A broken heart is an open heart.
ANN C. AVERILL
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Crossing over

12/30/2014

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A four year old is standing behind a toy ironing board pressing her dolly’s dress. Mommy presses the little girl’s pinafore at a grown up ironing board.

Looking out the front window the little girl says, “I want to cross over.”

Mommy says, “When Jacky gets home from kindergarten.”

Jacky is the little girl’s best friend. His older brother Ricky gives her piggy back rides and makes her fly by holding her hands and spinning around till both are dizzy. The little girl’s doll is named Mary Lou after Jacky’s sister who babysits. Jacky’s brother Peter doesn’t count. He’s still a stinky baby.

After lunch Mommy crosses the little girl over the straight country road where cars come fast over the hill. Mommy sits in the kitchen with Louise and sips coffee from a cream colored cup with raised ceramic cherries dripping down the side. The little girl sits on mommy’s lap and tries to pick the cherries off the matching saucer.

Nana sits in the living room in a nubby brown armchair next to a bird cage.  Nana lifts the embroidered cover off the bars, “Come hear my canaries.” The little girl stands in front of the narrow fireplace and listens to the birdies sing.

When Jacky calls, she runs up the steep stairs to his attic bedroom. There is a toy box under the window. The little girl lifts the lid. Nothing inside but a dirty argyle sock. Tiny cowboy boots lay on the wooden floor. A shiny cap gun peeks out from beneath one of the twin beds. Its stiff little holster sits atop Jacky’s blue chenille spread. A red bow and arrow sits on Ricky’s rumpled covers. Another arrow tipped in a blue suction cup sticks to the window. The little girl picks up a tambourine on the braided rug and shakes its jingles. In the hallway that leads to Mary Lou’s room, there are metal roller skates that adjust with a key. The little girl goes through the open door and gasps at the black patent leather tap shoes on the floor. She inserts her tiny toes and pulls on the black gross grain ribbons to keep them on. Clunk, clunk,clunkity clunk. As she crosses the floor, she spies a chrome baton with white rubber nubs at each end. Beside it are white majorette boots with tassels. The little girl pulls off the taps, puts on the calf-height boots, and tosses the baton towards the ceiling. It falls with a thud as Jacky fires the cap gun. Pow, pow!

Downstairs Mommy calls it’s time to go home, but the little girl doesn’t want to leave this tiny house that smells like diapers and spilled bird seed. She doesn’t want to leave smiling Louise with her hair tied up in a kerchief, her hands in dirty dish water. She doesn’t want to leave wrinkled Nana and the lemon yellow birds that sing, the toy box and its spilled treasure. She begs for a brother, wherever they come from, so she won’t have to cross over for a playmate to the house that feels like Christmas every day of the year. 
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The Crèche

12/21/2014

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There is a small corrugated box, a pile of Popsicle sticks, a jar full of sawdust, some huge pine cones, a few twigs, and some bark on the kitchen table. Mommy says we are making a crèche. I sit beside her as she sets the box on its side and folds the upper flap to make a roof. She pulls apart the pine cone petals and shows me how to glue them on like shingles. She opens the side flaps and the box turns into a building with wide open doors. She tells me to glue the twigs on the doors in the shape of an X. Now the box looks like Granddaddy’s barn.   Mommy puts glue on the back of the Popsicle sticks, and I press them against the inside walls. She spreads more Elmer’s on the bottom of the box, and I get to sprinkle saw dust on the floor.  The tree bark goes on the outside walls.

We wash our hands and Mommy zips me into my blue parka before she pulls on her maroon coat with the fur collar and cuffs. She puts me in the front seat and slams the door of our blue and white Dodge with tail fins like a big fish. She reaches in her purse and pulls out a shiny tube. Then glancing in the mirror, arches each lip with the color of a candy apple. Her purse snaps shut, and we are off to the ten cent store across the street from Kroney’s Market.

In the center of the five and dime there is a high counter where a short little old lady sits behind a cash register while her little old man wanders the store.  I glide along the outside counters fingering the small bins of pink teddy bear erasers, the Mickey Mouse pencil cases, the blunt- tipped scissors, silver jacks,  rubber balls, green dice, leather wallets branded with lariats and rearing horses, cap guns, rolls of red caps, balloons, bubbles, balsa wood airplanes, Popeye  Pez dispensers, Tootsie Roll Pops, all things I can only hope Santa will leave in my green felt stocking.  

Mommy is standing by the plastic folded rain hats, miniature sewing kits, darning needles, and crochet hooks when the little old man says, “May I help you?” 

