Some Life Questions?

“Knowing the answers will help you in school. Knowing how to question will help you in Life.”

—Warren Berger

Greetings Dear Ones!

Have you ever spent the weekend with a certain friend who leaves you swirling in endless questions? Questions that rip you open and leave you room to grow that, until then, you had not known you needed? How many ways are there to ask such questions?  Is it Ok to have no answers? How may I live at peace with No Answers and instead live more authentically into where these Questions might lead? A musician-prophet my voice recognition software is calling “Elsewhere Phrases” wants to know—Why am I here?  What the hell am I doing at a fiddle camp when I should be cleaning my garage and selling my furniture so I can move and get on to my Someday-Life? Why not a sewing camp? (Are there such things?) Why not a writing weekend, which might be more necessary in the short term? (Should I start a sewing camp?) Would I just wind up cooking instead?  Or would I have to spend a lot of time wondering how to change a fuse box because the teenagers blew all the fuses with their hairdryers?  At the very least, shouldn’t I be back in the shop, laboring over one of the 67 prom gowns, which has to be 3-6 inches shorter by May 11th?

Why go to a fiddle retreat?  Because the grass is too wet to mow? Because I couldn’t face cleaning the garage? Because the Journey Continues?  Or all of these things? Now that I am here, what is the best use of my time—to sit on a couch until the wee hours, making verbal burbled heart-connections with fellow members of this beloved tribe, or shall I travel out alone beneath the stars and use horsehair on a stick to capture one by one notes that scamper like fireflies into the bewildering darkness, until each is safely caught and resting in neat lines along the length of the tune, waiting submissively for me to tap it gently with my finger so it can glow when the time is right?  Awash in music, intoxicated by an ancient Celtic reel clicking by at a heart-rate of 120 beats per minute, in a vortex of vibration, community, and the frictionless flow of a bow arm swinging like a piston on a steam train—is there any better way to LIVE? Ever? If only for a breath, a moment, or an evening that connects itself to Eternity in every direction?

What does it mean to Be Here? To be ALIVE? To me? To you? To any of us? Does that young mother, eating with one arm because the other one is holding a baby, have any idea what she is giving her child as she feeds her with her own hungers for Beauty, for Peace, for the thrill of this Universal Language that connects?  What can mothers ever give us besides Food and also Hunger?

What is to become of us at this camp?  And why did I think it was necessary to consume the Whole of that bean burrito at lunch? Will there be embarrassing consequences? How can I ensure that the “Vibrations” I raise, have nothing to do with the legumes I have ingested? How can we succor each other as we labor to bring Light to a world that cannot yet decide how it wants to be but only knows the choices are “for better or worse” but never for the same?  Will we be better people come Monday? Is there any way to stand up, or sit down, or walk out, sing, speak, or shout, “Please, dear World, Choose Better!!!”? Or should I just cross my legs primly and wait, hoping I make it to the bathroom before everyone rushes out during break time?

Is there no greater act of Courage than in giving your soul to your art—to having some Call from within answered in your handiwork? Is there no greater act of Hope or Fear than in bringing a precious, vulnerable, newborn child into this world so that it can ruin your body, ruin your sleep, alter every aspect of your Life, your schedule, your finances, your flesh, your mind, your heart—yet see it grow so it can hear and play and LIVE this music?

Beyond Pro-birth, what does “Pro-Life” mean? Does it mean ALL life? Does it include spotted things like Owls and Salamanders? Does it mean we cherish our Polar Bears and the Jungle Lungs of the planet? And How do we honor those who bring and bear Life, who nurture, protect, and serve the vulnerable in their care?  Where are the babysitters and math tutors they need? Who is their help? Who brings their food, provides their shelter, lends them vocational or educational support? Where are the extra muscles, hands and feet, when they can go no further, in their deep exhaustion, and do no more for their (our) young?

What was that note that just flashed by? Was it C sharp or C natural? Why are these beans holding me hostage? Why did I eat that Burrito? Where is the balance point in this battle in my head—in the struggle between words and wordlessness?  Should I have stayed home? Was making sure a prom dress was 3 inches shorter a better use of my time? WHY did I eat so many beans?

When the instructor goes around the room and asks us to say why we are here, how do I reply? Is the correct answer to say that I want to master the up-driven bow in a snappy Strathspey? Or Grace notes? Or Love notes? What if I stand up and ask to be Forgiven and leave the “for what” up to everyone’s imaginations? Which will create the worse scandal? Truth or Beans?

What are the choices we make in our own lives, for Life? To be fully ALIVE—mentally, spiritually, organically—beans and all? Does Evil exist in any other form than the limiting, diminishing, or denying the privileges of Life? How can we begin to talk about this in larger, softer, kinder ways? Is there a friendly way to discuss Death when we cannot even decide if the bow should go up or down? For isn’t that what we imply, every time Life is mentioned?  How can we enlarge the discussion about the Seed into the discussion of the Forest too? And what it means to Bloom? What are the ingredients we need to Flourish? How can we make sure others are getting what they need too?

What if Life is not something that can be defined by Biologists, Priests, or Doctors? What if it is something that only you and I and the Poets can know for sure, after dancing naked in the rain?  

Who are you? Where have you been? How do you do? What do you do? Why are you here? How long has it been since I’ve seen you? Where are you going? What’s next? Have you found your voice yet? Have you heard your own throat in full song?  What if every relationship we entered into from now on was an answer to the question “What does Cherish mean to you?”

Since when is Cynicism valued over Optimism, as if it is the more intelligent choice? How do we begin the process of installing Sophistication on Optimism and removing its unhelpful connotations of naivete and ignorance? What happens to us when we seek to define ourselves outside of (or without) the traditional contexts of “Success”?  Is the cellist my software insists on calling “Gnat House” talking about a “traumatic” bass line? What is that word she keeps saying? Dramatic?  Is there even a difference anyway?

As notes pelt and land on the desert of my skin, seeping through to join the beating of my blood and emerge as tears, I ask myself, “What is it I have to learn from this kind of Loving?”  What if being around “like-minded” people is actually dangerous?  What if our minds are too small? How can we be around more like-hearted people?

What if I told you that I don’t actually love you for your [music] (or art or science) but for that Thing within you that makes you seek and serve your Gift? Would you understand that? What if it is not about the painting, or the song, or the dance, or the clever use of metaphor I love so much—what if I love best your ability to say YES? What if it’s simply your Thirst for what is Good—for Justice, for the perfection of an up-driven bow, and for “No Voices to be Silenced” by Orchestral or governmental forces, that makes me glimpse your Source, and therefore mine? What if the Serving of that Thing is the thing that makes you most Alive?  When are we going to stop worrying about what size or shape our candles are and start worrying about whether they are Lit?

What is Motherhood, essentially, but saying Yes to the Life crying to be born within us? And how is Mother’s Day to be endured by the aching women who said their Yes, yet whose empty arms extend with desperate longing to hold those yet unborn, those taken too early by disease, accident, drugs, disasters, or incarceration? How do we hold these women in our hearts and hugs and tell them they are not forgotten? That they have not “failed” Motherhood?  How do we include those women who never had their kidneys punched from the inside, who never felt that hot, red, spiral of hellish pain as they pushed another person’s body out of their own body, and tell them they are still Mothers for all they sacrifice in doing What Must be Done for the young? That they are some of the Best mothers of all?

Who said the first Yes to your request to be here? How are you now choosing your own Life? Be it with roses, with kind deeds or chocolates, with a card, or simply in the Silence of your heart—how are you Thanking your own Mother for the gift of your one, tiny, Amazingly Precious Life?

I love you, my Darlings.  Of that, there is no question! Happy Mother’s Day!

Yours aye,

Nancy

 

Faking It

Greetings my dear ones!

Spring has been a bit of Fake News here.  (Well, we certainly aren’t having a heat wave!) Flowers are defiantly squeezing themselves up between cold clots of mud only to be pelted and slain.  All night, Mother Nature chucked pearls at the windows which fell and crusted on my slumping Daffodils who, between the rain and the yellow dog scribbles, are probably wondering why they’ve bothered.  I turned the central heating off weeks ago as a matter of Principle; because the Calendar says I ought to, not because my skin or bones agree.   Even fur-bearing residents are still seeking the heat of the wood stove at day’s end and in the hours before dawn, when we rise but the thermometer doesn’t.

Mr. & Mrs. Wood Swallow, whose summer holiday home is beneath the overhang by my kitchen door, have returned to inspect their nest and to mutter and tut about what a mess it is.  The female glares at me like this is all my fault.  The male perches on a nearby plant hanger, whistling tunelessly, eyeing me with sidelong glances until his partner snaps at him to get back to work. I too am like a bird tearing her next apart—cleaning, clearing, rearranging my home.  We nod civilly, like good neighbors who don’t get too involved in each other’s business, as we pass by in this shared corridor to the garage, each on our way to our version of a dumpster to discard everything that no longer brings us Joy.

Mr. Shorts comes into the shop with everything bare from his ankles to mid thighs.  We remark that it is a bit early for shorts.  Shorts retorts “Anything above 38 degrees is shorts weather in New England.” It’s true that, by this stage of the year, 40 feels balmy—like T-shirt weather—but not in a driving rain and howling wind.  Prudence wrinkles her nose at the sight of a man’s leg before July. At least he is wearing shoes and not socks with sandals.

Prom season has made us all a wee bit tense and crabby in the shop. And by “a wee bit,” you understand I really mean “oh, Hell Yeah!” So I have had to get a hold of this Crabbiness—born of panic and fatigue—and give it a good wrestle, knock it to the ground, and insist to myself and it that I will be CHEARFUL [sic] (I love 18th Century spelling). This is a Great Opportunity to develop some Character around things that bug me.  Happiness is a Choice.  Even if you have to Fake it.

So enough whining.  Speaking of Faking it…On to the topic on everyone’s mind (after the Bruin’s chances in the play-offs, of course): Undergarments. Specifically, padded bras. What good is a blog about the Secrets of a seamstress if we don’t mention the Unmentionables once in a while?  We have another 68 gowns to alter before May 18th (we’ve already finished more than 70) and more are coming in every day. At least 44% will require the addition of Bust pads.  This time of year, we order them by the bale.

“What are bust pads?” ask the Uninitiated. It turns out that Bust Pads are little (or large) things that look like dented jam donuts with all the jam mooshed out of them that get sewn into a dress so that you don’t have to wear a bra stuffed with toilet paper to make the dress fit. Who knew? You would think I, of all people, would have known about this sooner—after spending anguished years as a teen, trying to fill out a AA cups that wouldn’t contain so much as a poached egg. (Though, in this weather, a bra full of cotton-balls does benefit the wearer a little extra warmth!)

Whether you scorn ladies undergarments as symbols of Patriarchal Oppression or, as in recent decades (think Victoria’s Secret), hail them as a source of female sexual empowerment, it’s undeniable that they have been an endless source of fascination, contention, and debate since women began wearing underwear. In the Victorian era, dress reformers declared that restrictive garments prevented women living healthy lives, and dared to argue that underwear should not “exceed seven pounds in weight.” (Try telling that to some of our customers! You should see what they lug in here!) Underwear gives us a glimpse into a larger story: the expectations, limitations and status afforded to women throughout history.  Corsets, crinolines and crotch-less pants: for centuries, women have been expected to wear a variety of weird and wonderful contraptions under their clothes to achieve a desirable silhouette. The return of the belly-squishing corset, in the form of the flattering Spanx, shows we’re not over our historical (hysterical?) obsession with flat tummies and small waists.

