Mom and Hilda

In the mid 1970s, near the time I was finishing grade school, Hilda and Bernie Heinen moved in next door.  They had retired from the farm in rural Stearns County where they and generations of family had lived and where some still lived: still farmed and some still spoke a form of German compromised by a couple of generations away from the motherland, a couple of wars with which they did not want to be associated and a longing to be able to navigate the logistics required to make it through a trip into town, the stock yard or the grain elevator.  Hilda and Bernie’s English was good with irregularities common in our town that often interchanged the words borrow and lend as well as the words teach and learn and with an accent that hinted at the rural Minnesotan and German.  Lake Wobegon.

Mom and dad came from New Orleans, a different world where a few still spoke the last smatterings of Creole, but themselves spoke English that had no hint of the French that dominated many of the name places and was cultivated to distinguish them as Xavier University students.

Hilda and Bernie moved into town partly uninfected by much of the media bias that tainted most of America’s perception of African Americans.  Mom had learned well from her father and her own experience to meet people like you were meeting Jesus.

Hilda and Bernie were good people and good neighbors.  Mom and Hilda became good friends.  Better than the neighbors across the street who were related.  Better than most would have expected and better than most would have dared or bothered.

And most would not have expected the exchange that happened between mom and Hilda one afternoon while they stood in one of their front yards.

Hilda referred to to a black person using the word nigger.  That, in Stearns County, Minnesota and many other places would not be so unexpected–maybe for reasons other than why, on this day, the word came out of Hilda’s mouth.  What came next was truly unexpected.

Of course, my mom what stunned.  Surprised and stung in a way that hearing the word nigger always stings.  It is America’s ultimate unwelcoming–and we as black people know the unwelcome that comes with this word and a lot of other edifices that loom larger than a passing insult.

But mom was not mad.  It did not change her relationship with Hilda, like so many stinging encounters might.  Mom was hurt, but took a half moment to seek the best way to respond, maybe even asking God what to do.  She decided to do something that she might not have been able to do with many other people, with any other type of relationship and maybe not in today’s social spaces.

She told Hilda what that word meant: what it means in common language and what it felt in her ears and to the ears of someone who is or believes is the humanity of African Americans and other people who walk this earth.  Mom was kind and gentle–because she sensed that Hilda really didn’t know.

And she didn’t.  Hilda faced the biggest shame of her friendship with mom.  She really didn’t know and would not have wanted to hurt mother or anyone with the word if she knew what it meant.  Hilda could not have been sorrier.

What was so remarkable about this exchange was that this is not how we handle this issue in America and not many are willing or really have the honest, safe space to misstep and repair the damage.

What usually happens is that someone shouts “Nigger” to draw a line of supremacy.  The target of the slur either gets out of the way of the unhealthy and harmful verbal assault or responds with either the angry pain of the injury or a rebuttal that falls on the emotionally deaf or dumb.

Or maybe the response it an attempt to say how that kind of language and attitude is hurtful and damaging to common spaces, not much unlike what mom did with Hilda.  Where Hilda showed her exceptional nature was in her response.

Most of the time when we explain that this kind of language and other slights we encounter (and I hate to call them slights because there is nothing slight about systemic degradation and social, political and economic disadvantage), we get a response that complains that is dismissive, that we don’t have any reason to complain, that somehow they are entitled to speaking to and about us with impunity.

Instead, the two women chose to understand each other.

They made a space moved mom to choose Hilda as the person to whom she sent her two youngest after getting off the school bus for tending and a snack before her older kids got home.  It made a space that moved mom to be the primary helper for Hilda, more than her family who lived not far from us, or the once removed cousins who lived across the street when Bernie was dying of cancer.

The two women chose to share a space that most of America will not work to create, for which most of America is reluctant to work and that many do not want to exist.

After Bernie died, Hilda let her hair go white.  She let mom know how sad she was without him.  Mom worried, wiped tears and let her tell stories and shared a few of her own.  They were busy being Jesus for each other and entertain the angel they saw in each others’ eyes.

