Bonus Telescope Included!!

“For it is in Receiving that we Give”

 Season’s Greetings Dear Ones!

Christmas has begun!  It’s the Second Day!  All those of you with true loves out there should be getting your turtle doves any moment now.  No?  (Maybe your true love is a little worn out at the moment and needs a foot massage and a nap after getting up at three a.m. yesterday with the excited Believers in your household.)  I am relieved that everything that needed to get done finally got done and none of it really matters anyway, in the big scheme of things.  As my daughter and I finished wrapping up the last parcels on Christmas Eve, she looked at the empty cardboard tubing leftover from the wrapping paper and sighed. “Just think of all those Bonus Telescopes everyone is throwing away!” she said.  We laughed and laughed.  Every year we retell our favorite family Christmas story that goes something like this: (with a few Em-Bell-ishments of course!)

 Once upon a time, there was a happy little family whose father came from Scotland.  Every few years, they would journey back to “The Auld Country” to celebrate Christmas and New Years (Hogmanay) with their relatives and cousins far, far across the sea.  They would pack a minimum of clothing and a maximum of chocolates and sale items from discount stores and big-box retail outlets in their British Airways luggage allotment (with plenty of room for duty Free additions). The children assumed that Scotland was “up in the sky” very near to Heaven, because they could not drive to get there. They had to fly.  (It had not occurred to them that the plane came down as much as it went up.)  When the children were infants, their parents had not had to worry too much about where Father Christmas would deliver their presents.  Of course, he would leave them at their home address in America.  But this year, the children were a bit older—at six and eight, they might not be able to understand that they were not going to receive anything from Father Christmas in Scotland—especially when they saw their cousins receiving gifts—and it might be hard to delay their gratification for another two weeks until they returned home.

            “We told Santa that we wanted him to come to our house in America,” explained their father, “because we don’t want to have to pay for extra luggage on the return flight.  We need the room in the suitcases for other things.”  The children nodded as if they understood completely. They did not really care as long as they got to be with their Scottish cousins.

            “So you’re not going to get any presents, understand?” asked their mother, worriedly.

            “But did you tell him we have been very good?” asked one of the children.

            “Yes,” said the daddy, “and I think if you are willing to wait until you return from Scotland to receive your presents, maybe Santa might even bring you an extra one—if you keep being good, of course!”  

All throughout the advent season, as the candles got lit each week on the wreath in the center of their dinner table, the parents reminded the children again and again why they would not be receiving any presents from Santa on Christmas day.  It was not because they were bad children. Goodness and Badness had to surrender to the supremacy of Logic. The mother continually doubted that the children would actually be ok with this on the day but the father had complete faith.  This was a Good Plan.  It was sensible. What could possibly go wrong with a Sensible Plan?  The presents would be waiting for them under their tree in Massachusetts. That was that.

These horrible, Practical parents even instructed all the Scottish relatives to give their children only the tiniest of presents that would not take up too much room in suitcases.  Things like sweeties they could consume or tickets to a Pantomime would be ideal—Nothing that might take up space or last long enough to inconvenience the baggage handlers at Heathrow Airport. 

For a while, the children really did seem fine with this.  They were so thrilled to be in Scotland with their Grandmother and their Aunties and Uncles and cousins!  There were parties and pantomimes and long walks in the glens and everyone playing music and singing in the evenings.   On Christmas Eve, they all ate mince pies and left out one pie and a frothy pint of Guiness for Father Christmas and some carrots for his reindeer, then went to bed in a big nest of sleeping bags with their cousins.  Their parents tucked them in and told them again about the “deal” where Santa was going to go to America instead and that only the Scottish cousins were going to get parcels under the Scottish tree.  The Scottish cousins had a flicker of pity for their American cousins.  “It’s going to be sad that you don’t get anything,” said one, “but we can share.”

“It’s NOT because we have been bad,” said the wee American boy, though his sister was not of the opinion that he had actually been very Good either.

Downstairs, the adults enjoyed their adult beverages and wrapped presents by the Christmas tree.  The U.K. cousins were having a “big” Christmas.  There was a lot to wrap.  Their dad had just gotten a big promotion and there were two new bikes, a play kitchen, and a huge Scalectrix thing to build, as well as a myriad of other things.  The brother-in-law went through four giant rolls of wrapping paper to cover it all.  “How is this actually going to be tomorrow when our kids open all this stuff and yours sit by and watch?” he asked. “This is awful!  I feel so sorry for them!”

“They will get stuff at home,” insisted their father, who grabbed a cardboard tube and began mock sword play with it. This gave him a Splendid Idea. “Don’t throw these away!” he cried. “I’m going to give these to my kids for Christmas!”

“You’re Joking!” insisted the Scottish brother. “What? We give our kids all this lovely stuff and you just give yours rubbish? That’s not on… That’s worse than giving them nothing!”

“Nonsense,” insisted the Americanized brother. “It’s all in the marketing.  Watch this. I can market anything. They will love this.  This is going to be great!”  He grabbed the clear plastic box the wrapping paper had come in and made a sign.  His wife helped him cut one of the rolls into smaller pieces that became hilts when she cut circles through their sides. 

“They won’t fit into the original box if we attach the hilts now,” she pointed out.

“Even better!” he screamed. He scribbled “some assembly required” on the sign he was making. “Every good marketer knows that ‘some assembly required’ means the buyer has to invest his own creative energy into the product.  This makes it way more valuable, psychologically,” he said, slugging back the last of Santa’s Guinness.  His brother shook his head.

“We have enough to make three swords, with this bit left over,” said his wife, holding aloft a section of cardboard tubing about eighteen inches long.

“Bonus telescope included!!” roared her husband.  “This is perfect.  There are four kids old enough to play with these—three can fight each other and the forth can watch and report on the battle.”

The next morning, the kids were up early.  First, they saw the empty Guiness glass and the pie crumbs on the plate.  Then they rushed outside and saw the nibbled carrots and the reindeer poop on the lawn, which their father picked up and ATE, saying “Yum!  Reindeer poop tastes just like raisins!” to their shrieks of disgust. Their aunt showed them the tiny footprints the elves had left in the butter while they hastily ate a few required bites of a breakfast none of them could taste.  Then they saw the tree, shimmering with lights, with heaps of presents under it.  The young Americans looked at it with shining eyes, then wilted visibly.  None of this was for them… The young Scots tore into their presents and the mayhem began.  

After a few moments, the father of the Americans announced, “Hey look!!! Santa DID leave you a present!  Look!!” He produced the box.  All the children paused, stunned.  They had not expected this.  The older sister lisped out the large sign attached to the box: “It says ‘To Katie & Calum: Genuine Imitation Viking Do-it-yourself-sword-making-kit with BONUS telescope included!! Made in Hong Kong, packaged in Brussels, shipped by way of Cape Ann. Some Assembly Required. I have left the rest of your presents in Americay. Merry Christmas!  Love, Santa”

“Bonus Telescope included?!!!” roared one of the Scots cousins! “Wow! Did we get one?” The Scottish boys began pawing through their presents in search of similar boxes, looking for their “sword making kits.” “Aww…didnae Father Christmas bring anaither?” they wanted to know.

The adults looked at each other in astonishment. They had not expected this! Meanwhile, the Americans were busy assembling their swords and pestering the adults for cellotape and markers.  The Scots had paused in their unwrapping and were watching in envy.  They dropped their gifts and began to help make the swords.   Within moments, three out of four cousins were hacking each other to bits while one looked on through the telescope, and the other gifts went ignored.

“Look what you’ve done!” said the Scottish father to the American father, “You’ve ruined Christmas! Think of the money I spent on all that crap they aren’t even playing with!” which delighted the American father no end. 

“Come now,” said the American father with a twinkle in his eye, “the Spirit of Christmas is not about presents but about family togetherness and memories and having a herd of armed children all hopped up on sugar doing battle in your house for the next four days!”

 That Christmas has become cherished family folklore that gets better over time.  For me, it was a profound lesson in how “trash” received in the right spirit can become treasure.  It’s not just the thought of the giver that counts; it’s very much the thoughts of the Receivers as well… I think the best giving and the best receiving are when we are able to bring our authentic selves into the equation—when we bring our own creativity and imagination to the “present,” in every meaning of that word. That’s when macaroni necklaces colored with magic markers become more precious than anything from Tiffany’s. 

 Allowing ourselves to be Loved, is every bit as much about Receiving as it is about giving.  Feeling “unworthy” is the most selfish feeling of all, it turns out.  Refusing to receive, or “feeling crummy” when someone does something extra special for us that we did not think to do for him or her, leaves us walled off, separated, unable to commune. It aborts the cycle of giving and makes it crash into an emptiness that replaces the Good with Nothing, Isolation, Emptiness.  We trade Heaven for Hell in those moments.  When we pause and consider the story of Christmas itself—that a King comes as the humblest, weakest, most vulnerable of gifts, in the dirtiest of packages (a stable)—we see that the story of Love is not about flash and power.  Babies are utterly incapable of giving. They teach us Love by being the ultimate in joyful Receivers.  Gratitude for what we have changes us internally in ways we cannot imagine and makes for the best legends over time.  And that is the miracle of Christmas.

 Merry Christmas, Dear Ones!

Yours aye,

Nancy

Prudence Thimbleton's Finishing School

“Well done is better than well said.” –Benjamin Franklin

Season’s Greetings Dear Ones,

 “I want to open a Finishing School,” I say.

“Oh Goody!” pipes up Prudence.  “Are we going to teach people not to slurp their soup? That proper tea is made with BOILING water added directly to the tea, not some cup of tepidness with a dry bag perched on the edge of the saucer? Or how to dance over their OWN feet, and not their neighbors’?”

“No,” I say, “It’s not that sort of finishing school.  It’s where people can gather together to Finish Things.  A communal workshop of sorts, where people can work on their PhDs…  You know—Projects Half Done.”

“Oh…” she says, non-plussed. “And just who do you think is going to teach this little school? YOU? Pah! You never finish anything! Just look around you—you are surrounded by Nothing Done.”

