How can I keep from singing?

"When my feeble life is over/ time for me will be no more/ guide me gently, safely over/ to thy kingdom's shore, to thy shore."

So I have totally legitimate excuses for not writing the past two days, both of them having to do with me actually having a miniscule social life. I refuse to drunk blog (applying to my birthday), or blog when I am so tired I can't see straight (applying to last night). So I absolve myself of all lenten slackness.

I recorded another gospel hymn last week. We sang it in the Rise Up Singing book at the monastery and I just felt so homesick and yearning for the soulful music that takes me back on the wings of a snow white dove ("pure sweet love") to the South. I think that along with "Softly and Tenderly" and "In the Garden" and "Near (In?) The Cross," that "Just a Closer Walk With Thee" is at the top level of my hymnal wedding cake tower. Except for maybe the song they sing at the beginning of Doris's church led by a toothless deacon who is probably near to a hundred if he's a day. Something to the effect of "Jesus is alright with me" and then at some point "It's alright, I can't hide/fight it, but it's alright."

But I was just thinking today how powerful this particular image is to me, this crossing over the river stuff. Rest beyond the river. Crossing to the other side. I got no boat so I'll be good and muddy when I get to the other side. My home is over jordan. They'll be no graves on that bright shore. Wade in the water. We shall meet on that beautiful shore. Of Death's cold wave I will not flee, since God through Jordan leadeth me. Maybe it is just growing up Southern Baptist that makes my soul so susceptible to river/water/washing imagery and this preoccupation with "the other side." Nevertheless, I love these hymns. They are hymns of comfort for the weary and they move the deep river inside me.

Annual Aging Crisis

In the place of my usual aging crisis, I am not going to have one. So there.

Instead, lets look at some of my baby pictures....

Birthday Tiaras and bowl cuts.....


Talking to horses....

Talking to butterflies....
Road Rage....

Tragedy...

Angels Unawares

"I am moved to tenderness by what we cannot bear/ humbled by what we can and do and learn to share." ~Carrie Newcomer

This will have to be a short post as it is now midnight, and my wine glass (such a rare indulgence) is in hand.

I had a hankerin' to hear Carrie Newcomer's Regulars and Refugees as I hadn't heard it in some time and it is such a calming album when one needs relief from overwhelmed-ness or needs a faith-boost in humanity. The former was my issue tonight, not the latter, fortunately. And in the first song, I hear this line...I am moved to tenderness by what we cannot bear. I've been trying to find a way of expressing this feeling for literally an entire year, longer even than that. This intersection of sorrow and joy...that life is both astonishingly beautiful and astoundingly sad.

In losing my grandparents, I didn't know how to handle this emotional hybrid that nearly paralyzed me with its unexpectedness. Never had grief for me been so adulterated with this unexplainable and confusing love and joy. Loss had always been so shocking, so raw, so devastating, nothing like the slow dance of goodbyes that we got with PaPa and Gan-Gan. When we said goodbye to PaPa, there was this moment where I was holding his limp hand, looking at my grandmother's aching heart on her face, the rest of our family gathered around his bed, my mother's hand on my shoulder. And I just started to sob uncontrollably, burying my face in my mother's side to hide from this feeling. It wasn't sorrow, or not exactly. I still don't understand exactly. Here we were watching this man slowly drown, and all I could think was, "I'm the luckiest person in the world!" Because I was there to witness it. Because we were all together in our grief. Because so much had been said and unsaid, done and not done.

And then a few months later, after five years of watching Gan-Gan's mind go, we stood around her in the Hospice House and watched her body go. And a few hours before she died, we crammed in her room (she was a prolific woman with prolific children, so there were a lot of us, not to mention her own siblings) and passed out crudely-made print outs of the world to all our favorite hymns (or really just my favorite hymns, since I was the sap who had made them) and we sang. And we had all four parts and even as we dropped in an out with tears, we sounded so good. The old ones sang and the little ones sang and the rest of us in between. And my grandfather even sang through the cloud of his unimaginable sorrow, though mostly he just cried. And I swear to God, I thought my heart might just burst out of my chest. It was perhaps the most beautiful moment of my life so far.

I am moved to tenderness by what we cannot bear. That explains it.

Touching Base

Now the thing about having a baby-and I can't be the first person to have noticed this--is that thereafter you have it. ~Jean Kerr

I was just poking around on Facebook and stumbled upon the profile of a former student of mine, a sweet girl, eager to please, who always did her work and liked to read and wanted to get the hell out of Dodge (Dodge in this case being Oconee County, SC). I taught her when she was 15, a sophomore. She had the highest grades in my class. She shouldn't have been in my class really. She would have been better off in an honors class. She was about 5 months pregnant before I figured it out (unsuspecting me...). I volunteered to do her homebound. I really liked her and I wanted to make sure that she had an advocate. Obviously her life would not be the same and school would change its shape in her life, but I really wanted to see her through it.

