A Midwestern Life

On the Bike Path, with Lori and Clover

2007-09-23T10:53:00.001-07:00

This is an essay written about 2 years ago. Unfortunately for all of us, Lori & I don't have time currently for walks with Clover.

One of the best parts about living in Granville is the bike path. My house is about a quarter mile from the community park that lies beside the path. My dog, Clover, and I drive there 3 or 4 times a week (in a good week) to meet my friend Lori and we walk for exercise, enjoyment of nature and companionship. Clover loves Lori. Just the sight of her car can send her into a frantic, manic tizzy in which she is bouncing in circles, desperately trying to form words out of her whines, all the while turning back to look at me to be sure I have seen her too.

Regulated by the minimal amount of gray matter in her dog brain, Clover will bound recklessly toward Lori’s car in an enthusiastic and premature effort to welcome Lori to the park. She seems to believe that Lori’s car is an extension of Lori herself, and is therefore nothing to fear. I hold onto her collar, until the car is safely situated in a parking space, then let Clover run up to the driver’s side door, ready to greet our friend with leaps of joy and slobbery doggie kisses. Yuck. The business of greeting is perfunctory, though. There is a bike path waiting and we must be off.

For Clover, a walk is more than a chance for exercise. There is dog-work to be done. There are smells to be smelled, squirrels to chase, ground hogs to flush out and intriguing holes to explore. If she catches a scent, but hasn’t located its source, she sniffs at the air, and comes to attention. Her ears, which normally fold in the middle like a collie’s, stand straight up and she resembles a half-sized German shepherd.

On a good day, we walk 2 ½ miles out and back for a total of 5 miles. On a tightly scheduled day, we turn back after only ½ mile. It’s better than nothing, but leaves all of us, especially Clover, feeling a bit unsatisfied. When I call her back to turn around early, she looks at me quizzically, as if to say, “You’ve got to be kidding!” Then, in typical dog fashion, she bounds back toward me and Lori and hurries to regain her rightful place about 10 feet ahead of us. When she is bounding down the path in her happy mood, her tail wags as she bounces and it appears to be spiraling around like a corkscrew. In her typical walk pace, her tail and butt alternate swing direction and the long, long fur on the tail whips at the air like the last child in a long line of crack-the-whip.

I have heard that you can tell the difference between a sheep-herding dog and a cattle-herding dog by how they walk with you when left to follow their natural instincts. A cattle dog will stay behind you, keeping their eyes on you, making sure you don’t stray. If you veer too far off course, the dog will put itself between you and “the great beyond” and encourage you to return to the familiar trail. A sheep dog will walk ahead of you, scouting out potential dangers and pitfalls, proving to you that the way is safe. The sheep dog assumes that you will follow. After all, that is what sheep do. Clover, though of indeterminate parentage, is definitely descended from dogs of sheep farmers. If a jogger or power-walker overtakes Lori and me, Clover will quicken her pace to match that of the newcomer. She is always willing to add another human to her herd and happy to accommodate a faster pace.

For being a good-old used dog from the pound, Clover is a very attractive dog. She is medium build with a silhouette that is vaguely collie-shaped. Her fur is short and trim around her face, longer on her back and chest, feathery on her legs, and elegantly long on her tail. Her face is tan with a slightly crooked white blaze between her eyes running down the length of her nose. Her eyes are ringed in black that points up and out on the sides like the makeup on an Egyptian princess. Her back is black and gray with a feathery tan mark in the middle that is in the shape of a dog-bone. Her leg feathers are tan and her toes are white. Her tail is black on top, white on the bottom with an elegant white tip. The white fur on her belly and hind haunches is curly and fluffy and billows out from beneath the coarse black fur of her back. It makes her look a little bit like a can-can dancer dressed in a black skirt on top of layers and layers of white petticoats.

Today’s walk is short and we’re back at our cars before we’d like to be, but Clover has the attention span of a dog and has already forgotten that we turned back too soon. She stands between my car and Lori’s, as though contemplating who might offer the more enticing treat at home. Once I have opened the back door of my car and she sees her familiar blanket on the seat, her decision is made and she hops in, eager to get to the house where her water dish and the pantry full of treats are.

