My Facebook Break-Up

It's official. My OCD has ruined this relationship! You're right, Facebook, It's not you. It's me!

I have the smarts to see when a great relationship has reached its expiration date. There comes a time when novelty fades and the razzmatazz of adding new "friends" is quickly replaced with the doldrums of dodging  repetitive requests to play Candy Crush or to "like" pictures of  puppies, public service announcements, or Snooki's baby. Facebook and I broke up quietly without drama, without too many hurt feelings. In fact, all of my "friends" were quite supportive.

Tonight will be the first night I no longer flip my phone over and over from the reaches of the dark long after I have crawled under my comforter and clicked off the lamp on my nightstand. I won't check relentlessly to see if Facebook had something to say to me like which of my friends have checked in at Chili's this evening and whose child is awake with a fever on the couch and watching "Frozen" for the third time again tonight.

Our relationship had turned shallow and no longer supplied the intoxication of intrigue it did when we first hooked up 6 years ago. Instead, it slowly began to reek of jealousy, cast judgement, breed hypocrisy, and turned many once-hearty, realtionships into nothing more than the flimsy, annual "Happy Birthday" post they receive when Facebook reminds me a day in advance of my loved ones' special day. I admit! The blame falls squarely on my shoulders. I owe it those I really love to call them, visit them, email then and yes, even text them. After-all, I owe them for not posting pre-pubescent photos of me and my lop-sided bob and my gold hammer pants when Throwback Thursdays rolled around!

I need space, Facebook. Time to sort out my junk, to mechanically separate my relationships into usable and practical parts. To tend to those relationships with things like talks, hugs, and letters. I know, I know.....
Those things seem to have gone the way of other cultural antiquities like sasparilla, hootenannies, and haberdasheries! I get it! But Facebook, consider us on a break. I can no longer squealch my need to see other people. See them with my own eyes, touch them with my own hands, and hear them with my own ears.

An Ode to Walt Grace

I am one of three people left in the United States who still buy CDs.  Though I have owned an MP3 player for the last two years for the sole purpose of convenience during my weekdays trips to the gym, I confess I still relish the feel of a slick, shiny CD in my hands.  Though bulkier than it's stylish compact offspring, the CD offers something that the IPod fails to deliver: the CD jacket with the treasure of written lyrics within its folds.

As a teenager, I would lie stomach-down on my bed in the evenings after homework, fully plugged into my stereo system paid for with babysitting money and boasting waist-high speakers and cockpit-style headphones.  From this position, I would pore over the painful, delicious lyrics of the CD jacket that gave me the insight I desired to connect with the artist and the message he delivered through the pounding foam covering my ears.  It was here in the CD jacket that I discovered that Steve Miller never intended "Big Old Jet Had a Light Out" but simply "Big Ol Jet Airliner."  The CD jacket cleared the air for many misguided listeners who got their information previously from the one-dimensional jackets of cassette tapes.

Today I bought the new John Mayer CD "Born and Raised."  I had not purchased a CD in a few months and decided that it would be the perfect soundtrack to a nippy but clear fall day and some banana-bread baking at home.  As soon as I crossed the parking lot of Walmart with my buy, I nestled myself into the driver's seat and commenced to nipping the CD cellophane with my teeth and trying to pull the adhesive strip off of the case so I could preview my new tunes on the drive home.

By the time I turned into my driveway and triggered the garage door opener, the CD had already progressed to the ninth song on the disc.  Earlier in the day, I had spent the afternoon with my mom at a lakeside cafe having bowls of toasty chili for lunch as we dished on life, the pursuit of happiness, and the beauty of the world around us through the floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out onto the lake.  I had already been contemplating my life's direction and evaluating past and present decisions.  The ninth song on the CD interrupted my getting out of the car and carrying my groceries into the house.  I turned off the ignition and leaned into the dashboard as the song wrapped its melody around my ear and had curled my attention toward a man named Walt Grace that Mr. Mayer found worthy of praise. I followed along with my eyes and got lost in Walt Grace's plight.