She went nearly full term and was a real trooper as we plowed through mounds of busy work until the last week. She had a her baby, which was mostly cared for by the grandmother. She looked at me like I was growing bean trees out of my ears when I asked if she was nursing (silly me). I think her mother occasionally let her hold the baby, and when she did, she looked overwhelmed and unsure of herself (as many new mothers do). I, however, took great joy in holding him while she took her Biology tests and made her U.S. History project. We finished up and I left their bewildered home and flew to England where I had my own adventures, free and unencumbered, while this child of a child of a child grew into little person over the summer.

My student returned in the fall looking fabulous. She had probably starved herself into her old jeans and compensated for weariness with impeccably applied mascara and eyeliner. I know this because I ran into her and her mother and the baby in K-mart buying school supplies a few weeks earlier and all party members looked ragged and frustrated. She wasn't in my class anymore, but I kept up with her. Her straight As had turned to Bs and Cs, but she kept her head above water. I let go. I was dealing with my own troubles. And then one morning as I fussed at several of my students for being late to class, I was given the ultimate legitimate excuse: "But Ms. Capps, there was this awesome fight. [Former Student] just beat the sh...("ahem") crap out of [Other Student]!" I couldn't immediately envision such a scenario out of my sweet, reluctant, quiet pupil. As I told my students (in a totally professional way) to mind their own damn business, I knew that it must have been about her baby. My intuition was right. The other girl had said something derogatory about the baby and, being a child herself with typically teenage impulse control, she had flown off the deep end and evidently really hurt the offending girl.

By the end of my second year, I was too preoccupied with my own future to worry too much about hers. Over two years, I taught 300 kids or so. If you kept up with all of them, there would be nothing left of you. But I clicked on her profile today and read that she had another baby around Halloween, which means she would have been pregnant around the time of that fight. Accept this baby was born in a storm. The latest pictures show her little baby at 4 months, still intubated and in hospital. I'm afraid to ask. My stomach hurts thinking about their lives, what the years will bring, what I might have been able to do. Maybe because she was the first student who I thought, with first year teaching hubris, I could really help. I thought that maybe if I showed her enough attention and supported her amidst all the judgement and drama, that she would be able to pick up the pieces of her life and move forward and overcome the odds of so many other teen mothers out there.

In two years I taught seemingly countless teen moms, most of whom were surprisingly enthusiastic about their pregnancies, unlike their adult counterpart. All these girls just want to be loved. They have sex (bad sex, most likely, given the skills of teenage boys) because they think they might be trading the use of their bodies for real love. And, in turn, they have babies that will love them unconditionally. It's what we all want, right...to love and be loved in return.

WhataboutawaterbottleWiddle?

"The highlight of my childhood was making my brother laugh so hard that food came out of his nose." ~Garrison Keillor

My favorite movie scene perhaps of all time is in Mary Poppins in the tea party scene at Uncle Albert's where their laughter lifts them to the ceiling.
I love hearing people laugh uncontrollably. I love when laughter becomes contagious. I love when people get the giggles at inappropriate times and try to hide it. I love laughing until I cry and get asthma. I love not being able to stop laughing no matter how hard I try. When I think about laughing (especially the uncontrollable sort), I think a lot about my time at Governor's School.

I remember a particular class my senior year at Governor's School when we were reading Ovid's Metamorphoses and talking about the story of Ceyx (Sigh-Ex) and Alcyone. Our teacher was a loud (and utterly amazing) Northerner who didn't realize that when she said Ceyx, it sounded exactly like a really redneck version of SEX and coming from her it was really hilarious. It sent the entire class into giggles. At first, it struck the funny bones of only a few, and we tried to hide our grins. And then she said it again, and more joined in. She stopped and said, "What?" and we all laughed harder. She shook it off and started talking again, and after the third time realized why "Ceyx" sent us into such a state, but by that time it was too late. She tried unsuccessfully to get us back on track (though she was fighting it as well). Most of us were silently convulsing with laughter, tears streaming down our faces. Someone actually left the room to gather herself. After it should really have been getting old, I tried so hard to stop. I just buried my face in the crook of my elbow and snorted into my sweater. Afterwards, none of us could dare look at anyone else for fear that we would all start up again. That was definitive happiness.