Her enthusiastic attitude toward all the joys of life is enviable. She experiences disappointments in her everyday life, but she gives them no more time than they deserve. She mourns for a moment when the kids head off to school, but immediately turns her attention to the next adventure of the day. Surely, I have made her angry or hurt her feelings at some point. Maybe when I left the house (in my tennis shoes!) without her or when I made her go to the groomer, but she has never held a grudge or withheld her forgiveness. The next time she sees me, she welcomes me home with an enthusiasm and joy that a poor human can only dream of. Her goals and dreams are simple: to smell more stuff, to eat more treats, to spend more time on the bike path with Lori and me.

Piecing It All Together

2007-09-01T12:58:00.000-07:00

One of the most important pieces of my life is my church quilt group. I wrote an essay several years ago about my experiences with "The Quilters" for a creative writing class. Here's an excerpt:

My first assignment was to cut as many 8” squares as possible out of a stack of homespun fabrics. Homespuns are loosely woven plaids and stripes that feel and look primitive and, well, homespun. It turns out that cutting them into squares that are actually square is far easier said than done. They slip and move and stretch and pull. Once the “squares” were cut, I had to sew them together in pairs diagonally down the middle and cut them apart into squares that were now made up of triangles of two different fabrics. Let me just say that it is pretty tough to get a diagonal seam through a shape that only resembles a square. Nevertheless, the process was repeated until the resulting blocks each had 4 different fabric triangles in an hourglass configuration. These were sewn together until there was a lap-sized quilt top made of hundreds of triangles of soft, homey plaids.

I lamented and fretted and worried about the crooked seams, the mismatched corners, the missing points and the resulting six-sided ‘triangles.’ “Don’t worry,” the experienced quilters told me. “We believe in the theory of the galloping horse. If you can’t see the mistake from the back of a galloping horse, it isn’t big enough to worry about.” Happily, it turns out you can see all that much from the back of a galloping horse. Our quilts aren’t meant to win contests, they are meant to share love and give a hug when there isn’t anyone else around to give one.

It wasn’t long before the quilt group was officially adopted as a ‘sub-committee’ of the Parish Care Committee. Leave it to Presbyterians to put a layer of bureaucracy over everything. It hasn’t changed much in our daily lives, but it does give us a line item in the annual budget, so we go along with the idea. Now that we are official within the church, we have to fill out an annual questionnaire about our mission work. Mostly it is filling in the blanks, ‘how many individuals were benefited by our efforts’, stuff like that. There was one question that threw us momentarily. “Do you open and/or close your meetings with prayer?” Well, no. But we do call upon the name of the Lord frequently when we have to rip out the same seam AGAIN! This is not your grandmother’s quilting bee.

Quilting has had unexpected gifts. I have spent most of my life in an internal tug of war between my right- and left- brains. I spent 10 years as an actor, (well, aside from my day job), which kept my right-brain happy (or is it the left?), but the other half was frustrated and restless. Then, I spent almost as long as an accountant, which kept the left-brain happy (or is it the right?), but my artistic, creative side was lost and forlorn. With quilting, I can satisfy both the artistic and methodical parts of my soul. The artistic self chooses fabrics and color and designs the layout. The methodical self calculates the measurements and angles and insists that, despite the galloping horse, I should at least try to keep my seams as close to ¼ inch as possible, or the whole block is not going to turn out right. And if the block doesn’t turn out right, the quilt won’t turn out right, and so on.

More importantly, though, coming to quilt group twice a week for the past few years has helped me pick up the pieces of a life that had disintegrated into rags, and begin to construct a new life of my own creation. The loving support of the women in the group has given me enough strength and courage to face the challenges of being a single mom. Their hugs held me together when I lost my mom (and later, my dad) and their laughter pulled me out of the doldrums when each day’s mail brought yet another surprise from the divorce attorney. When I thought I would collapse from the stress, it was the quilters who produced a certificate for a massage at the local spa.