                                             "Walt Grace's Submarine Test, January 1967"

Walt Grace, desperately hating his old place
Dreamed to discover a new space and buried himself alive
Inside his basement
The tongue on the side of his face meant
He's working away on displacement
And what it would take to survive

'Cause when you're done with this world
You know the next is up to you

And his wife told his kids he was crazy
And his friends said he'd fail if he tried
But with the will to work hard and a library card
He took a homemade, fan blade, one-man submarine ride

That morning the sea was mad and I mean it
Waves as big as he'd seen it deep in his dreams at home
From dry land, he rolled it over to wet sand
Closed the hatch up with one hand
And pedaled off alone

'Cause when you're done with this world
You know the next is up to you

And for once in his life, it was quiet
As he learned how to turn in the tide
And the sky was aflare when he came up for air
In his homemade, fan blade, one-man submarine ride

One evening, when weeks had passed since his leaving
The call she planned on receiving finally made it home
She accepted the news she never expected
The operator connected the call from Tokyo
'Cause when you're done with this world
You know the next is up to you

Now his friends bring him up when they're drinking
At the bar with his name on the side
And they smile when they can, as they speak of the man
Who took a homemade, fan blade, one-man submarine ride.

As I write this, I have listened to song number 9 at least a dozen times and I just bought the CD 3 hours ago.  I have tried to decide if the song was simply fictitious or maybe a metaphor for something going on in in Mr. Mayer's own life at the time the song was written. Perhaps Walt Grace was a real man who simply had enough of the unsatisfying circumstances of his life in 1967.  I reckon I could just ask Google while I'm online tonight if Walt Grace was a real person or just a fictional musical subject like the Beatles' "Mrs. Robinson" or Barry Manilow's "Mandy", but I am not sure I want to disrupt my image of Mr. Grace, the squatty, be-speckled, milk-toast family man turned maverick with a library card and a desire to formulate a blueprint for a means of encapsulating himself and propelling him where the current may sweep.  Beyond the pun, if I look beneath the surface, I see Walt Grace as a man deafened momentarily by the weight of the sea who facilitated his escape and then later re-birthed him from her watery womb. Upon another repeat of the song and now a familiarity with Walt Grace, I could conclude that sadly Grace succumbed to the numbness of suicide and perhaps even going so far to say that the fan blade which propelled him under the water was a knife that generated a pair of sad incisions to his own wrists in a bathtub.  Perhaps he vanished into thin air and resurfaced in Toyko, where it was here, by the blade of the fan in his hotel room, Walt Grace dogged the heels of death until the two were reconciled at the end of a rope for eternity and it was his casket that transported him beneath the waves of time.  As he surfaces, the sky was set "aflare;"  I can see that it would only be the real hell had awaken to find himself in and at the same time, I can't help but think how Walt Grace ended up there with purpose and intent.

For whatever reason, I find myself standing on the shore in this song waving to a man I have never known, in person or in fiction, silently mourning him on as he glides out past the breakers. I am slightly relieved to know that the unfulfilled, laughing stock of a man eventually came up for air in a painless new world by means of death in metaphor or by literal re-appearance in a humbly cobbled watercraft. I can say that Walt Grace was a man who managed to live on through the tales told by the casual naysayers who doubted he had the guts to go through with it, be it pursuing life or running down death.  I do know, he has been haunting my thoughts all afternoon and his ode plays on in my mind long after the CD has come to rest in its entirety.



Nicely done, Mr. Mayer.  Something to be said for finding the great importance is printing the lyrics and letting us become fully entwined in the music....and in this case, the man.

*Video link posted above*

The Dousing of Dreams

There are some things I just have to be in the mood for.  Can you relate?  For example, food has seasons. You don’t see turkey, stuffing, and pumpkin pie served at a Fourth of July picnic and in the Midwest where I live, you have to practically finance a mango if you can find even one in the supermarket after July.  Some of us get antsy when our neighbors fail to dismantle their Christmas light displays after the first of January and I tend to grant myself leniency in terms of bra strap exposure until somewhere around Labor Day when the tanks tops that have been exposing my fashion faux-pas get put away in their respective storage tote where they will slumber until I dig them back out in May.  There are some matters in which we have expectations to when and how certain things are to occur.

