around.

And then, at FSU’s Episcopal University Center, it is expected that during the communion service’s passing of the peace you will hug, or at the very least shake hands with, every person present. I got hugs from the priest (Father Mike) and the pastor (Mama Nan); from organist and one-woman choir; from people I’m close with and people whose names I still can’t seem to remember.

Some of the hugs are spontaneous, some are expected, and some just happen because the church was smart enough to make a ritual that gives everyone an excuse to reach outside their bubbles, just for a moment, and hold on to someone else.

Annie was the one who brought this gem to camp from her days working at a day care. It has a not-very-sophisticated tune and she sang it mostly when doing things like handing out different-colored freeze pops: “we get what we get and we don’t get upset, we get what we get what we GET” (the caps there symbolize both an increase in volume and a rise to some indistinguishable high note.) At camp, we used it with campers for, yes, freeze pop distribution, as well as when campers were balking about having to get into the grey kayak instead of the green-flowery one, or when a group of swimmers had to practice backfloats (yes, again) before they could dive for rings.

The phrase gained popularity amongst the staff. We’d say it to each other when we didn’t want to teach swimming lessons, or plan another on-the-spot lunch skit, or have a meeting during rest hour when we really only wanted to nap. I found myself saying it even in fairly serious situations: a counselor coming to me in tears with a particularly difficult cabin group, a staff member getting moved unexpectedly to a different job.

And, at the end of the summer, when I was hoping to get the year-round position working at camp, and didn’t: we get what we get and we don’t get upset.

It’s a philosphy that I’ve adopted heartily this year, as so much hasn’t gone the way I would want it. It’s taught me a lot.

For years, between college and summer camp, I’ve been completely surrounded by fabulous people who are my same age, and share my same interests, and are mostly warm and kind and interested in building relationships. I have had more potential friends than I’ve had time to build friendships; I’ve had days full of meaningful conversations where I’ve gone to bed with my head swimming with all of the folks that I missed and needed to connect with the next day.

I used to live in a place where I couldn’t make breakfast without rubbing shoulders with any of a dozen people who I genuinely love; now I live in a weird cul-de-sac community where I don’t know any of my neighbors. I used to wake up every morning, look around, and think gratefully, “wow, I get to live here;” now, I work to look for things of beauty and wonder on my concrete-and-strip-mall-and-housing-development lined bike communte.

At the end of the day, though, it doesn’t do much good to dwell on all the things that I want or don’t want, that I have or don’t have. At the end of the day, I’m still remarkably blessed: even if my best friends are women in their fifties, even if the people I spend most of my day with can’t really talk, even if I’m kind of lonely and frustrated. I’m trying to put less energy into the “what-ifs,” and more into making the best of what I’ve got.

This afternoon, with a baby snuggled against my spine in a worn teal baby backpack, I found myself on a walk through one of Tallahassee’s fancier neighborhoods with both of my little girls and their grandmother. Thanks to years of working in the admissions office at college and welcoming families at camp and, let’s face it, simply being my mother’s daughter (the same mother who knows all of the cashiers at Piggly Wiggly, who brings plates of cookies to construction workers to have an excuse to say hi, who regularly wraps a couple of beers in a plastic grocery bag to give to the 70 year old woman who works the Friday afternoon shift at the thrift store), I don’t have to work at all to feel familiar around people who are almost strangers.

And so, while I was walking on the wide sidewalks in the really perfect fall air (early November in Tallahassee is still bright and warm; I was wearing a sundress and sandals), trying not to think about the strangerness of getting paid to take a walk with two babies and their grandmother. She pointed out a couple of the houses where she knows people but admitted that, though she’s lived in Southwood for two years, she still doesn’t really know very many people. It’s a neighborhood that’s meant to be intentionally designed to foster community, but there’s only so much you can do when people move from car to garage to the spaces behind the closed blinds in their windows.

I told her about my own frustration with the lack of connections I’ve got in my immediate neighborhood, told her about my front porch last year and my familiarity with everyone who walked by, told her about how I thrived at Warren Wilson where I knew almost everyone and was connected to what was going on. She told me about the “active senior living community” she moved out of, where everyone did activities at the clubhouse and talked to each other and interacted all the time.

“Do you miss it?” I asked.

“Oh, it’s what I live for.” We both nodded.

And there I was, walking down a sidewalk, a two year old strung between our hands, and we knew just exactly what the other one meant, knew just exactly the frustration of wanting to be able to reach out to other folks but not knowing quite how to do it.

Being back in Tallahassee, his has been my main question: how do we make connections in a place that doesn’t foster it for us? How do we reach people when isolation and separation is so ingrained in our culture? How do we build community?

And the answers have come slowly, but they have come: in the idle chatter before baby music class; with the hand on my shoulder after a poetry reading; knocking on the door looking for an egg or a cup of sugar; biking down a shady trail with people I just met. Yes. The answers are coming.