Rickrack, Metaphorically Speaking

When I grew up, all seventh-grade girls took Home Economics. No questions asked.

Yes, we were encouraged to attend college, but not for any sense of personal ambition. The assumption was that we would all marry but might need a profession to fall back on in case the husband died young and we became sole support for the children. College was Plan B.

Housewifing was every girl's main duty. We had domestic skills to master.

So one day Miss Uhl explained the important task of sewing aprons because we needed to wear them for the cooking unit. My mother, a self-taught seamstress, crafted beautiful clothes that could have hung in department store windows. She put the song in a Singer sewing machine. My pleated apron, Mom explained, would be black and white gingham, sporting a pocket (to hold a hankie or tissue) with appliqued red apple and green leaf.

A row of red rickrack would grace the hem.

That rickrack was the death of me.

Outfitted with my heart-shaped wristband pin cushion (which inexplicably I still have), designed by my mother to fulfill an earlier class assignment, I was prepared. I'd been laying out patterns for doll clothes under her eagle eye for years. I was a wizard at threading a machine, and I knew about sewing in reverse to catch the last stitches. I understood that speed did not lead to accuracy. I embraced the magic of clipping seams and pressing them open, despite the extra step.

Other girls finished quickly, unconcerned with bunched gathers or wrinkled waistbands or lopsided ties. Finished was all they cared about, but I labored on as if I were seeking the approval of Coco Chanel. Well, I kind of was. My mother would know the difference between a slipshod effort and brilliant precision.

Finally Miss Uhl told me to finish mine over the weekend because we started the cooking unit next Tuesday. If I didn't have an apron, I'd have to sit it out and be marked down accordingly. Preparing capable wives was serious business back then. Of course, she'd never looked at my project to see why it was taking me so long. The poor woman oversaw a room lined with thirty machines that had to be kept humming from 8 am to 3 pm five days a week--a suburban sweat shop of giddy girls. She was too worried about gum chewing and note passing, the kind of distractions that could lead to needle-pierced fingers. I was the least of her concerns.

My mother was distraught upon learning I was the last to finish. "How is that possible? Let me see what you've done," she said, leaning against the kitchen counter. I held up my apron with its dangling trim. She crossed the room to examine it.

She smiled. "Oh, honey," she said. "Look what you're doing."

You have to think about rickrack to understand this. Do you know how it angles right and then makes a sharp left? Only to turn a quick right again? And how it continues doing this for the entire length?  Do you know about sewing machines? How you have to pick up the lever for the foot under the needle to release the fabric and pivot it slightly for each of these turns and then lower it and stitch again and stop and lift...?

No wonder it was taking forever.

"You're making this harder than it has to be," my mother said softly. And she showed me the trick to rickrack.

You sew right down the center. One straight line of stitches holds it in place.

I amazed my parents regularly where practical matters were concerned. My dad once wisely said, about a history project that was running away with me, that I couldn't see the forest for the trees. Rickrack was yet another example of how adept I was at getting in my own way, at perceiving roadblocks that were figments of my imagination. I wish I could say I'd learned that lesson once and for all, but that wouldn't be true.

The good news, however, is that I'm quicker now to see those random oaks and sharp turns that overwhelm me. I understand my internal compass is capable of spinning east and west simultaneously. I know that north, right down the center, is hard for me to find.

That's a start at least.


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The Trouble With Teenagers

Back when I wanted a career in journalism, this was my first serious piece for the Milwaukee Journal Magazine. When Reader's Digest reprinted it, I was astonished. I even received fan mail. Now that I have a teenaged daughter, I read myself with even greater interest.

People say teenagers are no good. They make too much noise in shopping malls. They drive recklessly up and down America's main streets. They carry chips on their shoulders as big as the Sears Tower. And at least some of the time those things are true.

But we shouldn't forget there are hard moments in the life of a teenager, too.

I watched such a moment not long ago at a woman's funeral. I didn't expect the event to affect me. She was the wife of the man who owned the company where I'd worked for only a short time. Through much of the ceremony, in fact, I remained unmoved. One daughter sang her mother's favorite song; another read from The Prophet; her son read from the Bible. A priest spoke about her devotion to the church, the community, and about God's plan for us all. The smoothly organized service assured us that everything is controllable and understandable and fine.

Then her teenaged grandson, with golden hair and flushed cheeks, stepped forward. With his very first deep breath, every heart in that church was achingly reminded of something long ago forgotten. Softly he began:

"My grandmother was the nicest person I know. When my dog jumped up on her and left dirt on her dress, she said, 'Oh, what beautiful markings he has.' That was Nana's way.

"She took a back seat to my grandpa, who was a successful businessman in this city, but she was the one behind the scenes who provided the strength and support for his career," he said with a voice now trembling. "That was Nana's way."