I lived in Italy for a few years and they were, without hesitation, some of the most phenomenal, colorful years of my life.  I had possessed a bucket list of things I wanted to see and do in Europe during the course of my residency. One of them was to spend my Christmases in Tuscany in a quiet farmhouse, me and my husband, and a little Andrea Boccelli on the portable stereo I trucked in.  (Remember the whole “life soundtrack” thing?)  It was a simply magical experience that I had carefully crafted and articulated right down to the scarf I wanted to be photographed in while leaning against the cascade of bougainvilleas just outside of our guesthouse.  We would pack up our tres-chic rented European sedan and stuff it with the wrapped Christmas gifts we planned to open during our stay. Along with a suitcase full of clothes, and a handful of maps we gathered from gas stations along the autostrada, we headed north toward what would be our first of multiple Tuscan escapes.  During the course of our weeklong hiatus, we relied on coin-flipping (left or right?) rather than examining the map for navigational guidance. Few Italian streets have signs and my finger pointing made our navigation all the more confusing.  Mid-navigation, I would inhale sharply and say, “Wow! Would you look at that beautiful balcony! Remember how that looks so when we build a house someday you can make that for me!” My husband, white-knuckled and intense, would tell me to pay attention to the road and stop peeping in people’s villas as we dizzied ourselves on the roundabout. When we weren’t bickering over roundabouts and peeping in people’s villas, we danced by the fire in the fireplace of our farmhouse and drank wine. We laughed while people-watching in the piazzas of medieval towns right out of a King Arthur tale.  I tasted dainty marzipan confections from sugar-frosted bakeries and licked the remnants of dark Perugian chocolate from my fingers.  My husband and I held hands and listened to the youth choirs that lifted their praises in Latin from the open church halls in the glisten of night.  Something happened to me when I was there. It created a frame of reference for me that suspended me in time. 

I have to be in a mood for certain things these days. I can’t watch “Saving Private Ryan” any old night I happen to stumble across it on late-night cable. It’s just too heavy. I need to prepare before a movie like that. I need to be told about it two weeks in advance. In a perfect world, a friend or coworker would read it in the TV guide two weeks prior to its running and relay this information to me. I would have enough time then to get a full eight hours of sleep the night before,  a nutritionally sound breakfast the day of, a workout in the afternoon to stockpile the feel-good endorphins I would later need when I had turned to a puddle on my living room carpet. I would also pick up a bottle of wine on my way home from work to mellow myself out, and then make sure I had enough toilet paper to blow my nose after my heavy-duty bawling two thirds of the way through when I realize Matt Damon looks really good in army fatigues and he really isn’t a Marine in real life. I need to prep for an event like this. 

Perhaps my need for preparation came from a childhood where my mom made ordinary events extraordinary. When I would lose a tooth as a small child, my mom would spray a dollar bill with cheap hairspray and sift a handful of craft glitter on it.  We didn’t have much money, but we enjoyed the ride to wherever it was we were going, whether or not we actually had the money to buy an admission ticket once we arrived.  It was much the same way living in Italy.  You don’t need anywhere to go, just an open window and an open heart.

I cannot watch “Under the Tuscan Sun’ without being prepared.  Other than the main character being a divorcee on a gay tour of Tuscany, the main character and I have much in common. We are both writers at heart with longings, with a penchant for metaphorical living.  This movie (and I know it’s only a movie) but it yanks my taut heartstrings the way Roy Clark plucked a banjo. Give a girl a warning, please!  Frances describes everything she sees, smells, and experiences in Italy and it had a way of engraining itself into who she was.  You become what you eat, sleep, and breathe.