In December, 2004, our community was struck hard by an ice storm. Phone lines were down, power was out and residents became refugees scattering to relatives’ homes and motels in neighboring communities that had escaped the full wrath of the storm. We lost touch with each other for more than a week. When we were finally able to reunite, we met at the local coffee shop, since the church was still cold and dark. While swapping “survivor” stories about our storm experiences, we saw our pastor come in. She came over to our table and we announced that even though we couldn’t quilt, we had been compelled to meet anyway. She grinned at us, saying only “I’m not at all surprised.”

Now Playing

2007-08-27T12:25:00.000-07:00

I'm going to start by sharing an essay I wrote for a Creative Writing class I took a few years ago. The assignment was to write about an early memory:

Sometimes I pretend I’m an independent film maker. I write, direct, produce and star in trendy, evocative, critically acclaimed films that play to tiny little audiences in art film houses. On exciting, but rare occasions, my films are shown to large audiences at independent film festivals. I have a small, but dedicated, following of fans who wouldn’t dream of missing my latest work. This loyal group is made up of college professors and high school English teachers and organic farmers. There are intellectual lesbians and Birkenstock-wearing environmentalists. Moms of babies who wear only cloth diapers and soccer moms who have to skip the credits to hop into the SUV to dash off to pick up the kids at practice. (Usually they watch all the practices, but they can make an exception when something important happens, like my latest film is in town). There are even some men, of assorted types & sizes. They haven’t quite figured out what it is about my films that resonates in their souls, but something small, primal, and hidden deep inside their hibernation chambers stirs just a little, shortly before the final music starts and the credits appear. They come back hoping to grab hold and look it in the eye long enough to determine if it’s a threat or a promise. My latest film is about me.

I am 16 years old and I work at Hardee’s. In an early scene, it is rush hour and the restaurant is packed. It’s noon and the crew is different from the one I usually work with. I know them by sight and can call them by name, but I don’t really know them. Know what I mean? Usually, I work at dinner time, after school. There’s a shot of two workers talking, laughing, making plans to meet after work. I step between them to get a coke. They smile politely and turn their attention back to work. They’re nice enough.

The place is packed and we’re taking orders; handing out hamburgers, French fries and cokes as fast as we can. There are the obligatory shots of burgers sizzling on the grill. The manager calls out directions to the bun man. The condiment guy switches out an empty ketchup dispenser for a full one and finishes dressing the row of burgers waiting to be wrapped up. There’s a close up of a hand putting cheese on the meat patties, another one of fries plunging into hot oil and a shot of hands giving and receiving change. There’s so much noise. The customers are talking. A mom wants to know what her preschooler will eat and she wants her older boy to settle down. The buzzer goes off signaling there is a basket of fries ready. They slap against the metal pan when they land out of the basket. The fry cook sprinkles them with salt and tosses them around to distribute it. The fry serving tool grates against the bottom of the pan because of all the grains of salt.

When you work in fast food, the action behind the counter becomes almost choreographed after you’ve worked with the same people for a while. One person steps away from the shake machine & another steps in. An arm can reach around a body for one pack of fries, if it is timed just right. There isn’t much room between the counter and the food prep area and we move fast. I keep making missteps. I step out of one person’s way and bump into someone else. I reach across to pour a coke & spill a root beer into the ice machine. I grab the last hamburger, just when another server is reaching for it. I know the routine of a different crew. I’m off my game.

A quiet, poorly dressed, man has been patiently waiting his turn. The camera keeps focusing on him in between all the construction workers on lunch, the moms & kids on the way to the pool and the office workers from downtown. The man isn’t very tall. He is wearing a suit and tie, but they are poorly fitting and threadbare. The suit is brown and the tie has a couple of spots on it. It isn’t pulled all the way up to his throat and the top button isn’t buttoned. His shirt isn’t white. It’s pale yellow, or maybe it’s just that dirty. He gets up to my register and asks if we have any extra food we can give him. He’s hungry and he doesn’t have any money. The first thought that pops into my head was that the inventory count would be off if I handed out a hamburger without collecting any money for it. I don’t have time to think. The crowd isn’t thinning at all and I have to keep moving as fast as I can. I’m just staring at him with a pretty blank look on my face. I glance back at the manager and around at everyone else behind the counter.

