Musings – Maria's Musings

I’ve always said, “Writing crystallizes thought.”

I believe it too, but if you’d ask me what I mean by that, I’d be hard pressed to answer definitively. I just know it. I’ve experienced it. I can feel it in my bones.

Anyway, I’ve been stuck–emotionally…mentally–for a long time. It probably began with my father’s passing, but the full tarry mire of stuck-ness didn’t arrive until my son’s death 20 years later.

In those first grieving days a dear friend told me I should write, and I knew that–I’m a writer, after all. But sometimes you can’t write because you’re so afraid of what might come spilling out. Will it be very ugly? Will there be a bloody massacre of words in death throes strewn across my page? Will I discover the painfully naked shell of the person who lurks among the shadows inside? Worse than that, what if somebody else discovers it all?

Several years ago I was laid off from my job in the drilling industry, and of course, that’s always an unsettling experience. My response was to turn to God and pour my heart out to him. About everything. I told him that I wanted to write, “this book that’s in me.” And I asked him to help me be the writer he meant for me to be, if it was his will.

Within one year, two book deals were dropped squarely into my lap from out of the blue. Tailor-made for me! Imagine. Nobody gets published like that; but, miraculously, I did. I felt my prayers had been answered. Yet, THE book still remains incomplete. Heck, it’s barely started.

It (the book), and other parts of me, have been compartmentalized. I am fragmented, and I’ve picked up all of the broken pieces and tucked them safely into their own little rooms and closed the doors.

The problem with that is that “self” is a whole. It’s like a hologram. A hologram’s most fascinating property is the way it stores information about a scene. If a piece of a hologram is broken off, the entire scene is still viewable through the little piece. This happens because the information of the scene is present in every part of the hologram. It is this property of the hologram’s ability to contain the whole within its parts that has made it interesting to theoretical physicists—but I think it has psychological implications as well.

Try as we might, walling off and living with a select few of our broken pieces can never work. Even our tiniest shards contain the information of our entire truth. We cannot escape, or insulate ourselves from our whole truth indefinitely. We will stumble upon it among the fragments again and again.

So, today I begin writing again. I will go to the painful spots. I will experience both revelry and tears. It must be done. Because what is an artist without thoughts and devoid of sensation, but a land of drought with nothing to offer—and all for so much vain toiling at an impossible task.

Once upon a time, a long long time ago, lived a forlorn young woman with strawberry hair who but for a toddler and a six-month-old baby, found herself all alone in the world. Her husband had abandoned them.

And winter was approaching. The baby needed shoes to warm his feet, and her little girl had no coat. How would they get by?

She did have a job, but it paid little. Every penny she earned went toward rent, a meager diet, and the fuel required to get her to and from work each day. Yet, even as bleak as things appeared to her, God smiled upon them.

One night after she had prayed with her children and had tucked them safely in bed, she sat on the sofa and reminisced through a small overnight case where she kept a few belongings from another life—a time long before babies, and long long before getting married.

There she found a lovely stone, smoothed to a warm glow from the constant handling of a little boy called Charlie Brown; a precious gift that she never could bear to part with.

There was also a woven afghan kit from Sears & Roebuck, in appalling autumn colors, that she couldn’t bear to contemplate—but neither could she consider tossing it. How wasteful would that be? Besides, the materials in the kit might be useful one day. In dire times, one never knows.

And look! There was a luxuriously soft rabbit’s pelt. Many years before, the grandfather of a boyfriend had given it to her. But not before teaching her how to skin her own rabbit and stretch its pelt for drying. He was a wonderfully wise and kind old man; a farmer of cotton and veggies, a keeper of cattle and chickens, and the unwitting adoptee of a mated pair of peafowl. Special.

Her mind drifted further back—to a time of endless summers. Before boyfriends, before her family had settled down. She thought of the friends she had made while her father was still in the Army. There were the Fohls who were the closest thing to family you can know when you’re a five-year-old military dependent living far far away from that place your parents keep referring to as home.

“Aunt Ruby” Fohl was a magical being! She could even take a little ball of yarn in her hands and transform it into a Christmas stocking right before your eyes. But the young woman never did get to learn the magic from her Aunt Ruby. Her dad had gotten orders for Korea, and they would have to move again.

As she wistfully numbered all the friends who remained ever in her heart but were long gone none-the-less, the young woman recalled a week during the summer of her eighth year. Surely God had smiled down upon her that week.

A young military couple had moved into the duplex next door; a GI who had married a woman with a charming accent while stationed in Germany. They also had a toddler and a newborn baby, and in the afternoons this woman would sit under the trees in the shade and crochet while her babies slept. She had the magic too, just like Aunt Ruby before her.

She strained to remember their names, but couldn’t anymore. It was a little bit of an unusual situation, because the family only lived there for two weeks before the fellow got orders for Viet Nam and they moved away. Yet, in just those few days, this gentle woman taught a girl with strawberry hair how to crochet and how to knit as well.

As the sweet remembrance of that brief time washed over her and the young woman reached to close her little case of oddments and treasures, she was suddenly struck by the realization that she had already been given every thing she ever needed.

That very evening she began fashioning a little turban cap and a fur collared coat for her daughter, and two fat pair of warm booties for her baby boy—all, in the happiest of autumn colors. God had smiled again, and all was right in the world.

Category: Musings

The Hologram

The Girl with Strawberry Hair

Once upon a time, a long long time ago, lived a forlorn young woman with strawberry hair who but for a toddler and a six-month-old baby, found herself all alone in the world. Her husband had abandoned them.