A while back, my husband and I went to the movies; this particular action flick we were seeing seemed harmless when I found it in the local newspaper’s movie listings.  However, seven minutes into the film, it is obvious that the film was filmed in Venice, Italy and I started to feel as if I had a cantaloupe maturating in my neck. I was not prepared for this and had really wished I had scrutinized the plotline and setting a little with a little more discrimination.  I shoveled fistfuls of greasy popcorn into my mouth in hopes of deterring the growth of that pesky cantaloupe that had now doubled in size.  While an unannounced Matt Damon flick can sneak up on me before I am “in the mood,” anything Italy is my trigger these days.  I confess that once I even cried at a Barilla pasta commercial on television.  There he was that bugger! Andrea Boccelli was crooning in the background while a beautiful, young Italian couple hovered over a steaming stockpot of penne pasta while their open kitchen window exposed a view of the Tuscan countryside that I cherished so much.  I wanted to slap that happy couple.  They were having penne in Portofino and I was having a hotdog in my sweatpants. I was totally unprepared for the new commercial and considered contacting the people at Barilla and letting them know that this commercial needed a warning that went something like, “The following advertisement is a paid commercial by Barilla pasta. If you have ever lived in Italy, and more importantly, if you have left your heart there, please exercise caution when viewing the following paid program.  While Barilla pasta is delicious, the content you are about to see might cause a cantaloupe to spontaneously sprout in your throat. Call your nearest travel agent if you experience any discomfort. Buon appetito!”

Though my memories of Italy have been subject to years’ worth of fading and bleaching, they can be reconstituted with a snippet of something from an herb garden or an overly-romantic noodle commercial. When something has begun to show signs of wither, like a plant in a windowless office, it is usually time for some schmuck to dump a coffee cup’s worth of water into it.  Thank you, Lord, for those unexpected “dousings.”  Thank you for not allowing my dreams of Italy to fade into oblivion.

"Like My Father but Simpler"

I've seen him before but I'll be damned if I can't remember where. His eyes were polite, soft and darted back and forth in their own rhythmic twitch as if set to his brain's own timer. I sat in my booth holding the ceramic mug of coffee to my lips and watched him as he slipped two quarters into the newspaper box outside the diner window.  He looked to be my dad's age but with a much gentler face and the smile of a mischievous child.  He clapped his hands together as he waited for the coins to register in the metal slot and then he looked inside the vending machine like a child waiting for a sheet of cookies to be taken out of the oven.  He rolled the paper up under his short arm and he bounded into the diner where I sat with a plate of pancakes and a pot of black coffee. His black mustache might make you think he was a husband or a truck driver or an alcoholic, but the moment he walked in the door, I could see he was a man who had never been kissed, driven a car, or tasted a beer.

I could never understand how my heart could pick out the adult in the crowd that looked like life had dealt them a stack of cards that no one wanted to hold; the hand of the simple-minded, the lonely, the picked-on, the put-down; men without shells.

I watched the man who looked like my father but simpler, high-five the waitresses that wore too much hairspray and called everyone "sugar" as he strode in with his paper.  The diner was filled with pairs of pock-faced, red-nosed men in camouflage as turkey season had begun that day. They slammed their coffee cups down with weighted fists and they discussed union benefits and truck parts.  They ate their breakfast meats first as this is the custom of whole, hard men.  To fill their bellies with the flesh of other animals, those conquered by men like themselves that now lied in a puddle of ketchup, asserted their high place in the universe.  I was more interested in the man who looked like my father but simpler and watching him wave at people from the interior of the clear bubble than encased him.

He smiled a toothy smile and skated his way to a corner booth where someone I assumed was his mother waited for him. He delivered the paper to her waiting hands before he slid into his corner of the booth. I became happy because breakfast was being eaten in pairs all over the diner and the man with the soft black eyes would not be rendered defenseless on a stool with his back to the hungry crowd if he was without company or protection. I was relieved that he had someone  there who could protect him from the whole, hard men who stared at him with full bellies and hard, unbroken minds.

Was I sad because the man who looks like my father but simpler will never know how it feels to have a to-do list on Saturday morning like I did? Will he ever know how it feels to have self-satisfaction from earning money from a job when one has a whole brain?  Would he ever know what it would feel like to sit across the table from a woman that wasn't his mother and dream life's dreams over eggs and toast with her?

Or was I sad for me because the man who looks like my father but simpler will never know how it feels to have a to do list on Saturday morning and I was jealous?  He will never plagued by migraines headaches that scrape away at his brain over the to-do lists that dog our heels to the grave.  He will never waste his weekends beautifying a home that he works his knuckles to the bone to pay for whether or not there comes any self-satisfaction in paying for it or keeping it up.  He will never have a job that chains him to a pension, an unused college education or a mound of insurmountable debt that siphons the oxygen out of his soul.  He will never have his heart broken by a woman or have a child taken away from him too soon.  His bubble kept the pain out swirling around in our world, where we had the capacity to feel it and be devastated by it.