Before I know it, I am telling him that there isn’t anything I can do for him. He says he understands and is gone. I wish he had argued with me.

I don’t remember seeing him go. He is just gone. I can’t remember his face. It seems to me that he had on a hat, maybe a fedora or a bowler. He disappeared so fast that I think it must have taken all his courage to come in and ask for a hand out. When I turned him down, I think he was embarrassed. I’m standing there sort of stunned and my mind begins racing with ideas. I could have given him some food and marked it on the “damaged inventory” list. I could have asked the manager for advice. I could have given him the food and paid for it myself at break. I wish I had thought of all this before now. I wish I could remember what he looked like and then I could look for him when I get off work.

Wait, hold it right there. I don’t want to tell you what’s going on in my head. This is supposed to be a visual description of a movie that I’m going to make. I'm getting distracted by the internal motivational thoughts that the actor who plays me needs to feel and think. I’m fed up with this memory. I carried it with me right up front in my brain for the longest time. I was probably almost 30 before I could lay it to rest. I know it was one of the “midnight confessions” that I shared with my husband early in our marriage. Somehow, it seemed like proof to me that I was really just an imposter in life. I was pretending to be a Christian; a good student; an earnest, hardworking, promising young woman, but really, I was just as shallow and self-absorbed as everybody else. I mean, wouldn’t a REAL Christian be able to think faster on her feet than that?

Somewhere between 30-ish and now, I let it go. I began to understand that I had beaten the dead horse of my guilt for far longer than was reasonable. I was young, caught off-guard and he was out the door before I had a chance to gather my wits. I’m not trying to make excuses, I just began to see the incident in shades of grey instead of stark black and white. Yeah, I screwed up and didn’t take the action I wish I had taken. If a man walked up to my fast food counter at any point in the entire rest of my life, I’d give him a hamburger. I’d figure out what to do about it later. But, I didn’t do it then and I’m genuinely sorry.

I don’t cringe when I think about it any more and in fact, I haven’t thought about him in years. Funny though. When I hear the phrase “tell me about a memory…..”, he is the first thought to come into my head. The very first thought. What's up with that? Why doesn’t that man leave me alone? I mean, think about it. No matter how many times I go over it, it always turns out the same. He asks for a hamburger, I say no, he leaves.

It isn't the man that's bugging me though. It's me. He's in MY head, right? - I'm not in his. So, I'm the one that keeps bringing it back. Surely, I have better things to think about.

The scene begins to echo itself. The camera is working in film-verite style. The focus is bad and the camera angle is amateurish. “Do you have any extra hamburgers you can give away?” “Do you have any…” “I’m sorry, we can’t do that here” “I’m sorry” “any hamburgers…” “extra… you can give” “Do you?” “…give away, …give away, …give away” “No, I’m sorry” “Sorry” “We can’t…” “No” He turns away. I’m staring. He’s walking. He turns away. Turns. I’m staring. He’s walking. The door. He’s at the door. Wait! Stop! Wait! SPEAK UP! SAY IT OUT LOUD. WAIT! The door shuts, door shuts, shuts, the door shuts. The fryer timer beeps. The manager calls. The burgers sizzle. The salt grates. He’s gone.

I think it might make a good film. Depending on where I go with it right?

Why blog Midwestern?

2007-08-27T11:59:00.001-07:00

I have pondered a blog for a long time, but figured I needed an "angle" to be considered credible. Since the old rule of thumb is to 'write what you know', I searched and searched my soul, my life, my history, my family, my interests, my job - anything - looking for something notable that would stand out. Finally, I decided that it is my very normalcy - my ordinariness - that beckons me to share my thoughts via this blog. And frankly, what could be more ordinary and normal than the "midwest?"

I hope not to be boring or dreary though. I believe the challenges I face in my life are not unique. Neither are my joys and my triumphs. I think they are typical of an American life in the Midwest. And because they are typical, maybe others will understand and relate. Maybe not. At any rate, this begins my public journal.