I slump.  It’s true.  I am Un-Done again. Christmas is only six days away and here I am, buried in a small avalanche of needles, pins, yarn, scraps of fabric, and BIG, BIG plans that are rapidly dissolving into eggnog and tears.  How do people Finish Things? I would like to know. Those of us with high levels of Creativity, Inspiration, and Ambition present an awful lot like manic, sleep-deprived lunatics at this time of year as we pull all-nighters to finish knitting a pair of socks, or suddenly decide to hand-embroider new Christmas Stockings for all the farm animals we know. (I don’t even want to contemplate those poor souls living with the additional tyranny of an “elf on the shelf!”) We abandon all capacity for rational thought and simultaneously begin baking twenty dozen cookies and knitting eighteenth century thrum caps out of indigo fleece that we dyed in a traditional manner by soaking it in our ex-brother-in-law’s urine.  (Ok, maybe that last one is just me…)  Then we panic and run to Target or T.J. Maxx anyway, hastily buy a bunch of rubbish that doesn’t reflect our value system, then wait until the last minute to wrap it.  As Nana Kennedy used to say, “the hurrier we go, the behinder we get” all month long.  I have convinced myself that there is no time left even to bake the cookies—we should just eat the dough raw and call it a night.

 Speaking of night, when is it going to be time for that “Long Winter’s Nap” the poet tells of? I would dearly LOVE a nap! My cap and kerchief stand at the ready but apparently, according to other maxims we must obey, I am Wicked so there is No Rest for me.  Thanks to a bunch of Teutonic Victorians, there is shrubbery outside that needs to be chopped down and dragged inside.  There are doorways that need to be festooned with garlands of fresh laurel, cedar, and twinkling lights with extension cords to be tripped over.  There are Battenburg lace angels awaiting their colo-rectal appointments with a Douglas Fir. There are pine needles that must mingle with the dog hair on the carpets, carols to sing, and cider that needs to be mulled.  There are two cords of “Yule-tide logs” in the driveway that still need to be stacked before the snow plow comes again... And Christmas cards to write…I am like an exhausted undergraduate at the end of term—up all night, incoherently scribbling drivel, trying to get my final exam in under the wire.  

 Smug customers come into the tailoring shop, hand us more work they need done “in no rush but immediately would be best” and say, “I hope you ladies have all your Christmas shopping done!” and we groan collectively behind their backs as they leave.  We don’t shop!  We are Seamsters; we seam.  We spend eight hours a day or more on Other People’s Projects.  And yes, we have Nothing Done for ourselves. A customer suffering acutely from PPS (Precious Princess Syndrome) announces that she’s had everything done for a month now.  It’s all I can do to resist the urge to poke her with a pin.  Prudence promptly puts me on the Naughty List.

 It’s that time of year when I need a little pep talk.  It’s not even officially “Winter” yet and already I am sick of the dark and the cold. We leave for work in the dark. It’s dark when we emerge from the shop to chip the ice off our cars and drive home under the stars.  The days don’t just seem short—they are. This Friday night, December 21st, the day will be the shortest of the year and the night will be the longest.  The coming Winter Solstice is the physical embodiment of one of the oldest, if not the oldest, story human beings have ever told—the story of Light vs. Dark, representing Order vs. Chaos.   For now, it certainly seems that the Chaos and Darkness are winning.  Perhaps we create all this seasonal mayhem to keep ourselves warmly distracted with all our rushing about and list-making.  (Santa isn’t the only one making a list! Prudence makes lists of her lists.) Even though we know, intellectually, that the Light will return, the primal parts of us want to hunker by the fire, lured by light, warmth, community and grandma’s fruit cake.   (Ok, so no one actually wants the fruit cake.)   Still, we want to be together.  The part of us that fears the dark wants to make something beautiful to give, to share, so that we will belong forever to that circle in the light.  Long ago, we did this with ceremony and rituals that included feasting, carols, candles, and bonfires which have transformed over the centuries into garish neon Christmas lights, clay-mation T.V. specials, and such enchanting musical compositions as “Grandma Got Run Over By A Reindeer” (Well, that’s one less fruitcake I guess…) Prudence gets panty-bunches in her backside when she hears real Christmas Carols before Christmas (like, the day after Halloween).  It drives her batty.  I have always called our family the “Jingle Bells” around this time of year, while she vehemently protests that “Jingle Bells” is NOT a Christmas carol! (I’m turning into more of a Silver Bell anyway…)  She reminds me every year that December 25th is the FIRST day of the twelve days of Christmas, not the last.  She is NOT a fan of Jingle Bell Rock, nor does she think that manipulative minx purring “Santa Baby” over the loud-speakers at Wallmart should get anything but a lump of coal and a quick trip to Confession.

  But I digress… My inner pagan, the Shadow side of Prudence, (wait…how can a shadow have a shadow? Perhaps I am taking this too far) adores the ancient druidic traditions of bringing both the fire and the forest within.  On Friday and Saturday, I will be lighting candles all over the house (and little old-fashioned ones on the Christmas tree too!), singing, and playing music with my children, who are grudging participants in my rituals.   The Advent season is all about awaiting the coming Light but I like to pause and honor the Darkness too.  Did you know that chickens lay their eggs according to the cycles of light and dark? Mine stopped laying in October and usually start again on February 15th, the day after Valentine’s Day. I’m pretty sure that’s when the sheep start growing their wool again too, as you can perceive their new growth by March.  I love how the seasons of light and dark regulate my little world, even me, and create necessary spaces for rest and suspension of the relentless forward momentum of “doing” rather than “being.”  

I have been feeling the darkness deeply this year—trying to embrace it, to see my internal lethargy and melancholy as the part of myself that needs to rest and go to seed.  It is time to go inward, be a small “something-that-is-not-yet”—not a pumpkin or a flower, or a vine, or even a shoot— held by a rich, mysterious darkness.  We are all like a bunch of garden pumpkins, softened by the frosts.  Our flesh sags and pulls us towards the earth and we grieve the loss of recognizing ourselves as we once were.  We have aged and sometimes not for better. But inside us, after everything else rots and falls away, is the seed, a condensed blueprint of all we really need to grow once more from our former ashes towards everything we love.

We must take the time we need to grieve the passing of another year, and all the sweet memories that may never come again.  This year, we have known dear Loves and lost them in the tides of time.  It seems treasonous to release them too soon, so we are given this moment with the Darkness to dwell with our sorrows and regret.

It’s challenging to consider the differences between Finishing and “quitting” at a time like this. It can be hard to continue to press ourselves onwards towards our goals at harried times when we feel simultaneously rushed and suspended, despondent and depleted…Waiting.  This is why I want to start a Finishing School. (Yes, I am aware of the Irony inherent in that statement!)   The dream is to have everyone drag his or her unfinished projects to a shared workshop space where we all help each other FINISH what we’ve started, lending tools, talents, and communal as well as moral support.  Both the physical and the metaphysical require that we somehow bridge this gap between Beginning and Ending so that the eternal Cycle may continue.  Some of us get stuck and need a little push.

 How do we know when something is done? Calling something Finished that is not quite as good as we had hoped it would be is really hard.  You know that by “finishing”—either by completing or abandoning a project—you are saying to yourself “I really can’t manage to do anything better than this right now” and if that is not perfect, that can be really hard to accept. When something ends, when something is complete, when you finally Finish—it is to give you new space in which to grow a new dream. You are on the right path to Create more of everything that makes your heart sing.  Even Sorrow is here to redirect our efforts towards a Better Good.

In this liminal space, take a moment to meet and feel the Darkness all around you with openness and curiosity, with your own breath as your only companion.  This is Ancient Magic. Your breath is the oxygen you are giving to help burn all the tiny fires inside of you.  Dance then with the Cold and the Dark, knowing that you yourself are warmth and light.  It’s true, you come from dust, and to dust thou shalt return—but RIGHT NOW you are dust that is magically on fire.  You are dust mixed with Light.  You are Magic and absolutely anything can happen.  Any sort of Miracle at all—like getting all those presents finished, wrapped, AND to the post office on time or making peace with cousin Betty!

In the midst of Constant Change, lie deeper things that never change. We are part of something Bigger than we could ever imagine.  Let your inner tree-sprite sink her toes deep into this darkness and anchor you firmly, as you reach towards new seasons coming with the returning Light. May you too find your rest, your bliss, and your new growth—perhaps your heart’s own Love—in the stretch between the two.  You are not alone in the dark.  I’m cheering for you from over here!  When we Finish really well, what do we do but usher in a New Beginning?

Solstice Blessings Dear Ones! May you be Merry and Bright and do Good Work!

Yours aye,

Nancy

Tis the Season...

“Real Generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present.” —Albert Camus

Greetings Dear Ones!

Well, the Holly Daze is in full swing here at the little corner of the world where I spend my days looking at the world through the holes in your pants.  Mishaps with pants have been a running joke in the shop since Thanksgiving.  First, there was the young woman who brought in three pairs of yoga pants because her dog had eaten the crotch out of all of them.  She wants us to patch them as best we can…crotchless Yoga is definitely NOT a thing here in New England, at least not yet. (“Lord, have Mercy!” exclaims Prudence)  She notes snarkily that if this young woman hadn’t left these pants in little piles on her bedroom floor, this would never have happened.  “Her room is probably a pig sty!” she mutters. 

Next in is Mr. Winchester, a senior gentleman whose pants have been very hard to fix.  The fabric, which probably dates to the Geneva Convention, is fraying badly and the very act of patching it is creating more holes.  “I’m not sure there is a whole lot of life in these pants,” I start to explain.  His eyes widen with astonishment and his nostril hairs quiver as he snorts, “Young lady, I’m not INTERESTED in having life in my pants!” He seems quite put out by the very idea.  I can’t help being drawn to him. He would make a fabulous New Year’s date for Prudence. 

Another woman comes in with a bag of pants to hem.  She plops them on the counter and says “Betcha can’t guess where I just came from? Holy Mackerel Cemetery is having a sale!  Yeah, get this—their little niches are usually a thousand dollars a-piece but all this week they are going for seven hundred!”

“What’s a niche?” I want to know. 

“It’s when they cremate you and you have a little hole in the wall to put the ashes in after,” she explains.  “I decided to go for it.  It’s probably my only shot at getting a smokin’ hot body in this lifetime. Anyway, you should go for it!  I bought two—one for me and one for a friend so I know who my next door neighbor is going to be.  The sooner you do it, the cheaper it is.”

“Which church is Holy Mackerel?” I ask.

“It’s that big old cathedral on the south side of Main Street. Their two main gripes are about loose living and tight giving,” she says with a roll of her eyes. “I don’t go all that often but I thought I should end up hanging out where everyone I know is going to wind up eventually. My parents are there already. But they’re in the ground. I ain’t going in the ground.”

Mrs. Merryweather pops in then to collect her order and says “I’m sick of all this rain.  I hear it’s going to snow.  Well, at least you don’t have to shovel rain.” She sighs to indicate how hard her life is under an umbrella all the time.