I watched the man who looked like my father but simpler scan the smudgy plastic menu in his hands. He held it close to his nose like a child reading a comic book and he smiled a toothy smile before deciding on waffles with lots of strawberries and whipped cream. He had the best of everything. A sunny corner booth in a diner, a breakfast that threw caution to the wind, and a broken brain that kept him safe from the whole, hard world outside.

All Roads...

I have logged many hours in hospitals and have come close to reading every magazine that has ever been published while parked on my hind end in waiting rooms.  I have uncovered the birdwatcher in me by thumbing through outdated copies of “Birds and Blooms” and had once even thought I might like to try my hand at a round of golf after reading an entire year’s worth of “Golf Digest” at the neurologist’s office. (That was a fleeting idea and I blame that monetary lapse of reason on low blood sugar due to the lunch-hour timing of the appointment.)  For the most part, the magazine selections in waiting rooms stink and I blame the scant choices at doctor’s offices on women. Around the first of every month, receptionists all across the country come out from behind the plexi-glass of their registration desks to shuck all of the fresh magazines out onto the coffee tables of waiting rooms. If you are lucky enough to get an appointment during the first week of the month, you have half a chance of getting to read a “People” magazine or another prime read before other patients walk off with them. For some, it’s hard to think about picking up your purse and coat after being paged by the nurse midway through Brad and Angelina’s latest adoption.  I blame the disappearance of magazines on women simply because we have purses and there are no reads in a doctor’s office that men are willing to steal by shoving down the tops of their jeans. If you are the unlucky schmuck, like myself, who always seems to be weeks shy of the new releases, you will be doomed to sift through the leftovers in the racks on the wall. We pick them up to read despite our advance lack of interest in the available titles. Though on rare occasion I have found a recipe for a paper plate art project in a children’s Highlights magazine that I thought I would like to try, I have never found enough enjoyment in it to make me want to roll it up and cram into my purse for later. Seasoned waiting room veterans are easy to pick out in a clinic or hospital. They are the ones who come with a tote bag containing a knitting project, a laptop computer, or the latest Dan Brown novel.  Though I spend much time in hospitals with the care of my husband, I have yet to obtain “the tote.”  I have shoved bananas into my purse and have smuggled in a peanut butter sandwich or two as I do plan ahead for hunger.  But when it comes to the passage of time in waiting rooms, I guess you could call me hopeful. I am always hopeful that there will be enough periodical reading scattered on coffee tables to peak my interest and cover whatever appointment duration we have ahead of us.  I am most often disappointed when after I have overturned all waiting room furniture in hopes of shaking loose a “Glamour” magazine, I sadly discover that all of my pillaging produces nothing but another year’s worth of “Birds and Blooms.”

The other day, I was in the hospital visiting a friend in the ICU when I had an “aha” moment. That week has been an especially trying one in our home and my mind had been abuzz with worries and “what ifs.”I was standing casually at the counter of the nurse’s station flipping through a newspaper when I overheard a conversation from behind the pulled curtain of a patient’s room.  My back was to the curtain and I continued to peruse the paper as the conversation carried on between an adult woman and a young girl.  I could hear the inhalations and collapses of the ventilator that was running in the room they were visitors in.  Heart monitors beeped and oxygen flushed through tubes and hoses that were threaded in all of the patient rooms of the unit.  The ICU is a special area of the hospital where patients are in really tumultuous situations and can be admitted for anything from drug overdoses to heart failure to severe burns.  It is a place that begs for healing and mercy and a place that floats on the hope that those notions will manifest in the bodies and hearts of the patients who lie in beds there.

