High Lonesome's Open Salon Blog

Get out, kid, and keep running

Mon, 5 Mar 2012 21:03:48 -0500

This weekend, my daughter posted on her Facebook page a link to a magazine article about a national park near here. One of her cousins, a junior in college, commented that he'd like to see it again, because he'd been too young to truly appreciate the only time he visited. She replied that he should visit and assured him that my husband and I would welcome him and show him around.

All that was very low-key and cordial.

Then my husband's brother got in on the exchange and said that travel was for the upper class. He meant it.

We had extended the offer before, and my brother-in-law had torpedoed it in short order. His son had to stay home and work. (We offered to find him a job here, one that was more appropriate than earning minimum wage fixing flat tires.) What if he got lost? (We'd find him.) What if his car broke down? (We'd get it fixed.) Don't make him want things he can't have.

Well.

The kid is 21. Are they going to let him out soon?

I was far more irritated than my daughter, who was just laughing at being lumped in with the 1 percent. What a bizarre idea, using her Facebook page to criticize her, her friends and her family for succeeding. And what else could she have said when the poor kid expressed interest? "Neener neener neener, loser"?

Inviting him to visit us isn't exactly luring him into sin. This is not Aspen; it's a beautiful but impoverished place. We are not Beautiful People; we live in an 1,800-square foot house and get up every morning to go to work. We weren't going to sell him into slavery or even try to talk him out of voting for Rick Santorum - if he's allowed to vote. She just thought we'd show the kid a good time, as we have a lot of other kids.

There's an old adage about crabs in a bucket. Whenever one gets close to the rim, the others pull it back down. I'm trying to remember that. I'm trying to empathize with my brother-in-law.

But wow, resent much? Does sniping at my beautiful, well-traveled, upwardly-mobile, gracious daughter make you feel better?

My brother-in-law has made choices that have not served him well, and he continues to do so. This isn't all about the economy and the 99%. It's about being afraid to venture out, being afraid to fail, being afraid to even talk about trying. Those aren't traits to pass on.

I want to kidnap the kid and bring him here for deprogramming. I want to say, "Look! We got out; you can too! There's a wide world waiting!" I want to tell him, in a thousand different ways all summer long, that his dreams are worth dreaming.

And I want to smack his dad for picking on my kid.

33 for Candace

Mon, 5 Mar 2012 00:03:19 -0500

1. Your main trait: Determination.

2. The quality you like best in a man: Decency.

3. The quality you like best in a woman: Courage.

4. Your main flaw: Nasty, stupid people irritate me to the point of making me lose my composure, when I want to be icily disdainful and brutally effective.

5. Last time you cried: After a hospital visit with a terminally ill child.

6. Ideal job: Most days, the jobs I have. Some days, nearly any other job in the world. (See #5.)

7. Scent of a place: My grandmother's house.

8. Beloved movie: The Secret of Roan Inish, and The Big Chill.

9. Book on the nightstand: Common Prayer for Ordinary Radicals

10. First and best kiss: First: Some boy whose name I've forgotten but who tasted like pineapple Lifesavers. Best: Still my husband, after all these years.

11. You couldn’t do without: Family, books, writing materials, potato chips, 8 hours ofsleep.

12. How you would like to die: In my sleep.

13. Song you sing in the shower: Whatever's in my head. Today it was "Gloria."

14. Your deadly sin: I don't believe in deadly sins; I believe in grace.

15. Your not-so-deadly sin: Wishing the chairwoman of the local Republican Central Committee would get worms. (Ok, and my total intolerance of stupid, selfish people.)

16. Your motto: Just do it.

17. Ideal first date: I haven't had a first date since 1976.

18. Favorite present: Books my children think I'd like to read.

19. In the train: Alternately watching scenery and watching people.

20. Something you’d change in your body: I'd love it.

21. Your addiction: Carbonation, but I gave it up for Lent.

22. Now on your left: Stereo to play old albums, pile of notebooks, sleeping labradoodle, wall of bookshelves, antique Roller Derby #10 skateboard, framed Confederate $2 bill.

23. Now on your right: Small table with bubble-free beverage (bleck), window with old bottles on sill, and outside, 8 feet of snow on the level.