“Wadda ya expect?” says the cemetery lady. “It’s New England.  It’s supposed to be cold!”

“I don’t mind the cold so much,” says Mrs. Merryweather primly, “It’s the snow I hate.”

“Really? I’m just the opposite,” announces the other one. “I’d take four feet of snow any day just as long as it’s ninety degrees out! I’m back to Florida as soon as Christmas is over.”

They leave together and I pick up a tiny pair of pants to hem.  “It says ‘hem as marked and pinned but there are marks all over this pair of pants.  Which one is right?” I ask my friend who did the fitting.

“Oh,” she says giggling, “those belong to a little boy who asked why I was marking his clothes.  He was fascinated with the chalk and wanted to draw some of the lines himself.  These are his lines,” she points out a series of marks, “and this is where the finished length should be. Leave him plenty of hem for growing.”  I nod.

And so it goes in our cozy little shop…an ordinary day of gossip about the weather, the afterlife, and our various plans for growing and dying and trying not to get too cold or wet or miserable in between.  As usual, it’s a balancing act of appreciating the absurd and having heart-touched contemplation as we Prepare… both for Christmas and what comes next.

I finish hemming a batch of pants and dial the telephone number on the order slip to let the customer know he can come any time before five p.m. to collect them.  A woman answers the phone.  I ask to speak to the name on the slip—a man’s name. “Who is this?” she asks in Alert, Suspicious tones.  I am taken aback and pause, confused.  She must not have heard me identify myself and the shop when she first answered.  “I don’t recognize this number,” she says, her tone escalating sharply, “Why are you calling my husband?!” For one delicious, wicked moment, I consider responding in my most sultry voice “well, madam (breath…) if you MUST know (breath…breath…) your man left his pants here when he came to visit me last week…(squeak) and I cannot divulge my identity but he knows (breath…sigh…squeak) where to find them if he wants them… And honey, please remind him we only take cash for our services…He usually remembers but…just in case…” Luckily, Prudence steps in and smacks my inner harlot upside the head before I can go through with it. 

There is a lot of seasonal sewing and attaching-red-plaid-bows-on-things to do.  Luckily, it’s the time of year when customers are most apt to bring us plates of cookies!  Hannukah has been and gone—not that there is too much sewing to be done for that—and all the Nutcracker costumes are finished being tailored to fit the dancers.  (All excepting the wee boy who played Fritz, whose britches kept falling down during the entire party scene.)  The bulk of what we have left to do consists of commissioned Christmas gifts and all the formal gowns for New Year’s Eve events—three of which are actually weddings.   Thanks to a kindly aunt, nine lucky grandchildren will awake on Christmas day to find their deceased Meme’s blouses and shirts turned into pillows they can hug.  A border collie named Molly is getting a new hunting vest in neon orange, and a rabid sports enthusiast is getting a custom-made sport coat made of eye-wateringly “busy” Red-Sox-patterned fabric his wife dragged here from the quilting section of Jo-Ann fabrics.

This fabric was never intended to be used for a garment.  But this is Red-Sox Nation.  Baseball is a religion. Apparently, this man is going to wander his village as some sort of loudly dressed prophet, with his clothes silently screaming about fly balls, foul balls, and whatever other sorts of balls they have in baseball.  Does he really WANT this? The mind boggles.  To see his excited wife bounding about the shop, clapping her hands with glee worries me.  Is this something he actually wants or is this something she is relieved she has designed because better ideas were not available?  At the end of the day, does it really matter? It’s the thought that counts.  And the hours of labor… She has no worries about how much this will cost.  “He’s going to LOVE this and you have NO IDEA how hard he is to buy for!” she gushes.  She is so excited that she has hit the jackpot on Ideas this time.  With the Bruins, the Patriots, and the Celtics—each with their own garish, god-awful fabric designs at Jo-Ann’s, his wardrobe expansion is set for the next 3 years to come.  “Can you make matching suit pants?” she wants to know. 

As deadlines approach for mailing things and finishing things, we grow a bit more frazzled and frantic.  “The Most Wonderful time of the year” can often be the Most Stressful too.  (No…wait, that’s Prom Season!)  It’s dark and bitter cold by the time we close the shop.  At home, it’s a deadly game each evening on my little homestead, as I skitter to bring water to my chickens and sheep over an alien topography of residual snow that has turned to icy cement.  Survival, for any of us, is not guaranteed.  It’s a blessing to distract ourselves with happy projects and thoughts of giving and anticipating another person’s delight.  It’s a privilege to be creatively involved in other people’s impulses to share.  We need things to warm not just our hands but our hearts and minds as well.

Our lives can seem small and rough and drearily mundane sometimes.  It can feel like we aren’t getting what we wanted or that we are unable to give others what it is they might want.  Some of us are prompted to ridiculous, over-extended extremes.  Giving itself can be a tricky form of asking—asking to be special, asking to be loved.  Sometimes, as George Bailey learns in “It’s a Wonderful Life,” it’s not about getting what we want after all.  It’s about realizing all we already have—and what we give daily, without even thinking.

 Blessings Dear Ones!  Keep Giving!  Keep Creating! Keep doing Good Work! May your hearts, hands, and homes be warm and merry and bright.  

Yours aye,

Nancy

Who is Prudence Thimbleton?

“We are all failures—at least the best of us are.” –J.M. Barrie

Greetings Dear Ones!

Few things in life are quite as satisfying as making a very neat job of turning up a sleeve on a man’s tweed sport coat and replacing the buttons and buttonholes precisely, in such a manner as to be indistinguishable from the original.  Lucky for me, I have good old Prudence Thimbleton, that internal nit-picker, watching over me to make sure I do it right.  She does not deal well with praise of any kind.  Her job is to find fault.  So when I hand the coat over to its owner, a distinguished looking man with a stern countenance and eyes the color of the sky after a summer storm, and he says, “hmmmm…. You do not disappoint.” Prudence goes all giddy and burns with so much Pride the poor thing nearly rushes herself off to Confession right then and there.  She does not know how to deal with such glowing approbation!

“Am I Prudence?” asks one of my friends.  Others have asked this too, wondering if I am writing about them.  Heavens No!  Prudence lives in my head.  She is the amalgamation of every wretched little old lady I have ever known, as well as one gay male horse trainer (he trained female horses too) and two truly terrifying nuns who have haunted me since grade school. She is simplistic and inflexible.  She does not take the ambiguities or subtleties of life into account what-so-ever. There is not even one shade of grey for her, never mind fifty!  She assumes that for every crime, there is a criminal who must be brought to justice.  She is like an over-active immune system that, with nothing “real” to fight, will turn on me and attack me.

Where did Prudence come from? I don’t really know. When you grow up with 19 Barbies dressed as nuns under your bed, you tend to attract some interesting “characters” into your life.    She is full of fantastically bizarre ideas such as killing two birds with one stone by translating the license plate in front of her into Morse code with Kegel clenches at traffic lights.  (This keeps your Morse code skills at the ready, should you ever need to signal that there are German U-boats off the coast of Maine, using only your vagina.) She makes all her own clothes and has despised “today’s fashions” for more than 100 years.  She will tell you simultaneously that “Jesus loves you very much” and that “you are going straight to hell” without perceiving any contradiction in the matter.  She likes to hang out in the shop and grumble quietly about the customers who abuse their zippers and brides with blurry tattoos that don’t look right under lace.  She’s from the era where most women knew how to sew and her dry, witty rants about “the state of things today” continually leave me in stitches.  

For years, she was just a horrible sense of dread—a nameless, vague, discontented wretch who seemed to hate everything about me—a heavy rock in my chest I carried about that negated every nice thing anyone said to me.  I once carried her for nearly a half marathon hearing nothing but “Is that a stitch in your side? What’s wrong with you? Why do you sound like a steam engine when you breathe? Is this the best you can do? How come everyone is passing you? At least get by that one-legged woman on the crutches—surely you can take her!  It’s mile 6—how has she stayed ahead of you for SIX miles? Easy now, you are going to get diarrhea in front of all these people if you keep swilling Gatorade at every mile marker—one more bowel-curdling sip and you are done for young lady…” By mile 11.5, when I was limping due to a seizing I-t band, she took to barking. “This is to what happens to people like you.  You should have trained better or stretched better, or at least worn a better outfit so that when the ambulance comes to scrape you off the pavement you look a little more coordinated than THIS…” she snorted with contempt. So much energy was going into beating myself up—and then beating myself up for beating myself up—the concentric levels of beatings going on were breathtaking, literally.  It was like being in a bar fight and punching myself in between jabs from a drunk. (I am astoundingly good at making myself the villain in my own melodramas.) I finally stopped right there in the middle of the road.  I could choose to finish this race or I could lie down and continue making myself feel like dog poo on a running shoe.   I did not have the energy to do both. I told that part of me to shut the hell up and I headed for the finish line. “Once we get our medal and a damn banana, then you can start berating me about where I may have left the car keys,” I told her. She seemed huffy but relatively content with that.

Afterwards, I realized I needed to befriend her or at least put her in her proper place or she was going to kill me.  Like the scary Bumble in the iconic “Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer” television special, she needed to be named, have her teeth knocked out, and be given a proper job.  She can still waste an incredible amount of energy worrying, being fearful, feeling  inferior and at fault.  She still judges harshly things like Winnie the Pooh tattoos and people who grind and smack their chewing gum sideways like they are bovines cudding.  She will “should” all over me at the drop of a pin. One of her little tricks is to point out how horrible other people are in order to make me feel like I could make some progress if I applied myself and overcame their low standards.  This is dangerous. I need only to compare myself to who I was six months ago, or this morning, to see how I am doing. I am my own Ruler, in every respect.

I have thought many times about whether or not Prudence should be killed off anyway. She is bloody annoying when she isn’t put to some constructive use.  There are plenty of self-help books (“Silence Your Inner Critic Forever”) and programs and coaches willing to collude in this murder of the Inner Critic. Yet I have decided against it. Firstly, I am against murder of any kind (though I quite happily usher blood-sucking insects to their after-life and encourage them to come back as dolphins or polar bears). Secondly, having an inner critic I can trust is extremely valuable.  I need this self-critical, judgmental part of my psyche—this is not a “bad” or “damaged” part of me that needs to be silenced or fixed—though sometimes her impulses are ridiculous.   I just need to understand, with extreme clarity, who she is and what her motives are. 