In the dressing room, we see everything from ribs with nipples to women who would suffer severe head trauma if they jogged.  Not only are no two women exactly alike—on the same woman, not even two breasts are alike.  How this figures into bra sizing makes the mind boggle.  Thanks to modern technology, we now have available to us a dizzying array of synthetic prosthetics for surgery survivors, cross dressers, and those, like me, who got two generous helpings of rump and forgot to add breasts when they went through Heaven’s Body Buffet.  Now, toilet paper is once again free to be used for what it does best—and making nun’s costumes for Barbies. (You might have to reread past blog entries to get that last reference…)

For the most part, this is a female issue.  Guys, for all their insecurities about “size issues,” don’t seem to worry enough to fill their jock straps with Kleenex on a regular basis. Nor do their “fashionable silhouettes” require this of them, cod-pieces having gone out of style in the 17th century.  But girls… wow! Day after day, I witness them in all their anxious vulnerability, wearing big, clunky sports bras underneath their prom gowns. They stand there, their dignity and crinolines so tightly furled about them, as they clutch at their meager bosoms and wonder what can be done about these gaudy bodices that dent inward. I feel their pain.  I hope it does not take them another thirty years to understand that Femininity and Allure have nothing to do with how much adipose tissue you have or where it is located.  No woman can be considered truly “sexy” who does not love herself.  It’s not what you put on yourself, but what you summon from within  that makes people sit up and notice. Well…most of the time. (I’ll admit that it IS possible to roam the streets of Boston taking selfies in leather bondage gear with Smurf-Blue hair to your hips and get more than a few people at a traditional music session in an Irish pub to go to the window to Look at you!)(Don’t ask how, but I do know this for a fact…)

Underwear, by its very definition, (hint: the clue is in the name—UNDER) is not meant to be seen. But Underwear doesn’t just shape our bodies, it shapes out lives.  And our History.  It seems to take the pendulum an average of 40 years to complete its swing from the absurd back over to the ridiculous. A hundred years ago, in the 1920’s, an androgynous style—flat chest and slim hips was popular.  By the 1940’s, hip pads and the “bullet bra” (making breasts resemble twin torpedoes) made for a highly stylized “womanly” figure. By the 1960’s, we were favoring the “barely there” bras.  Ten years later, in the 1970’s we got smart and burned them altogether, deciding to use exercise not underwear to reconfigure the body.

Now we have bust pads and Cutlets. Cutlets are little silicone things, the shape of a push up pad (or a chicken cutlet, hence the name) that you put in your bra to add cleavage.

Prudence thinks there is no sense in adding in what God has left out but I disagree. I once invested in a set of “cutlets,” which you can get from any CVS or pharmacy.  That was when I lived in an extremely COLD house.  It was winter and I wanted to wear said cutlets to a formal event.  When I pulled them out of my lingerie drawer, they were frozen rock hard.  Who wants to put that on the tenderest of bare skin? I put them on the radiator to thaw, got distracted, and forgot about them.  When my then husband found them (locating them by means of an unusual smell) they had scorch-lines across them like genuine grilled chicken breasts. “I think these are fully cooked” he said. “Thank you,” I said, tucking them into my bra with as much aplomb as I could muster.

It’s hard to make small-talk at a social gathering with Vanity in the form of charred silicone sticking to one’s chest but I managed.  It took me a few more years to realize that Beauty is more in how we radiate the Light of loving who we are, loving what we do, and loving and connecting to the people we are Listening to and serving, rather than anything we can stuff, tape, or tie to our bodies.

 “Fake it til you make it” is one of those obnoxiously chipper little memes that pops up continually in “pop” psychology and encourages us to be “ourselves, only better…” through the use of blatant, cheery deceit. I’m all for bettering myself, sure—but the idea of “faking” it is a fraught one on many levels and starts with the premise that we are “Not Enough.”  But sometimes Faking it, if only for a while, offers us a useful crutch --a way to begin.  If a hunk of foam rubber makes your dress fit better and that gives you more Confidence, then go for it.  It’s the Confidence that is sexy…NOT the foam rubber.

Don't pretend to be anything or anyone -- simply take action to Enable Joy.  It’s not warm just because one chooses to wear shorts; we don’t have any less work to do when we choose to smile and be kind—but it helps. It helps a lot.  Authenticity takes a variety of forms: Do one small brave thing, and then next one will be easier, and soon Joy will flow and morale will improve.  Sometimes we smile, not because we are Happy, but because we are Strong and that’s as good a reason to smile as any.  With regard to Spring Weather, Good Cheer, and Bust-sizes we need all the help we can get!

Be well, my darlings!  Be Warm and Brave and do Good Work!

Yours aye,

Nancy

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Holy Week

“Dignity, and even holiness too, sometimes, are more questions of coat and waistcoat than some people imagine.” Charles Dickens 


Greetings My Lovelies!

Forgive my more-than-usually-disjointed ravings this week—I’m a little revved up on 75% off Cadbury’s Crème Eggs and what I think might be glitter poisoning…

Last week was quite an intense week on many levels.  For one, I truly appreciate and am deeply humbled by the number of kind-hearted souls who took the time to write encouraging notes congratulating me for showing up to write this blog for fifty-two weeks in a row.   I know it wasn’t always pretty—sometimes it was more street-fight than ballet—but I put myself out there and got roughed up and dirty and it felt really good to pause and celebrate surviving that.  I had planned to slap myself on the back, eat a truly revolting amount of chocolate, and totally slack off for a while but no… Thanks a lot! Because of helpful busybodies like them and all that residual “catholic guilt” from childhood, I now feel like I can’t stop.   So! On we plod…to glory, glitter, or the grave.  Who can tell?

The number of Prom gowns has reached the triple digits in the shop.  I am bobbing on a tide of tulle and lace, trying not to swallow too much glitter.  I keep losing my thimble, my scissors, and large portions of my sanity.   I’ll be so happy if we aren’t all bald with a twitch by June. I haven’t glimpsed my co-workers for days in the multi-colored forest that hangs from every rack and hook and spare bit of ceiling. The phone is ringing off the hook with teenagers who have never made a phone call to a live human being before: “yeah…um…I have like…um…I’m going to a…well, I need a dress that needs to get made, um… like, shorter maybe? Is that something you do?”  They might prefer to text but we can’t answer those because our hands are busy.  At least they are calling for themselves, not having their mothers do it for them.  Prudence thinks that any girl old enough to go to Prom is old enough to sort out her own schedule and the intricacies of getting a gown fitting in between cheerleading practice and student senate meetings. Fifty percent of the girls who don’t phone ahead, who just walk in the door with dresses the size of a bale of hay, have completely forgotten to bring their shoes. (Hint: we don’t know how short to make these dresses if you aren’t wearing your shoes! Offering to stand on tip-toes does not count!) For some reason, the fashion this year is to have gowns with skirts big enough to slip-cover a Volkswagon.   Some of them have as many as seven layers with the average layer being nine yards around with a least one four-inch bit of plastic horsehair braid around a layer—sometimes three.  “I don’t understand why this hem was so expensive,” says one mother, “after-all, it only had to come up a little bit.”  Yes, mutters Prudence, but that “little bit” had to come up all the way round, you daft woman, and it took a whole day!  It’s like watching a drunk trying to make it home on a Saturday night—it’s not the length of the road he has to stumble—it’s the width that really wears him out.  

For every two gowns we complete, another four come in.  The first prom is this Saturday, April 27th and they carry on every weekend until June 15th.  There are three or four different local schools all sharing the same date of May 18th so that seems to be the high water mark to hit.  In addition, we are still mending zippers, hemming trousers, and (up until Saturday) repairing adult-sized Bunny costumes.

A girls walks in with a gown. “Did you call for an appointment?” asks my friend.

“Oh,” she says hesitantly. “No…”

“It’s just that we can’t take any more gowns for May 3rd,” she explains.  “We are totally swamped and we want to be able to give everyone they best service we can so we have to say no to the May 3rd now, in order to get all the other May 3rds out of here.”

She says it as warmly and kindly as she can but the girl just meets her with a confused, blank stare.   My friend tries another tack: “When is your prom, honey?  Is it May 3rd?”

A light seems to switch on in the girl and she beams. “Oh!” She says brightly, “No, it’s not!” and heads for the dressing room.

“When is it?” I ask.

“Not until April 27th!” the girl announces cheerfully over her shoulder.

A man calls, wanting to know if we can hem his pants. “Yes,” we say, “Of course, just drop them off—give us a week to ten days.”

“WHAT?!” he barks.  “A Week? But I need them for Sunday!” (It’s Thursday.)

“Can you bring them right over now?” we ask.

“NO! I can’t do that!” he says, “I’ve got too many things to do today…I can’t get there until Saturday.”

“Just bring them,” we tell him with a sigh.

Saturday comes.  We are only open for three hours but more happens in those three hours than sometimes happens all week.  For one thing, the parking lot is always full when I arrive because people think we open at 9 and we open at 10 on Saturdays, so many have been in their cars, on their phones for the past 30 minutes before we unlock the door.  Their mouths are all making the same thin, peculiar line as they simultaneously grit their teeth and smile.  Their eyes are as hard as stale jelly beans. This is just one of their many stops and their errands are now all behind schedule.

Within three minutes, we have four people texting in the waiting area and two people roaming the shop putting their items on the work tables, the main desk, anywhere except the counter where we write up new work.  There is a bride in the dressing room who says she doesn’t like the way the top of her strapless dress is standing out so far away from her boobs.  “These look like boobies on the half shell,” she whines. We give her some body tape but instead of having it pull the dress in towards the body, it pulls the boobs out to the dress, so they resemble pale beige chewing gum stuck to a shoe. I can’t figure out how to solve this problem because the phone is ringing again and a woman in flip-flops with what appears to be a 3-litre container of Dunkin’ Donuts iced coffee (now half empty) is wondering if we have a bathroom.  In storms Mr. Thursday, wanting his pants hemmed while he waits.

I look at the pants he hands me.  The tags are still on them.  These are very well-made, high-end trousers from a reputable men’s shop that went out of business in JANUARY.  I can tell from the number of mark-downs on the price tag that he got them in the final days of the close-out sale.  “How long have you had these pants?” I want to ask him.  

“I need these for Easter,” he shrugs.  Prudence fumes. She’s all for people dressing nicely for Easter, or any occasion for that matter, but the notion that this man has to have this pair and no other, pants he’s owned for at least 15 of the previous Saturdays,  to celebrate the Joy of the Risen Christ seems absurd.  What else is in his closet? Would he have to run naked otherwise? What has he been wearing since January? Prudence suspects that he has NOT worn out all his other trousers by kneeling in hard pews at church or doing Penance.  She’s not even sure This Pair is destined to see a church.  More likely, he needs his mother and aunties to think he went to church before he tucks himself into their baked ham, ricotta pies, and ethnic cookies.  “Bona Pasqua!” he shouts as he exits the shop.  “Bona Pasqua!” answers my co-worker in Italian, though both of them are clearly American.  Prudence, invisibly, gives him the finger.  (Now, now, Prudence, shame on you!!!) She would like to point out that there were Other races and creeds celebrating Big Things in their communities too this past week—not one of them rushed us using their Religious Holiday as an excuse to manipulate us into neglecting other customers they deemed less important than themselves.

Thank goodness “Holy week” is over and we are done with the drama of Vernal Christians barging in and demanding we solve their fashion disasters with the urgency of a forest fire. (Whatever happened to knowing them “by their Love,” and not their hemlines?)  On the bright side, at least all the chocolate shaped like bunnies is now half price.  Now that Lent is over, we can wear white again and start the real days of pain and sacrifice…getting ready for swimsuit season!

Be well, my Dearies!  When the chocolate coma clears, listen for the chorus of peepers and the choirs of morning birds—the Music of Spring, the Real Worship—is all around you!  And just in case no one has said it lately, I love you very much.

Your aye,

Nancy

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Happy Blog-iversary!

Greetings Dear ones!

