The Way We Are

For me the jury will always be out on Facebook.

I'm not really a picture poster of my morning walk or my pot of soup or my new shoes. Still, through Facebook I've been found by great people who have been absent from my life for decades. I've read some interesting articles I wouldn't have discovered on my own. I've been inspired by artful banners with lovely sayings.

Recently, however, I happened onto a heated exchange among students I taught at an independent high school in the 80s. I was amazed.

In all honesty, I couldn't remember much about some of them, but some I will always know like the back of my hand. Teach teenagers for four years in a small school and sponsor them in extracurricular activities, and their emotional fingerprints leave marks on your heart.

My husband Cliff and I met at that school. He taught in the elementary division, and over the years, his students began to show up in my classes. By trading notes, we realized they hadn't changed from kindergarteners to freshmen. The rowdy ones were still racing down the halls. The anxious souls were still biting their nails. The excellent students were still academically engaged. Children were children.

But here's what snapped me to attention as I scrolled through the Facebook ranting. They really hadn't changed in adulthood either. Grades and classroom behavior were no longer the issue here.

Civility was.

Tolerance was.

Goodness was.

No matter how many degrees they'd earned or spouses they'd had or children they'd raised or careers they'd exchanged, their personalities were basically the same.

I was relieved to no longer be responsible for the difficult ones. But I missed the dear ones like all get out. Their considered comments made me smile. Few things are better than knowing you once played a part in the sweet lives of people who have maintained their clarity.

We are who we always were. For better or worse.

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The Strategy of Belief

Children come easily into the lives of some people. That was not the case for Cliff and me. Armed with a wing and a prayer, we ended up on the roller coaster ride of international adoption in the 1990s.

China had their rules. The United States had theirs.

Our job was to send countless notarized documents back and forth across this country and theirs. I walked around with my hands in the air, ready for yet another round of fingerprinting. Cliff said there was no reason to put his checkbook away because every office wanted another fee. 

Then everything changed. China said the baby demand required an overhaul. They padlocked their adoption bureau doors. Our paperwork was trapped inside. It would take however long it took.

We waited.

Like a lot of women in my shoes, I avoided toy stores and children's departments. Tiny sweaters and stuffed bears were painful reminders. They went into the hands of every child except ours.

Then one spring shopping day in the middle of housewares, I needed to believe in her, our anonymous oversees baby. Ceramic ducks and glass eggs lined the shelves, and I remembered the Easter decorations my mother displayed every year. They made the holiday real for me. I wanted something that would make the holiday real for her. Some day. With us.

Magical thinking is hard to explain. There is no rational equation here. Every heart clings to something.

Suddenly I spotted them: a sugar and creamer of adorable bunny sweethearts. He held the yellow mirror so his girlfriend could admire her bonnet. I knew she'd love them, this child I'd never laid eyes on.

A year later, she did.

Maggie carefully positioned her face to peek into that tiny mirror, adjusting the girl so she could see herself. She's done that every year of her life with us until this one. In that offhand teenager way, she said it didn't matter.

I've been thinking about this. For several years we've played a game when I'd make out a grocery list. I'd ask if she needed anything. She'd offer several items: strawberries, peanut butter, and a boyfriend. "I'll look," I'd say, pretending to add that, too. I finally realized this year she has the thing she's wanted for years--a sweetheart of her own.

I moved the girl for her.

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Teaching in the Dark

I don't know that people can really be taught how to teach.

Anyone can memorize strategies. Anyone can follow the Teacher's Guide. Anyone can give a multiple choice test. But what do you end up with? None of that accomplished what I thought ought to happen in a classroom.

I once had a sophomore English class of 15 or so kids who wouldn't talk. They were good kids, but I don't know if any of them were destined to become college English majors. Scheduling controlled the kind of students who ended up in a section. Maybe these were excellent math/science minds. The answer needed to be 24 or it was wrong. The experiment needed to prove at what temperature oil boils.

Discussing a novel was wide open territory. That kind of horizon might have been too far to travel for them. I knew it would be a long year if I couldn't bring them along on the journey.

Out of desperation, I decided to make them invisible. If no one saw them, they wouldn't have to risk being embarrassed for an answer. So I took a lantern that we were using for the fall play to class. The windowless room would be pitch black without the florescent lighting.