Inner Critics evolved as the part of us that wanted to stay safe. It’s very human to be naturally more attuned to what is negative and that is not a bad thing.  Historically, those of us heeded warnings were safer than our compatriots who perished, leading our species to evolve in ways that depend more on “watch out! That’s a scorpion!” rather than “Gee, Thor, I really admire how you handle that club of yours…” Negatives have an immediacy and a relevancy that positives often don’t:  Don’t touch that iron! (or you will burn)  Don’t eat that mushroom! (or you will die) Don’t wear white after Labor Day! (or we will kick you out of the tribe and you cannot come to our drum circle and drink things out of coconuts).

The importance of discernment cannot be underestimated. To know when a person is talking rot—especially if that person is me—is invaluable! Prudence keeps me honest.  She makes my seams straight.  She is the part of me that pulls out a row of stitches that “might pass” and makes me do them again perfectly.  I need this part of me that says I can do better, because usually, I can.  At heart, I am a Slacker.  She is not always a trustworthy moral guide like a conscience:  I have to listen carefully and discern whether she is saying what I have done is wrong or who I am is wrong. 

I have so many friends who are wonderful musicians, artists, writers and Intensely Creative People.  Through their tales and triumphs, I see that there is nothing more painful about the creative process than struggling against the feelings of self-doubt and self-loathing.  Some of us literally hate everything we write or paint or scupt or make or compose.  Nothing is clever enough, funny enough, good enough—or worse, our best ideas have already been done.   Apparently, this is not only “normal”—it’s often a sign that you are pushing yourself towards an interesting frontier, which is a Good Thing.  True Creativity is NOT safe.  It will definitely arouse your Inner Critic and have her snuffling out of her lair, stumbling towards strong coffee and a crowbar the moment you think you are meeting with some success.

And sometimes we just get it Wrong.  That’s ok.  A healthy inner critic, one who is fighting for us, not against us, will help us to learn. And learning itself is a beautiful thing.   Sometimes, after we learn, we have to try again, risk again, unfurl again and hope for a better outcome.  Sometimes, we just have to ignore those inner voices for our own damn good.  But first, before we do that, we must listen very carefully to what they say and why they are saying it.

Once in a while, that inner voice is not just toxic for toxicity’s sake; there may be a painful but true message that you need to heed.  Plenty of data from social psychology studies indicate that many of us are deluded and are not nearly critical enough.   Maybe your song only needs four verses and one key change, instead of thirty-seven.  Maybe you shouldn’t have composed fiddle tunes in F and expected gin-swigging mortals in the intermediate levels to learn them in a week or less.  Perhaps choosing a mermaid-style wedding gown with hips like yours was indeed a ghastly mistake. 

When should we worry when the inner critic is too strong? When we aren’t taking good care of ourselves; when we are overly self-effacing and cannot receive compliments; when we ignore health issues and don’t exercise; when we spend ten days in a row knitting and binge-watching “Bojack Horseman,” eating (and drinking) out of cans only.…  We NEED a sense of judgment to navigate in this (basically unsafe) world.  However, the intensity of that judgment lies along a continuum from gentle redirection to crippling shame.  It is a life-long process to learn to co-exist and persistently co-create with the parts of ourselves that wish to criticize or complain.  To compound the problem by blaming ourselves for engaging in this struggle is both futile and absurd.  A good friend reminded me recently: “Those who Judge don’t understand; those who Understand don’t judge.”   If we seek to understand, we are on the Right Path.

Incidentally, Prudence does NOT approve of this blog. Every time I click on the “save and publish” button, she has to take two aspirin and go lie down. She surveys my “purpled prose” and feels sickened, over-exposed, distraught.  She would much prefer it if we would Hide and work out our rash creative impulses on the cleaning the garage or sorting out the enormous stash of homespun wool that is attracting nesting Jack Russells.  I pat her hand and say, “my Dearest Prudence, fret all you want; I’m a Seamstress who doesn’t give a Rip.” We are going to be Ok.

And you are too, Dear Reader.  Keep creating!  Keep birthing your Beauty into this world that needs it so desperately.  Let us all strive to possess impressive inner cohesion, despite our fragmented, scattershot lives and abilities.  Our minds can be consistent and our hearts dependable, regardless of adversity from within or without.  We can delight in the flaws we perceive around us as we strive to make things better.  Keep radiating your own Moral Joy as you see what needs to be done and you DO it! Keep doing your Good Work!

With so much love,

Yours aye,

Nancy

Asking "For a Friend"

Greetings Dear Friends!

A woman in her early seventies comes in and deposits a vintage hunter green wool coat on the counter.  The lining is what we call “ripe”—in that any kind of touching it causes it to split and disintegrate along the vertical lines.  There is no sewing a lining like this—it must be cut out completely and replaced.  “I’m asking for a friend,” she says looking at me. “I’ll be your friend!” I say instantly, naively assuming this poor dear is lonely. She purses her lips. “No,” she says, “I don’t need a friend. I already have a friend. This is her coat.  I took it out of her house without her knowing it to see if you could do something about the lining. I’m sick of telling her she needs to get this fixed!” “Gee, that’s too bad,” I say wistfully, “I sure could use a friend like you who would pilfer all the things that need fixing out of my house!” This catches the woman off guard and she looks by turns irritated and confused. “As for this coat,” I continue, “it’s going to be quite a bit of money to replace the lining.  How much of a favor are you willing to do her?” It turns out, not that much.

“I’ll just leave it here with you and tell her how much it is and that she has to call you if she wants to have it done.  At least I have done this much,” the lady says with an exasperated sigh. Yes, at least she had done that much.  How much is too much to do for our friends? It’s a question I ponder for the rest of the day as I marvel at all the boundaries that lady crossed in her benevolent thievery.

Ours is a Friendly shop.  It goes without saying that the women who work here are dear friends.  Quite a number of our customers are also friends, soon become our friends, or bring their own friends. “Patty Payalayta” always comes in without cash or checkbook.  (Perhaps because she is a long-time friend and loyal customer, she always seems surprised that her work costs money.)  She whips out a credit card and then pauses in shock as if hearing for the very first time that we cannot take any form of “plastic” payment. She will take her stuff anyway, promising to mail a check later because she is such a “good friend” and we know she is good for it.  We trust our friends.

There are a variety of archetypes that come in as “friends” to assist one another with the tedious difficulties of getting their clothes adjusted and setting the needle just right on that fashion dial that goes anywhere from “I was just on my way to church to donate alms to the poor” to “I AM the Poor” to “my services are available for hire on an hourly basis.” We need these knowledgeable people to tell us that carrying around a stained mug of cold tea is NOT a fashion accessory or to prevent us from roaming the streets in tight yoga pants with enough panty-lines to make us look like a well-trussed Easter ham. (Not enough people are getting this memo!)

More often than not, “The Friend” is that annoying person who comes with a weak customer to tell her everything she is thinking is wrong.  Yes, I said She.  That’s because I never see any men bringing anyone like this, unless of course she is his wife.  (It takes the matrimonial bondage of church and state to entice a man to submit to the overwhelming strain of a steady stream of well-intentioned advice.) This friend, while not an actual customer, is the authority on everything that customer does.  She is a fashion expert, a tailoring expert, and an expert on how much things should cost.  She will sit through a lengthy pinning and consultation only to advise her friend that she should go elsewhere. 

I recently overheard the following half of a conversation emanating from the dressing room: “So, where’d you get this little number? Did your ex-husband’s new girlfriend pick it out, or what? What do you mean what’s wrong with it? It’s fuggly! No…I definitely was NOT with you when you bought this.  Take it off.  We’re taking it back.  I’m not going to let you do this to yourself…”

How we long to get our fingers in each other’s clay and take over where the Potter left off!  What forbearance it takes to stand back and allow people to hurl themselves towards their own destinies in coats that you think should be longer, shorter, cleaner, or taken to the back yard and burned.  What fortitude it takes to let them roam the earth in colors that make them look like they are awaiting a liver transplant.  Some friends have no idea where they begin and the other person ends.

I observe a lot of tricky partnerships from inside a pair of pants.   I always feel sorry for Little Herman Peckhen:  He is brought in by Mrs. Peckhen who is here in case Herman attempts to say a word—she will say it for him, and quite a few others besides.  She is vastly irritated with him and follows him in to the fitting room to make sure he buttons his trousers properly and puts his shoes on the right feet. She will tell us everything he needs and how things are to fit him. She will tell us what he likes and what he cannot abide under any circumstances, though in the end, it will matter far more how things look to her than how they feel to him. 

The Siamese Brain—every now and then one comes across this amazing duo getting by on one single brain between them.  Since they have only one mind, and they don’t want to wear it out too soon, or lose it altogether, they keep it safely at home a good deal of the time.  Somehow, through deft use of muscle-memory and reflexes, one of them manages to operate a motor vehicle to the shop without incident.  It is there they discover that their Brain has been left at home, often with the wallet, the shoes, or the garment that needed altering.  Every query directed towards them, such as “May I help you?” is like a pop quiz for which they have not studied.  Immediately one turns to the other one with a blank and beseeching look, as if the answer might be written on his/her forehead.

Straight out of a Geritol commercial, Mr. and Mrs. Adorable are the retired couple who come in to show off how cute they are and how they do everything together now that the kids are grown and the mortgage paid off.  Their affection for each other can be seen in the way they gently correct each other’s anecdotes about how good-looking the other one used to be.  He will talk about how she was such “a looker” back in the day and how tiny her waist used to be.  She, thoroughly pleased, will bat his compliments away with shining eyes that belie her protestations.  Something about the way he hands her his trousers makes eye-brow-arched Prudence think their other errand that day will be stopping at the pharmacy to refill their Viagra prescription on the way home. 

There is something endearing yet ultimately cloying about each of these co-dependent, symbiotic dyads. Like any good partnership or pair of pants, there are two legs to them—two sides, working in tandem to maintain a risky sort of balance.  One submits while the other pushes forward with an agenda. I can’t help being convinced that when a woman can be her own best friend, that’s when life gets easier.  We don’t need to boss anyone else around, nor do we need to submit to bossing. When we trust our own competence and inner wisdom, when we know Who We Are and How We Want to Look the dressing room safaris are much simpler.

Friends are supposed to be the people with whom we dare to be ourselves but sometimes our “friends” can be very hard on us, or we on them. I can’t be bothered to look up the information now but I am sure I have read something to the effect that says our blood pressure is lower around our dogs than around our best friends.  Unless of course, our dogs have just taken a dump on the carpet.  Then the blood pressure is apt to sky-rocket. (I’m pretty sure that last part wasn’t in the original study…but I know it is true.)

