Omit needless words

You know that I love Strunk and White and their seventeenth principle of composition: Omit needless words. Never was that principle better presented than by railroad crossing signs.

Stop. Look. Listen.

Always, for all things.

Don’t type, don’t type, don’t type

This may be the most important advice I ever give you, sweet girl. Typing when altered for any reason can lead to all kinds of problems. Being angry is one of the best reasons to avoid typing. Though it could give you a feeling of momentary relief or even victory, please remember that anything you type and publish to the Internet can follow you for the rest of your life.

I would love to type something entirely different than what I am typing now. I would love to be sarcastic and superior and downright nasty, but what would it serve?

I suspect that anything I would type is already known by those who have placed me in an untenable position tonight. Placing negative thoughts in type that will last forever won’t aid me or the other persons that have been wronged. It would lower me to the level of those perpetrating the dissension and in some ways it would make me worse than them, because I know better.

I hope you do, too.

Thank the Dixie Chicks for popularizing an English proverb (the song is good, too): “To talk without thinking is to shoot without aiming.”

Think today. Type tomorrow.

The greatest love of all

In early 1986 a wonderful thing happened. Whitney Houston released a song that resonated to the souls of a bunch of siblings belonging to a tiny mother in northern Indiana. As each of us heard the song on the radio we called that little woman. You know her as Grandma Beanie. We called to tell her to listen for the song that she, herself, could have written. We wanted her to understand that we got it, her lesson had pierced our hearts. Whitney Houston’s Greatest Love of All was the perfect musical reminder for us, and a conveyance of that lesson to others, we hoped.

The first time I heard the song I was driving down Cleveland Road when, while listening, something happened to my vision. It became blurry and I thought I would have to pull over to the side of the road. Instead, I let the blurring well up within my eyes and fall as tears of joy that I was hearing something Beanie had taught us, something important, something that seemed to be missed by so many.

Grandma Beanie had long told us about the need to love ourselves and that, indeed, we could not love anyone else UNTIL we loved ourselves, for we would have no understanding of love, no love to give. That was one of the most profound lessons of my life. It was also among the most difficult to comprehend, and the final understanding was hard won.

Grandma Beanie’s words were simple: “You can’t love anyone else until you love yourself.” I had to dig a little deeper to have those words penetrate my mind. I had to prove to myself that within the contemporary world, her words were still golden as they had seemed to be when I first heard them. I did learn that they were golden words, and that they would always remain so.

It’s difficult to live in a world that tells one to be what is perceived as selfless in order to be accepted. It makes no sense. Self preservation argues against such logic. The root of the word selfless argues against such logic, for without a self, what have we to offer?

There is no shame in recognizing and loving our self, though that is what most of us are taught. I find the terms selfish and self-centered confusing due to their negative definitions and the pall they cast over a common root: the self.

The term self-absorbed better defines a person whose outlook is centered around me first (and sometimes me only).

Our self is our foundation. It is the building block upon which we build the rest of our world. It is the rock upon which sits all of our caring, compassion and empathy. Develop it. Love it, and then share it. Never deny it.

I’m not an ogre

This post probably belongs in either the “Some things” post or “Daddy and the Duke,” but because Heather responded to my query for family stories and said this is one of her favorites (one of the least of mine), I think it warrants its own post. Because she has always been so doggoned cute:

No one could have ever suggested that I did not love my stepchildren. I was willing to accept them as my own, and because of that I treated them as if they could have been my own, but only within the reality where their own mother was Mom, and I was Daddy’s wife. With regard to Joe-your-dad and Jenny, however, they were siblings. There were no qualifications of the terms brother and sister—a brother is a brother and a sister is a sister.

Heather was a very giving child, and from her age two we bonded in a way that allows a stepmother to feel as though she is a true partner in the life of a child whose soul caught the attention of all of those who experienced her. That is not to say that she didn’t drive me nuts, sometimes. I am sure I returned the favor and drove her nuts sometimes, too.

I was very sad to lose a close relationship with Heather and Kimberly to the banked embers left after a divorce. I had hoped that would not happen. Sometimes, almost-lost relationships pick up again many years later as this one did, with a story that I probably would not have told because it’s a tiny story, and for me, an embarrassing story. But for Heather, it’s a favorite story (may that VHS tape burn in hell), so I will relate it here.

I never realized how much glasses had become a part of my personality until the danged video camera caught it. Though in those days I still wore contact lenses most of the time, with the family and on camping trips I was likely to skip the contact lens ritual and throw on a pair of over-sized 1980s eyeglasses.