Through a muffled sob, he continued. "Whenever she did anything worth recognition, you'd have to hear it from a different source because she was never one to brag. That was Nana's way."

Finally, in a voice breaking free of sorrow, he looked up and said, "Nana taught me courage. She put up an incredible fight to the end, when she died peacefully, which is how she lived her life. That was Nana's way, and I hope I can carry on in the same manner."

There are no hearts as delicate as those of teenagers because everything is happening to them for the first time. And despite their swaggering charm and flippant commentary, teenagers are scared about what to think, to say, to feel.

When the grandparent dies who has been the truest ally of an insecure teenager, nothing about the world ever feels quite right again. Not that death is easy for the adults involved either, but they have things to do: a service to arrange, flowers to select, relatives to call. Young children remain thankfully unaffected because the impact of a life lost has yet to strike deep notes in their brief world. But the teenager sits helplessly alone. Nothing but the loss occupies the time while neighbors arrive with cakes and casseroles. 

The perfunctory obligations of death and funerals spare adults who have learned to be controlled. They've accepted the safety provided by surrendering to a greater power. They've learned how to appear to be fine.

Structure deadens the immediate pain.

The trouble with teenagers is they haven't learned to be controlled. Living life right down the middle, with all its attendant land mines, is all they know. It hasn't occurred to them to run a zigzag pattern.

When that boy rose to speak about the woman who surely had been his truest ally and dearest friend, his honest voice dragged each adult out into the open, no longer able to hide in the calm of ritual. He exposed the truth about this real woman who believed in a boy who probably tried the patience of many adults. He reminded us that his grandmother was more than another dot on the predictable chart of life and death.

All over again, each adult felt the powerful losses crisscrossing their own hearts and knew that saying goodby to a beloved grandparent meant saying goodby to something unconditionally happy in a life.

That something never really returns. That pain never really goes away.

The trouble with teenagers is that they keep adults from forgetting about how they once were.

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No One Needs To Be Smarter Than A Fifth Grader

Fifth graders have life figured out.

Every spring my husband Cliff, an elementary school principal, invites his fifth graders, five at a time, into his office for milk and cookies. Information from these chats is used in the final assembly, attended by parents, to honor their children's time at the lower school campus. He says a few things about each student.

He contends that fifth graders know the importance of people. One boy told him that "being around someone you love makes you nicer." A girl suggested that a lonely person should watch the playground carefully because someone else is all alone, too. Just go over there.

They know everyone needs a friend.   

They understand effort. A child recited a Thomas Edison quotation: "Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration." Many know homework is only bad when they wait until the last minute. "Always pretend the deadline is now," one advised.

They know everyone should try their best.

Causes now matter to them. They pay attention to examples of courage. Ghandi's statement, "Be the change you want to see in the world," is as important as Olaf's, the snowman from Frozen, who says: "Some people are worth melting for."

They know everyone can make a difference.

At this age, a sense of humor deepens beyond knock-knock jokes. With understated irony, they can create an effect. One boy said his favorite quotation was from Richard Nixon: "I am not a crook." When Cliff announced this at the characteristically sentimental assembly, it brought the house down.

They know everyone loves to laugh.

By now, they have a sense of personal history. They've succeeded, and they've failed.  They know life can be overwhelming. One girl embraced the saying: "Accept that some days you are the pigeon and some days you are the statue."

They know everyone struggles.

While a popular TV game show insists we should be smarter than fifth graders, I'm not so sure. The announcer asks fact-based questions, as if that's all there is to wisdom. It isn't.

Just ask someone who is eleven years old.

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Sudden Angels Part 4: Each Dime

My mother died in 1999. That's when I realized what mattered.

Until then, I thought I had every last thing--wonderful husband, wonderful daughter, wonderful chance to publish a book, that turned out to be Sweet Moon Baby.

But the devastating loss of my mother, a larger-than-life presence who squeezed the best out of each day, left me paralyzed. My mother could do at least fifteen things at once to perfection. She did them with a single-minded intent, grabbing me by the hand to share the adventure beside her. The task might be routine, but she jollied me into thinking it was the chance of a lifetime. She was wise and funny and devoted to my valuable contribution. She saw to it that I succeeded at whatever it was, quoting from The Little Engine That Could who climbed an impossibly steep mountainside track. As I grew up, the challenges were increasingly harder, but she convinced me that with another tap, turn, or try, I'd make it. Quitting was never an option.

"Anything worth doing, is worth doing well," she said with a smile that shot sunbeams of possibility through my doubting heart.

Without her steadfast encouragement, I couldn't see how I'd rise to accomplish anything again.

She'd been gone for three days when I found the first dime.

While Maggie, who was two and a half, napped, I cried silently in the rocking chair. I was sinking. Then my eye caught a glimmer. In the distant corner, a single dime sparkled from the most unlikely location. Something about it did not seem random, so I placed it on my dresser.