We did it!  We made it a whole year together!  I am so excited and proud of myself and immensely grateful to all of you who continue to read, comment, share, and support. Exactly one year ago, my dear friend Emerald Rae challenged me to drop what I was doing and Make This Happen.  Because, when you have a Dream, that’s when Life is about to Happen. (It’s also when someone lets you know you snore too loudly!)

So! Let’s recap.  Have we learned anything?

Time for another quiz:

1.     You write your very first blog. As per the instructions of your in-house tech-support (which is any resident under the age of 32) you manage to get it to “publish” without having to call a variety of hot-lines, break the internet, or speak directly to anyone in Asia. You then immediately:

a.      Feel sick, think “what have I just done?!” and need to lie down.

b.     Get up and go to your “real job” and try to behave normally.

c.      Step in dog poop because someone didn’t let the dog out.

d.     All of the above.

2.     When your loving and supportive friends read your first entry, their responses are, conveyed as kindly as possible:

a.      To express concern that you will never keep up the quality of writing or storytelling because there is “just not that much to write about with sewing.”

b.     To write you long emails, worrying that your intention is to make body-shaming the purpose of your literary endeavours.

c.      To remark that your writing is “self-indulgent,” “shallow,” and that you are “worthy of better things.”

d.     All of the above.

3.     After you ugly-cry yourself into a snot-snuffling mess, feeling totally unworthy, untalented, inept… you then:

a.      Watch inspiring Ted talks and recite affirmations until the urge to guzzle scotch directly from the bottle passes.

b.     Decide to buy a Celtic harp, for no reason what-so-ever

c.      Say, “F**k it.  Who cares what they say? I know who I am.  I know my intentions are kind. If I run out of stories, sure, I’ll quit. And yes, damn it, I AM Self-indulgent.  So what? I have teenagers, incontinent pets, and a Vitamin D deficiency. Who the hell ELSE is going to indulge me?”

d.     All of the Above.

4.     You find the harp is extremely good for

a.      Practicing scales and discovering that all the F strings and C strings are the colored ones. (This only takes a five days to figure out!)

b.     Distracting you from doing other Things You Should Be Doing, like sewing 62 snaps on an airline stewardess’s blouses.

c.      Holding laundry that’s too dirty to go back in the drawer and too clean to go in the wash.

d.     All of the Above

5.     When more of your friends say lovely, kindly, complimentary things to you praising your efforts, you:

a.      Try to believe them but still feel the need to eat a quart of Ben & Jerry’s “Cherry Garcia” ice cream to cheer up anyway.

b.     Lapse into fantasies of trying to write something “better” next week

c.      Ignore them because you have a dead sheep in your garage that needs burying and you don’t have time to dwell on your insecurities.

d.     All of the Above

6.     We each manifest, with our own time, unconscious intentions, and energies the Universe of our choosing. In some Worlds:

a.      All the clothes fit, the socks match, and the cars run

b.     All there is to do is watch T.V.

c.      Infant farm animals are using the living room couch as a playground

d.     (Guess which two worlds are totally incomprehensible to me)

7.     When you say YES to Life, to doing fifty things that make you more “you” because you just turned 50 and it seems like as good a time as any to start such nonsense, things will happen like:

a.      You might find two lambs bouncing around your cottage in the woods, getting tangled up in yarn from your spinning wheels until one lamb manages to drag about forty feet of yarn off a spindle and knit all your furniture together in a giant cobweb before she falls over, giggling and kicking her hind leg.

b.      People you never suspected will turn out to be amazing friends and co-conspirators.

c.       There will definitely be More Poo.

d.     All of the Above

8.     Choosing to stretch yourself beyond your comfort zone

a.      Will be really fun and wild and exciting at times

b.     Will make you feel like you move forward like an amoeba

c.      Will make you look like a total loon

d.     All of the Above

9.     This blog is in desperate need of

a.      Better editing

b.     More quizzes

c.      Cash prizes

d.     All of the above

10.    In my stories, to protect the Insolent, I always change:

a.      The customer’s physical description

b.     The customer’s garment

c.      Everything except the core “kernel” of the story

d.     All of the above

11.    This is because

a.      I protect and cherish my customers and sincerely wish for their happiness and satisfaction

b.     I want to poke fun at Ideas, not individuals

c.      I have enough angry people coming in snorting fire about bloody hems coming down—I don’t want an influx of irate customers who don’t like how they look in print any more than they don’t like how they look in the mirror.

d.     All of the Above

12.    I write:

a.      Whenever inspiration strikes—whenever  a story pops it’s head around the corner to see if I can hem a “quick pair of trousers” before closing time

b.     When I am supposed to be doing other, more Useful things like cooking supper, cleaning the house, or interrogating the residents to see who left that laundry in the washer until it grew fur

c.      At 4:44 am, in a bleary, sleep-deprived, last-minute frazzle

d.     All of the above

13.   If I have learned anything yet in my short fifty years, it’s that:

a.      Pretending I can sew/dance/cook/play music/write is a hell of a lot more fun than pretending I can’t.  

b.     Sometimes we are going to fall and make fools of ourselves and that’s ok as long as we learn from it and apologize to those we hurt when we crash.

c.      The yellow jellybeans really do taste like vomit.

d.     All of the Above.

14.     Sewing has taught me:

a.      I should have paid more attention in Math class

b.     The left side NEVER comes out like the right

c.      I have to take all the pins out of my padded bra before I go grocery shopping.

d.     All of the above

15.     Working with the general public has taught me:

a.      People are Amazing, Fantastic and Inspiring

b.     Sometimes they are Nice

c.      I totally hate people and prefer the company of animals

d.     All of the above

16.    The people who have been my Best Supporters are

a.      Veterinarians (hands down)

b.     Believers who operate through (any) Faith, not Fear—the Musicians & Dancers, Artists & Riskers, Darers, Doers & Dreamers, who bring incredible beauty, insight, and Love to the world through their practices and sacrifices. 

c.      My children and honorary “spirit children” who come into my life to offer tech support and teach me valuable lessons like LOL means “laugh out loud,” not “Lots of Love” (I still think it should mean the latter!!!)

d.     All of the Above.  I am indescribably grateful to you all!!

17.     Completing a whole year, despite all the things a Tuesday night ever threw at me—power outages, illness, escaped reptiles…. Feels like:

a.      A Victory! A tribute to dedication, perseverance, and sheer bloody-mindedness.

b.     Like an elephant, or a bicycle, eaten one bite at a time. (Burp)

c.       An exhausted marathoner limping towards the finish line with blisters, farts he can’t trust, and a pulled Achilles tendon.

d.     All of the Above

18.    This mile-marker means

a.       I can eat all the cookies I want today

b.      I just kept a big promise to myself.  I’m proud of that.

c.       I kind of want to slack off now…but I worry that it will be like when I decide to stop running for “a few weeks” in November and don’t start back up until April.

d.     All of the above

19.    My goals going forward are to:

a.        Keep taking one day/week/month/year/Life at a time.

b.      Create more opportunities for writing

c.       Vacuum more often

d.     All of the Above

20.    Hey!  If I could pull this off—if I could stick to a plan and hack away at it, bit by bit, usually at the very last minute but still getting it done,

a.      Anybody can

b.     Even people with an abundance of Dung in their lives

c.      You can too

d.     All of the Above

Scoring:

If you answered “A” to anything, anything at all, you my friend, are an Optimist.  Bless your loving heart.  Don’t EVER take off those rose-colored spectacles!  This world needs dreamers like you—who wake up ready to play, ready to dream, ready to create and willingly perceive the Joy and Abundance that surrounds them—who exult in the Possible. You are my Favorite kind of people.

If you answered “B” to any of the questions, you are fairly realistic. Like the majority of our customers, you want things done Yesterday but will settle for next Saturday and not complain too much as long as the work is done well.  You are my Favorite kind of people.

If you answered “C” to any of the questions, well, it just shows that you were too impatient to read all the way to “D.”  You are one of Hell’s tourists who fears the worst of everything.  Like Prudence, you are always available to mention “I could have told you that” even though you didn’t.  You are the experts we need to keep us safe, who make us check the “sell by” dates on yoghurt.  You are well-meaning but a little crochety. You are my favorite kind of people.

If you answered “D” (All of the Above) to everything, you are very special indeed. You are my Favorite kind of people!  You appreciate nuances of Wholeness, Balance, symmetry and that there are at least three sides to everything.  You know that more than one thing can be true when we are talking about Ourselves.  To be Whole is to invite and include Everything. We are Magnificent AND Horrid.  And oh, SO funny at times.

Prudence wishes I had done better.  She wishes the entries were shorter, funnier, more high-falutin and literary as well as more down to earth and less pretentious; more universal, less personal; more Profound (as in a Pro who is Found) rather than Lost… But here we are—soft and shattered—trying to tie everything up in a neat little bow with a few pins in it, here and there, to keep it in place.  The answer to every question is D.  Yay! We get a D+.  We have NOT failed.  D stands for: Dare Determined, Dark Daily Dance, Danger Defended, Dawn Development, Depth Delight, Depression Described, Desire Deserved, Diversity Devoted, Drivel Drafted, Doubts Destroyed… (don’t forget Diarrhea…) And best of all… DONE!  (My favorite!)

 Thank you, Dear Ones, for taking this journey with me.  I am profoundly grateful for the chance to share. I began the blog with a prayer.  I would like to close out this first year with a blessing:

May the year ahead be better still. 

May we be bright as Buttons, warm as flannel, fun as polka-dots, and sturdy as Tweed.

May our little rips and tears be where we tailor our coats and lives to fit us even better. 

May we piece things together with patience, humor and kindness.

May we do Whatever It Takes to be our Best Selves…

And when our work is done, may we look back and be Satisfied that we did our very best.

Yours Aye,

Nancy

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Getting in Tune

“There is nothing more to be said or done tonight, so hand me over my violin and let us try to forget for half an hour the miserable weather and the still more miserable ways of our fellowmen.” — Arthur Conan Doyle

Dawn is coming and the Enchanted Forest is getting yet another glazing of snowishly crusty “stuff”! After a golden evening of gardening and discovering sleepy crocuses and daffodils, as unwilling to rise and shine as surly teenagers from beneath their duvets of dead leaves, I can hardly believe it.  Will the warmth ever inhabit the light again? This watery light lacks the heat to melt the ice lingering along the margins of this muddy, exhausted looking landscape. My little lambs, who don’t know anything different, frolic and delight themselves with springing on stiff legs across the yard, playing chase with a leaf and doing complicated jumps off the front steps that would make a skateboarder proud.  They giggle and wriggle and fling themselves in all directions at once as if they had ants in their black wooly pants.

You would think Spring (a peppy little word that accurately describes the lambs but not what New Englander’s call The Time of Mud) would bring out the Best in people, as it does other creatures—with its weddings, proms, fancy dress banquets and galas—but no.  With so much celebration approaching, each customer comes in grumpier and in more of a hurry than the last.  I have found that true New Englanders can cope with grim, hard winters that last eleven months; they can survive on nothing but bread and milk and NPR for weeks on end but they get all pissy when they have to take off their snow gear and don a proper suit, bare their arms, or attend any occasion that requires them to eat petits fours while wearing Spanx.

Because I really cannot abide grumpiness for very long and because my life is my own damn fairytale and I can change the story any time I want, I decide to magically turn all the customers into musical instruments and instantly restore humor and harmony to my little corner of the world.

A tin-whistle telephones. Her daughter has been jilted by her date—do they still have to pay for their alterations, since they no longer need the dress? An English horn rings, her daughter is not yet sure if her date is planning to take her or his ex-girlfriend.  The mother, unsure of how this drama will play out, wants to know over the ‘phone, how much it will be to hem the dress at the last minute, in case her daughter, the understudy, gets called in for the starring role on prom night. She doesn’t want to “waste the money” to get her daughter’s dress fixed if the girl is just going to stay home.