Heather was somewhere between childhood and tween-hood the year that we embarked on a mission to discover the Smoky Mountains. She still clung a bit, as do those children who are not quite ready to fly, but she was ready to take a serious dog-paddle through life. The most recent serious discussion we had had was during a summer weeding session, prompted by some long-ago and forgotten punishment for who knows what forgotten infraction. Strangely enough, Heather’s punishments brought her closer to me: weeding, snapping beans, things I would be doing on my own had she not have been recently naughty. And her naughties were such trivial affairs. Truly.

The weeding session yielded two important pieces of information. Firstly, Heather claimed that Kimberly had stolen her boyfriend, a dashing young lad that lived down the street. My sister and I had dated his uncles an eon before. The family was particularly handsome. As those things do, it worked itself out.

The second important piece of information was that Heather wanted to have braces for her teeth. Kimberly was in her second or third application of braces to correct everything under the sun. The current set of headgear was astonishing with two wires sticking straight out from her chin and then making a near ninety degree turn up into the air. We teased Kimberly, saying she could hang her jammies there when they were not in use. Heather simply wanted equal time—and perhaps she thought that Kimberly’s snazzy headgear was the thing that caught the boy. I promised Heather that she would have her braces as soon as possible. She did get her braces—and only one set was required versus four sets for Kimberly—when she was a teen. She looks beautiful.

So it was within this real stepmother-stepdaughter relationship that we took off to see the Smokies. As vacations went it was typical, except someone was running a danged video camera far more than I would have liked during the whole trip. I didn’t like that video camera very much.

Just after setting up a camping site and cooking area, when the scent of percolating coffee from the Coleman stove wafted into my just-traveled-hundreds-of-miles-with-four-children addled senses, Heather very innocently asked, “Can we get some crayons?”

Oy. I was a grump and responded coldly, “Heather, I am not an ogre; crayons, I think we can handle.” I punctuated my statements with a jab to the center of my eyeglasses, pushing them back on the nose from which they constantly attempted to escape. It went something like this:

“Heather, I am not an ogre. Crayons…”
JAB to eyeglasses.
“…I think we can handle.”

It wasn’t my best moment. Most of the time I tried to do better.

It was all on tape. It IS all on tape. I had fully intended, but somehow forgot, to burn the danged thing along with the videos that contain audio of my raspy, fearful breathing while traveling up hills (mountains, in my mind) and back down into valleys in a car that was far too close to any safety rail, or far too close to the edge of roads sans safety rails. The tapes are no longer in my possession, so to whatever winds of life or fates that take them: please be kind.

I am far from perfect, but I am NOT an ogre. And I have always loved my stepchildren. Still do.

Documenting those vacations:

Our southeastern trip (The Smokies) : Daddy and the Duke
Our trip out west : Westward, ho!
Our northern trip : Redux

Mum

We have talked about how it feels for someone to betray our confidence, but what exactly is a confidence?

Sometimes I think there is a genetic steel trap running through certain parts of our family that keeps anything and everything confidential. I have been surprised when I learned that Grandpa John didn’t know something about me that Grandma Beanie had known for years, or even decades.

I looked at her with new respect each time that occurred. Her feelings are that if we wish for someone else to know something that we have told her, we would tell them. That is keeping confidence. I like that thinking a lot. Learning it young kept me out of a lot of trouble growing up.

Gossip still turns my stomach. Exaggerated stories infuriate me and, as you know, a betrayed confidence is the death warrant of a relationship for me.

None of us is perfect and we will all talk about others in our lives, but it’s important that we try to limit ourselves to topics that can’t hurt others. How do we know which topics are safe?

Would we want someone talking about us in the fashion we are thinking of sharing with a third party? Is the secret we are about to share our own, or does it belong to another? I don’t believe we have the right to share the secrets of others. If we decide to become righteous and tell a secret for the ‘good’ of someone else, we had better closely evaluate whether we would really be helping.

Most importantly, if we are divulge information to a third party, would we truly say the same, face to face with the person that is the topic of our information? If not, remaining mum may be the best course.

Truth

You already know that children don’t always like their parents and grandparents. You have also seen that parents and grandparents don’t always like their progeny. We usually love them, though. Unless their actions have become dangerous to others, it’s very difficult to lose the love we feel for blood relatives. It hurts when we need to either tuck it away or try to quash it completely.

Having seen up close examples of what causes the complete breakdown of familial love, it seems simple to me precisely what it takes to keep that love forever.

