The fall that Rod Stewart’s top-40 hit, "Maggie May," hit the airwaves was the same autumn season that marked the beginning of an inexplicable sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach, and an overwhelming sense of dread, mixed with a kind of transfixed paralysis: Lot’s wife in the process of looking back at Sodom and Gomorrah, slowly (or not so slowly) transformed into a pillar of salt. That’s what you get, when you look back, right?
But, I do not recall looking back at anything. What was there to look back at with any sense
of longing? I had loved being a Bluebird, with our crisp white short-sleeve
shirts, navy blue button down cotton vests, and red neckscarves. I chose being a Bluebird over being a Brownie
simply based on the uniform. It made me feel happy and cheerful, and I loved
the days when all of us wore our uniforms to school, then raced to the home of
the mom whose turn it was to come up with activities for restless, curious, and
easily enthused (and saddened) little girls.
During my mom’s tour of duty (about six weeks, as I recall),
we went craft crazy, fashioning puffy pompoms of yarn, stringing beads,
painting coasters and hot plate holders. When it was Mrs. Collier’s turn, we
made plaster casts of animal tracks left behind in sand and clay. I was intrigued by an especially big canine
paw print, which I not so secretly hoped was from Bigfoot. Perhaps it was – now
there is an annual Bigfoot Festival just a 50 or so miles from were we made
those plaster casts.
I played my favorite pop songs on the record player (45 rpm)
we had in the formal living room in front of the massive Victorian armoire,
beige carpet, watered silk wallpaper, dark carved overstuffed sofa with watered
tapestry. I loved “Jingle Jump” (that
came with a mini hula hoop for your ankle and a ball on a string that you could
rotate and jump over … I know I’m not doing a very good job describing it),
Georgy Girl, My Favorite Things (from The Sound of Music), and Minuet in G by
Bach, Sonatina by Clementi, and other pieces I was working on after school for
my biweekly piano lessons with Mrs. Crow, and then Mrs. Hunecke.
Fly, fly, fly, little Bluebird! Bluebirds and the concept of
being a Bluebird shaped my sense of self. We lived on the edge of farmland and
a long, snaky creek, and birds chirped day and night. I had a light blue
cloisonné Bluebird pin that I always affixed to my vest, and a cute little tie
ring for my neckscarf. When I wore my navy blue skirt, navy blue knee socks,
and little saddle-Oxfords, I felt very snappy and well put together. It was
satisfying to see the other members of my unruly, noisy little flock – we
chirped, hopped around, and poked around for cookies and snacks.
The times were not as innocent as all that, though. After
all, we were in the throes of the Cold War. Did anyone notice that our red
scarves were more or less equivalent to those worn by Soviet Union’s Young
Pioneers? I am sure my mother did not see they irony. She was a big Goldwater
fan, and a John Birch Society member. My sense was that group was proto-Tea
Party and intensely against a command economy, and a surveillance society that
cohered only when a critical mass of the citizenry regularly ratted out each
other, and where mental hospitals were charged with drugging and lobotomizing
the “enemies of the state” (non-conformists). Ironically, we lived in Norman,
Oklahoma, where the top two employers were the flagship state university (The
University of Oklahoma) and the flagship mental hospital (Central State).
My mother, whose depression would engulf her in a few years,
right about the time she lost her mother, perhaps never saw the parallels, or
if she did, she viewed it as proof positive that we were the “heads” side of
the coin; the positive side of the binary relationship that placed one side
(ours) as shiny truth-warriors, and the other side (theirs) as chthonic robotic
tools, crushing to the human spirit.
Years later, after seeming to have conquered her depression, my mother
sat on the edge of the sofa, listening to televangelists and tapes of Bible
studies. She filled notebook after notebook with longhand notes. After she
passed away, I tried to find the notebooks, hoping for pure gold that I could
transcribe and publish as a book of daily devotions, a legacy of sorts. I
envisioned something like the notebooks of a mystic, say, Julian of Norwich or
Margery Kempe. It was not to be, however. Sadly, the few notebooks I was able
to salvage had nothing in them but hand-written copies of Bible verses, repeated,
over and over with no accompanying thoughts or insights…
The experience of reading my mother’s notebooks (page after
page of absolute emptiness) was exactly the same as the one of talking to my
mom and looking into her eyes – it was like looking through glass bricks and
seeing a distorted set of color blocks and contortions that echoed the human
experience. You knew there was a person there, and you could see the big, bold
gestures, but it was hard to connect through so much intervening glass and air.
West Junior High School was not Monroe Elementary. For the
14-year-old, it was a different universe. Girls at school had stopped being
nice to each other somewhere in the second nine weeks of the sixth grade, just
after Thanksgiving and sometime when Santa’s workshops started to appear in the
local department stores and shopping centers.
if I did so, I am sure I would feel a bit of sadness. It would be the
last year that the girls I went to school with were nice to each other.
The leaves had changed color early that fall. I was second
chair in the first violin section of West Junior High orchestra, and I took two
private lessons per week – one with Mrs. Keith, whose husband was something of
a local celebrity at the University of Oklahoma, and one with Mrs. Powers,
whose son had an explosives fetish and ended up being a brilliant geophysicist
working on the North Slope in Alaska, and who herself, changed directions
entirely, and flung to the side her career as a music educator and orchestra
teacher in the Norman Public School system and decided to return to school to
become a registered nurse.
Was she? No. She had to deal with the consequences of having
been an impractical idealist, and being foolish enough to think that one’s
violin prowess would mesh well with the exigencies of middle class life, and
being a divorced mom of three feisty sons.
I loved taking lessons from both Mrs. Powers and Mrs. Keith.
Their personalities were utterly different, as were the pieces they assigned me
to learn.
Mrs. Keith was delicate and refined in a “faculty wife” kind
of way. Mrs. Powers was thin, but in a wiry, un-made-up, scrappy survivalist
sort of way. I was never convinced that either could play their instruments
more competently than their students, but I have to say I love the way that
Mrs. Keith’s technique chilled me with the ravishing tones and the perfect
pitch, not to mention intense coloratura. Mrs. Powers was more utilitarian – no
drama in her interpretations of the classics. Her performance and delivery
screamed “I’m practical!” “I’m utilitarian and proud of it!” – technically
proficient, her interpretations were divine on some level, but it was hard to
engage the affect enough to make her listeners passionate, riveted, filled with
raw desire for music produced by wire, horsehair, and thick, hot rosin.
But, I’m digressing, obviously in order to avoid the painful
subject of my own raw, inflamed, chapped, and incapable of gripping anything
with any sort of fervor at all.
I want to tell you about the passion(s) that everyone feels.
There is the passion for life, the passion for
chrysanthemums in the fall, and for seeing under the surface, and into the
great, deep heart of memory.