A bellicose Tuba charges in, wanting to know why we haven’t called him about his pants. “Well, sir, it’s Prom Season…we have a FOREST of gowns in here to chop down one by one and you said you were not in a hurry so...”

“Yes,” he honks angrily, turning pink, “but that was two days ago!”  I briefly consider changing him to Timpany, since Timing seems so important to him even though he hasn’t a clue how it works.  He marches, huffing and tutting, out the back of the shop and brushes past a tiny little piccolo and a family of woodwinds trying to reach the bell so they can be let in the back door.  The little piccolo gets dressed up in her frock for Easter, which is far too big for her while her sister woodwinds busy themselves with rearranging pins in the pin cushions. (“See,” says Prudence knowingly, “your grandmother was right.  Children don’t need toys. They are having way more fun with a pin cushion than those wretched things called ‘Hatchimals.’”)  After the woodwinds’ peaceful departure, in comes a dear little pedal Harp.  She just had her 100th birthday and she wants us to find a way to accommodate her long underwear under her blouse so that it doesn’t show at her great-grandson’s wedding in July.

While she is still in the dressing room, a Bassoon comes in to ask if we have a “rest room.”  Prudence archly wants to know if he is really going in there to “rest” or if his more accurate intentions are to tinkle all over the seat then leave it up.  He returns after a brief absence (during which we do not hear the water running in the sink) to enquire if we can add a third button to a suit jacket that has only two.  I get excited because I love doing buttonholes by hand. There is something about getting a row of tiny knots to lie down next to each other and Behave that never loses its thrill for me.

“Can you believe it? This is my first suit I’ve had since I made my first Communion!”  The Bassoon stands there double-reeded in his single-breasted suit, a column of air, vibrating and producing sound, as we pin him and organize the fabric around his shoulders, chest, and back. “I’m over sixty and I’ve lived my whole life without needing a suit.  I wouldn’t get one now either, ‘cept my daughter’s getting married and she wants it to be fancy.  She says I have to have a suit.”

All day long, the parade continues—clarinets and trombones, trumpets, kazoos and kettle drums.  A sweet, little round French horn comes in to ask if we can custom-make little round sheets for his little round bed.  It is a “perfeck round bed,” he says, “right in zee middle of zee room, where one can appreciate it from any angle.”  He wants a round duvet and cover too. He is hoping to make it nice so he can lure some little round females there to keep him company.  With his heavy French accent and his Inspector Clouseau mustache, he is almost adorable.  (We decide to ignore his comments about enticing women.) “Where does one put the pillows on a round bed?” I want to know.  For some reason, my innocence irritates him and his tone shifts suddenly from mellow, seductive metallic to brassy, forte: “Anywhere you Want, damnit!  Anywhere you want! Zey sheeft wis you ven you move…  I sleep like dis” (he indicates with his hand vertical, rotating in sharp, staccato clicks) like a Sundial all night!”  I can just see his Tinder profile now… “seeking fellow sundial to share round bed—only the clockwise need respond…”

 I am still thinking about music at the end of the day, as I make my drive home.  When I arrive, there is a banjo in his mid thirties who is leaking badly and needs to talk.  He is having a crisis at home.  He is worried that his wife is ready to walk out on him and the little harmonicas.  There is no harmony.  He does not know what to do. 

“What kind of music are you trying to play?” I ask.

“I’m not sure,” he shakes his head ruefully, “I’m afraid there isn’t a musical bone in my body,” he sighs.

“Well, that’s just crap,” I say in a businesslike tone.  “Everyone’s bones are musical.  One of my favorite dance partners of all time is stone deaf and just ‘feels’ the music through his bones.  He keeps perfect time, just by connecting to the beat through the floorboards and watching the musicians on stage. He senses it perfectly though he’s never heard a single note. Music is everywhere, even if you can’t hear it.”

The banjo just shrugs.  He looks defeated.  Prudence can tell he needs a stern talking to and possibly some scones and tea.

“The reason I ask, is that my answer to ‘what you should do’ has a bunch of layers.  Firstly, it’s not for me to heap “shoulds” upon you but to point out that you have some wonderful opportunities here! If you want to reestablish harmony with your wife, you both need to get in tune before you can start trying to share a melody.  Someone can be out of tune because their instrument needs tuning—their strings are out or their sound-post or bridge needs adjusting. So, first you need to make sure the physical instrument is ready to play.  Your four strings are diet, exercise, sleep, and eliminating vices. Do those things first.  Tune your body. 

The next reason a player is out of tune is because his fingers don’t know what they are doing.  You need to teach them scales and exercises and simple tunes.  You need to practice.  DAILY. You will quickly find that fingers are an unruly mob of insolent and disobedient rabble. This is because they need a leader. You need to tune your Mind. Listen hard to the Best Music. Listen every day, as much as you can.  A lot of people think because they have music on constantly that they are listening to it.  They are not.  They are actually tuning it out and ignoring it.

Sit with it in your own silence and Pay Attention at the deepest levels. Listen. Your ears will teach your brain, your brain will teach your fingers, your fingers will reveal all the beauty in your heart.  I don’t care which Prophet you choose—whether it’s Alasdair Fraser or Yo-Yo Ma or Rumi or that rock star, Buddha. Pick one and Study faithfully. Devote yourself.

STOP pointing out how out of tune your wife is.  This does no one any good.  You can only tune you. So do that.  She will have to decide for herself what kind of music she wishes to play in her one short, precious life.  Meanwhile, you will be a lot more fun to play with when you are in tune and sounding great.

Here’s the thing about music.  To be good at it, you have to be willing to be bad at it—for a Very Long Time.  Finding love in the hardest of situations is part of what we all come here to do so forget about how hard it is and look for the love of it. You need to be realistic about how bad you are and do something about it but you also have to love the journey and yourself.  Loving yourself is what makes you realize you could be amazing with a little work, that you are Worth that work. It’s called practice.  And Discipline. No one wants to play with someone who never practices and never improves. One of the beautiful ironies about bringing music to the world is that you need to spend a lot of time alone before you can play with others. You can’t just keep showing up at congregations, jam sessions, or synagogues and going through the motions as if you know what you are doing. You don’t. Don’t think you must only ever play alone either! Playing solo only is not healthy. Music is a language.  It is meant to be shared, to communicate—to commune, to community-ify, to make Common.  

Music is fundamentally organized by Silence. The duration of each mini silence between the sounding of each note, along with the duration of each note, is what gives us our sense of timing. One must honor the Silences as equally as one honors the notes, in order to stay in time. You cannot just run all the right notes together, even if they are in the right order, and expect it to sound like anything. So meditate. Befriend Silence.

If you really know someone, you already know what tunes he or she knows too and you remember to play them when you are together. You don’t get complex and show off for too long—you create community by including the lowest level players.  Love is a Music that Includes.

Your pain now is your future blessing. It’s a signal that you are on the Right path to fearlessly create more of everything that makes your heart sing.  Everything is going to totally suck for a little while and that’s ok. It’s necessary even.

Of course, I couldn’t exactly say ALL of that to the weeping banjo.  But I wanted to. So I’ve said it here, to you, my darlings.  Remember, Life is a Symphony! (Or a slow jam!) We each have a responsibility to get ourselves in tune!  Let’s work on our chops and PLAY, PLAY, PLAY!

May you find your harmony today and do all kinds of Good Work!

With so much love…

Yours aye,

Nancy

 

 

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Snowplows and Slackers

“I have found the best way to give advice to your children is to find out what they want and then advise them to do it.”  --Harry S. Truman, 33rd President

 Greetings Dear Ones!

It’s 1:am as I begin to write this.  I have been lying here in my bed, gritting my teeth through guided meditations designed to put me into a deep sleep, but I feel like something is trying to pry my chest open with a rib spreader instead, so it can grab my heart with bare hands.  I don’t know how I will be able to see to thread a needle tomorrow, through these hot, salty, puffy little eyes of mine. The son and heir, who forever leaves the seat of his throne Up (grrr), who festoons his room with wet towels draped like Christmas garlands, who plays music until all hours of the day and night and eats his weight in cereal between meals…this BOY phoned tonight to say that he is moving out!   After nearly nineteen trips around the sun, this man-ling is old enough to vote and work and pay taxes (and therefore swear). (We have a rule that you are not allowed to cuss unless you pay taxes.)  In the eyes of the law, he is a man.  He has a job and now a rented room in Boston and he is off to continue his adventures as a Musician and a Seeker in the lands beyond the Enchanted Forest and his mother’s endless nagging that is like a church bell defining a parish.

I lie here thinking dizzily about how quickly my little nest has emptied and how swiftly flew Childhood.  The moments were long but the years are a blur made fuzzier now with tears. I think about what kind of parent I have been and how that matches up against the parent I wish I had been.  

I see other mothers with their children on a daily basis in the shop.  I see your classic stereotypes—the neurotic dance mom, the “tiger” mom, the helicopter moms hovering anxiously outside the dressing room door in case “darling” might need them…Apparently, there is a new kind of parent called the “Snowplow” parent.  It makes total sense to me that in New England half the country-folk are out plowing during every snowstorm (it’s actually snowing here right now!) and they probably have kids… Then I found out that “Snowplow parenting” has nothing to do with snow; it’s when the parent tries to remove or clear all on-coming (character-building) obstacles from the path of the child.  These kinds of parents have been the focus of a scandal that has been in the news a lot recently.

This kind of news just depresses me and highlights more than ever what a Slacker I have been as a parent. I had no idea we could bribe our way into prestigious universities and sports teams! (Whaaat?? Fetch my cheque book!)  Instead, there was I, hunched over in 1920’s stadium seating, knitting socks as my kids thrashed their way—kind of drowning in forward motion—up the length of a murky pool at swimteam practice every night for years, in the hopes that… what? That they could be strong? That they could get swimming scholarships one day? No.  In the hopes that they would be too exhausted to bicker and might go to bed earlier with less fuss.  When the little one got in the car and threw up a belly full of green pool water, saying he didn’t know what to do with the water when it came in his mouth so he just glugged it down as he swam (basically swimming as fast as he could swallow, poor sod), I yelled at him to throw up outside, and not on the floor of the car. (I ask you, what kind of witch yells at a child who is throwing up?) Not that we could see the floor of the car.  I drove a mini-van so messy and filled with food scraps that if it had had a sunroof, sea gulls would have followed us like it was a shrimp boat. I wasn’t a Tiger, a helicopter, or a snowplow. I was a SLACKER mom.  You might be tempted to confuse me with those mothers called “Free Range” mothers—who let their children out to graze on bugs and grass and lay their eggs in the yard.  No.  I wanted to be a Tigress flying a helicopter with a plow on each end.  The truth is I was just too tired and ultimately too lazy to pull it off.  Those women look like exciting mothers—mummifying chickens for their child’s project on Ancient Egypt, and getting them up early to do math games on weekends. Where were my children? Living in a cardboard box version of shanty town under the dining table. The main box, which had once contained a new appliance, later became a pirate ship that clogged our hallway for years. The “sea” around it was a piece of fabric that they could swim under with less difficulty than real water, bless their hearts.

_______________________

 In the shop, each prom gown is bigger than the last. They take hours to hem, even by machine.  We have close to fifty on the racks waiting to be altered. I got two gowns done yesterday, while four more came in.  Some have as much as a nine yard circumference. There is a turquoise one that would make a great sea for a cardboard pirate ship.  It belongs to a young girl with so much aplomb she should be running for office any day now.  She is good at organizing her mother who I suspect, like me, of being a Slacker.