I think a lot about the partnerships and friendships we enter into.  I think about the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. (Ms. Bridesmaid, ask yourself, would you have someone follow you into the dressing room and tell you your gown made you look like you could play tight end for the Patriots? So why are you doing this? Margueritas are no excuse…)  And that other bloody good biblical suggestion: “Love your neighbor as yourself!”  These two maxims are not really about being Nice to other people—though they seem so at first glance. These are Equations, not injunctions.  They say that we must each be strong.  We must bargain as hard on our own behalf as we do for others’ or we risk slipping into the dynamic of slave or tyrant.  We must be equal partners.  It is much better for any relationship when both partners are strong.  As Carl Jung points out, this means embracing the sinner who is yourself as much as forgiving and aiding someone else who is stumbling and imperfect or trying to wear a shade of orange you cannot stand. (I’m pretty sure he didn’t mention the orange part…he surely wanted to and just forgot.)

In my own periods of darkness, during my long, dark nights of the soul, I find myself often overcome and amazed by the ability of people to befriend each other, to love their intimate partners, children, parents, family and do what they can provide for each other’s good and comfort.  I give them immense credit for their ability to act productively and selflessly.  Navigating healthy boundaries when we are trying to love and serve each other is tricky business indeed.  It takes amazing communication skills—both in speaking and in Hearing the Truth.  I think hearing another’s truth requires the most curiosity and courage.  Plenty of people go about blabbing their truths—the only problem is that no one else is listening.

Eventually, Silence is where the real conversation happens between true friends.  It’s great to be able to say anything you want to another person.  It’s even better not to have to say anything at all…  It is in listening to the great Silence within our own hearts that we become our own friends.  Once we do that, we can be nice to anyone! (Yes, Prudence, even if we fall short of Glory, even if we attempt to mold others to our image instead of leaving them as God’s, and even when we find ourselves tempted to pilfer a friend’s ratty coat for her own good.) 

Be well, dear ones! May you be merry and do Good Work!

Yours aye,

Nancy

P.S.  You don’t have to be crazy to be my friend—I’ll train you!

Which guest will you feed?

“Piglet noticed that even though he had a Very Small Heart, it could hold a rather large amount of Gratitude.” A.A. Milne

Greetings my dear Fellow Pilgrims and Pioneers of Life,

Don’t forget to set your scales back! Tomorrow is Thanksgiving Day—the day when patriotic American families gather to feast on traditional foods, crab about referee calls in football, and give thanks for ALL THEY HAVE in preparation for storming the malls less than 24 hours later to trample their fellow Americans in the pursuit of MORE—spending money they don’t have on things they don’t need to give to people they are not even sure they like. (And so the Holly Daze begins…)  As Seamsters, we know it as a day that is particularly hard on pants (and Turkeys, bless them!).  Some of us will eat until we have enjoyed a polite bite of everything and have had “enough.” Some will eat until “full.” Some of us will eat until we hate ourselves and need to be cut out of our jeans—especially when we find out that there are three kinds of potatoes on the table and something called pumpkin chocolate chip cookies for later….  Come Cyber Monday, when the rest of you are cyber-clicking yourselves into debt until March, seamstresses everywhere will be receiving untold numbers of popped buttons, stressed out waistbands, and shattered pants that look like they’ve just barely survived Custard’s Last Stand (or Sit as the case may be).

But I am getting ahead of myself. Let’s focus on the Thanks and the Giving part of the holiday first. As Prudence Thimbleton primly points out, “It’s not Happiness that brings Gratitude; it’s Gratitude that brings Happiness.” In the shop, we’ve been talking all month about things we are grateful for.  We are thankful for a range of everything from thimbles to safety pins and customers who don’t call us every five minutes to see if their stuff is done yet, which it would be if we weren’t so interrupted by calls.  (I am personally very grateful for this job!) We have been dealing with a flurry of customers who need special outfits to wear in front of their families during the holiday.  Their motivations range from “not arriving naked” to deviously making envious sisters wish they had done weight-watchers all summer too.  The people chat about their plans, or lack of plans, whether or not the grandchildren will make it back from Georgia and whatnot…

I listen carefully at my perch and from what I can tell, most people will be bringing along at least two Unplanned Guests. I know how that goes.  I often entertain those guests too. One is there to make war.  She is angry, defiant, and capable of torching more than the crème brulee if she needs to get attention. She is like a character from the Netflix series “The Norsemen” who arrives breathless, clad in animal skins, on a magnificent current of Righteous Ego and firmly held convictions—Certain Rights she needs to fight for, claim, or preserve. There is a knife in her sock and her Honor is at stake in every utterance and gesture she perceives from those around her.  She is desperate to discuss unhelpful things in unhelpful ways. She feeds on the ideas that she deserves more, better, or something different.  In a crowd of people, she is hollow, lonely, removed. She HATES to sit at the kids table.  She is not there for the mashed potatoes and gravy.  She is there to pick a bone.  She is there to feed on every morsel of Un-lovingness she can glean, gathering evidence for her future case against you and all of humanity.

The other guest is the one you really want to sit with:  She is the Angel of Serenity.  She floats in on light and with just a smile, replenishes all that aches within you.  She catches the pain of others with her deep, knowing eyes, and reflects back only love and sympathetic understanding. She is gentle.  She takes all that makes us want to fight and cradles it in her Unconditional Love.  Over and over again, she loves us Just As We Are.  She is warm. She is tender. She is funny. She takes disasters and makes us laugh with new-found unity at the wonderful stories they become.  She creates community.  All the kids want her to sit at their table! She heals, where the other guest wounds. She serves, rather than severs.  She replaces, restores, and revives where the other robs.

They are twin sisters, these two, in our dual nature as humans.  In the heat of certain family gatherings—especially those kinds of families that Hallmark never puts on its festive cards—it takes incredible courage to choose which one of these guests within us we are going to feed. It’s hard, when one feels ambushed by a comment or a look, to take the Peaceful Angel’s soft hand, rather than the weapons offered by the Warrior.  Weapons we all know far too well how to use—(We could have that certain sibling or nephew sobbing in the car, on her/his way home in minutes if we wanted!) Such power, such intensity is so alluring—intoxicating in its force, though weak at its root.  The gentle choice is far less glamorous. It requires dropping deep, getting grounded, breathing soft full breaths, rather than rising up and spinning like a roman candle on the fourth of July.  It requires holding ourselves instead of hitting another or the bottle.  Every triggering moment will be this choice—which guest will you feed?

The inner warrior is the one we must hold with all the love we can muster in our hearts. She is angry because she is afraid and trying to protect her own softness. She will lead you to eat with a hunger you cannot satisfy, or to drink with a thirst you cannot quench, and shop like you have Croesus’ gold to spend, and it will never be enough.  Then she will blame and torment you for not having filled her emptiness. She will be the one berating you when you are broke, exhausted, hung over, staring at a closet full of “nothing fits.”   Only Loving her will bring her to submission. She can only survive because we have forgotten to love her.  Loving her makes her small, contented, ready to sleep.

There is no question which choice will feel better in the long run.  Our souls are not asking for more anger.  No one will suffer more than you if you choose war, even though you might temporarily enjoy the glory of fighting.  It will be the hollow sort of victory that has you limping for the rest of your life. Living takes courage. Holding ourselves peacefully in the midst of wine, combative relatives, and really good pumpkin pie takes an inner kind of parenting we cannot do without Gratitude.  Gratitude gives us instant access to the love we are longing for.  Even the smallest things can make us grateful and be the tiny handles by which we drag ourselves back towards the Light.

A beautiful girl was in the shop recently.  She was complaining about the shape of her nose and the shape of her thighs and the thickness of her ankles.  I wanted to wrap my arms around her and say, “Aw….Sweetheart, can your nose smell? Do you know the scent of a rose? Or puppy breath? Or fresh, sun-dried laundry right off the line? Can those thick little legs of yours run and swim and climb and dance?” What a GIFT to have a body!  Sure, some of us have gotten into bodies, like bumper cars at a carnival, that don’t look quite like or work like some of the other bodies bouncing around out there—but we can still have fun.  We can still enjoy a good ride. May we be grateful for our Bodies.

Some people in the shop struggle with their mental faculties. (Often, one of them is me!) They drop things off and forget to pick them up, or they pick them up and come back two days later forgetting they already came two days ago.  They think we have coats we don’t.  They call three times in a row. They can’t remember where they lost their shoes. We all get side-tracked, find it hard to focus, battle ADD and lack mindfulness.  May we be grateful for our Minds.

Some people have been feeling alone, isolated, left-out.  Others are nursing long-held bitterness over heart-shattering loss. Some are falling in love again anyway as little kindnesses lap away and melt the frozenness within.  Some are being angels here on earth. May we be grateful for our Hearts.

May we be grateful for our Spirits which long for beauty and music and Connection and Community. 

May we be grateful for Each Other—warts and warriors, bumpy-rumpy bumper cars and all.  Life is the FEAST—we are each of us a unique and necessary flavor—some of us, like Prudence, are crab apples; some are kale; (I think I’m a brussel sprout), some are pure Maple syrup or honey; some are nuts or turkeys…we ALL are needed for our tartness and sweetness and comfort and substance. So let your better angels win today--your pants and seamstresses will thank you!

I am grateful for YOU, dear ones!  More than you could ever imagine.  Thank you for reading, thank you for subscribing, thank you for taking your precious time to comment or share. 

With so much Love and Gratitude,

Yours aye,

Nancy

Wishful Thinking

If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair.”

C.S.Lewis

Greetings Dear Ones!

I am sewing a bridal gown.  I begin by pretending that taking up the shoulders so much (four inches!!) will not change the structure of the gown.  When I realize I now have to incorporate a disproportionately large sleeve that no longer fits, I pretend that I can just gather it.  When the resulting lumps make it look like the bride will be hiding dinner rolls under there, I pretend that I can just make a center seam where now there is none.  When that is blazing a crooked trail down her arm like the white dot trail on nearby Mount Monadnock, I pretend I can camouflage it with lace and beading… On it goes… my fantasy life with this gown—one wish making way for other wishes—each wish getting smacked by a new, emerging Reality that cannot be denied.  I am looking for comfort, as C.S. Lewis would say, rather than truth.  The truth is that I don’t want to mess with lowering the armhole because there were too many bones involved—both mine, and those belonging to the dress. (Yes, most fancy dresses have more “bones” than a bad piece of haddock. They are little plastic rods added to seams for the dual purpose of supporting the structure of the dress and driving innocent seamstresses to drink.) Besides, this bride does not need the extra space there.  She has skinny upper arms. “Never wielded a pitchfork in her life!” mutters Prudence.  I sew on, with that combination of hasty, lazy Diligence that I do best—trying to atone for my short-cuts with other shortcuts.  I think, not for the first time of that maxim emblazoned on swim-team T-shirts everywhere: “Winners make a habit of doing things Losers don’t want to do.” I am not quite sure yet if I am winning or losing with this gown.