As I stood and flipped though the noisy newspaper, it became clear to me that the woman and the girl in the curtained room were working on a crossword puzzle to pass the time while their loved one dozed, hitched to the switchboard of hoses that sustained the ventilator. “Okay,” the woman said, “our next word has four letters. Second letter is “o” and the last letter is “e.”  Your clue is: All roads lead to ______.”  “Easy,” I thought to myself. “Rome. Everybody knows that. Say Rome.”  The dialogue had ceased as I envisioned the little girl who remained invisible to me, scanning the horizon for the right answer, her young brain unacquainted with Rome or sayings of antiquity. Spryly, she piped up. “Well that’s easy, mom! Duh! Hope! All roads lead to hope!” I froze hard and was unable to budge from the classifieds while I processed what I had just overheard.  I quickly tossed out scenarios in my mind that couldn’t possibly have a hopeful ending.  Could a life sentence in prison lead to hope? Sure. Look at all of the wonderful prison ministries that spring forth from the hearts of hopeful inmates like Karla Faye Tucker.  Could a terminal illness lead to hope?  Sure. Miracles happen and a healing could come and if it didn’t, my hope isn’t in my physical body anyway! We have been dying since the day we were born.  Physical bodies pass away and isn’t my greatest hope in Christ?  I left the ICU that afternoon with a renewed sense of hope and applied the “all roads lead to hope” concept to every situation in my own life that I could think of. When I had exhausted my own circumstances, I began applying it to the circumstances of friends and family who had situations in which their own hope was waning. 

Later that afternoon, I spent some time at the gym hammering out a little stress and letting my mind process the whole hope thing.  While barely hanging on for the final fifteen minutes on the stair-climber, I noticed a woman on a treadmill in the row directly in front of me. She was white-haired and plump and reminded me of Mrs. Claus.  She had a neatly matched sweat suit on and her sneakers were perfectly white. She walked on the treadmill, hardly breaking a sweat, but pumped her arms steadily at her side as if she had a bake sale to get to!  She had a magazine opened on the treadmill’s console and she read it while she wiggle-walked.  She was reading a muscle magazine, the kind that bodybuilders and the scrawny teen boys that are eager to become bodybuilders subscribe to.  She was intensely studying the pages of rippled abdominals on the men and women who posed in bathing suits made of nothing more than what appeared to be licorice strings.  They were heavily spray-tanned and flexed in horrific poses that made their faces look contorted with agony.  The article headline blared “Your can achieve your best body now!”  Surely the sweet, round lady who looked like a first-grade teacher who was good at bandaging knees and broken hearts did not spend $6 of her own money to buy this magazine in the hopes that she would actually be able to get fitness tips out of it.  I hoped that a staff member of the gym would pass by and notice her reading this magazine and kindly take it from her and remind her of the safety policies that are in place.  (Hack squats are not for folks in rainbow sweat suits!) Perhaps like me, she was at the mercy of the reading rack next to the sports drink machine that only supported the few magazines that others had not carted back into the locker rooms to toss into their gym bags.

Although I have never seen a “Birds and Blooms” at the gym, it is entirely possible they have been consolation reading material. Perhaps Mrs. Claus just didn’t feel like listening to the rap music that blared overhead from the large box speaker hanging from the rafters and decided that learning how to do a perfect power lift would be a better way to pass the time.   Or perhaps she was hopeful.  I applied the “all roads lead to hope” concept to Mrs. Claus in the rainbow sweat suit. Was there hope for her?  Of course.  She was not a good candidate for a future photo shoot with the muscle-head magazine, but I was certain that a renewed sense of confidence and a way to hammer out her tensions would be a side-effect of her hopeful thinking. Besides, maybe she was hoping for a chance to put a little wear on the perfectly white sneakers I pictured she had been saving in the closet until January 1^st.

There is a sign in my home that hangs above my sofa that reads: “Hang your hope on God.” It is true; all roads lead to hope.  What our eyes see is often conceptualized through a heart that lacks hope.  We feel desperate when the answers don’t come; when the world tells us that we aren’t favored to win.  Be hopeful and keep your eyes on the cross.

Dashboard Confession:  Dear God, I have put my hope in others and of things with worldly value.  I confess, Lord, that my heart has lacked hope.  Thank you for reminding us that the greatest hope we have is the cross and that no matter the path we have taken to reach the cross, Your road leads to the hope we have in Christ.

Who the Heck is Moses, Anyway?