Leaving Kevin

Ten minutes into sandbox play, I wanted to go home. I sat across from Keven Ward. Kevin was in 5th grade. I was in 6th. Kevin, a toe-headed, skinny lad, avidly plowed with his Tonka Toy bulldozer. I was less enthusiastic.

I felt odd, because for the previous ten years, just about everything I got my hands on became a car or truck--or bulldozer--or some vehicle I pretend to drive.

Suddenly, watching Kevin move sandy earth and listening to truck sounds coming from his mouth as we sat in front of the ranch office his parents owned, I was aware of how uninspired I was to do the same.

Instead of feeling the fun, I felt guilty. Guilty for leaving Kevin. I was still there in the sandbox, but emotionally, I had left the play space in which he was earnestly engaged.

Kevin was nice enough to invite me to play. He was cool enough--not that cool meant much to me at that point in my life. His family had a ranch. They had a college bookstore, both of which held enough adventure for two grade-school kids, and enough trouble to tactfully avoid. They had a camper, a Winnebago in which they took me on two camping trips. They were all nice to me. 

And maybe that is why that leaving felt like such a betrayal.

But I had already left that childhood space before I got there.  It was the first time I had any concept of my own personal maturation--real change that was, for some reason, more powerful than graduating to footless pajamas, being able to bike across town on my own, or even later, getting behind the wheel of the huge family station wagon.

I had an awareness that, at that moment, different from any other moment during the time I had known Kevin, I was older than him. Somehow, we had lost, without either of us noticing, a big chunk of peer space, the space where we could both be excited by toy cars and making truck noises and having that be enough to keep us entertained and connected with each other.

The next year, I would be in junior high and Kevin would still be at our grade school. I am not sure how many little boy things I had shed by the time I reached junior high, and how many I carried with me. A pile of toy cars that I left in the toy bins of our basement were not missed, but even today, the loss of a baseball glove is devastating. (I am still mourning the loss of a baseball glove I acquired in college.)

But losing friends from childhood is inevitable. The guilt of not knowing how to bring Kevin, occupied with the amusement of the toy bulldozer, into my emerging adolescence has belatedly transformed into a mild grief. Today, I am none-the-wiser, except to understand that I have grown out of friends and they have grown out of me, and it is a blameless loss. And it is a constant renewal with joy, pain and pangs of longing for past simplicities and futures not yet achieved.

I think of this today as I think of an old photograph of the old gang, Kevin included. We are posing with our baseball gloves on the vacant lot behind a house of another friend. We all seem happy with the sun beaming down on us, glad there are just enough to field a two teams for pick-up sand lot. I am wearing a glove that I still have today, one I pull out when an emergency game of catch breaks out and a kid needs a glove to participate.

I still have the memories of that lot, the place, the faces and the fun we had. A couple of these kids are still friends. But more is different than the same, as it should be.

And I look at my son and the relationships he has, how they have transformed and what it will mean in the future, what they have meant in the past, the joys, the heartaches and the wondering: what will happen in later days—or even with the passing of the next summer. I look at some of his friends and see Kevin in them—and sometimes in him. I see Kevin in myself.

In the mean time, it is a luxurious discovery to find that adult fun is really kid fun. It is a luxury because what I see as recreation is really the life work of the young while for us grown people, it is just play. It is adult because I am old enough to see that those things are so good for our mind and body. Our creative imaginations. An academic test of how we interact with others and care for their fun and well-being. Only games.

And most of the time, the grief that comes from winning or losing—either the game or the friend, is more a lesson than permanent injury, and we pick up with life and the kids who happen to be on hand for the next game, lesson and adventure.

And in the mean time, it is fun because it is fun. And now, more so than before, it is fun because I can see it in the faces and bodies of the children in addition to feeling it myself. And in the mean time, I can tell myself that I have at least grown a little.

Counting the Places at the Thanksgiving Table

November 25, 2011

.It is one’s duty to be thankful at this time of year. I see and hear so many statements of thanks. Enough to create more than just a little dissonance when I see them pasted next to pictures of our real world. Still, maybe today’s lesson is that thanks is not the antithesis of those sometimes sad pictures. Hard days sometimes accentuate those things.

