Grace

I am a complete coward. I thought I wasn't going to write for a while but spending time with family has a way of slamming my face right up against some of my most lovely traits. The moment my parents come, I hide.

Most of the year we say grace at the dinner table. I shouldn't say we. Matt says grace. He came home from preschool one day and simply announced that he was saying grace and he has ever since, the very same one he learned in preschool. "God, you are very good to us, to give us food each day, to make us big and strong, so we can work and run and play. Amen."

Luke hates it. There have been nights when the simple act of Matt saying grace has touched off yet another round of the never-ending theological, philosophical, legislative ( as in "I shouldn't have to be forced to sit here while this is being said.") debates.

I love that it hasn't changed one bit in all these years. I wouldn't know what to replace those words with anyway and I sure wouldn't want to replace the feelings. I don't know if what is said matters as much as that we take a moment to appreciate that we are sitting together, to recognize, with gratitude, that the many things that could disrupt such quotidian tranquility are not in our lives. I like the fact that, at fifteen, Matt likes the ritual and still feels comfortable with those preschool words in his mouth. I even like the fact that, as much as Luke sighs and complains, he still takes the hands of whomever is sitting on either side of him and suffers through it.

Okay, so why on earth do I let the simple presence of my parents in my house cow me, cow us into abandoning one of our rituals?

At dinner years ago, when Matt was four or five and the words of the grace were still fresh, he started to do what he always did: make us hold hands. My mother was shocked but she complied, perhaps because he was cute and small, but the eye-rolling and significant looks at my dad were loud enough that none of us - especially Matt - wanted to do that again.

It makes me so sad that I haven't figured out a way to be myself and their daughter at the same time. I feel lost if I force it, lost if I don't but there is something about taking the time to recognize the sacred in the day-to-day I don't ever want to lose.

Christmas break

Mom and Dad are in town so I'll probably be too busy dealing with the "now, why exactly are you doing this crazy thing" questions to post until the end of the month but, maybe not... I hope your holiday season, whatever it entails, is filled with peace and joy.

A present -- my favorite passage of the Bhagavad Gita from Stephen Mitchell's translation all together in one place:

He who can see inaction
in the midst of action, and action
in the midst of inaction, is wise
and can act in the spirit of yoga.

With no desire for success,
no anxiety about failure,
indifferent to results, he burns up
his actions in the fire of wisdom.

Surrendering all thoughts of outcome,
unperturbed, self-reliant,
he does nothing at all, even
when fully engaged in actions.

There is nothing that he expects,
nothing that he fears. Serene,
free from possessions, untainted,
acting with the body alone,

content with whatever happens,
unattached to pleasure or to pain,
success or failure, he acts
and is never bound by his action.

When a man has let go of his attachments,
when his mind is rooted in wisdom,
everything he does is worship
and his actions all melt away.

Bhagavad Gita 4.18-4.23

Telling them...

So I finally came clean with Mom and Dad.

I didn’t do it until just before I started all of this in earnest. I was afraid to tell them. I'm an alleged grown-up with kids of my own and I'm still worried about what they think about what I'm doing, even more fearful of what they'll say. To be fair, I've had decades of experience telling them things they didn't want to hear. When I came home from an expensive fancy college to tell them that I wasn’t applying to medical school, that I wanted to get a job in television, my mother said, “What did we send you to college for?”

Now this? They're going to think I'm an idiot.

I'd put off telling them for months. When I quit my job running the regional public television newsmagazine, I kind of forgot to mention that I knew what I was doing next, specifically. They heard “writing,” they heard “more time with Luke and Matt” and that my husband’s work was doing okay, so Mom and Dad didn’t really ask too many questions.

On the phone, Mom had said, “Maybe now you won’t have to work so hard all the time. I hate to see you run ragged.”

“Me, too, Mom.”

But I talk to my parents so many times during a week it just got plain weird not to tell them what was going on, especially when this project was becoming my life, especially when we were all going to be together for their fiftieth anniversary at their honeymoon spot in Florida.