Respect. Honor. One of those is even a commandment: Honor your father and your mother. I believe that we should honor our children and grandchildren, too.

What does it mean to honor?

I don’t think it means that we need to always like our parents or our progeny. We wouldn’t be human if we didn’t have I-am-mad-and-don’t-like-you moments. I think it means that at the very least, we need to respect them enough to listen, to learn about them, to try to understand. I think that whatever way we spin it, the conversation repeatedly comes back to the Golden Rule:

Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

We all have thoughts we wouldn’t like to divulge to another living being. It’s what we do that is important. Actions speak. Words don’t do much until they are followed by action.

Act accordingly.

Dancing with Dad

I have always marveled over the parenting job that Grandma Beanie and Grandpa John did for all seven of us. I tried to emulate them but family sizes, circumstances, outside pressures and tragic occurrences, times, ideas and ideals were different, so there is no measuring stick we can use to compare. We only hope that we have given our best when our children have grown into adults.

I can’t count the mistakes I made, and I heard Grandma Beanie and Grandpa John say the same thing many times. I know they made mistakes; I remember some of them. I don’t idealize your great grandparents and am telling stories of things that actually occurred. Of true importance are the things that your great grandparents got right. They were amazing. They put a solid foundation under each individual they were building, and a home in our hearts that was always there when the world seemed just a little too big.

We endured, sometimes tearfully, hundreds of conversations over the years about attitude. Grandpa John’s booming voice spoke of it at least a couple of times a week with regard to whatever was going on at the time. Anything we did wrong was part of the wrong attitude. Often, things we believed as young idealists were part of the wrong attitude to a reactionary Air Force veteran, and we needed to prepare ourselves for a protracted fight if we wanted to hold on to those beliefs. We had to prove our case, over and over again. Even then we sometimes found our beliefs on Grandpa John’s wrong, or bad, attitude list. Even our clothing made the bad attitude list.

The arguments often went far into the night, and I was one of the worst about arguing with Grandpa John. Many of the arguments could have been avoided but I would bring it on, time and again. I knew just how to do it. Grandma Beanie didn’t like that very much, but I did. I loved arguing with him. I had points to make. I loved arguing that although I understood his almost divine belief in taking exclusive care of what he called me and mine, there was a larger world out there, and we were all members of the human race. We had a responsibility to others.

He would argue and argue, saying that me and mine were the only things for which he was responsible. But his circle of mine grew larger with each passing year. When I chuckled and told him he was full of baloney and that he created his mine from most of the people he met, he informed me that those he decided to add to his mine were not my business; their additions were his prerogative. They did not change a single part of his attitude.

He was right; it wasn’t my business. I just liked to argue with him, to keep the dance of our conversations going from topic to topic, from year to year. We did agree on some things, but over most topics, we bucked heads. We bucked hearts. We were alike, yet neither of us could see that we were arguing with our mirror image, our mirror soul, even down to sharing the same birthday. Wasn’t I a great present for him?

We did see it long before he died (and long after many family members and friends called me his clone—and yeah, we all knew that clones are always the same gender), and we still continued the same dance. It was our dance. It was challenging. It was fun.

Our arguments changed over the years, becoming less testy and more philosophical. Growing up causes that, on both sides.

Sometimes we would stop arguing and sing, or dance for real. Grandpa John loved to stiffen his back until it looked as though his spine had turned to steel, hold out his right arm stiffly with his elbow locked in a semicircle, and with his left hand at the ready to receive the hand of a lucky lady, he would hold me, Aunt Linda, Aunt Cindy, or Grandma Beanie gently yet firmly around the waist. He would then lead the dance, and we would allow it. It never occurred to him that we might not allow him to lead, and that is one topic none of us ever argued. It was altogether proper that he should lead, and respectful of a wonderful man that we would not argue those fleeting moments that meant so much to him.

I still grow, and still dance in my head, and I hope that things about which you and I disagree in the future will contribute to growth for both of us, as they did for my dad and me.

Down the trail of the bumpity road

It was a stretch of sidewalk in front of the house where the concrete had not cured properly. Most of the cement binding the strip together was crumbling, leaving thousands of tiny pebbles and flaking, chalky limestone deposits. It was a hazard. It was a mess. It was a trail to imagination.

We called it the bumpity road.

It was a road as surely as the two lane road running parallel to it was a road, but it was for smaller vehicles and smaller people. Adults didn’t like those stretches of the sidewalk because the pebbles and powdery limestone deposits were slip and trip hazards. The hazards started and stopped in front of our house and the neighbors’ houses for two blocks.