This Thanksgiving Day was, like many others, was spent at my parents’ house. Mom and dad have made a good home, always a good place to be. It is a good place to visit, for me. It has proven to be a great place for others whom we have invited over the years and my parents are people who I love to show off.

This Thanksgiving morning, my son and I rode up to mom and dad’s, a happy escape from a hard week. It was a quite drive, this time with no radio and only a book in my son’s lap, leaving his hand-held video games unlit beside him. The silence let in a lot of thoughts from the previous days, things I guess I needed to talk about and may tell you later—and some that I will not, but all things that I need to process. (Maybe some of today’s stories will make enough sense and find the right emotional space to retell, and maybe, with time, wisdom will tell me that there is no story.) Apart from the half hour slowdown as we left the outer ring suburbs, the speed of our trek let my thoughts disappear in the slipstream and vaporize on the freeway.

Grandma was so excited to see her grandson, the first of three grandchildren to arrive, she almost forgot to greet me, her first of four children. The other grandchildren would follow, with their parents. What was different this year, is that there were no friends, no neighbors, and no strays who mom and dad so kindly invite into their home on a day that should be shared.

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. It is a holiday where everyone is supposed to be welcome without having to fake obligation to a particular religious perspective, and a time when people can just get together to be with each other around a special meal. And be reminded why everyone who joins us around that table is special. No obligation to buy the right gift or spend money we need but don’t have on things we don’t have or need and no code besides a heightened idea of how we should treat and enjoy people we know well or met for the first time.

What is missing is more than just the chance to show off mom and dad—two people who are more than worth showing off; more than the stories we get to retell to guests who have missed the previous 40 Thanksgivings at our house, but have to be shared, especially the ones that embarrass one of us.
This year, there were few stories. This is the first time in a couple of years that we’ve been guestless, and as much as I love my family, my siblings, my nieces, my parents and my son, this year’s empty places at the table left an empty place in my heart and a lots opportunity to share the a great spirit with which I was raised with people who are special by their being there.
I am thankful, without grudge, for the blessing of having this place, this home to call my own and from time to time to give to people I love and people who need to receive the love that lives at mom and dad’s. Driving home, the freeway, I am left again with my thoughts, including all the reasons why there were no Happy Thanksgiving visitors, but, also why and how I am blessed to have the place share.
It has been a hard week and I know I have a hard week to come. And, yes, I am still thankful.

Love Lessons

My friend Linda started her blog post this week, “Mom? Dad? What are You Doing Here?”  with a quote. I will steal it. I steal it because I have something else to say about it. I steal it because, in essential ways, we are telling parallel stories, learning parallel lessons.

“Whatever your eye falls on – for it will fall on what you love – will lead you to the questions of your life, the questions that are incumbent upon you to answer, because that is how the mind works in concert with the eye. The things of this world draw us where we need to go." — Mary Rose O’Reilley (The Barn at the End of the World: The Apprenticeship of a Quaker, Buddhist Shepherd)

Love must serve some purpose, but there are some types of love for which I am struggling to learn the lessons.

And what happens when those lessons of love are lost, do not get learned? Are we doomed to repeat them? I think maybe so. But we are still drawn—days to nights, drawn like a ship to a siren.

We are drawn until the lesson has run out and so has the supply of love, until the next time. How much of the lesson will we capture this time around?

For Linda, these love lessons are getting pulled into her life with her family. I have the fortune—or misfortune—to be leaning them through relationships of choice. Not such a simple choice. Drawn by the eye, mind and heart.

And I realize that these lessons are not just ones of resistance. It is not a lesson of how to control, master or submit to them. Maybe it is the task to salvage the love from them, maybe shedding some poison or lie from an apple of lore that sours the true love we have. Maybe the lesson is to realize that we are not the poison, but the poison's leaving is almost never something we can make happen by our own efforts, virtue or even the love itself. What it's not: it is not trying to fix past relationships or just our past with new relationships. Or maybe it is.