In 1999, I was living and working in Memphis, Tennessee as part of a military relocation. As a gifted road-tripper and chronic relocator, I was rather comfy with moves that occurred every 2-3 years with the military.  It brought a fresh change of scenery and brought me cool, new accents what I would try out on my family when I would go home to Minnesota for Christmas.  (“Would y’all like to try my sweet potato casserole?”) This was how my relatives would know that I must have moved again, as all Midwesterners know that casserole is called “hot dish” in Minnesota.

I was always trying to plant some sort of roots in my new towns only if they had but short shoots on them.  It’s easier to grab them and rip them out of the dirt in 24 months when it’s time to go again without crying too much or having too large of a going away party. I would neatly and swiftly pack small apartments up and slip out the door and into the motoring U-Haul in the parking lot. 

As newcomer protocol, I would make a point to locate the nearest Chinese takeout, the nearest dry-cleaner, and the nearest Pottery Barn store.  I was not prepared for the day a patron at the fitness center I was working at asked me if I had found a home church yet.  Not a believer at the time (what I like to call “Jamie B.C.”) I smiled and rolled my eyes when he walked away.  I like to think back now at all of the times God knocked on the door of my heart and I quickly flipped the porch light off and pulled the blinds.

Day after day, this customer would poke his head into my workspace and invite me to his church. I would hide in the ladies’ locker room until I knew he had signed out for the day or I would quickly bend over and tie my shoe behind the counter if thought he might have seen me while he sipped water from the fountain.  I did not want to go to church and I did not want to have to give an answer to why I had no desire to go.  Sure, we could dress me up in heels and a straw hat and send me off to the nearest hand-clapping, foot-stomping gospel church in town, but the heels wouldn’t be high enough nor the straw hat large enough to distract from the baggage a woman like me would drag into a pretty ‘ol church like that. Churches to me, were full of “good Christians” both of whom I was neither. You weren’t gonna find me fainting or Halllelujah’ing any time soon, sista! 

I cannot recall the exact moment I stopped running from the man who kept inviting me to church. I went on a Wednesday as going for the first time on a Sunday seemed way too formal.  It was a casual weeknight bible study before Christmas and the pastor was away at a retreat and his son would be leading the study.  I had never owned a bible and fumbled awkwardly at the back of the pew to dislodge a raggedy bible from the pew pocket to follow along with.  This was over my head!  It was a study in the Old Testament and I was immediately thrown off by the extensively listing of tribes that the pastor’s son had pored over that night.  In looking back, the devil used everything in his stinkin’, rotten hands to scare me into not coming back and drinking the Living Water that was being shared that night.  Somewhere in the study, Moses came up.  I had heard of him before! He was swallowed up by a whale, right?  In my mind, I saw Moses, bearded and wizard-like in appearance, standing next to (or was it in, perhaps) water.  Was he a fisherman? A trick water-skier?  A merchant marine? Wait, I think he was the guy who was swallowed up by a fish.  I might actually be getting this!

When the bible study was over, the pastor’s son had approached me and thanked me for attending the study. He invited me back and then asked me if I had any questions for him.  In complete reluctance, I felt my palms sweating and my cheeks flushing as I searched for a way to make my question lack the stupidity I felt it oozing with.  I was in the house of the Lord here tonight and I worried that my theological question would lack the panache I needed to impress the pastor’s kid with my puny knowledge of doctrine.  I leaned in carefully, inhaled sharply and whispered, “Who the heck is Moses anyway?”  He leaned abruptly away from me and as if I had just spit while talking and said, “For real? You don’t know who Moses is? Girl, are you joking?”  Uh-oh, I could feel my heart beating in my ears and I think my stomach had fallen out of my butt.  I knew it! The pastor’s son laughed and proceeded to call a few others over to inform them that the new dummy in pew six had no idea who Moses was.  It was like being in the front row at a live comedy performance. You know when the comedian says, “How about the lady in the front row in the red sweater?”  And you suddenly realize you ARE the lady in the red sweater.  You know it’s going to hurt temporarily and while you writhe in pain, others will soon be laughing with glee at your screw up, be it not knowing who Moses is or choosing to buy that gaud-awful red sweater in the first place!