We ran up and down the bumpity road in front of our house when we were too young to leave the yard, and ran its entire two block length as we grew older. We wiped out with our bikes and our bodies and we dented fenders, sprung wheel spokes, and scraped knees, elbows, and hands.

We were ogreish toll takers, sea captains, jailers, warriors, crusaders, construction workers and even popcorn vendors when we turned tricycles upside down and, spinning the large front wheel with our hands working the pedals, dropped the tiny bumpity road pebbles over the tire and into the fender to make a rock and metal racket, with pebbles flying in all directions.

We traveled the world on the bumpity road before we left its length for new horizons. At the eastern end was the first school we attended. Beyond that school by a few blocks were other schools where we completed junior high and high school, from which we graduated to new forms of learning. At the western end of the bumpity road was the highway, where we spent our first nervous days driving, found our first jobs and spent our first coffee dates in various restaurants. From the highway we graduated to the world of responsibility.

The bumpity road launched us into worlds we dreamed of inhabiting. Fearless on our treks down the hazardous trail, we reached the end and then moved into the next trek as our next logical step.

I haven’t yet reached the end of the trail on which I embarked when I left the bumpity road, and there have been occasions when I have stumbled or felt lost. It is during those times that I remember the crumbly, bumpity trail and realize, though the road wasn’t solid when I was a child, I survived it and am still here, only slightly worse for wear.

The bumpity road and our travels just beyond made us tough. From scuffed knees, elbows, hands and hearts, we learned that the wounds from bumpity roads are temporary. We heal, and move on.

Pocahontas

Aunt Cindy is gorgeous, and was gorgeous as a child. Like most siblings, we didn’t notice that beauty on any relevant level until she won a beautiful baby picture contest when she was in the fifth grade. We could see it then. She really was beautiful, from birth.

That didn’t stop us from calling her Crackle-Teeth when when she gritted her teeth in her sleep. Siblings must do something to keep the beautiful ones real, you know. To her credit, she was as real as they come, loving camping, and learning, and living a life full of family, friends and general craziness.

She was stunning as the queen of her senior prom, tanned and wearing a simple, white, floor-length halter dress, teary-eyed because Grandpa John was playing “Queen of the Senior Prom” by the Mills Brothers on the stereo and preparing to claim his very proper, straight-backed and stiff-armed dance before she left for the evening. But she was not more beautiful than she had been as a toddler, touched by the sun until she was as brown as a nut.

Struck by the beauty of her own little daughter, Grandma Beanie said to Aunt Cindy, “You look like Pocahontas.”

Aunt Cindy immediately began to cry inconsolably until Grandma Beanie was able to make her understand that Pocahontas was a beautiful Indian princess, as she was believed to have been. Aunt Cindy liked that. We will never know what thoughts she had of Pocahontas before Grandma Beanie was able to convince her that Pocahontas had been a very good and beautiful person.

Mock trial

I am very excited about your mock trial and already having a ball discussing it with you. I agree that you are working on a very exciting case. Can you imagine having been one of the original prosecutors of Dr. Samuel Mudd for conspiracy to assassinate the president of the United States? I don’t believe he did anything wrong in treating John Wilkes Booth’s broken leg, but it seems he did much more than that.

As we discussed earlier, the page at University of Missouri – Kansas City School of Law is really interesting. I am not convinced that Dr. Mudd knew of any plan to assassinate President Abraham Lincoln, but it seems likely that he knew about a plan to kidnap the president.

I have no doubt that you will do very well in both the direct questioning and cross examination that you are preparing. I am so proud that you are a prosecutor.

The 1978 mock trial at Notre Dame University that I told you about, in which I was the star witness, was not based on a historical event. But it was murder. I do like murder mysteries.

My role was to play a very loud and dramatic young woman who claimed to have seen the murder. The defense attorney tore me apart on the stand (remember, they were Notre Dame law students). He almost got me to break character, he rattled me so much.

The worst part of my day was when I was late leaving my apartment in the morning and was running to the car. It was a bit icy and I slid and fell to the concrete. As knees do when they are skinned, it felt as if all of the skin on my knee was hanging down to my ankle, and oh boy, did it hurt. There was no time to change pantyhose, so I found myself tugging my skirt down all day to try and cover the knee.

Good luck in your mock trial. Don’t wear pantyhose, and don’t fall down. I know you will shine.