This week, I was an uninvited but timely and welcome witness to Linda confronting the poison of one of her loves. I watched a powerful woman consumed by the lies and half truths, as she likes to call them, that built her family of origin's love on shifting sands of unreality. I saw her take leave of the lesson that she has learned well, just for a brief moment, that is an emotional home on more solid ground. I saw the vessel of love crack, spilling its contents in a helpless gush for those moments, like a loss of a kind of faith that allowed Peter, so briefly, to walk on the water. I saw her fall back to the identity of the little girl who knew no other reality than the that thought the half-truths and secrets were a normal reality.

And as I watched and listened, I received a lesson of my own. About the half-truths with which I live—the ones of which I been convinced and some that I have created, or co-created by my tacit acceptance—and the “little girl” I become when I miss my own lessons and lost loves.  And even as I write this, I can see one lesson that I am avoiding.

These are lessons I will have to visit again. Will I visit them with the faith of Peter or the Peter of lost faith. I often try and keep that faith on track like someone trying to balance a bicycle by leaning one way or the other rather than by the physics of motion. This failing is easy to see watching someone else ride the bike. Not so easy to see on one's self. The bike is a lesson of the heart.

Thank You, Friend, by L'Etoile du Nord and Scandia 1st and 2nd Graders

I am currently involved in a residency working with 1st and 2nd graders at L’Etoile du Nord French Immersion school in St. Paul and Scandia Elementary. They have enthusiastic minds and show it in their writing. This project is one sponsored by the East Metro Integration District (EMID). EMID creates classroom partnerships between schools in St. Paul and east suburban and exurban districts “to address the educational issues resulting from dramatic demographic changes and inequities among school age children.” This office has been doing important work during its history, work that is currently the target of legislative cuts.  Hopefully, this valuable tool will continue into the future.


What I share below is a poem generated by the work of these kids, facilitated by poet Julia Klatt Singer.

We all have an imagination

I imagine I have a sweet older sister

I imagine she is like a bird in my ear

She is my best friend

My friend is nice, she is happy



We all need friends

We all need air, sun to run and to love

The air is clear, we cannot see it

It blows, blows the trees, it blows



We all have the sun

It makes light for people

It looks like the pizza of light



In the sun and the air

I run with my friends

My legs are great, they are good

I love my legs because they are cool

We run like it is fun

As the air chases what it wants to be

In the shadow of the meadow



Thank you, sun

Thank you, air

Thank you, friend

Will You Be My Friend?

“What is your definition of a friend?” a friend asked. She was looking for material for her blog “Dangerous Linda.” Asking challenging questions like that is, I guess, why they call her “dangerous.” She was leading me down a path of true folly.

In the past, I've tried to define friendship, but have been smart enough to keep most of the ideas to myself. People have identified me as a good friend. Sometimes I am. Other times, I know, I have failed. I'm still not an expert.

“I don't know. I have never tried to define it,” was my half-true response. “There are so many different kinds of friendship. Some of them are not really friends, but maybe it changes to fit what I need at the time.”

“Give it a shot,” she said. “I'm trying to define friendship and I need your help.” MY help?

I tried. I started with a list. THAT was true folly.

• Care.
• Affection.
• Relative trust.
• Affinity.
• Love.
• Common spaces for good feelings.
• An unselfish desire for the person to whom you give things to pay them forward instead of paying them back, but in a way that benefits both/all.

“You're answering the question, 'Who are you in a friendship,' right?” she said. At this point, I am feeling a bit shaky and vulnerable. I am not only putting myself in a position of exposing my ignorance about what a true friend is; I am also risking exposure: she might now see that these ideals of friendship are ones that I have trouble living up to.

“I'm asking you how you know someone is your friend or if you want them to be your friend,” she continued.

I had to insert a modesty in order to protect me from hypocrisy. “Maybe (that was what I was answering, what I TRY to be in a friendship), but I have said a lot here that is really tough to live up to.”

“I don't know if I know,” I admitted.

I told her that for the first part of my life, what made me want to be someone's friend was that they wanted to be mine. After grade school, it was hard to find someone who really wanted to be my friend, someone for whom I was more than an incidental aspect of their surroundings and who understood me enough to get what my life was about. In time, I gradually came to the realization that my friends needed to be as much about what I wanted as it was someone else's desire to be with me.