“Yes, Mr. Koontz.” Mommy scans the shelves above the bins lined with china figurines: German shepherds, angora kittens, Jack and Jill going up the hill… “Do you carry nativity figures?”

“Right this way.” Mr. Koontz leads us towards more bins chocked with ten cent bearded men in red bathrobes, ladies in blue bathrobes and matching head scarves, and babies stuck in troughs like where Granddaddy feeds the cattle. There are all sorts of animals too. Mommy says I can pick out two lambs, a cow, a donkey, and even a camel with a fancy red saddle. We pick out two of the bearded men. She says one will be Joseph, the other a shepherd. One blue lady will be Mary, the mother of the baby stuck in the trough.  She also selects three men dressed like kings. The purple one carries a golden treasure chest, the green one a basket. The red king has his hand over his heart.  

When we get home the saw dust is dry, so I can put all the animals in our little barn. Mommy says the people go in the barn too. She says the baby’s name is Jesus, and the kings are wise men who have come to worship him. She hangs a crocheted angel from the window latch to sing to the shepherd while he watches his sheep. She tells me this is what Christmas is really about and yet we place the crèche on the shelf next to the record player where Daddy plays Bing Crosby’s White Christmas and we hang up my stocking.   

Before bed we put out a plate of cookies for Santa and two carrots for his reindeer.  Lying on the braided rug in the dark living room, I stare at the Christmas tree lights, and believe, as only a child can believe, in the magic of Christmas Eve. And so I dream up a plan. After mommy and daddy go to sleep, I will sneak out of my bed and hide in the cupboard by the fireplace. From there, I am sure to witness Santa coming down the chimney to stuff my stocking.

But in the morning, I find myself under my covers, my plan failed.  Yet there is my stocking, the top bulging with a pink tulle tutu. “Mommy, Daddy, Look! Santa knew just what I wanted.” They titter and sip their Nescafe as I squeeze the leotard on right over my pajamas. Mommy sets the arm of the record player on the Nutcracker, and I leap onto the coffee table, twirling with joy beside the crèche – waiting patiently on the shelf.

Waiting for me to figure out that Mommy and Daddy ate Santa’s cookies and tucked me in my bed, that shepherds are poor, dirty men nobody usually sings to, that having a baby in a barn is gross and desperate. Yet Christmas is not the fraud that Santa is.

It will take years before I understand why the green wise man’s basket held incense used for both burial and worship. Years before I understand that the purple king’s glittering gift was nothing compared to the gift of the baby stuck in the trough. Years before I am again child enough to place my own hand over my heart and believe the eye witness account of the Christmas miracle displayed by a tattered crèche.

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The Christmas formula for Success

12/5/2014

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Last year I published my first novel, Broken, 180 days in the Wilderness of an Urban Middle School. It describes a middle class teacher, discovering the agony of professional failure for the first time in her life. Ironically, she must solve the same conundrum her underachieving students face:  if you are what you do, who are you when you fail? According to the pattern of this world – nothing!

Like the teacher in my novel, I grew up following the world’s formula for success. Gain some kind of professional identity. Then achieve, achieve, achieve, for the sum of your achievements equals your root value.

I still remember the Christmas when this traditional paradigm was turned on its head. I read in the Bible that God knows we are all underachievers, unable to control the evils in our lives from both within and without. He knows we are unable to carry out our best intentions even when we drive ourselves crazy trying. Our worth is not grounded in what we do, but on what God does on our behalf. Christ’s mysterious birth sets in motion his ultimate sacrifice. Jesus dies the death we all deserve for our abysmal performance in this fallen world. The Star of David points directly to the cross and answers the heartbreak of a creator who desires peaceful reunion with his damaged creation.

This year, I’ve started a new memoir. Looking over the stains and disappointments of my youth, I marvel that God could love me at all. But if I am not the sum of my success, neither am I the sum of my sin. Jesus frees me not only from striving, but from shame. This season, as I look outside my wintery window, I really do feel whiter than snow.  Joy to the world, to all who need to feel clean, the Lord is come, to set us free. Let earth receive her king, may we acknowledge our need for a relationship with the ruler of the universe. Let every heart prepare him room, Jesus is available to anyone who humbly desires his presence in the deepest spaces of their being, and heaven and nature sing! Hallelujah! That’s the Christmas formula for success.

 

 

 

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    The more specific a story, the more universal. I love memoir because it's willing to face the truth. No matter the topic, if it's true, it reveals what needs to be known by both author and reader.   

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