24. Now in front of you: Coffee table with my feet, books and magazines, husband, husband's fly-tying desk, framed rim-to-rim Grand Canyon permit, 40-year-old baseball glove, mandolin.

25. Now behind you: Lamp, 10th Mountain Division wood skis, really cool print of brightly colored dogs driving a turquoise 1955 Chevy on a road trip through the mountains.

26. Names for your children: Most of them came already named, and their names aren't mine to give away.

27. 3 things in your purse: Gerber pocket tool, composition notebook, Kindle (plus about 20 pounds of other stuff, heaven knows what).

28. 3 places that fascinate you: The whole world fascinates me, but right now my fascinations include the transitional prairie, Patagonia, and anyplace that doesn't have 8 feet of snow.

29. 3 people you’d like to meet: The Kansas OSers.

30. 3 traits you hate in people: Viciousness, violence and stupidity.

31. Values inherited from your parents: Love of nature, sense of responsibility, and that keep-putting-one-foot-in-front-of-the-other Puritan work ethic.

32. In your past life you were: Wasn't everybody Cleopatra?

33. In your future life you’ll be: A crone, in the best sense of that word — one of the Weird Sisters.

I thought I was home

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 22:01:20 -0500

Let’s start this off with an understanding: I am not an acquisitive person. I’m still using the pots and pans I bought when I moved into my first college apartment. I have one purse, which I will replace, when it wears out in 10 years or so, with one more. I don’t own a television set, a stereo or a single diamond. I don’t like to shop, not at Walmart, not at the mall, not online. I am almost completely indifferent to material possessions.

I’m also not house-proud. We have lived for a quarter-century and raised a herd of children (yes, I said “herd,” and they were a thundering herd indeed) in a 100-year-old 1,700-square foot home that, for most of those years, had only one bathroom. We bought it very cheap and we’ve never been sufficiently motivated to trade up. It wears its scars proudly, which is a very good thing. The landscaping has been heavily influenced by children wielding kitchen utensils. I could live here comfortably until I die. I probably will.

But here’s the confession: I covet a second home.

My road to covetousness was a slippery slope indeed. A family member — or rather an entire family of them, it was the children we wanted to help — tripped over his own baggage, fell into hard times and called asking for money. It wasn’t a large amount in our scheme of things, because we had grown accustomed to writing five-figure tuition checks, and we agreed almost without comment. Still, he had some pride, and he offered to sell us, for that amount, a piece of land he owned.

I began to consider whether I might someday want a house “back home.”

The house that sat on our new land, however, did not meet our minimum standards, those being a roof, four walls and indoor plumbing. The land was gorgeous, with a creek and trees on one side and long views on the other, and we talked for a while about renovating, but one of our sons summed up the prospect best when he commented, “I have an explosives license.” We burned the house and outbuildings and called the junk man to haul off many tons of metal; then we leased the land and water to the neighbor (which is what our relative should have done in the first place).

But the idea of a prairie home hasn’t gone away.

A couple months ago, in the middle of the night, an early winter storm blew in, hurling sleet against the side of the house, screaming past the ponderosa that grows outside our bedroom window. We get wind here a few times a year; Kansas gets a few days a year without it. Awakened from a sound sleep under my down comforter, for just a moment I thought I was home.

I thought I was home.

“So buy a house,” my husband said when I tried to describe the longing that experience engendered, and I began that day to browse what he calls my real-estate porn. It didn’t take long to find a house I liked, in a place I wanted to live, for a price we can afford.

Real estate on the Buffalo Commons can be had for a song because so few people can make a living there. Hardly anyone (with the possible exception of Nanatehay) would want to try. That makes such real estate a foolhardy investment, and other arguments against the move abound, from chiggers to tornadoes. It’s a long day’s drive from here, dawn to dark of a long summer day. We have a perfectly good house here, in a place where people really do want to live, with a nice view of the mountains. We aren’t anywhere near ready to retire, and even now, I’m nothing like the girl I remember being in that country.

But oh, I ache for it.

I took one of my daughters and went to look at the house. I told her I’d be spending part of her inheritance, probably a part she could never recoup. She’s a sane child, one upon whom I can depend to point out the flaws in my plans. “Mom,” I expected her to say in that tone adult children use with their slightly addled parents, “the stairs are steep and the rooms are tiny. The nearest town doesn’t have a doctor; it doesn’t even have a grocery store. What are you thinking?”