The next day, as I carried groceries into the house, a wave of despair overtook me. Grief does that. With no warning, it covers your soul with the cold fingerprints of regret. As I placed the sacks down to find a tissue, I saw a dime by our door. I picked up the blinking comfort.

This appearance of dimes continued, sometimes alone and sometimes in pairs. They always seemed to radiate something about my mother. Maggie found them. Then Cliff. We couldn't explain it. We'd never found dimes in our lives before. Maggie named them Nana dimes.

We took her to Disneyland for a distraction after losing my mother because the heartbroken toddler could not comprehend why her grandmother would leave without saying goodby. Sadness swept through me when we approached the "Small World" ride I'd ridden with my mother at the New York World's Fair in 1964. It had been her favorite attraction. I knew she would have loved taking Maggie through it. Overwhelmed by her loss, I hesitated, trying not to cry in the world's happiest park. There on the pavement ahead, gleaming alone, untouched by the passing crowd, was a dime. I picked it up, believing my mother would indeed ride with us.

The people who helped my mother at the end of her life all found dimes within months of her passing. It made sense; she always sent thank you notes. Her housekeeper's skeptical husband said, "I don't think God works that way." I answered, "Maybe not. But I believe my mother could." He dropped by several days later to say he, too, had found a dime.

In Sweet Moon Baby, I searched for a way to include her dimes in the story. Maggie's arrival from China was the grandest day in my mother's life. Perhaps no one ever loved a grandchild the way she did. Widowed at forty-six, she'd packed away a trunk of certain joys. But Maggie was her unexpected blessing. And so I wrote:

          They crisscrossed a hundred roads. Coins twinkling like scattered moon beams
          took them from corner to corner.

By now I've found almost 350 dimes. Each one appeared on a day when I struggled or on a day when I was elated. The same is true for dimes found by Cliff and Maggie. Their arrival feels linked to something we would have shared with her.

There must be a way to calculate the odds for finding dimes. An equation surely exists to explain this event.


I don't care about numbers.

The other day Maggie helped me plant grass seed. I don't like yard work. She doesn't either. Like any teenager, she was not at her best. I remembered my mother patiently overlooking my poor attitude about things I didn't want to do. So I started telling her about my mother's yard-planting joy and how she hoed huge expanses, removing every twig and pebble, raking the space for all it was worth, faithfully watering twice a day. "Those seeds knew better than to disappoint Nana," I told her.

Maggie forgot her misery. We talked and laughed until we'd finished. No one would have been more proud of us than my mother. By now I don't have to tell you what I found in the seed the next morning.

Once my mother died, I understood what mattered. At first I thought death meant I'd lost her forever. But she wasn't about to let that happen. Not my mother. She had no intention of letting anything get in her way. Ever. While death is a powerful reality, it can't hold a candle to the certainty of love.

In each dime.  

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Oklahoma Winds

Almost no one has ever spent time in Oklahoma.

Whenever people ask about my life, and I mention my time in the state, they nod and say, "I passed through once on my way to Dallas/Los Angeles/Memphis. Not much there." I can't disagree. The Indians, who were marched in on The Trail of Tears from their beautiful homelands elsewhere, felt the same way.

I've said plenty of times that if I'd been on a covered wagon headed West, I'd have turned around and gone back upon rolling into Oklahoma.

The Wichita Mountains near Lawton are the country's oldest range and, in their hey day, would have looked like the Rocky Mountains. Now they're on their way back into the earth, which explains why they're reduced to piles of colossal rocks. Even the mountains want out. Enough said.

Yes, Oklahoma has cities with air-conditioned malls and elaborate suburbs like any place in America. Their universities are impressive. First-run movies play there. They have Starbuck's.

But the lay of the land defines any territory. Despite its post-card pretty spring azaleas, it's basically a hard place with far too many flat acres sliced up by barbed wire. During summer droughts, people give up on lawns and daisies and tomatoes because water is rationed. The blamed hot wind burns the life out of everything green.

So it's an everlasting wonder to me that Broadway's first modern musical was Oklahoma! Set in a simpler time, it's about everyone getting all dolled up to go on a picnic. Such a sweet notion. If you know the story at all, however, you know it takes a bad turn. Tap dancing and fringed surrey aside, a menacing darkness roars through the fun.

That is Oklahoma.

Smack dab in the center of Tornado Alley, it is a horrific place to live. I've seen my share of twisters. They are a swirling, mesmerizing wonder. Dropping out of a bottle-green sky, they massacre the landscape with an unforgiving tunnel of wind.  I've hidden in hall closets and underground shelters and never been hurt.

But that wasn't true a year ago when twenty-four people died from a tornado in Moore. Our relatives there suffered serious property damage. Life is still not back to normal for many and never will be for some.