Another mother comes in and wants to pick her daughter’s dress up early, before it is finished, so she can have a fitting at home. “I don’t want her to flip out in front of you if this is not what she wanted.  I want her to flip out at home where I won’t have to be embarrassed in public. You know how she is…” says the mother, in conspiratorial tones and rolling her eyes with dramatic flair. She is a Snowplow who seems intent on pushing her daughter under the nearest bus.  Prudence has diagnosed this daughter before: “She caught a mild case of CLB (Cheeky Little Brat) when she was very young. It’s a perfectly routine, fairly innocuous childhood malady that usually gets better with a few mild corrections and redirection.  Unfortunately, this case went totally untreated, like Lyme disease of the Soul, and has progressed into a full-blown, possibly terminal case of PPS (Pampered Princess Syndrome.)”  The mother is terrified of the monster she has created and she wants us all to fear it too. I refuse.  She’s a perfectly civil and polite young lady when she has to be and she will probably do a fine job of parenting herself in a few years when she enters the Real World, leaves the shadow of the Snowplow, and learns these simple things:

We don’t always get what we Want in life; we get what we Are.

People are either accusative or inquisitive. (We humans like one of these kinds much more so than the other.)

Lots of people have more of and better than you do. (Just as many have less of and worse than too.) The battle is not about circumstances.  People go to war over circumstances when the battle is really about the Mind, the Will, the Heart. What do you Believe in? Go there. Do THAT.  The circumstances around it are, as this seamstress sees it, “im-Material.”

 We are short-staffed this month as one of our three best workers is in Alaska for a family wedding. We need help. We ask people we know who like to sew if they would consider doing some work in the shop. “Oh. No!” They say, “I could never work on other people’s clothes! What if I messed something up?  I could never forgive myself!” Being a seamstress, it seems, takes a lot of courage.  Does it take more than average courage? No.  Hardly not.  Mending a pair of pants that have come in after being triaged in the field (the crotch was sewn together with dental floss), while thrilling work, hardly equates to rushing into burning buildings to save kittens. But pretty much all the things we humans do require Courage, the willingness to fail our way to success, and the self-compassion to forgive ourselves when we accidentally cut the pants two inches too short because we cut at the “finished edge” line and not the cutting line, especially if we did it to all nine pairs of pants at once. (Yipe!)

Please understand, I’m not judging anyone’s parenting style here.  Different children may require different styles.  Just like in clothing, one size does NOT fit all! But somehow, we need to raise children who have Courage—the Courage to Show up, the Courage to Speak up, and when the moment requires, the courage to chop into a vintage wedding gown without a pattern.

 I think we could go far if our kids were endowed with both Courage (a word whose Latin origin means “heart”) and Imagination—the mind’s ability to “image” or picture what is not present.  Strong Hearts, Strong Minds, Strong Bodies.  Not one of them is made in Comfort:  Discomfort, Disappointment—these are fundamental requirements. Letting our kids deal with their own discomfort is uncomfortable for US.  We abhor witnessing pain. As Prudence says, “We all want to get to Heaven but none of us wants to die.” We, who cannot let our children experience Difficulties fully, on their own terms, are weenies. That’s the truth.  We do them a great disservice. When we free a butterfly from its chrysalis, we avert the struggle it needs to force blood into its own wings so it can fly.  We cripple it.

 So, how do we, who wish we were over-achievers, stop from making our kids into trophies we give to ourselves? How do we do the NOT-doing that needs to be done? Benevolent neglect. Boredom. No Screen time.  One of the best things my parents ever did was not buy me and my sisters everything for our Barbies and dollhouses. We became creators, not collectors. We learned to look at things with imagination. We made our own furniture and doll bedding out of scraps and cardboard. Yes, it looked like hell. We did not care.  (Ok, we cared.) We felt deprived and desperate—which made us try harder and get Creative with things like Kleenex and tape, dental floss and markers.  I’m not certain that MacGyvor ever played with Barbies—Maybe he did. If so, I’m sure he is the better for it because playing like we did, without parental intervention, taught us that Everything Required is always present. If it is not present, it’s not required. I’m convinced that every skill I have today can be traced back to “needing” something for my dollhouse that my own Slacker Parents did not provide so I had to call it into being through my own patient ingenuity, trial and error.  

The Best things I have ever done have been the Hardest, at every age.  At 32, it was the birth and welcoming home of this astonishing and magical boy. At 51, it’s letting him go… I truly believe that our children will never be defeated by what others say about them. They can only be defeated by what they say about themselves. Their triumphs can only be genuine if their challenges were too.  I’m full of angst about the poison in the world and all the troubles that await him but he is champing at the bit and ready to jump like a stiff-kneed lamb off the biggest little rock he can find.  He wants to test himself, to prove himself. I am so fiercely proud of him. He’s borne and traded many a scrape for dignity and maturity already.  His future Triumphs await. I can only hope I have neglected him enough.

 Slack on, fellow Slackers! 

Yours aye, with love and admiration,

Nancy

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Let's NOT grow up...

“The most sophisticated people I know—inside they are all children.”–Jim Henson

Greetings my Dear Ones!

I woke up nine years old today. I can tell because I looked at the cap on the toothpaste and thought “this would make a fantastic little planter for my doll house when the toothpaste runs out.  A dab of glue and some moss and dried baby’s breath colored with markers and it will be a perfect little pot of flowers!” and I felt a happy, innocent kind of joy in my heart.  There was a two-week-old Shetland lamb running around the bathroom too, which made me giggle, and I’m pretty sure Most real grown-ups would have frowned at that. I often think I have absolutely nothing in common with grown-ups!  

 Driving through the tunnel of trees lining the road on my way to work, the morning light flickering through the tree trunks makes the scene before me click like I am in one of those old-fashioned home videos that is skipping.  I hope I don’t have to grow up too quickly today!  I get to the shop and my friend announces “Today, we are Diesel Fitters.” “What?” I say, confused. She holds up a pair of jeans and says “Deeze ‘ll Fit ‘er!”  We both laugh and I sigh with relief.  Growing up can be postponed.  I pick up my needle and thread and continue daydreaming about plans for my doll house. 

Prudence shows up just in time to ruin everything when we see the first prom gown of the morning.  I attempt to continue the balancing act of appreciating the absurd and having heart-touched contemplation as I gaze at the sight before me. I note that throughout history, women worked so hard for permission to reveal an ankle, an elbow…but taken to extremes, we now have things like Lulu Lemon yoga pants and prom gowns such as this one…It’s a cross between a swimsuit and a beach tent. The top is little more than a bra; the bottom has enough glittery fabric to hide a Shetland pony.  “Did gravity pull nine yards of fabric to the bottom of this dress?” asks Prudence. “What the hell?”

“What do you think this needs?” asks the girl, pulling at her straps and trying to make the bra part even smaller.

“It needs a COAT” snaps Prudence. “A cape, a shawl, a large blanket! Anything to stop you looking like one of those half-naked dolls one shoves into a cake. You look like half a girl embedded in Glitter Mountain for pity’s sake!”

The phone starts ringing off the hook.  A series of customers coming and going disrupts all momentum on our projects and I realize that I am no longer full of creativity and joy.  I am now just waiting for lunch, like a pack animal.

We all brighten considerably when a little four-year-old comes in with her mother, who is to be fitted for a wedding gown.  (The mother is being fitted; not the four-year-old!)  The four-year-old is picking her nose, singing little songs, and talking to the pictures in her book.  Her delightful prattle is like sunshine. When she sees her mother in her beautiful gown and we ask her if she looks like a princess, she smiles shyly and climbs the carpeted platform to look at her own self more closely in the mirror.  She likes what she sees. Her tummy is protruding and she makes it stick out further.  She sticks out her tongue and makes funny faces at herself.  Her dark eyes sparkle with pleasure and her curls bob.  Even with her finger up her nose to the second joint, she is just gorgeous.  I am looking at what will someday be a grown woman’s inner child.  She is as precious as a newborn lamb.  I hope she never wants a nose job or a boob job or a dress that diminishes her in any way. I Love her just as she is.  She is fantastic.  The body will lengthen, swell, and age around this spirit and encase it in other flesh, other worries, other beliefs about what is “acceptable.” I shudder to think what she will really “learn” at school.

There is a lot of talk these days (and by “these days” what I really mean is since the 1960’s) about the need to find, heal, engage, and play with our Inner Child. This concerns Prudence deeply.  She does not like children of any kind, except perhaps the ones who are “seen not heard.” (She likes sneaky children, I guess?) When I talk about embracing our inner child, she feels a toe-curling dread that this means I long to roam the family tent with sand in my pants and gritty feet, or go to sleep with mashed potatoes in my hair, clutching a filthy “blankie” that (to me) is a sentient being. Squadron leader Prudence, self-appointed leader of the Anti-Creativity Brigade, swiftly hides all the crayons.  Creativity is messy. And Dangerous!  Watch out!  Children think they can do Anything.  And that is True, until we teach them otherwise.

The Cambridge Dictionary defines Inner Child as “the part of your personality that still reacts and feels like a child.”

“Nonsense!” tuts Prudence, “You only had two children inside of you and you managed to expel them both about twenty years ago…”

A damaged inner child, one who suffered wounds of abuse or neglect, causes a person to be impulsive, narcissistic, dependent, needy, afraid of being abandoned.  They cannot regulate their emotions or act from logic or reason. I remember attending a “Find your Life’s Purpose” workshop at the Kripalu center in Western Mass a few years ago.  The presenter asked us what we did the most when we were nine to twelve years old.  What did we play with? What activities did we most enjoy when we could use our time as we chose, when parents, teachers, coaches and clergy were not involved? Who were we before the world meddled with us and told us we needed to be someone else?  This unfortunate woman looked directly at me and asked me to share my answer with the group.  With unusually bold candor, I informed these concerned strangers that I had spent my time reading things like “Little House on the Prairie” and “Anne of Green Gables,” practicing my penmanship, and fashioning nun’s habits out of toilet paper for the collection of Barbie dolls I shared with my sisters, so we could play “The Sound of Music.”  I also had a Doll house, built for me by my grandfather, that I spent time decorating and dreaming about when I was supposed to be doing my homework. I was obsessed with animals in general—horses, bees, and dolphins in particular.  “Hmmm…” she mused thoughtfully, after the laughter had died away, “tell me about the Barbies again. I’m getting an idea that your life’s purpose is going to involve some sort of blend of spirituality and fashion in some way….”  

“Will there be cookies?” I want to know. “And what about the monsters?”

 When I was a child, I was convinced that the monsters were under the bed.  They are not.  They are inside of us.  And so is that sweet, sacred, innocent child. I am convinced that they need to learn to play nicely together. Including and assimilating the darker parts of ourselves is what gives us Character.  These are powerful, potentially destructive energies we can use to be able to negotiate on our own behalf. These are the sides of us we need to control but they help us to know who we are, what we want, and to be able to communicate it clearly. Otherwise, we will have fascinating, absurd or tragic stories. (Which is ok with me! I LOVE stories!)

Knowing who we are is vital.  So is remembering to tell others who we are.  We had a situation this week where someone texted the personal cell phone of one of my colleagues with the message “Hi. I have an appointment to have my hair and make-up done on Thursday afternoon. Ok to pop by after and try on my gown to get the whole look?”  With seven wedding gowns and over 40 prom gowns in the shop, my friend had no clue who this could be.  She did not recognize the phone number. “Who is this?” she texted back.  There was no reply. The next day, a woman rang the shop phone and said her daughter had been in a total panic, wondering if we had lost her gown and that we don’t know who she is. It turns out that she is one of the brides who assumed she was our only customer.

 There are many different ways to work with your inner child.  To my way of thinking, one cannot underestimate the importance of Benevolent Neglect.  Children need a lot of space to do “nothing.” Here’s how A.A. Milne’s Christopher Robin explains the art of doing Nothing.

"How do you do Nothing," asked Pooh after he had wondered for a long time.
"Well, it's when people call out at you just as you're going off to do it, 'What are you going to do, Christopher Robin?' and you say, 'Oh, Nothing,' and then you go and do it.
It means just going along, listening to all the things you can't hear, and not bothering."
"Oh!" said Pooh.”