She flattened her hand on the sun-warmed stone and was enchanted. “Buy it,” she said. “Buy it now.”

Of course, nothing is quite that easy. The price, while very low, is still too high for the value. The sellers are willing to deal; their banker, naturally, is not, and I, a Christian minister, am deeply ambivalent about pushing for a short sale. On one hand, three people have looked at the house in the three years it’s been on the market. I may be their only opportunity to sell it, perhaps ever. The landscape is peppered with abandoned homesteads. On the other hand, should I be a party to the real estate collapse? Or should I let it collapse without me? I certainly can't stop it. With so many serious needs in the world, should I even be entertaining the idea of another home, however modest?

Partly, it’s an exit strategy. The place we currently live is leaning into an energy boom, and we don’t want to be a part of that. When it comes, we’ll hold out for a couple years, until prices are driven as high as they’re likely to go, and then we’ll sell out and leave. In the Midwest, we’d own the mineral rights to our acreage, not that it will ever matter. We’d be as assured as anyone can ever be that no one will build a McMansion just across the property line. We’d have a windmill (that moaned constantly) and a garden (decimated by grasshoppers), a barn (pushed well off kilter by 120 years of ceaseless wind), a (smelly) chickenhouse turned into a greenhouse (or a meth shed in our absence). We’d have the worry of finding someone trustworthy to look after it. We aren’t interested in farming, even on shares.

See how the arguments go? Then they circle back around to the one true thing: I want to go home, or at least I want to be able to go home. My bones, my blood, my soul want that house.

While we were nestled all snug in our beds

Thu, 5 Jan 2012 19:01:45 -0500

This is our Christmas tree. Ok, this is actually our daughter ~~Pippa~~ Kate and her little dog ~~Toto~~ Olive beside the tree, because I am not in the habit of photographing my Christmas tree, but that's beside the point.

If you look, you can see part of a pile of gifts under the tree. Behind Kate, you can see a tall box. I'd say we had a lot of presents because we have a lot of children, but the truth is that we just plain had a lot. The pile was bigger than it appears here, because for some reason we only wanted a picture of Kate from the knees up so we could get the cheesy garland hanging from our curtain rod.

Because, you know, that's important. That's the point. It was Christmas. We had garland. We had a star. We had gifts. We had too much food.

We had.

We have.

And while we were doing all that having, while our kids were still home and we were still celebrating our affluent, materialistic holiday, a woman froze to death in our city park.

I've written about this before. She's not the first, and every time it happens, a person's death seems sufficiently important that I ought to tell you about it, even though you didn't know her.

Even though I didn't know her.

Even though no one, apparently, knew her well enough to miss her on the first night of the new year, when she was huddled against the rec center wall, probably too intoxicated to make a better decision and go to the shelter, or maybe just too empty of hope to face another hopeless year.

Freezing to death, they say, is not the worst way to die, but I hope she was drunk. I hope she slipped into sleep without realizing that she was too cold to save herself. I hope she didn't cry out, hoping someone would hear, until she couldn't cry out any more, until she knew no one was coming to help.

Ever.

There is no direct relationship between the stuff (for that's what it was) under our tree and her death. There is no line that one could draw between us and her. If we'd known, we would have helped. Many people would have.

By the early hours of the morning, when the temperature dropped to single digits, we had gone to our warm beds. We didn't know. There's no reason we should have, and yet, there's also no good reason for a young woman's life to slip away unnoticed.

But — what a world. What a world, in which we carelessly rip colorful paper from gifts we could have bought for ourselves if we'd really wanted them. What a world, in which just those wrappings and boxes might have made a fire big enough to keep her warm and alive for one more night. What a world in which a woman can freeze to death in a public park and no one notices until it's too late.

Ok, that was weird (or, the revenge of the Johns)

Sun, 30 Oct 2011 21:10:36 -0400

Today is Reformation Sunday, a fact that means little to any here but a few churchgoing Protestants of the Calvinist tradition. It’s not a holy day, exactly, but it requires some observance. In our congregation, tradition (that bugaboo of the Reformers) dictates that we invite a bagpiper and eat shortbread, although I personally take great delight from the idea that John Knox must be turning in his grave to have so many women in the pulpits of the Presbyterian church.