There was also the classic electronic whoopie cushion episode in Jan's class. I forget who owned it, only that Jan confiscated it later on because she was worried that we would take it to the Emrys Poetry reading (and really, I wouldn't have put it past us). Jan was talking to us about sestinas or something (it was definitely our form poetry days) and we kept passing that thing around and pushing the button at every break. "Blah Blah Blah Blah.....PPPppppplllluuubbbb.....Blah Blah Blah.....BBBBPPPppppppttssst....What is that?" By the time she caught on people were literally crippled in hysterical laughter. Jan was such a good sport, though.

Also Governor's School related was the time our writing class went to the classically horrid Emrys Poetry reading where we saw that god-awful slam poet with (I kid you not) a really pronounced lisp. She was probably 45 years old and writing really bad slam poetry about her shoebox of sexual secrets. All twenty of us in the writing department were covering our mouths and holding our noses and biting our lips, desperately trying to keep from laughing. In a classic good-cop, bad-cop moment, George was just grinning his silly old grin which didn't help us at all, and Jan was shooting us ferocious glances that said "If ya'll don't knock it off, I am going to tear you all to pieces all the way back to the dorms." But really.....a slam poet with a lisp talking about her Sheckshual ShoeBocksh of Shecretsh...

I feel like I laughed my way through Governor's School. Maybe that is why I look back and see those years as the happiest of my life. It seems like I was either laughing or crying the whole time and not much in between. And for the most part, the crying was cathartic (and usually in the context of a writing workshop) or at least a joint endeavor.

Come to think about it, I think crying and laughter are pretty much the same thing from physiological standpoint. Think about it. Your diaphragm is doing the same thing. Your breathing is short and forceful. Weird noises emerge from your throat. It hardly matters that one springs from joy and the other sorrow (or sometimes joy). And in either case, your mind has very little control over what the rest of you is up to.

So here's to laughter!

For who knows how my love grows? And who knows where the time goes?

When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. ~1 Corinthians 13:11

I'm having a Sandy Denny kind of night.

Under the pretense of tidying up my bookshelves, I read my old journals from middle/high today. I only ask two things of my friends and family if I was to die suddenly: 1) Please don't let the horrible state of my bedroom taint your memory of me and 2) throw those damn journals out and for God's sake, don't read them. I said so many things that I didn't really mean. I would throw them out myself, except that I get a sort of grim satisfaction from reading them, and they never fail to make me less anxious about getting older. I don't want to be a teenager again. You certainly couldn't pay me a gazillion dollars and get me to go back to middle school. It's a wonder any of us make it out alive. I was so dramatic, so misunderstood, so troubled.

It's not all bad, those journals. It's interesting to look back at my budding self--the fervent political life of my Governor's School years, the yearning to please my teachers, the self-righteous moralism. (Isn't it nice to be 18 and know EVERYTHING?) Amidst the angst and drama and ridiculousness of my interior life in adolescence, there is, at least towards the end, an astonishing confidence that radiates through it all. Looking back, I always think of what a brave little person I was, and yet all I remember is the fear and doubt.

I will be a quarter of a century old on Friday. I think that getting older doesn't bother me as much as it used to now that I have resigned myself to the fact that deep down I will never feel all that different from my ten-year-old self. We carry our child-selves with us forever. There is no real adulthood cut off and distinguished from our childhood. We carry many of the same desires, the same fears, the same strengths, the same insecurities. We never really put away all our childish things. We just learn to articulate them better and to ignore them when needed.

Pity Party

Black Lung, Black Lung, oh your hand's icy cold,
As you reach for my life and torture my soul.
Cold as that water hole deep in that dark cave,
Where I spent my life's blood diggin' my own grave.
~Hazel Dickens

I don't know how spiritually productive it is to whine (I think not very), but I'm gonna do it anyway. I'm tired of my lungs, and today I woke up with a rather disturbing thought, they are only going to get worse as they get older. I've never smoked a cigarette in my entire life, and yet I have to live like a chain-smoker because I entered the world with a shitty pair of lungs and a nearly-as-shitty set of sinuses. My daily survival depends on some inhaled steroids and bronchodilators and there isn't a day in my life since I was 3 or 4 years old that I have been able to breathe like a normal human being without the aid of chemicals. Don't get me wrong, I'm damn grateful for the chemicals, even if it means I start glowing florescent green in my dotage, but I just wish for one day I didn't have to think about my lungs.

In actuality, it doesn't bother me that much on a daily basis. Asthma just gets incorporated into my "normal." But for once in my life I'd like to be able to get a cold, sneeze and cough and drip and feel icky for a week and then get better. I'd like to be able to drink soup, stay in bed, eat oranges, drink water, think good thoughts, and let my body take over. But instead, my sinuses become impenetrable with infection, my lungs burn and pool with fluid, my every breath becomes a wheeze and I end up hooked up to my nebulizer half the day, jittery from the meds, stomach revolting due to antibiotics, and hacking up all sorts of crap every time I breathe too deeply.