There is a lot of wishful thinking in sewing, as in Life. (Was it not wishful thinking on the bride’s part to think that she could buy a dress so out of proportion to her body and have us wave a magic wand, or needle, over it and have all that extra fabric just magically disappear?) The Wiki definition of wishful thinking is “the formation of beliefs and making decisions according to what might be pleasing to imagine instead of by appealing to evidence, rationality, or reality.”  Also known as thinking that eating salad for six days will make you a size 6, or believing that one tank of gas should last a week, despite three trips to Vermont.

Sometimes, I am blundering my way towards Truth through a series of failed experiments. This is pure Science.  But when the desire for something to be true takes the place of evidence for the truthfulness of the claim, it becomes a logical fallacy or a cognitive bias that causes one to evaluate evidence very differently based on the desired outcome.

Example #1:

I wish I was a size [x]. Therefore, I am a size [x].  Size [x] is what I buy.  I cannot understand why it looks terrible on me.   

Prudence says: Madam, wishing it to be so, and finding it to be so are two entirely different matters. Empiricism wins the day, at least in dressing rooms.  Blind faith should be reserved only for God and rooting for the Patriots.

Example #2:

I know in my heart of hearts that you can fix this for me and make me look like something out of a magazine.

Prudence says: No, Madam, you don’t know that, (unless the magazine happens to be “Cast Iron Skillet” or “National Geographic”) and what the heck is your “heart of hearts” anyway?  You need two EYES, not two hearts—heck, even half a brain would do...  LOOK in the mirror. This is classic wishful thinking -- wanting your closed-eye “vision” so badly that you begin pretending that it is/has to be true.  In fact, it is so possible in your mind that that there will be no one to blame but Everyone Else if we fail you.  (Just because you spent thousands on this gown does not mean this is not your fault!)

Exception: When wishful thinking is expressed as a hope, wish, or prayer and no belief is formed as a result, then it is not a fallacy because no direct or indirect argument is being made.

I really hope that I don’t have to undo all this beading! I really hope she likes this! Is it lunchtime yet?

What I am learning about Wishful Thinking here at my little sewing table is that wishing for something to be true is a powerful technique when and only when, a) you have an influence on what it is you want to be true and b) you take action to make it come true -- not just wish for it to be true. Magic doesn’t happen by wishing. It happens with Doing.  Only Doing changes facts.  As a sewing “scientist” I can mess with the current “fact” that this dress does not fit by changing all the variables within my power to change.  As John Adams said, “Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.”  No amount of wishing has ever made mosquitoes suck fat instead of blood.

I read a lot about the Law of Attraction and about the theory that says “whatever we think about most” will come to us.  It’s an intriguing idea but I must confess my doubts and wonder if it is not just another form of Wishful Thinking.   If it were true, I would have a lot more cookies in my life and no broken appliances in my home. (This week alone, my washer, the stove, and the hoover are all awaiting repair!)  I never think about breaking things.  It just happens.  I think about cookies all the time yet never have them.   I spend an inordinate amount of my days, sewing quietly and wishing fervently:

I hope both arms of this coat turn out the same.

I wish this woman had washed her pants before bringing them in to be mended.

I wish that very tall, skinny young man had not bought all those ragged, portly-short waistcoats at the consignment shop and brought them here to be tailored for himself (It’s wishful thinking on his part to think these things will ever fit him right or remain any sort of bargain after we put twenty hours into remaking them)…

I wish my bank account filled up as easily as my dirty laundry basket.

I wish I could have faith that our government always served the will of its people. 

I wish certain customers came with warning labels.

I wish everyone I knew enjoyed perfect health and vibrancy...

 Not all wishes can come true.  I have a recently-divorced friend who commiserates, saying, “I don’t have a lot of wishes. I just want to play my fiddle, drink some decent gin, laugh a lot, and then take my cute ass home to love the same man every night—why is that so hard?”  I don’t know.   Some days, I wake up feeling so ugly inside I wonder if I should just eat my bag of make-up rather than apply it to my face. I wish I could climb inside the dryer and shrink my skin for ten minutes, instead of my jeans. I wish life was easier for us all.  As Burgess Meredith’s character says in the movie Grumpy Old Men, “Well, you can wish in one hand and crap in the other and see which gets filled first.”

We need to stay away from useless wishful thinking as much as we need to stay away from anyone who makes us feel like we are too hard to love.   Wishes are a form of magical thinking that says we can make wonderful changes without doing any work—though To Wish is one of those primordial, axiomatic elements of Being.  Such is our human condition:  Between the rocks and the stars, we make our home.  We can wish on all those stars but we live here, in the dirt, made of Dust ourselves, so it’s no wonder we crave sparkle. It’s absolutely necessary that we thirst for and create Beauty where we can.  Sometimes, our wishes lead to other wishes; sometimes they conflict with our other desires, or the desires of others. When we come together and share our wishes, prioritize them, evaluate what is actually Possible—then we arrange them into hierarchies of what is Do-able.  This makes them, and us, Sophisticated. We get Organized. We begin to work with each other, with the desires of other people and the wider world beyond our own closets.  Our wishes lead to our values.  Our values become our morality.  Our morality leads our actions.  Our actions become the foundations of the Good we leave behind.  Sometimes we don’t get what we want until we get up and just DO that Thing Which Must Be Done. Don’t tell me you didn’t get everything you “wished for” in the last election or that sale at Macy’s. Tell me how you are now building a bridge to what is Possible.

Be well, be Merry and Kind my dearies—and do Good Work!  Wishing you the BEST sort of day,

Yours aye,

Nancy

P.S. For those of you “wishing” I revealed more outcomes in these blogs, that bride turned out very happy with her sleeves—we got very lucky with the beading and the lace.  Some wishes do come true!

Living with Bias

Greetings Dear Ones!

The lady standing in front of the dressing room mirror is huffing, tutting, stamping her foot, and wiggling like a five-year-old who has to go potty.  She is mad because her dress does not fit her like it fits the model wearing it in the catalogue.  She ordered this dress on line and it is supposed to make her look Just Like That.  What the hell? Vexation emanates from her in billowing waves.  I study the dress. It is a long, bright fuchsia contraption which is made entirely on the bias.  What is bias, you say? Well, in sewing terms, the bias is the when you cut diagonally to the grain of the weave of the fabric.  The word “bias” comes to us via the Middle French word “biais” but originates from an older Greek word meaning “oblique.”  The fabric has been cut on an oblique angle.  Picture a grid: When cloth is woven, it is constructed on a loom whose strong warp threads run north to south.  The weft fibers are then woven in side to side, east to west and back.  When you cut the cloth north to south or east to west, it will not stretch as much as if you cut it on an angle. Any time you cut a curve into woven cloth, you will have to deal with some sort of bias issue—meaning that part of the hem will sag or those pieces of the pattern will not go together smoothly without some deft convincing.  There is a lot of “give” to one side rather than another which is jolly useful, mostly, but also causes a lot of problems.

 I start trying to explain this to the woman.  She has no idea what I am talking about.  She impatiently wants to know why this dress is pooching out over her navel in such an unflattering way. She thinks it is too big and I need to take it in. The opposite is true.  It’s too tight under her armpits and needs to be let out.  She won’t hear of it.  “But I’ve LOST WEIGHT,” she insists.  “This is NOT too small for me!”  No, it does not look too small, but just because she can get it on does not mean it “fits” her.  The way the entire front of the dress was cut in one piece, on an angle, means that it is going to behave in an oddly stretchy way when the normal forces of body physics are applied.  Biases aside, we cannot supersede the Natural Laws of physics!  When you pull this dress tight across the breasts, it creates a series of ever-enlarging ripples that end up looking like a pooch of “extra” fabric over the navel.

The lady’s attitude makes me realize I am dealing with more than fabric bias.  We have cognitive bias too! A cognitive bias is “a mistake in reasoning, evaluating, or remembering, often occurring as a result of holding onto one's preferences and beliefs regardless of contrary information.” This woman has seen the photo in the catalogue that shows a person wearing this dress looking sleek, elegant, svelte—approximately 5’9” and 120 pounds.  She is guilty of a heuristic bias. (The lady in the dressing room, that is, not the waif on the page)  Heuristics are simple, efficient rules humans tend to use to form judgments and decisions. They are mental shortcuts that streamline cognitive thinking (saving our energy for remembering where we hid the Halloween candy) that involve focusing on one aspect of a complex problem and ignoring others.  For example, this woman has not focused on the fact that she is neither 5’9,” nor 120 pounds.  She thinks “if I wear this, I will look just like that!”

While I am working with her, I discover a few more “bias” issues: Of the 25 most common cognitive biases, she has a mere 26.  First, there is the Intrinsic Bias—she “just knows” quite a lot.  She just knows how sewing works, even though she does not do it, and she just knows how fabric is supposed to work, even though she has never heard of a bias cut before. She also has Choice Supportive Bias.  She has chosen this dress; therefore it is the Right Choice. If she chose it, it must be right for her.  (This is why we often believe in who we vote for, rather than vote for who we believe in, especially if we have voted for someone based on the Bandwagon effect—which is when we just go along with what everyone else is doing so that we can belong to the majority.) Having chosen this dress, she backs it up with Confirmation Bias—that is, she will listen only to information she already knows.  She is not interested in facts that don’t support her current beliefs.  My attempts to get her to recognize other truths are met with Ostrich Bias—this is her subconscious decision to ignore negative information such as “this may not be the dress for you.”  She bats that away like a gnat at a summer barbeque.  She wants only to know when I will fix her dress, not how or if.  Negatives do not apply to her.  She is never told “No.” (Ostrich bias is the foundation of all ignorance.) So I trick her with a Placebo bias: she tells me to take the dress in and I don’t.  She puts it on again and insists it fits “much better.”  I hem it to the length she wants and she is happy.  Outcome bias: after a decision has been made, she evaluates my performance solely on whether the end result was positive or not.  She will not consider the conditions under which we had to work to get this result; the result is all that matters.