 “Nothing,” especially when it is done Outside in Nature, is a tremendously rich playground for a child who is otherwise happy and well-fed. They are like little prophets in the desert. I never heard of a prophet who was surrounded by social media and screen technology and had people seeking to exhaust him or her with constant novelty. It’s the trips to the desert of Solitude and Nothing when the prophets gain their creativity, connection, insight, and vision.   They seek the refuge of their own inner beings in the Wilderness.  It is there they find a God who speaks to them.  It’s there that they grow a capacity to see things as other things and Other Things as All One Thing. It is there they find Themselves and realize that Cheerios painted with nail polish make the perfect scale donuts for a doll’s house.

Most of the “adults” I meet on a daily basis are just chronologically old.  Anyone with a bit of luck can manage that! Yes, having a rampaging two-year-old in a forty-five-year-old frame—especially when it has access to a credit card—is no joke. To be truly Adult is to be integrated.  Too many of us feel we need to quarantine our childlike capacity for innocence, wonder, awe and joy along with the monster tantrums. We feel too silly being Silly. Being a psychological adult, not just a chronological one can be ridiculously fun…It means you love your play time AND consider the needs of others. You are responsible and Goofy.  Take a look at Pinterest and Etsy (AFTER you take a walk outside, of course!!)—there is a mind-blowing array of creativity and whimsy out there.  Inner children everywhere are thriving and pouring Beauty into our world.  Make sure you get to play with yours today!  Maybe soon, we can get our dolls together for a tea party in the garden, or wiggle our toes together in the sand box, or turn all our single socks into puppets… the possibilities are endless!

Wishing you much joyful creativity, Good Work, and Good Play today!

Yours aye,

Nancy

 

Lionesses and Lambs

March is like trying to party with a hangover…

Greetings my Dearies!

I received a kind email last week from a reader who said “I would love to see you do a blog about what Spring does to one’s life.” So I decided to act on the suggestion Right Away—partly because I adore mail and am anxious to please, and partly because I haven’t yet thought of a better plan;  I’ve been crazy busy as a result of What Spring Has Been Doing To My Life! I’m definitely the self-inflicted victim of some March Madness that includes the arrival of a tiny, orphaned Shetland lamb (who has taken up residence in my bathtub until better arrangements can be made) and the purchase of a 32-string Celtic Harp. Why I decided to ratchet up the ambient nuttiness by setting an adorable yet hyper-active miniature farm animal loose in the house while I am attempting to sound terrible on eight times as many strings as I am used to can only be ascribed to utter lunacy—which makes sense, since today’s full moon is a Super Moon and coincides with the first Day of Spring.  There is much Magic and Madness about!

I’m not sure what happens to “normal” people in Spring, but here in the Enchanted Forest, the transition is not exactly smooth.  There is a lot of robbing going on. The government took one of my desperately needed hours, just as I was busy forking over my last sack of gold to its Income Removal Service.  I’m fine with redistributing the money; I bitterly resent the loss of the only hour during which, I am convinced, I used to get anything done!  I too am on the take—continually robbing Peter to pay Paul, I am now robbing the chickens as well. They have taken to laying their eggs any damn place they please—including places that are hard to reach due to snow.  The eggs I don’t collect promptly freeze and break their own shells from the inside.  I am waiting for the weather to warm up enough so that I can move the most incontinent dog and the lamb into the hay shed together.  I am tired of shampooing carpets and excited about planting peas. We are all waiting for the Big Thaw…

In the shop, the annual Glitter, Glam & Lace Parade has begun—pale, spotty, sunlight-starved teens are coming in to exercise their right to bare arms, backs, midriffs, legs, you name it, all in the name Fashion and the competition to see who can bleed their parents’ bank accounts the most before Prom.  My current bet goes to the lass with not one but TWO full-price Sherry Hill Gowns, averaging $650 a piece. “It’s disgusting, when children are starving,” mutters Prudence, “why the hell can’t she wear the same dress to two completely different proms in two completely different towns?” (Apparently, there is a law against wearing the same dress twice that people follow with more far more ardor than traffic regulations.) My favorite dress so far belongs to a young woman who comes in with her grandmother.  The grandmother tells us the girl worked hard at her job after school, earned her own money, and bought this used Sherry Hill gown for $200 on Craigslist.  (It’s still a waste of Money, if you ask Prudence, who thinks all prom gowns should be made of flannel and button at the neck and wrist.)  The girl who sold it, sold it filthy dirty and in tatters around the hem and bustle.  I agree to fix it, taking special pains to repair all the damage and make it look as good as new.  Then we have it dry-cleaned. It’s perfect.  Her happy radiance when she tries it on at pick-up makes my heart sing all day.  Other delightful moments include explaining to a young man that everything goes with navy blue, except navy blue (he is trying to put a navy jacket with navy pants and call it a “suit” but they aren’t the same color “navy”) and fitting a girl with Down’s Syndrome for her prom dress.  She has been invited by one of the most popular boys in the school.  Her parents could not be happier as she spins and admires herself in the mirror.  Stories such as this feed my soul for days.

AND THEN…

Well, we have the Other girls. The Queen Bees and Wanna Bees.  A mother-daughter duo arrives at the shop and the girl slips on her dress.  It’s a fabulous bright orange strapless with a mermaid skirt. She fits this dress like a fruit smoothie that is exactly the size of the glass. Every seam lies quietly without straining or flaring.  There isn’t a single bulge or pucker anywhere.  Prudence and I don’t like strapless gowns generally (for differing reasons), but even I have to admit this is flattering to her figure. I assume we just need to hem it but the girl is turning this way and that, looking into the mirror and sneering.  The mother is looking exasperated. “W-h-a-t?” her mother asks, rolling her eyes like she too is sixteen. “What now?”

“It’s just boring. I don’t like the back.  It’s so plain,” she says to her mother.

“She doesn’t like the back,” the mother says to me, as if there is something wrong with my hearing, or perhaps I need a translation.   The girl continues.  “This back is just so…I don’t know…boring. My friend’s dress is interesting.  It has this ribbon thing...” Prudence is ready to explode with one of her rants about the difference between a complaint and a request.  I bite my tongue. 

“How are you planning to wear your hair?” I ask, noting that waves of thick, straight hair totally obscure the dress down to the middle of her back.

“Um… down,” she says. “Yeah, down.”

“Well, then no one is actually going to see the back, really, so why waste money changing anything?” I point out. (I truly am a lazy seamstress!)

Her shoulders sag. “But it’s so Boring…” she moans.

“Only Boring People are ever bored,” grumbles Prudence inside my head. I try to get the part of me that never judges anyone to kick Prudence but that person is too nice.  She slinks away to daydream about planting a garden while Prudence goes off on a rip about Complaints. “My dear Madam,” she says internally, while I hastily line my lips with pins, “I take exception to your habit of announcing that a situation is unsatisfactory or unacceptable to you with the implied Assumption that everyone around you will subsequently make all haste to correct conditions to your liking. Complaints are not good currency in conversation. They tell us Madam is a spoiled brat but they don’t actually tell us what Madam WANTS and I have no patience for guessing games.”

Complaints that are not attached to specific requests are one of Prudence’s Pet Peeves. (Prudence has so many pet peeves there could be an entire blog on them alone…)  When my children were small and made proclamations like “I’m Hungry!” I used to put out my hand and shake theirs and say “Howdy Hungry! I’m called Mummy!” which annoyed them no end but trained them to say things like “may I have a snack?” instead. When they said “I’m Hot/Cold/Tired/Mad/Lonely/Bored/…” I would say, “hmm… Good job identifying the feeling. Now, what is it you Want?” (By the way, in the interest of full disclosure, this Inspired kind of parenting never really went down all that well.  More often than not, it had the effect of inciting a full-blown, total-body-thrash tantrum and accusations that I just did not Understand.  Nothing sends a teenager round the bend faster than calmly meeting their distress with questions like “Ok, I hear a complaint. Where’s the request? What would you like me to do for you? How can I help you?”

In my experience, Teenagers, Toddlers, and Women over Fifty are some of the wildest people I know.  Like March in New England, they are both thrilling and miserable to deal with. What do they have in common? Frequent Bad Manners and the fact that they are all in the midst of a massive Transition. People in transition do not yet know who they are.  They are emerging.  They are lions and they are lambs.  They are fresh new crocuses poking their heads up through dirty snow and last year’s leaves.  They are mud with ice.  You need all sorts of rain gear around them.  They melt and freeze without warning.  They are faced with daunting situations that are unfamiliar and uncomfortable, in traitorous bodies they no longer recognize.  They understand change is inevitable and they are willing, even excited, to grow.  But then come the moments when their balance is so off they fall. They fall hard and cry loudly. They are embarrassing and embarrassed and their shame tempts them repeatedly to abstain from being themselves but they cannot help it.  Truces must be navigated.

This is the Light overcoming the Dark and the Future taking the reins from the Past. This is New Life.  It’s a wondrous, exhausting, and exhilarating MESS.  It is a churning upheaval bursting with possibilities, laughter, and a new kind of music mixed with the bleating of young lambs who capture our hearts and soil our carpets…. This is Spring. At least from where I can see it.

May you bravely clear away the Old and celebrate your own New Shoots, Dear Ones!  Wishing you many Unexpected Blessings and a very Happy Spring!

Yours aye,

Nancy

A little Sweetness...

Greetings my Dear Ones!

March is Maple Sugaring month in these parts. An older man (and by “older” I mean in his mid-nineties) marches into the shop with an armload of trousers he wants hemmed and three quart-sized mason jars full of amber liquid, which he plops on the cutting table with a thud.  “Here you go, girls!” he announces in a voice that tells us his hearing aid is either off or out of batteries, “I brought you each a jar of my very own maple syrup! I’ve been boiling off all week. This is for you but I expect a little sweetness in return.” And then he holds out his arms as if we are supposed to rush to him and smother him with hugs and kisses.  We all stand still and look at him for an awkward moment.  He is well known in town as “a character.”

“Well,” says one of the “Girls,” “Sir, we’d be glad to hem your pants for you for free.  That’s pretty sweet…”

“Hem my pants for free? Boy, you’re really getting the better deal out of that one!” he scoffs. “Do you know how much this stuff is worth?” he says, pointing at the syrup.  Then he laughs and hugs the lady closest to him.  It’s a brief hug and she laughs it off good naturedly. “My wife’s been dead for these past twenty years and I’m still mad at her for leaving me.  Boy these hugs feel good,” he says, attempting to grab the next woman.  She shrugs and gives him a tepid, wooden little hug.  I am in my corner, behind my table, observing all of this from a safe distance as he launches into some inappropriate jokes that crack no one up but him.  My colleagues and I exchange knowing glances.  Our forced smiles and stiff-cheeked little chuckles accidentally encourage him.  Ours is a “service” industry and we are polite “girls” but does this really have to be part of the service? Prudence is disgusted with him. 

“It’s lonesome out there in the sugar shack,” he sighs. Part of me marvels that he is in a sugar shack at all, instead of parked in a rocking chair somewhere.  I have never seen a man in his nineties looking so robust.  He is built like a windmill. “Do you know how much water has to come off the sap before it becomes syrup? It’s a hell of a lot,” he says, “it’s about forty to one.  That’s why it don’t come cheap.”

Boy do I know… One cannot live twenty five years in Red Sox territory without having tried, at least once, to make Maple syrup.  I’m not sure how other people do it, but this is how I have, keeping in mind Pete Seeger’s comment that “Any damn fool can make things more complicated…” or words to that effect.

1.  Have Scottish husband told by friend in pub that Maple syrup comes from TREES, yes, trees!  Trees in our yard.  All we have to do is poke some holes in them, gather sap, boil it and Hey! Presto! FREE syrup right in our own back yard. No more spending twenty-three dollars a gallon at the grocery store. What could be easier or more fun? The kids will love it!