I then bravely asked, “How is it different from wanting to be in a relationship? How is it the same?” That IS a dangerous question. I left myself open to a lot of self examination, more than she might have picked up on. Maybe this was more than I was willing to be accountable for. “Defining friendship can be dangerous, like defining a relationship before it gets figured out-- maybe,” I said. I was getting myself in a little deeper. I should shut up while I'm ahead.

“Hey, I'm asking the questions here!” she shot back.

“And you're asking ME?” I smarted back. “If you want an answer, good luck!”

Time to defer to someone else's wisdom.

One bit of wisdom came from the only fortune cookie message I have bothered to remember. I still remember it after about 25 years. It said something like, “A good friend is a gift one gives oneself.” It still makes me think. That God gives us a person is a blessing, but we have to use it; we have to make the friend.

Another insight I remember hearing is the idea that the people we want to be our friends are people to whom we are attracted. It is not necessarily that we want these people to be lovers. But HOW IS IT DIFFERENT from how we choose our relationships? Again, feeling vulnerable, I am afraid to answer that question and it is a question I only ask myself, alone—on my brave days.

I am afraid to ask in the light of the fact that most of my friends are women. Not as many men seem to want to hang with me, or let me hang with them. I am afraid to ask in the light of the fact that most of my relationships have been with women who have been friends. This is good, but tricky when the realities and particulars of that connection change, either toward or away from romance.

(Do I really want to contemplate that quandary in front of anyone, including my friends reading this now?)

What does it mean that I have no man attraction that works like romantic or sexual desire as far as I have been able to discover so far. I do have men friends and, maybe, I am seeing the part of attraction that has a lot of the pieces except the sexual desire. Is this the part that makes “friend?”

So, how do I know I want someone to be my friend? I don't know. Like. Love. Care.

Maybe the last bit of wisdom comes from a story told in class to me and other fellow students by Rabbi Michael Goldberg during a most-challenging semester of Jewish theological and philosophical study. It is the story of two neighbors. One greets the other and asks, “Neighbor, do you love me?”

His neighbor responds, “Well, of course I love you. We have been neighbors for years and we get along quite well.”

The first neighbor says, “But do you really love me?”

The second says, “How can you doubt this? Our children over the years have grown up together, best of friends. Our wives are quite compatible and we share the same law, values and God. Of course I love you.”

The first says, again, “Neighbor, do you love me?”

The second continues, “We have done business together all these years. We have never had a dispute. I admire you and your work and you mine. Is there still a question?”

The first takes the hand of his neighbor and says, “Then, if you love me, what are my problems?”

My friends, I hope I care enough to know. I hope I know enough to care. Friendship is such delight and such folly.

Pleasant Valley: Four Friends called Monkees

Remember the Monkees?

I was listening to the radio--or rather hearing the radio until I was struck by the airwaves carrying their song, "Pleasant Valley Sunday."  It is a bit of Byrds, The Who, a little evolved Beach Boys and a healthy dose of Buffalo Springfield.

It is a good production.  A lot of people don't realize the talent that lurked behind the tepid television persona and studio gloss.  Micky Dolenz, Davy Jones, Peter Tork, and Michael Nesmith.  They were all talented.  They all had stronger personalities than a television show or a canned musical group could contain.  (Maybe they didn't play all the instruments in the studio, which is not uncommon unless you are Prince, but they were all quite skilled and trained musicians.)

A lot of people also do not realize that some very talented and impactful artists tried out and did not make the cut to be a part of this manufactured group, including the Buffalo Springfield's Stephen Stills and the Hollies' Graham Nash.  Thankfully, they both found better things to do.

Before the Monkees, Davy Jones was more disposed to belting out show tunes.  Stephen Stills and Peter Tork were referred to as the "kids who looked alike" during their California days and got to be friends. There are a lot more stories, most not to be found in the reruns. 

TOMORROW.  LOOK FOR THE DISCUSSION ON FRIENDSHIP.

Hope to see you then.