Today we talked about John Calvin, about the fact that John Knox wrote the Scots Confession with five other men named John, and the ways in which that could have gone wrong.

Err, that was after the service, after the bagpiper blasted out our brains and we were punch-drunk on shortbread. We were properly reverent when we should have been.

Tomorrow is Halloween, which meant that despite being a woman and not a John, I had to invite approximately 2 bazillion kids (quite a feat in a town of 200 people) into my church this afternoon. Then I cleaned up and came home for a well-deserved a nap.

In the middle of my nap, the church bell rang, not just a little bonk like a pigeon might have crashed into it, but several minutes of bong-bong, bong-bong, bong-bong, long enough for me to hop off the sofa, find my shoes, stumble out of the manse and dash up the office stairs and into the church, while mentally reviewing the list of disasters that might precipitate a bell-ringing. A fire in town? A declaration of war? The president shot?

Our church bell weighs 700 lbs. I can barely ring it if I grab the highest knot in the rope, lift my feet and put my full weight into it. To get it ringing repetitively, bong-bong, bong-bong, requires more strength and more weight than nearly anyone in my congregation has. We usually ring it with the hammer that thunks against it, but that won’t make it go bong-bong, bong-bong, no matter how hard someone pulls on that rope.

The church was empty. There was no doubt; empty buildings are silent in a different way than a building in which someone is hiding. Empty churches are peaceful places. Even the dust motes settle down. Just to be sure, I climbed the stairs to the belltower, in which there’s nowhere for anyone to hide. The bell ropes weren’t swaying. There was no one there.

I went out by the front door, which was locked, and found three little boys milling around the front steps. The ring-leader was, coincidentally, a boy named John. If hellions exist, Johnny must be the prototype, although he has good reason. His mom is a big-time tweaker. His dad makes her homeschool the kids after the school nurse reported them to Social Services because their teeth were rotting out of their heads. The family had a child die under suspicious circumstances. The kids lived in foster care for a while, but now they’re back. Ours is not to reason why; we just feed them, buy them coats and mittens, and call Social Services frequently.

We do what we can for Johnny, and it’s not going to be enough.

But Johnny might weigh 70 pounds soaking wet. He hadn’t rung the bell. There was no reason for him to be looking so pale. I’ve shaken him down for all manner of sins and he’s been gleefully unrepentant.

I didn’t have much hope that he’d rat on someone else, but I had to ask: “Who was in there?”

“Preacher dude,” he mumbled.

What preacher dude? (Dunno.) How did you know he was a preacher? (He had on a black dress — which wasn’t all that startling to hear, considering that we’d worshipped that morning with a guy in a plaid skirt.)

Three parishioners arrived, summoned by the bell. Once they realized we had no emergency, they had the same questions I did: What preacher dude? Where did he go?

Johnny didn’t know that, but besides the black dress, the preacher wore two little neckties.

Geneva tabs. Wow. On the other hand, some of us do wear them on Reformation Sunday.

Other congregants arrived. Some searched the church. Some checked the locks.

Some sat on the steps and talked to Johnny and his sidekicks. Had they seen him go in? (No.) Had they heard the bell? (Yeah.) Had they seen him go out? (Yeah.) Out this door? (No.) Out the office door? (Um, no.) Where, then?

Uh, over there. Between those windows.

Where the side door used to be before the kitchen and bathrooms were added — before Johnny’s birth. He couldn’t have known about it. I didn’t, until one of the older members’ eyes grew wide and he blurted out, ‘The old door.”

There was no evidence of it at all. Whoever had matched the lap siding had done an exceptional job, as had the plasterers inside. The steps were long gone. The grass had grown in, which is no small feat in a place where the annual growing season is approximately 27 minutes. The church now sported a well-established flower bed along that wall.

There’s no moral to this story, no way to make sense of it. I don’t know who rang the bell; I don’t know whom the kids saw. He didn’t frighten them, so much as startle them. His presence seems benign.

I do know that in our church history book — which is not something any small child, let alone one of Johnny’s ilk, would ever page through — there’s a picture of a tall man in a black robe and Geneva tabs, dedicating the new church building in 1892.

His name was the Rev. John Ramsay.

And I know that if the bell rings in the middle of the night, I’m out of here.