I struck a match, replaced the globe, and lowered the wick, knowing most of them had never seen a lantern lighted. When I told the girl near the switch to turn off the lights, she hesitated. This was not a direction ever given. "Go on," I said encouragingly.

There was a soft gasp. I let the silence settle as their faces faded into the darkness. Every last classroom expectation disappeared.

They became anonymous.

I asked a question about the chapter. No one answered, as usual. "I know," I said. "It's a hard thing to think about. I'm not sure I know how to answer it either. I can wait."

They realized there was no point of raising a hand that couldn't be seen. They calculated this puzzle. Finally someone spoke quietly, admitting he wasn't sure either, since I wasn't sure, but thought....Then someone else spoke. Then someone else. I asked another question and another, all based on possibilities they'd offered. It was a discussion, all right.

I suppose you couldn't do that now. I'd be reported for having matches. A parent would complain that I'd endangered lives. I'd be written up for violating fire codes. It wouldn't qualify under Common Core guidelines.

But I can tell you this: Nothing was ever the same in that room again. They found their voices in the dark. And they weren't about to go back. I still have that lantern. If lighted, you'd see the same glow. But I see those golden sophomore faces.


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Lilies Nevertheless

In Minnesota, spring is a struggle.

I awoke on this April morning to five inches of new snow across the garden--pretty and fluffy but wrong.

On a day like this, it takes imagination to remember what lies beneath the snow. Below the cold drifts, my grandmother's lilies wait for their chance. Even though they are invisible, they hold their inevitable green and yellow promises close.

They are not worried. They are not frustrated. They are not desperate. They wait patiently. Theirs are resilient spirits. 

I cannot face making another pot of hot soup for dinner, not in April. Instead, I'm looking ahead, trying to be like a lily nevertheless. So we'll have poppy seed chicken and asparagus with fresh lemon juice. I'll let a few seeds fall onto the platter. Dinner will be a reminder of what people forget when faced with April snow.

Seeds.

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The Illinois Seashore

Most families have some tradition they can't explain.

I once read the account of a woman who always cut the end off a ham before cooking it. When her daughter asked her why, she answered, "That's what my mother did, so it must make it taste better." The daughter asked her grandmother, who replied, "My pan was small. That's how I made it fit."

Something practical becomes magical.

My grandmother always kept a fern in a large seashell on her porch. I assumed ferns grew best that way.

I never once considered how my grandmother, living all her life in Southern Illinois, got that big shell. I don't remember ever hearing a story of a relative traveling to the ocean and bringing it back as a souvenir. She came from a long line of farm people, and they never left home for longer than a few hours.

Who would feed the chickens? Who would mend the fence? Who would pull the weeds? They lived a Little Red Hen life without complaining.

By the time I wondered about it, my grandmother had died. My mother didn't know the answer either.

But I couldn't stop thinking about it. For some reason I've always believed that if I thought long enough about any puzzle, I could connect its dots and find a plot line, a character's motivation, a meaningful metaphor. I could solve anything.

I remembered summers in the front yard swing with my grandmother. I'm sure now it was how she got me to take a nap, my head resting in her lap. To my right, her seashell fern bobbed in the breeze on the porch, a wide expanse of cement beach out there in the country. And in the distance, the wind blew the rows of corn, the stalks rising and falling like green ocean waves. The warm air rushed up to us, ruffling the long grass blades at her feet. My grandmother and I rocked together, our hearts afloat in our swinging boat, daydreaming together on the Illinois seashore.

Forever after, I've kept a fern in a conch shell, too, not because I know why, but because she did.

That's reason enough.   

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If a Stone Turns

I resisted labyrinth walking at first.

I thought it would be upsetting in the way that walking a maze, with its Point A to Point B prescription, made me panic. Finding my way through the tall shrubs was a living nightmare. I didn't know if I should turn left or right. My heart raced. I was trapped by my own doubt.

I wanted out. I wanted someone to save me.

A labyrinth, however, bobs and weaves with meaning. The trail is clearly set. Walk within the marked boundaries and you succeed. In fact, even if you stray, the course will take you somewhere. Ultimately it doesn't matter how you reach the center or if you bypass it completely and return to the beginning for the second time.