__

In my suitcase, I brought two things to give them: a pair of patchwork pillowtops I’d made for them with their wedding photos ironed on the center squares of each and a copy of the pages I’d given to Hemu and her sadhu, the same ones I'd given to Swami Sarvadevananda. I took the pillowtops out right away – they were a big hit – but the manuscript stayed in the bottom of the empty suitcase until the day before we were meant to leave.

Not long after breakfast, I walked into their hotel room, handed over the paper held together by brass grommets, and took Luke and Matt to the beach.

Hours later, fingers wrinkled, salt baked into skin, I sent the boys ahead to take showers and opened the door to Mom and Dad’s room. Beyond the entrance hall, Dad sat with his back to the sliding glass door, scratching words into the squares of his spiral-bound double acrostic book. It wasn’t late but the sun was already behind the tall building we were in, its shadow crossing the pool and even the beach beyond. His pose was so familiar it was like a hug: one leg crossed wide over the other to support the hard pad, left hand curled around a pen, head down and slightly tilted. His hair might be baby fine and white with a whisper of tan skin beneath but the scene was the same since I was little. He seemed so happy when he was like this. He seemed so alone.

“Hi, Dad.”

Dad’s hearing is flawless for someone nearing eighty but his puzzle concentration is absolute. I tried again. “Dad?”

“Oh, hi. Boys have a good time down there?”

“Yeah, where’s Mom?”

“She’s getting ready.”

Screaming through my head was: Did you read it? Did she? Nothing in his eyes or voice said anything so I didn’t either. Forcing it felt wrong. Besides, I knew better than to start with Dad; he let Mom handle stuff like this. So I just asked, “When are we leaving for dinner?”

Looking up over his reading glasses, “Half an hour.”

After the fastest shower I knew how to take, I was back, a kid waiting for approval of a lumpy handmade ashtray.

I know I’m not supposed to care what they think, what she thinks. I mean, when am I going to get over this? I’ve investigated bad guys while at 60 Minutes, I’ve worn hidden cameras in dangerous places, I’ve interviewed a serial killer on death row and many other criminals in prisons and jails, in my last job, I’ve made decisions that an entire staff didn’t like, and yet I’m still tiptoeing around looking for signs in my parents’ eyes.

Why do I care? What am I waiting for? Permission?

And then I knew: the dread of having this very conversation and others like it is what’s stopped me dead for decades. I feel like I was born with only one subject on my mind: Is there a point and, if so, what is it? Is the visible all that’s real? Yet it’s taken me half a lifetime to become either stubborn enough or driven enough to make anyone else’s reactions meaningless…. that’s probably overstating it…to make anyone else’s bad reaction less important. But, for all that progress, I was still standing there, desperate to know what they thought.

The smell of Jean Nate and the sound of charm bracelets always told us when my mother was ready to go out. My parents didn’t go out often when we were little but, when they did, Mom loved dressing in red and black, sometimes with big wide belts or dresses she’d made, some dramatic. The bracelets were still there but the playful smell and dramatic outfits were gone. In their place were long pieces of silk and comfortable shoes.

Dad picked up the plastic hotel key from the table and called for the car while Mom finished putting a few things into one of her tiny sparkly purses. I gave up looking for them to say something. It was plain: she knew I was waiting, knew I wanted to know, but she either couldn’t figure out what to say or maybe she hadn’t even read it yet. Maybe she wanted to wait until she could figure out what she even thought about it.

Maybe she didn’t want to ruin dinner.

But, as I held the hotel room door open and turned off the light, Mom stopped and looked up at me and said, “I really never knew you had this problem, I really didn’t. I mean, you told me how you thought I should have taken you to art museums more and, you’re right, I probably should have, but I never knew about this.”

All I could do was laugh. I put one arm around her shoulder and kissed her jaw, the only part she would really let me near, as she continued with various permutations of this all the way down the long hotel hallway, with Dad following behind, until the elevator door opened and there were strangers inside.

And we had a really nice dinner.