If you live anywhere in Oklahoma, you know it's a dangerous place. Powerful loss can ride in on the next brutal wind.

So I was especially touched when we saw Maggie's boyfriend in his school's production of Oklahoma! They captured the romantic spirit of a farm on the plains. They whooped and hollered through ambitious dance sequences. They had ruffles and paper lanterns and picnic baskets. But best of all, they had a collection box in the lobby for donations to the Moore High School Theater Department because that 2013 tornado destroyed their construction equipment. A portion of ticket sales went toward the fund, too. These sympathetic students in St. Paul wanted to help.  

Annually in Oklahoma, "where the wind goes sweepin' down the plain," countless valuable things are carried away.

But every now and then, good winds blow in, too. Generously. All the way from up here in Minnesota.

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The Happiness of Lady Chang

I know she looks like a statue to you.  But she has a story.

It begins with Maggie's hardest year in grade school. The teacher was not adept at creating community spirit, so chaos prevailed. Whenever I volunteered to help with a classroom project, Maggie ran to me as I arrived and held on for all she was worth.

Often when I picked her up at dismissal, she was exhausted, quiet, worried after her tumultuous day at the "zoo." I understood.

Sometimes retail therapy seemed like the best medicine. She rode in the shopping cart's child seat, her hand over mine, as we looked at towels and mirrors and sandbox toys.

One day at the sale table, she pointed to a pile of garden trinkets. "Oh, Mama, look at her. She's so sad," she said, pulling a scuffed white wooden Asian statue from the mix. I agreed. We talked about her perilous journey from China to North Carolina. We wondered how it felt to be beautiful but overlooked among the chintzy plastic lawn accessories. We imagined what would make her happy.

Marked for Final Clearance at $3.99, we were her last chance. We shuddered to think where she'd be sent next. We had to take her home. 

She was lovely in our yard, placed beneath a pink dogwood. Maggie called her Lady Chang. I don't know why. The tree's petals fell around her, just as that horribly challenging school year was ending. Maggie insisted she looked happy for the first time. I could see the difference, too.

When we moved to Minnesota, Maggie started middle school, not an easy thing. We brought Lady Chang with us. She's had a hard time in the front garden.

We don't have a pink dogwood tree. Squirrels and rabbits have eaten the flowers we planted beside her. She has been covered by snow for seven months every year.  Happiness has been elusive.

Maggie moved on to high school. Boys can be rude. Girls can be mean. Teachers can be thoughtless. She didn't always get the part she wanted in the play.  

In desperation, I planted a bleeding heart in the garden last summer. A heat wave took its toll, despite my watering efforts.


Sometimes all a mother can do is wait and hope through a bitter season.

But this spring has been good.

The bleeding heart bloomed.

Maggie attended the prom.

I've never seen Lady Chang look happier. 

Trust me.


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Target Therapy

I spend a lot of time at Target. It has socks and celery and Starbucks in one place.

But more than simple shopping, I sometimes roam the store for inspiration, for head-clearing color. Because I spend so much time alone as a writer, moving mindlessly down their carefully arranged aisles of details has a therapeutic effect.

Maybe that sounds crazy, but it works for me.

You go any place often enough and you notice the regulars. My nearest Target has Charlotte.

She's always there in the morning, sitting in the plastic chair by the west door. She silently watches all of us entering and exiting. Her face is emotionless. It's hard to guess how old she is. She could be 45 or 65 under her short white hair.

Lost souls are beyond age.

Yesterday was unusual because she was walking the aisles with a Target employee. Charlotte wore purple plaid flannel pajamas under her red jacket. She thought she needed something cooler for spring, but she definitely wanted pajama bottoms with pockets or as she asked, "What will I do with all my stuff?"

He nodded understandingly and agreed no pockets could be troublesome. "Charlotte, let's look over here for something that might work. We have some on sale today." He led her to racks of pajamas. I went on about my way.

Then I found her in the dairy section, talking through the opened refrigerator door to the employee who was stocking milk. "These won't be cold enough," Charlotte explained to him. "They should have been put out during the night, so they'd be ready by morning." His answer sounded polite and apologetic. Charlotte said she'd come back tomorrow.

I'm guessing she always finds a reason to return the next day.

When I got home, I looked up Target's mission statement and noticed the part about "exceptional guest experiences" along with remarks about "behaving ethically and with integrity." Their design comments mention dedication to more than looks. They focus on how design "satisfies a need" and how it "makes you feel." 

I know Target has been under fire for the holiday credit card debacle. I don't know enough to weigh in on that, but honestly I'm surprised that stolen identities and banking fraud aren't hourly occurrences, given the cards we swipe into machines all over the place that send the information heaven only knows where. 

I just know that Charlotte, whoever she is, is treated respectfully by Target. She might not realize the importance of her experience, but I do. I'm glad for her.

We both benefit from Target therapy.

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