2.  Become convinced that all that “free sap” on our property will go to waste if we do not boil ninety gallons of the stuff for several weeks. 

3. Rush out and drill six taps in the trees lining our front yard.  Daydream about the Olden Days and how charming this little “family activity” is going to be, despite the fact that the children, resembling brightly colored bear cubs tottering around in their snow gear, munching on dirty snow, are totally oblivious to the project.

4.  Realize we are going to need some buckets. Some families assemble all the necessary equipment BEFORE they commence a project.  Not us.  We prefer the drama of racing to the garage, dumping buckets of junk on the floor, and hastily scrubbing out the dirty cobwebs after the sap is already dribbling down the tree trunk.

 5. Look doubtfully at the bare branches scraping the sky above.  After they have already been tapped, Make Sure you have identified the trees properly. “Are you sure these are the right sort of trees?” I ask, A Field Guide to North American Trees being conspicuously absent..

6. Get reassured by man Who Has No Idea. “Of course they are!” He snorts indignantly.          “They are made of wood, aren’t they?” he says, patting the nearest tree trunk affectionately. “So they are definitely trees. And these,” he says collecting some fallen leaves, “look just like the Canadian flag, so we’re good.” 

7. Watch him grab some of the plastic tubing and chop off a length.

8. Realize that it is not long enough to reach the bucket.

9. Connect trees to buckets using plastic tubing until they resemble medical specimens, hooked up to large plasma buckets, giving blood.

10. Have husband leave for a week-long business trip to Vegas the next day.

11. Check the buckets. Find all three full and frozen.

12. Lug three forty-pound buckets up hill, through deep snow, with a four-year-old on your back. Make two to four trips, as necessary.

13. Consult “granny Google, and Aunty You-Tube,” the modern repository of all ancient folk wisdom, to find out what to do next.

14. Learn that sap must be collected daily.  It will keep a short time if frozen but quickly grows an unsavory mold in less than two days if thawed.  Meanwhile, the tree will continue to produce more and more as the Spring sap run gets going.  The sap rushes up the tree in the morning and returns to the roots as the temperatures drop at night.  This means the sap flows quickly through the tubing, into the collection buckets, twice a day—just like the milking of a cow.  Like other farm activities, it is light-driven and happens twice a day.  Buckets must be emptied at least once a day.  One’s choices are to boil the sap continually, to concentrate it, or keep running to the garage to empty more buckets of tools onto the floor on a daily basis.

15. Also learn that it takes between forty and fifty gallons of sap to make one gallon of maple syrup.  This means an average of 39 gallons of moisture must enter the atmosphere of the home if done on the kitchen stove.  The website is clear: “This is an operation best done out of doors, as considerable steam must be released.  The sap must be kept at a rolling boil but stirred constantly and not allowed to burn.  Traditionally, this was done in cauldrons over large, open fires.”

16. Begin frantic search for a cauldron while children and dogs lick frozen hunks of sap, ignoring the bits of grass, leaves, and tree debris imbedded in the ice.

17. Ram a chunk into the largest saucepan you own and turn the stove heat up as high as it will go.

18. Hours later, discover kitchen enveloped in a sweet-smelling fog redolent of cotton candy floss.  Every surface of the counters and cabinets should be damp and slightly sticky. Look for Moisture collecting in droplets on the ceiling above the stove.  The contents of the pot, once clear, should be the color of muddy chardonnay.  A crystalline frost obscuring the windows signals things are going well. 

19.  Boil into the night, after the children are tucked in bed.  To them, observing syrup production is about as much fun as watching paint dry.  Forget the stories of Laura Ingalls and the community sugar party at the Little House in the Big Woods.  Here, in the Big Suburbs there is no festival; just their solitary, sweaty mother stirring and muttering over an electric burner.  The only exciting part is watching her dance and scream when she accidentally kicks a bucket of thawed sap all over the kitchen floor. So much for their father’s dreams of providing them with “education, exploration, and the power of self-reliance.”  Forget science; at best, they learn a few bad words while their mother mops and mops.

20. Give up at midnight and dump the rest of the frozen hunks into a large, square plastic container formerly used to store mittens.  The mittens, like the junk in the garage, can be stored temporarily on the floor.

22. Discover by dawn’s light that the container possesses a tiny hole which, while not being big enough to permit the passage of mittens, is ample to allow several gallons of melted sap to leak all over the floor. 

23. Begin the day with more energetic dancing and screaming, not to mention a washer load of sap-sogged mittens.

24. While mopping AGAIN, ponder whether other historic wives felt the way you do in this moment.  It’s hard to resist the dazzling enthusiasm of pioneer men who are certain their current plan is cheap, easy, and of benefit to Nature, Family and Society.  To them, nothing could be easier or more straightforward—especially when they are directing operations by cell-phone hundreds of miles away. 

25. Accidentally, set fire to the sap. Enjoy a spontaneous visit from the local fire department.  This is the first thing to pique the children’s interest in the project.

26. Throw out smoking pot and begin again.

27. Repeat steps 11-26 for the next three weeks, varying the order as it suits your whims and fancy.

28. When all is said and done, tally the expenses of making your “free” syrup. Be sure to include $300 in electricity, cleaning supplies, phone bills, Internet fees, not to mention damage to stuff you drove over in the garage that was formerly stored in the plastic buckets. 

29. Realize your three measly mason jars are worth about $900.  Display them to visitors with the pride some people reserve for bowling trophies.  This syrup is “too good to eat.”

30. Months later, cram the pantry shelves with bales of canned goods from the same wholesale retailer where you now purchase all your Maple syrup.  In trying to shove twelve cans of corn into line, accidentally crack one of the mason jars hidden in the back.  Slowly, with the invisible inevitability of a true force of Nature, the syrup will seep out along the shelf and crystallize, permanently gluing all of the recently purchased canned goods to the wooden shelf.  Ever after, when one wants something from the pantry, one must bring along a hammer and chisel to free it from the grip of an ancient tree spirit. 

So! There you are. How to make FREE Maple Syrup in 30 easy steps: All it takes is millions of dollars, some buckets, a lot of hand-knit mittens, every pot you own, some disinterested children, a few dogs, a good mop, new kitchen wallpaper (after the other stuff rolls down the walls) and one totally deluded female.

When the man in the shop approaches me with a jar of amber gold, and asks me what I think it is worth—I don’t know how to answer. Finally, he turns to leave and remembers he has not had a hug from me yet.  As this “harmless old man from another era” shuffles closer and closer, arms extended, I think about the “me too” movement.  I think about whether it is worth it to refuse.  I don’t actually want his syrup or his hug.  I think about how vulnerable we each are in that moment and what any one of us is willing to do for a little sweetness in our lives. However we define that “sweetness,” it is no bargain.

I have been a bee-keeper and a maker of jam.  I can tell you from experience that Nature does not give up her glucose without a fight.  It takes a lot of work to glean just a little sweetness.  As humans, we know that Naivette + Experience usually lead to bitterness.  Bitterness leads to defensive self-protection.  Faith, Hope and Courage make us carry on and keep choosing Sweetness, despite its labors.

And What are we here for anyway, but to add a little sweetness to each other’s oatmeal?

Be well my Darlings!  I hope your day is filled with the kind of sweetness you enjoy!

Yours aye,

Nancy

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Offer it Up

“A man who fears suffering is already suffering from what he fears.” —Michel de Montaigne

Greetings Dear Ones!

A dreary wind that sounds like a far off freight train blows an exhausting sort of cold through all the cracks in doors or windows. It’s true; we do have a little more light these days but it feels thin and watery and uncertain. Winter is losing its charm yet overstaying its welcome like a guest who should be going any day now.  It makes me think of that line from an Eagle’s song, “the sky won’t snow and the sun won’t shine/it’s hard to tell the nighttime from the day…” Only our sky DOES snow, with great regularity. Every few days, a fresh layer covers up the grimy stuff like a temporary whitewash that disguises treacherous ice or slush underneath.

The sap is starting to run up and down beneath the bark of the trees, confused as to whether spring is really coming, and all the maple sugaring folks are out there in their torn coats trying to wrestle a bit of sweetness from the bleakness.  It takes a lot of resilience and pancakes to survive in New England at this time of year!

I am tired of the grime—on my car, on my coat, on the floors when we walk in the door… I am tired of wearing heavy layers and boots that feel like depression yet I am NOT ready to don a bathing suit either! My body, along with my spirit, has gone to seed… Prom gowns and wedding gowns are trickling into the shop and bringing with them big, tiresome hems that take a whole afternoon to do properly. Last week, I did a gown so encrusted with glitter, it was like a glitter bomb had gone off in the shop.  I had to vacuum my machine afterwards because the bobbin case was jammed with a thimble’s worth of glitter.  There was glitter on every surface of the shop, glitter in our lunch, glitter falling out of my hair onto my pillow that night. I hate glitter!  It’s disgusting stuff that I’m convinced is actually an environmental hazard and should be outlawed.  Where does all that shite go eventually? Into our drinking water? Into the playgrounds of baby dolphins? One shudders to think of it.

A girl in the dressing room has eye-color-changing contacts which give her the effect of having the eyes of a wild goat.  She has jammed her arms through the ribbon loops at the armpits of her strapless gown and is now wondering why they are too tight. I explain that those loops are really to hold the gown on its hanger; they aren’t straps.  This is, after all, a strapless gown.  When I emerge from the dressing room, another customer is waiting for me at the counter.  She confides, in tones usually reserved for conveying the news that there has been a death in the family, that her undershirt has a layer that is “loose” and she cannot live another moment with it like that. The shop phone is ringing while a millennial, not realizing that seamstresses use their hands for other things besides texting, is simultaneously texting the cell phone to see if we are open.  Meanwhile, I have to get on with the business of destroying a wedding gown for a bride who fancies herself a great designer.  She bought a dress online that does not fit her in any way and is now having me hack it to bits to make it look like trashy lingerie.

I gaze out the sunless window at a passing plow truck scattering grit and sigh… If only there was some way to make all of this WORSE.  When things get Worse, they are usually on their way to getting Better. This time of year is so dull and dreary and filled with mediocre tedium.  We are all waiting for spring but not ready for it either. Making or forcing things to be better does not seem like a viable option yet.  Literally, we must wait for the planet to hurtle a few million more miles through space yet—it’s like the long trip to grandma’s house—and we are all asking from the back seat, “Are we there yet?” No.  So how can we make things worse?  Prudence steps from the shadows.  “I know a wonderful way to make everything worse,” she says.  “It’s called LENT and it starts today.  Offer it up.  Offer up all your measly little sufferings like spare change you can use to pay someone’s debt in Purgatory.” “Isn’t this Purgatory, right here?” I ask. “No,” she says. “Purgatory is a waiting room in the sky, full of people holding crumpled little numbers like the ones they give at the deli and they just watch the big screen with all the current prayer tallies in numbers spinning like trades at the stock market. They haven’t paid full fare to get to Heaven and they are stuck, hoping your bout with lumbago will get them on the next ferry.”

Offer it up.  It is an echo from my childhood.  Whenever I had a complaint, my mother or grandmother or some nearby desiccated nun would say “Offer it up.”  Whatever you are suffering, whether it is a stubbed toe, the torment of a sibling, or a broken heart, a nice slice of guilt is the perfect side dish for your troubles.  Think of how LUCKY you are and how Unfortunate someone else is and offer your suffering for the release of their pain.  Collude in your own neglect/abuse/discontent by choosing to embrace it, on a spiritual level.  You may not have any choice in the matter in the physical realm, but you do in the energetic realm.  This is what sainthood is all about. Choose to accept your suffering and make something holy of it that you can offer as a gift.  Prudence, who fancies herself holier than most because she “suffers” more than most, smiles a satisfied smile as I roll my eyes.  I hate being told to offer it up.