 Today, on Election Day of all days, I am thinking about bias a lot.  Just like in sewing, where we flex and stretch along our bias points is where we will come together to create what fits us best.  Perhaps the most challenging bias facing any of us is not the one that makes our clothing look lumpy but the one that makes us guilty of Naïve Realism: The belief that we see reality as it really is – objectively and without bias; that the facts are plain for all to see; that rational people will agree with us; and that those who don't are either uninformed, lazy, irrational, or biased. Or the Bias Bias—the belief that other people have biases, not us.

We all have biases—we have been shaped by our choices, experiences, culture, and religions, which are beautiful things so long as we take them into account and recognize when they might be impeding our higher cognitive functioning and causing us to hurt others.   I think many of us have been shocked to discover the level of bias in our country. Our nation is suffering from a compassion deficit as a result of clinging to entrenched and flamboyant bias.  We can be passionate about our beliefs while still being moderate in our behavior towards one another. Moderation, like fabric cut on a bias, is often misunderstood. It’s not just finding the bland, neither-hot-nor-cold mid-point between two opposing poles.  Rather, it is based on an acceptance of the inevitability of conflict. It’s absolutely necessary when making something two-dimensional fit a three-dimensional body.

Understand that you are biased and that others are too.  We still have to come together, and it won’t be seamless, to fashion the fabric of our version of Democracy in the 21st century.   We can take all these divisions, rivalries, and competing factions and still make something coherent and lovely, like the patchwork quilt that is our country.  Sure, it won’t look perfect but the truth is we need each other.  We need Both sides.  We cannot make a dress with left sides only.  We cannot have coats with right sleeves only.  By exercising our rights to enforce moderation, we are not saying that we have to have all the answers today—merely that we are willing to work towards workable temporary arrangements that balance our needs for security with our desires for liberty.   In an organized society, we must have room for the disorganized.  In a healthy society, we must have room for the unhealthy.  There is no ultimate resolution to these tensions.  We have to expect that—we are all fabric cut on a bias, rather than the straight of the goods.  There is damn little in this world that is pure and straight and unyieldingly perfect.  Most of us have curves. Some would have us believe otherwise—that having faith means that one must not tolerate those with no faith, or differing faiths. We must not tolerate each others’ curves. 

There is an age-old trade-off between liberty and license.  Political cultures are traditions of conflict.  As author David Brooks says, “There are never-ending tensions that pit equality against achievement, centralization against decentralization, order and community against liberty and individualism.”

We have this fantasy that there is glory to be gained in struggling against “Others.”  But Character only comes when we struggle against ourselves, against our own weaknesses, judgments, and bias. Great matters are not settled by listening to only one voice, one opinion, or one point of view. 

It’s how we will come together, despite the rhetoric that seems so fashionable at the moment that ultimately will make us strong at the seams. Yes, we are blessed with the right of free expression, but what about our responsibilities to the freedom of expression? Let us speak with In-tention, not to get Attention or to create A Tension.  At the end of the day, regardless of how the polls go today, we can still be kind.  We can be gracious in victory and humble in defeat. None of us want to be hard-hearted or cruel but we sometimes operate from unconsciousness of our own biases. We blurt out things that are mean.  We listen to messages of hate and fear and we don’t stand up.  Today is our day to stand up, individually and collectively, and admit we really do have dappled souls but we will strive to do better.  We have optimism and Hope. Reality might not look quite like it was sold to us in the catalogues but it will be ok.

 Today of all days, don’t be a bystander.  Of all the sins we commit, let’s not let today’s be the sin of Omission. To paraphrase the poet Marguerite Wilkinson, let us not, commit the sin of “unattempted loveliness.”  Loveliness is waiting for us, where our biases come together and fit us just right.  

Be well, my dearies, and Vote!!!

Yours aye,

Nancy

Ants and Grasshoppers

“Being forced to work, and forced to do your best, will breed in you temperance and self-control, diligence and strength of will, cheerfulness and content, and a hundred virtues which the idle will never know.” Charles Kingsley 

Greetings Dear Ones!

Harvest time is drawing to a close.  The hay is in the shed, the firewood is getting stacked up close to the house—I am working like an ant but still wanting to party like a grasshopper. My Now has become all about The Future. A killing frost has silenced the cricket choir—a harsh lesson warning my inner Grasshopper to shape up and Prepare: With frigid, snow-furred claws and icicles for teeth, It cometh. We’ve had hail, heavy rain, a sun burn, a rainbow, and a light dusting of snow all in one week.  It’s New England—Winter could be any moment now. 

Even in the shop, we do our work with an eye to the future.  A woman brings in a pair of slacks for her son. I secretly put four inch hems on the boy’s suit pants.  I normally only turn up two inches on a hem but this mother is getting them hemmed “for no reason.” There is no upcoming “event”—she just wants to be “ready for anything.” (All Yankees are part Boy Scout.) I say, be ready for this kid to grow! If I know anything about teenage boys, it’s that they go through a phase when they will eat the contents of the fridge on a daily basis and grow an average of six inches a week. I think about how the future versions of this mother and son will thank the little ant-minded seamstress who thought to make room for another half a leg. 

There is a somewhat skewed Bell curve to the time management strategies of our customers.  At one end, there are the pure Ants and sweet, polite Mr. Brisk-Vigour who gets all his winter woolens and long-johns mended and dry-cleaned in August. In the middle, representing the bulk of people, are the ant-grasshopper blends ranging from cheerful workers to dour party-ers. Most of them manage to give us just enough time to accommodate their needs. At the far right of the spectrum is Ms. Breathless Grasshopper: “I know it’s Thursday after 5, but the wedding is this Saturday and well, I just got the dress in the mail and…” One look at her tells Prudence that she has been chosen as a bridesmaid for her Karaoke talents rather than her organizational skills. The waft of tequila in the dressing room is palpable.

These harried ones, the Grasshoppers rushing in with their hair or pants on fire, these are visions of myself I could do without.  They haunt me. I see how Inconvenient I must be to the truly Organized.  The furthest to the left of this Bell Curve—which moves in a continuum from “People on Time,” to “People with extra time,” all the way to “People who make Extraordinary Preparedness an art form”—these are exotic creatures to me.  I long to live among them and study their ways.  They don’t seem to have the same troubles I do.  But then, they don’t have some of the domestic companions I do.  Apart from a beloved son, an assortment of animal criminals and a Russian tortoise, I live daily with someone else who drives me Totally Bonkers…who makes my life more fraught than three incontinent Jack Russells put together.  Let’s call her Past Nancy.  She’s a warped Zen ideal of “burning in the Now,” who thinks never of past nor future.  She’s a menace. She never thinks to refill what she empties. She never empties what she fills. She never puts the caps back on anything. She makes my life a living hell sometimes—spending money we need for more important bills on fabric she already has, somewhere, but cannot find; forgetting to turn the water off when refilling the sheep’s trough so that their paddock turns into a marsh and her well runs dry and burns out the pump motor; leaving apple cakes and scones in the oven until they are cinders… She’s a mess.  She’s the worst roommate I have ever had. “Who left these dishes in the sink? Who forgot to lock the chickens up at night? Who let her car inspection sticker lapse four months?”  Present Nancy often cannot get ANYTHING done because she is like a dazed member of FEMA following in the aftermath of destruction left by hurricane Past Nancy.  

The once and future Nancys are always in some form of conflict over what needs to be done Now. Present Nancy lurches between damage control and forward planning that would make tomorrow less hellish.   Inevitably, Past Nancy has aimed too high or too low, perhaps just too chaotically (if at all), which keeps Present Nancy in a rut—a rut that seems occasionally to be on fire with emergencies.   When the ambient chaos level leads to unwarranted suffering, it’s time to pause and have a little meeting with my selves.  Prudence is always the first to show up.  She has a long list of complaints, observations, and grievances. She is like the woman, years ago at a Maynard town hall meeting, who got up and told everyone she checked the mileage on our town policeman’s cruiser every morning when he went into the Bean House to get coffee.  

“Excuse me,” I say to my selves, “Winter and worse yet, Tomorrow, are on their way, even as I speak. I am tired of coming home to a place that looks like it’s been the scene of an epic Struggle.  The mice, not generally known for being such great planners  yet who are clearly much better planners than we, have taken over the kitchen and are even now annexing the closet, as evidenced by the pile of dog food I found in my boot this morning. I’m sick of realizing I cannot wear half of my clothes because they need: a. a button, b. a patch, c. a hem.  I am a seamstress, for crying out loud! (or as a friend likes to put it, a “Seamster” which sounds infinitely tougher.)  We need to pull together and turn this ship around!

The ranting feels good while it lasts.  Prudence tries to take potshots when she can, but the rest of me feels defeated, sullen, and bored.  Only Prudence is smiling. She is a fine one for issuing demands to “shape up or ship out,” immediately demanding more, being punitive and caustic about what we DO manage to achieve—such as having clothing on that is not back to front or inside out, remembering underwear and such things... She is an obnoxious Ant lecturing Grasshoppers.

I change course. “Look,” I plead, “I know we hate making decisions and that our choosit muscles are generally fairly weak but the fact is that we make around seven hundred decisions a day whether we want to or not.  (Very Important Life-affecting decisions like deciding NOT to smack that certain customer who leans on the back doorbell like it’s a fire alarm until I am almost to the back door before she skitters round to the front door instead. I can’t afford any jail time because they don’t let you have knitting needles in jail—so this is a very Important Choice.)  Could we not aim one or two of these many other choices at a better result for tomorrow? I mean, I don’t expect to find my wallet, car keys and cell phone all in the same day—so let’s aim low, at something achievable, like being able to eat breakfast at home, not at ninety miles an hour on the way to work so that we show up, literally, with egg on our face or a lap full of oatmeal? How about, starting now, we think of a few LITTLE plans that could make life a tiny bit better before sundown tonight? I promise to notice. I promise to celebrate. There WILL be a reward—so long as it is not Swiss Cake Rolls or whisky… The Inner Child perks up but Grasshopper Nancy is pissed.  She was counting on some whisky and a few Swiss Cake Rolls.  She would happily fiddle while pretty much anything burned, including Rome or Ashburnham.

The truth is, dear readers, we all are somewhere on the spectrum between Grasshopper and Ant.  It’s necessary to plan for the future but it’s important to have fun too.  What good is securing a future that will not be any fun? I love it when I get my act together and leave gifts for my future self—like when I get into a clean, neatly made bed at night, a gift from Morning Nancy—with my nightie folded under my pillow like a love note, or when I get to work on Mondays and find I have already changed my needles and threads to the right colors and prepped my work station so that my first project will go smoothly, or when I think to  buy toilet paper before I have to shuffle through the house with my knees bound together by jeans half-way down, scrambling for any kind of substitute that will work, like junk mail or Jo Ann Fabric receipts.