From that night on, I had abandoned all hope of finding God on my own.  Despite my academic knowledge and possession of a multitude of occupational licenses and certifications, my knowledge of God and any theology I had was squashed and my hopes of knowing God were deflated like a cheap set of tires. I was too dumb for God.  If I couldn’t even get to know the man who penned the first books of the Bible, how would I ever get to the New Testament where we are introduced to the messiah, the Savior Jesus?  I was a fool and apparently when other babies left heaven bound for earth, they were given a tri-fold brochure on Moses and Old Testament theology as a parting gift that I didn’t get.  It would be my hang-up about Moses that would keep me away from God for another full decade.

Dashboard Confession:  Dear, God, I still don’t really know who everyone in the Bible was or what they mean to the whole story.    Remind me, Lord, that I all I need to know is You and how much you love me. I want to know more of you, I desire you wholly. My knowledge of theology isn’t that of a scholar, but humbly, I know this much:  I love You and don’t ever want to live without you.

The Girl's Got Gab!

Confessions and Conversations:  The Girl’s Got Gab!

            My husband thinks of me as a fabricator. Not the kind that welds sheet metal into intricate doo-dads and thing-a-ma-bobs used to build conveyor belts and pulleys for factories. Not that.  I am also quite certain he doesn’t mean “fabricator” as in having anything to do with sewing machines and dress patters.  I get where he’s going. He knows I am a storyteller. Sometimes they involve him and sometimes they involve him making mistakes (this is the part I know he deems as fiction as we all know, husbands never screw up!) I am the campfire queen who needs no campfire over which to share tales no matter how grand or small.  All I need is coffee, an experience, and an audience.  In that order.

            When I was a young girl, I spent my summers plunking away on the old Smith-Corona that was stashed under my grandma’s spare bed.  She would drag it out from under the bed and supply me with typewriter ribbon and correction fluid as long as I kept asking for it.  We lived in the country in northern Minnesota and during the six week summers, I could compile an entire anthology of comical essays depicting life on our rural stretch of road. I was the Garrison Keilor of P.O Box 211. I loved to make up stories about my grandma’s neighbors and create phony travel brochures about our dinky town that highlighted our town’s must-sees like the collection of rock-hard work jeans at the general store that only came in one size and the truck stop that featured donut holes so big you had to cut them in three’s to eat them.  

When I was nine or ten, I read my first Dave Barry article in the Sunday paper and I was agog thinking about writing like him someday.  I loved the way he told stories about his children and his wife, how he was truthful about their simple, unspectacular life experiences and how he made them serious enough to make me begin to experience a slight emotional change on the inside right before he threw in a handful of humor to switch my heart gears again.  I wanted to write like Dave Barry, but I wanted to tell Jamie Kinworthy’s unspectacular life experiences. I now practice my storytelling while chasing an English/Creative Writing degree at Regent.  My husband thinks I am studying welding at a local technical college as this naturally should enhance my current vocation as a fabricator.

I want to make people emotional, like Jesus did with his storytelling. I have written essays and spoke at a women’s faith seminar. I naturally enjoy storytelling and doing so with gaiety and wit.  I sock my audiences with somber seriousness and then double them over with panty-hose splitting laughter.  Perhaps laughter binds us to the stories we laugh over. We find relatable situations and in peppering them with humor, we can make any situation tolerable.  Jesus told stories in truth, as he was Truth.  My panache is in writing essays that tell of true personal experience, my messes and my mountaintops.  They cover anything from living with panic attacks and taking care of a husband with a brain injury to conducting an interview with an old man in his barn on the topic of traditional farming methods when his giant Clydesdale horse “broke wind” in the man’s face and knocked his hat off.  (I then realized, perhaps journalism was not for me as it required keeping a straight face.) With writing, I too can laugh at my follies and my faux-pas in the privacy of my study and in turn, I hope that they change someone’s thinking for the better.  Like biblical storytelling, I hope someone finds a reason to seek triumph over adversity and find a smidgen of hope in their own situations by giggling at their guffaws.  I hope to present my stories where God can be seen. After all, He has implanted my ability to take my experiences seriously but my presentation style not so seriously. It is my hope that this style of storytelling makes my reader ascribe to their own lives with small comfort and a sense of semblance.