You don't win or lose. You keep turning. One way or the other.

And turning is the point.

I live in patterns, routines, habits. I drive the same streets. I buy the same yogurt. I relive the same disappointments. Those brain channels deepen into a self-imposed A to B monotony.

When I finally walked a labyrinth, I was forced to turn at unexpected moments. It pushed my brain left, with my feet following instead of hesitating. Before I could get too comfortable with that left turn, I was sent right. I gratefully paced forward at a steady clip, only to be pressed suddenly right and left and right.

Whoa. What happened? How did I get here? But I was still going. And I was fine.  I was not lost. I was on the journey.

I've walked labyrinths less than ten times by now, so I still know just enough to be dangerous. On a vacation in Cincinnati, I found myself on one by happenstance. I thought I was walking it on a lark to introduce the concept to an uninitiated friend. It was a warm summer day, and I followed the path marked by rocks from the Ohio River.

I wasn't thinking about anything, although walkers are free to ponder a particular issue while winding. For some reason, I took my eyes off the blue sky and glanced down. There it was--my unexpected talisman, a small crooked stone. I stopped.

I think of river stones as evenly edged, not as something bent. I considered its crook formed over millions of years, I guess. (Geology is not my field.) Something clearly got in its way--an aggressive rock or a stubborn tree root or a resistant dinosaur skull.  

That rock didn't wait for the impediment to pass. It didn't freeze, hoping to be saved. It changed course. It turned bravely, however long that took, and never looked back. It continued on its journey.

I hold it in my hand from time to time as a reminder when my brain stops too long in one of its  time-scraped ruts.

The stone's bent edge reminds me of my own possibility. If I keep turning.

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A Quilted Fish out of Water

I don't know what it is about me. My presence, specifically my name, doesn't compute.

I finally tried to create an author profile for the Goodreads page about Sweet Moon Baby: An Adoption Tale. I began clicking here and there, only to be told that HENRY was not an acceptable last name so I should try again.

A new round of clicking began, only to be told that I had to apply for LIBRARIAN status if I wanted to edit an author profile. There was no author profile; that's what I was trying to create. I just wanted to offer some details for the folks who landed on my page.

I don't want to be a librarian. That ship sailed. (I'm not even sure I'm an author on some days, truth be told.)

My trouble wasn't just with technology. My name has been swimming upstream for decades.

When I got married in the late 1970s, I faced name changing red tape when I explained to the bank teller that I'd need new checks. She congratulated me on getting married and began asking questions and filling out a form. She handed it to me, marking where I should sign. I scanned the blanks she'd filled in.

"No," I said. I don't want the checks to say Mrs. Clifford W. Clark."

"Would you prefer Ms.?" she asked with a knowing nod.

"No. I want it to say Karen Henry Clark. I'm not using my husband's name," I said brightly.

 Shocked silence. Then she asked incredulously, "Why not? Aren't you proud to be married?"

Okay. I'll admit this was Tulsa, Oklahoma, a state still known for being socially behind the curve. Our Junior League cookbook from that era listed recipe donors as Mary Brown (Mrs. John T.). Being married was everything then. (I suspect it still is out there in many circles.) 

In all fairness, the recipes were great. In fact, we still use many of them. (My husband cooks, but don't mention that. I'm sure that's not what the cookbook committee ever intended.)

I patiently explained to the teller that this wasn't about my husband and that I never intended to be known as Mrs. Him. She said she'd have to talk to a manager and disappeared behind a door. When she returned, she said my check request would be discussed at the next board meeting. They'd let me know their decision.

I am absolutely not making this up.

I don't remember how much time passed, but I finally received a call. They granted permission for one box printed with my requested name change "to see how it would go."

Don't you wonder what that meant? Was I a new-fangled scam? Some kind of feminist fiasco that would fraudulently steal millions from respectfully married members? Best I can tell, whatever they feared was never perpetrated by my red-flag name.

But as someone with three names, I can tell you that technology remains confused with it to this day. Some places have filed me under C or H or HenryClark or Henry-Clark. I've learned to roll with it.

But my basic inability to communicate correctly with computers, however, has continued. A tech-literate friend, who was trying to unravel a device problem for me, said, "Karen, you're the only person I know who would be better off living among the Amish."


I love quilts.

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