I work really hard at Accepting What Is and trying to change what I can for the better but I also have to admit that sometimes it feels churlish and ungrateful to denigrate my current insufficient (to me) success in order to benefit from my imaginings of  improving the future.  It’s hard not to feel guilty when we in this country are all so blessed and prosperous beyond the wildest dreams of most of the world, where both ants and grasshoppers are starving.  I should stay put and be overjoyed with my lot. Why plan ahead for a “lack” when there is such bounty? And yet, I also can’t help thinking “here I am at point A and I can clearly see that at point B, just over there, everything will be so much More Organized, Peaceful, Prosperous and Serene—with more to share, beds I don’t have to vacuum, houseplants that live, and car keys whose whereabouts are not a total mystery—let’s pack up and move there at once!” All I have to do is stop slacking off and fiddling…A little earnest, persistent drudgery is all it takes. Every day I get up before dawn and announce to myself “Today is the day I am going to Get Organized. Life is not going to happen to me; I am going to happen to It.” And then…Then, I find out that Past Nancy, that blasted grasshopper, has left a load of wash wet in the washer for the last three days and it is starting to smell…

Be well, my dear ones!  Some days are not so much about the Harvest we reap as the seeds we sow. Do something now that your Future selves will thank you for!  Pay it forward to yourself, and when you receive your own gift one day, may you smile and thank your Past Ant self.

May you do Good Work AND be Merry!

Yours aye,

Nancy

P.S. If only Past Nancy had written this Blog sooner, damn her!

Chipmunk Heaven

Greetings Dear Ones!

Here in Ashburnham, the Giant Silent Requiem has begun, with the cricket chorus singing its last, hushed “Te Deums” from the grass.  We are having the kind of crisp yet warm and sharply focused Fall days that New England does best.  I look with glad and wistful eyes on the shameless glory of Death as it flutters in a thousand vibrant hues around me.  It is Magnificent.

It is time to dig a grave, though I know not for whom and I know not for when.  I am a shepherdess. All I know is that, come January, I cannot spend a FOURTH winter with a deceased sheep in my garage, wondering which Spring will thaw first, the ground or the smell? The old-time farmers around me say I must dig a hole now, before the frost, so that I will have a safe place to put a corpse, should the inevitable occur.  My sheep, though they think of themselves as house pets, are too small for the rendering plant and too large to flush down the toilet, so we have to be practical and prepared. It makes sense, though every year I think it Cannot happen again… can it? This year, I will dig the hole.

In the tailoring shop, a little boy needs to have his suit pants hemmed up for a funeral on Saturday.  He is too little to be much concerned about the reason he needs fancy pants—he is more interested in the pin cushion.  I smile at him fondly and think about how Children host the best funerals.  My mind wanders back to the day, a day just like today, when I learned that Heaven comes in every size:

……A soft breeze causes the oak leaves to etch the cobalt bowl of sky like green razor blades.  There is the occasional plop of an acorn hitting the sand in the playground.  I am monitoring the outdoor free play of cheerfully grubby Waldorf students aged 5 to 11.  I have been hired to lead arts, crafts, and story-telling sessions one day a week for a handful of after-school students who must remain until after five p.m. because both of their parents are busy working full-time jobs to afford the dizzying private tuition of this school. 

Suddenly, a group of excited children rush up to me with bright eyes and dirt-streaked faces.  “Miss Willow, Miss Willow!” they cry.  (I have told them I used to be a tree. I firmly believe in telling children outrageous possibilities before their minds harden and set like cement. Unable to disprove a negative, they cheerfully embraced the notion and took great delight in telling me what they used to be.  A charming little lass said she had been a beautiful sunset!)

“Look!!” they clamor, “We have found a past Chipmunk!”  A past chipmunk? I wonder.  What the hell is a past chipmunk?  I don’t understand.  All I can think of is Dicken’s “A Christmas Story” and the ghost of chipmunks past.  Then I notice that one of the children is proudly displaying in his bare hands the lifeless remains of a very stiff chipmunk. 

          “Oh,” I say, “a PASSED chipmunk. A DEAD chipmunk.” I notice that folks in New England say “passed,” as in “passed away,”   more often than they use the word dead.  And they tend to abandon the word “away.”  I have often been confused to hear someone say “My aunt passed last night.”  And I think, passed what? Gas? A Kidney stone? A driving test? What did your aunt pass? Only by observing the concerned and sympathetic responses from the other New Englanders do I surmise that the aunt in question actually passed AWAY.   Perhaps the notion of “away” frightens them at some level so they drop it. Most New Englanders never see any reason one should ever go away and, Heaven forbid, leave New England. (Unless it is to go to Florida, which to them is New England but with palm trees…) But why they don’t say “died” intrigues me.  This notion of passing over some sort of “Rainbow Bridge” or through some imaginary curtain or membrane between worlds seems pervasive in this land that birthed the Transcendentalist movement.  I remember my dear friend Margie saying to me with intense certainty and quiet excitement from her hospice bed in her living room, “Nancy! I know where the Kingdom of Heaven is!  It’s just right there!” she said, eyes shining, pointing to the kitchen.  Ever after, even now, I do believe that the Kingdom of Heaven IS in the kitchen.

So here Life presents us with a dead chipmunk.  Far from being afraid of death or even germs, they crowd round him, taking turns to study him up close and stroke his stripes with thin, gentle fingertips. Death has made him accessible to them in ways that Life never could.  He is perfect. We can perceive no clue as to why he died.  He did not seem a victim of foul play. He left no note disclosing his personal anguish.

“Where did you find him?” I ask.

“Under the trees, over there,” comes the chorus. 

“Probably he fell out of his home in the tree,” says one of the littlest.

“Don’t be silly,” corrects a bigger child, “chipmunks live underground!”

“Speaking of underground,” I say, “This guy needs to get there soon or he is going to smell very bad.  He needs to return to the earth and feed the tree that has been feeding him.”

“Yes!” they agree. “We need a funeral!”  And immediately, the older girls assume command of the situation.  They know exactly what must be done. Everyone springs into action.

 “We need flowers!” they bark over their shoulders as they dig.  The older boys, having had the fun of looking at the chipmunk quickly lose interest in being bossed around and head back to their former game of kickball, all except for a younger boy named Charlie, who has the velvet eyes of a poet and continues to hold and stroke the chipmunk as if he is made of spun glass. I love how gentle he is with Death in his grasp.

“We don’t know who you were,” he says softly to the chipmunk. “We can’t notify your family, or your synagogue, or your friends.  You are just an unknown chipmunk.  But we know you were here and we know you must have loved jumping around in the grass looking for all these acorns.  You must have loved the warm sun and the tickly grass. And acorns, of course.”  He keeps up a sad, steady, soothing (if somewhat repetitive) murmur to the clump of fur in his palm.

Meanwhile, the girls have transitioned with smooth efficiency from whatever momentary flicker of grief they might once have felt for the loss of an anonymous chipmunk to busily digging “the tomb of the unknown chipmunk” under the direction of the self-selected Planners.  They scoop the ground with sticks and dirt-darkened fingernails, clawing back a chipmunk-sized opening in the earth’s crust.  Some pick flowers from the nursery school garden next door and are yelled at immediately by their bosses, “Hey! We’re not allowed to pick those!” Shamed, the girls freeze and drop the crumpled flowers where they stand. Common, honest, law-abiding dandelions will have to do.  Finally, their preparations are done and they summon Charlie to lay his tiny burden to rest on a little golden bed.  The headstone is a scrap of board they found by the equipment shed and inscribed with colored chalk “R.I.P.”  The foot stone is a pine cone.  They fill the hole above him with flowers and layers of warm dry sand, jostling each other for position.  Eventually, dusty and satisfied, they stand up in a ring around the grave.

          “Well,” announces one of the Queen Bees after a moment of quiet, “That’s all done! Thanks for coming, Chipmunk!” There are no tears.

          “Wait,” says Charlie plaintively, “we need to build him a stairway to heaven, like the ancient Egyptians.  How will he reach it without our help?”

          “Don’t be ridiculous Charlie,” snaps one of the girls, “recess is almost over.  We don’t have time for a project like that!” Her collaborators shake their heads and snort their unified mutual contempt of the idea.

          “Come on,” pleads Charlie, “It won’t take us all that long.  Chipmunk Heaven is really only about up to here.” He gestures to the side of his ribs.  The girls ignore him and run off to the swing-set tossing their pony tails like young horses galloping away.

          Charlie remains alone, slump-shouldered, staring at the grave—thoughts, neck, and head fully yet invisibly immersed in Chipmunk Heaven.  For this dreamy poet-child, a puddle is a galaxy, a bathtub is an ocean with an Antarctica of bubbles at one end—the whole of the universe merely a whisper in God’s ear. The dung beetle has a kingdom. The mouse has a commonwealth. A patch of grass is an ant safari. The sky is not some overturned bowl above us—it begins right at the moment his feet touch the earth, just like he has been taught in art class.  His own boy’s world is where this series of intertwined circles, spheres, and cosmoses overlap in magical, transcendental Venn diagrams of existence—with him at the very center. Suddenly his eyes light upon a stick nearby.  He grabs it and props it at an angle from the edge of the grave to reach the nearby fence.  He steps back and smiles.  His plan appears to be that the soul of the chipmunk will make its way up the stick, over to the fence, and thence up a steep climb the rest of the way to his Eternal Glory.

Moments later, the bell rings, and we are summoned inside to the humble human doings of snack, craft, bathroom breaks, and stories.  I follow the rushing bodies slowly, reluctant to part from the golden light shimmering on the oak tree, waist up in Chipmunk Heaven myself…

These Autumn days bring us graves to dig, and threats of cold and dark—yet they shine with the promise of Chipmunk Heaven too—in the lights of dusty smiles, in the warmth of noisy collaboration, and in shared beliefs that we were all Something Else once and something else to become again when we return to Mother Earth.  For now, we Live—in that sunlit space Between—in the games we play, the work we do, and the love we share.  And, unbeknownst to most of us, from the ankles up, we run and breathe and reside in a myriad of concentric Heavens for every living creature from wee tiny beetles to great mastodons.  The ancient poets and the earth-streaked seven-year-olds know it to be true. And so it is.

Be well, my darlings, and do Good Work!

Yours aye,

Nancy