Such is my current state as I wallow in self-pity. This time with a new development, a right ear that doesn't seem to be working properly. And yet, as one of my favorite childhood books once said: "Could be worse." I should be grateful for my miracle drugs and my ability to receive them and to pay for them (at least for now....don't get me started). And I am. I just don't feel very strong today. I'm plum-tuckered out, as we say.

But just so I won't have wasted this whole post on a gigantic whine, here's five blessings:

1) A warm house
2) Nyquil
3) Sweet, sleepy music
4) Understanding ears on the other end of a phone line.
5) New friends

My little chicken

"How long do you wanna be loved? / Is forever enough? Is forever enough?

I had such a nice day with Henry today. It was the right decision for me, even though it hurts sometimes, to find another baby to love. I thought that it might be like pouring salt into a wound that was finally starting to close up and heal, and I won't deny that sometimes I feel sad. But the boundaries of my heart just open up again, and it makes me feel whole, unbroken, strong...and I look forward to the few times a week when it is my job to watch and love a sweet little baby, my chicken.

I love how his little face lights up or spreads into this goofy, shy grin when I walk in the door or when I come to get him after a nap. I love his sleepy red cheeks and glassy eyes ("one of those sweet, sleepy moods that save the human race from extinction). I love his little language of grunts and beeps and twitters that he sings to me. I love his daily tragedies (who knew that the removal of a contraband pencil from a chubby hand could elicit such heart-felt sorrow...). I love the abandon with which he smears his lunch across his face with pure, unadulterated joy. I love his bursts of hysterical laughter brought on by God knows what. I love the way he touches my face, tenderly at first and then more enthusiastically, probing my eye sockets and pulling my earlobes until I have to take his hand and show him how to be "gentle."

I love rocking him to sleep. He always puts his little face in the crook of my neck and twists my shirt in his left hand and gently pats my shoulder with the other. And I sing to him, mostly the old gospel or folk and bluegrass ballads that I know so well. Henry's fool-proof song is "Shady Grove" which I usually end with, as his little body grows soft and warm and heavy and the patting and twisting stops. And beneath him, I also feel so relaxed and sleepy and so wonderfully content. My family calls me the "baby-whisperer" because I've never met a baby or toddler than I couldn't put to sleep, even the most reluctant sleepers. I don't exactly know how I do it. I just do. It is almost like meditation for me. My mind has to be, in that moment, untroubled, nearly blank. I have to focus on the rhythm, the music, the feel of him in my arms. In comparison, Henry is easy, so I don't even have to try.

And for the first time in my experience as a self-proclaimed baby whisperer, I love the transition from arms to crib, the time when the connection is broken. Each time, I lower him down, he smiles, barely awake, just about enough to break your heart, before I release him and watch him curl up like a rolypoly into his lovies. Usually, he hums for a few seconds before falling still. In that moment, I know perfect peace. Sometimes I don't pay attention to that moment. Today I did.

Alone we are born, and die alone

As for man, his days are as grass:
as a flower of the field, so he flourisheth.
For the wind passeth over it, and it is gone;
and the place thereof shall know it no more.

Psalm 103:15-16

For lent, I am going to write a little every day. Even when I am tired and sick and have more pressing matters to attend to. It struck me today that I have not been as reflective as I once was, and I'd like to change that, even for just a short while.

So today is Ash Wednesday, probably the single-most poetic day of the Christian calendar; the day we are marked with a sign of our own mortality and told to remember we are dust and to dust we shall return. And for a moment, with a fingertip tenderly etching this message onto our skin, death seems less scary.

The past year and half has been a season of goodbyes, of watching old loved ones fade away into whatever comes next, of grasping at the air left behind of those that went without warning, of secret griefs and sorrows. This spring I witnessed the last rattling breath of a man who was able to make peace with his family, who knew that he was dying. This summer I gathered with my the people of my blood around the bed of a woman with one foot already firmly rooted in the other side and we sang her soul the rest of the way. Death isn't pretty. It isn't easy. And yet, in some ways, it was beautiful. Oddly enough, it was death that restored my faith that had been lost with other lost things....it made me believe again. Perhaps it was death that taught me how to relinquish control, to become vulnerable again.

I feel like I've spent most of my life fighting for a place in the world, trying to figure out was I "should" be doing. And the older I get, the less certain it seems. And then, on days like today, a voice comes down from above and says "My sweet little idiot, what will you do with your one wild and precious life?" (remember that Mary Oliver and God tend to speak with the same voice for me) and I remember, with less anxiety than I would think possible on an ordinary day, that I am dust and to dust I will return.