Still, there is a lot to be said for changing my energy around what cannot be changed.  I often say, “when you cannot get out of it, get into it.” Even if that means making things temporarily worse.  A friend of mine is going through a dark time and confronting some personal demons. “Don’t run,” I say. “Stay and fight. Get in there and wallow.  Get scratched up and bloody and find out what these demons have to teach you.  You’ll be a better man for it in the end!”  Once we admit that the Buddha was right: All of Life is Suffering, then there arises some beautiful evidence against it. 

Today is the day that many people will go to church and have their foreheads crossed with ashes and be told “remember man that thou art dust, and to dust thou shalt return.”  (“I wonder if your house is some sort of way-station for people coming and going,” whispers Prudence.)  I used to think that this was to make us humble and to show us that life was essentially pointless. I used to think that we were encouraged to give something up so that we could suffer extra for the souls in purgatory—or just suffer for suffering’s sake. Sometimes Lent was just like a mini New Year’s resolution to lose weight or give up a vice.  I am reminded of the story of the man who told his son he was giving up alcohol for Lent.  Three days later, the boy witnessed his father having a beer. “I thought you gave up alcohol,” protested the son. “Oh,” said the father, “this is just a beer.  It’s not hard alcohol.  I just gave up the hard stuff.” “Whew!” says the boy, “what a relief!  You know how I gave up candy? Well, it was only hard candy!”

For some, the next forty days will be all about dropping a size or two before consuming all their lost calories in chocolate bunnies and peanut butter eggs.  For some, it will be a time of deep reflection and acts of piety and service. Maybe we will all be better for it, maybe not. It’s worth a try—bargaining and reworking our bargains with ourselves until we get back to where we started. It’s a great idea to test ourselves with consuming less and doing more.  These are good ideas any time of year whether you choose to hook them to a spiritual practice or not.

Don’t tell Prudence, but I like the idea that the next forty days is a potential workshop for the soul, though I have no intention of making myself humble as a result. Humility just leads to arrogance, as we try to smugly out-humble each other.  I am the oldest of five—I know exactly what smug out-humbling-as-a-way-to-start-trouble is all about!  When we are arrogant, we think certain people and jobs are beneath us.  When we are humble, we think we are less than and undeserving.  Neither is true.  When we are with What Is and see ourselves with loving clarity, then no job is too awful, no weather is too bad, and no season too dreary.  We get on with the business we came here to do and we continue the journey lovingly with our fellow travelers. We do that filthy, glitter-encrusted work AND we are Grateful!!! Like the pancakes, life is sweeter for our laboring.

Be well my Dearies!  And do good work!

Yours aye,

Nancy

Drama Mamas

“All women become like their mothers.  That is their tragedy. No man does. That is his.” –Oscar Wilde

Greetings Dear Ones!

February is slipping by as if it was greased. March looms and with it one of Prudence Thimbleton’s least favorite seasons of the Shop.  No, it’s not Prom Season—this is just the nasty little hors d’ oeuvres (or horse’s duvet, as some like to call it) preceding that banquet of insanity: Solo Dance Costume season.  Now, for those of you without teenage daughters, let me try to describe what is happening in innocuous-looking sidewalk studios around the countryside:  Essentially, grown people are losing their minds and deciding that fragile, young female psyches should be performing as near to naked as possible in bodies they don’t fully recognize yet, trailing glitter, glory, and grief on their way to their crash landing on a psychotherapist’s couch.  A mother, inquiring after the status of her daughter’s custom-made outfit, turns to me and says in utter seriousness, “Is this material stretchy enough for my daughter to lie on her back and spread her legs as far as possible?” (Prudence, wondering if the child was destined for a dance recital or a brothel, nearly had apoplexy.)  Another mother explains that she will be taking her daughter out of school for her fitting, since she cannot change the girl’s hair appointment after school.  School is the thing that is expendable in their frenzied schedule.

Preschoolers  and High Schoolers alike are being swathed in bling-ed-out spandex outfits that resemble a unique blend of circus performer and street walker. They will be spray-tanning youngsters fifty shades of beige and gluing fabric to their bare skin—all in the name of charging their grandparents five bucks a piece to watch them on stage. There is a lot of pressure on these girls and even more on their fraught mothers who have a series of maneuvers they must perform themselves:  they must keep the prized daughter happy and practicing (an impossible task), they must appease the demands of the coaches who seem to be suffering the after-effects of total lobotomies, and finally, above all, they must never let the husbands/fathers in question know how much any of this costs. 

Needless to say, this does not often bring out the best in the girls themselves.  “If there’s one thing sure to rot my garters,” huffs Prudence indignantly, “It’s brats who treat their mothers as if they are ignorant servants—who roll their eyes at us as if dealing with these simpletons is simply insufferable,” as the door slams on yet another angry-yet-entitled teen, trailed by her bewildered and beseeching mother.

The mothers are barely holding it together.  Last week, a mother of four came in and set three live squirrels loose in the shop.  I’m just kidding, they were little girls.  She held the baby on one hip while she tried to negotiate the fitting of a dance costume for the eldest and the two middle squirrels made laps of the shop and pushed all the pins from one pin cushion into the upholstery of a waiting room chair in the shape of their initials.  Among the rubble left when they all departed was the woman’s wallet and handbag.  We tried to ring her cell phone to tell her but she could not answer because the three-year-old was using it to play video games in the back seat of the car.

Wednesday night, on my way home from Brattleboro, I encounter a completely different sort of mother.   It is snowing lightly and I leave fiddle practice early in the hopes of beating the worst of the weather.  I am a few miles from home when I notice a minivan off the side of the road with its hazard lights flashing.  I slow down.  As I pass, I notice a small child, crouching behind the van, looking at one of the rear tires.  I drive on.  I start feeling a strong pull in the center of my gut to go back.  We are all each other’s angels here on earth.  Maybe this family needs “an angel” who can change a tire quickly in the falling snow, rather than having to wait for triple A to show up.  Out here, that could take a while and the roads are already getting bad.  I can almost hear the music they play in Old Westerns when the cavalry shows up as I turn my car around and head back to the van.  Oh, how my ego makes me laugh sometimes!

I leave my hazards blinking and cross the road to the driver’s window. A woman is sitting there with her hands in her lap.  “Are you guys alright?” I ask as she rolls the window down, “How can I help? Is it a tire?” She looks in her rearview mirror and sighs.

“No,” she says with beatific serenity, “We are just sitting here until we calm down enough for me to drive safely again.  I cannot drive when she is in a rage because it is too dangerous.” With that, the child in the back seat, the one I had seen earlier behind the vehicle, gives a savage kick to the back of the seat in front of her, jumps out the door, and starts running up the road, screaming.  “Is she ok? Will she run into traffic? Shall I chase her and bring her down? What do you want me to do???”  My questions are a torrent that she meets with a bleak and weary smile as she heaves herself out of the car and tries to reassure me.  “She’s ok.  She won’t run into traffic. She’s on the spectrum. She’s just having a really hard moment because she is angry and not getting her way.  It doesn’t mean she’s going to get her way.  I’m just giving her the space she needs around her disappointment.  I’ll wait as long as it takes.”  “Oh,” I say, really wishing I could change a tire instead.

We watch her run up the shoulder of the road, almost out of sight, as the snow begins to collect on our hair and faces.  “You have no idea how much I want to be home right now,” the mother says, her face suddenly dissolving in weary sorrow.  “Wow!” I breathe out slowly, taking in the whole scene.  I realize I have not been breathing until now.

She lifts her chin as some headlights flash by in the darkness and I can see that her eyes are the color of a deep, untroubled sea.  She radiates Resolve and Character and Strength.  This is no cringing, placating, vacillating dance Mom I am dealing with here.  I realized how arrogant I have been, thinking I might stop and “help” her.  She has this all well in hand.  She is forcing nothing.  She is threatening nothing.  She is just waiting, pausing, holding the space—as she has clearly done so many times, through so many dark and lonely hours already.  Divine Feminine Grace. There are no trophies to be won with this kind of mothering but there Should be!

“I’ll go if you want me to,” I offer. “But I would like to keep you company for as long as you like, if it’s ok.  This is one time you really don’t have to do this alone.  I know how awful this kind of stuff can be.  Sometimes being the only gown-up is just utterly wretched.”  She nods.  We stand together in the falling snow.  She tells me about her other children.  This one is the youngest of six.  “The others are normal,” she says, then laughs hysterically, “whatever the hell that means…” We both laugh.  “Normal” is just a setting on washing machines, I say. She talks about how people have judged her harshly based on this one’s behavior—as if having five other children hasn’t given her a single clue about parenting.  She has been told by well-meaning and concerned strangers to spank or hit this child to straighten her out.  “I used to be a preschool teacher,” she says. “I’m actually trained to deal with children! But I had to give it up to stay home and advocate for her.  It’s a fulltime job.”

“Being a mother is a full-time job,” I say, “no matter how ‘Normal’ your kids might be.” She laughs.  She doesn’t remember what it is like not to be a mother.  We talk about how mothers are on the front line for a significant amount of sibling sadism and general chaos that seems medieval by modern corporate standards.  I think about all the anguished dance mothers coming into the shop and a pregnant friend of mine who is awaiting the birth of her first child.  “You don’t know what you are going to get when you become a mother, do you?” “No,” she agrees. “It’s a total hijacking.”  By then, the little nine-year-old is back and begins raging and beating on the car.  She opens the side door, climbs in, stamps with snowy boots on seats and begins screeching for me to leave. “Go Away!” she screams. “Go away!  This is none of your business!” “Honey, you are SO right,” I say, smiling. “This is totally none of my business, except that I care very much about your safety and I’m going to stay here with your mama so she doesn’t have to be alone until you calm down. Take all the time you want. Everything is ok. You know what to do.”  Lest anyone have any delusions about me being a wanna-be child psychologist, let me just say that my kindly words have the effect of making her roar and catapult herself to the front seat and trash the front of the car.  She rips the rosary hanging from the rearview mirror and uses it as a whip to flail against papers and debris around the car.  Deftly, the mother slips her hand to the ignition and rescues the keys before she can be locked out.  Then she leans against the car and sighs again. I think guiltily of the Peace awaiting me by my fireside less than four miles away—my fiddle and spinning wheel, little snoring dogs, happy son playing music… This woman’s night will not end for many, many years, if ever... 

“God Bless You,” I blurt out, “You are so amazing!”  She laughs.  “Children are such irrational beings! Love isn’t rational either, is it?  Love isn’t about being rational or reasonable.  It’s about Inclusion.  It’s about making space for this…” she gestures towards her daughter rocking the whole car with her drumming heels.  “You can’t tell me any child wants to be like this or feel like this… they are at their own mercy as much as we are.”

Her words echo in my heart after they eventually drive away. LOVE is INCLUSION.  I realize that I didn’t stop to help. I was stopped to Learn.  She was the angel by the side of the road, not I.  I need this message. I need to appreciate the tremendous gifts we give one another simply by INCLUDING what is unexpected.  

When all the craziness of mothering passes, when it’s over and our children are gone and we can finally get some good sleep… When they’ve taken our wisdom and our tools and the last of our best shampoo—that organic stuff that’s twenty bucks a bottle—and they are off to reject everything we ever taught them and find out for themselves… When all the dance recitals are just photos in scrapbooks we never look at…  We turn and see that we haven’t raised our children at all. They’ve raised us.  Now we know how tough we are.  Now we know what is truly important to us.  Now we know what cannot break us in the fiercest storm and what can melt us without even a word.  Now we know what Love is…  And that’s pretty much all we ever need to know.

Be well, my Dearies!  And do Good Work!

Yours Aye,

Nancy