In the Glow

We turn off all the lights, except the Christmas decorations. The tree sparks with red, gold, green, and blue. White strands frame the window, reflecting off the glass, doubling or even tripling the luminescent specks. The only other light in the room is the glow of the fire in our big stone fireplace.

It’s quiet, but for the soft crackling of the logs and occasional pops of moisture escaping the wood. The light of the flames dances on the walls around the room, flickering and fading, growing and changing. I have always been drawn to the warmth of fires, where the world seems to slow down, where there is space to ponder and ruminate, where I find reassurance, peace, hope.

* * * * *

You start with the small stuff: twigs and shredded paper, maybe some dryer lint or pieces of cardboard. Then come some bigger pieces of wood, thicker branches and split logs. Be mindful of the air: leave spaces for oxygen and heat to move around. Strike the match.

The flames spread slowly at first. Sometimes they need a little help, a little breath: don’t blow them out, blow them through. Let the air pass over and under and through the cracks and spaces between the twigs and logs. Be patient. As the smaller fuel burns away, the bigger pieces start to catch and you’ve done it: you’ve created something that breathes.

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* * * * *

Camp outs in our Girl Scout troops were long days of hiking and cooking and relishing the outdoors, and they ended with campfires.  In the red glow, flickering and fading, growing and changing, we’d sing songs, mostly silly and nonsensical, and roast marshmallows, promptly squashed between graham crackers and chocolate. Our moms — our troop leaders — called us firebugs. These were days of learning self-sufficiency and self-reliance, working together and connecting with nature. We didn’t know it then though, or maybe we did but we didn’t care. For us, it was just friendship. There was so much world out ahead of us yet.

Summers at home growing up were often punctuated with similar campfires: out in the backyard on the edge of the woods, my dad would build a little fire and set his lawn chair up close enough to reach the flames with a long stick. As the twilight faded and the stars showed themselves, the glow of the campfire lit up our faces. We would sit out in the backyard, listening to the frogs trill by the pool or watching the bats flit by overhead. We would talk, sure, but we would also sit in the quiet of the warm evening and stare as the flames licked the logs, charring them, breaking them down, consuming them.

* * * * *

At our own home now, my husband and I track seasons by where we lay wood for the fires: in the winter and spring, the fireplace, in summer and early fall, the back patio in a small fire pit, surrounded by benches and cushioned seating. Backyard parties always end with friends and family gathered around the red-yellow gleam. As some friends call it a night, others just gather in closer, filling their glass of wine or grabbing a blanket to wrap around their shoulders. This is when conversations start to change: boisterous talk of friends catching up turns to slow, more thoughtful topics. This is sacred time.

Under the cover of mostly-darkness, faces lit only by a gentle blaze, we let down our guards and talk of the things that have troubled us, the things that have changed us, the things that have given us hope. Our voices lower and conversations become quieter as they become more serious. We choose words carefully, laying out offerings at the feet of our friends, which are picked up gently and turned over thoughtfully in the light of the campfire.

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* * * * *

In the soft light of the fire and the Christmas lights, we can stop the world. We can stop the worry and the bustle and things that up-end us.  We watch the lights flicker and fade, grow and change. Then, the flames die down low. The charred logs crumble and the ash settles. We lay down our weariness as we look toward the new beginning coming soon to save us, to give us another chance, to give us hope for brighter days. And we sit quietly in this space, in the glow of the last red embers.

 


Jamie Y. Watkins is a wife, sister, daughter, and friend. She works at a non-profit by day and goes to school at night, trying to find time to write in between. Her biggest passions are travel– France in particular– film, and good conversation. She lives in New Jersey, where she and her husband open their house to others with good food and wine. She blogs at Seek.Follow.Love about wrestling with faith and church, looking for meaning in the every day, and feeling her way through life.

Twitter: @jamieywatkins, Facebook: @jywatkinswriter, Photos by Obed Hernandez and Rahul Rekapalli

All My Favorite People

All my favorite people are broken
Believe me
My heart should know…

Orphaned believers, skeptical dreamers
You’re welcome
Yeah, you’re safe right here
You don’t have to go

—Linford Detweiler, Over the Rhine

***

“Good morning, Friendship!”

“Good morning, Darryl!”

And so begins the weekly ritual of Friendship Community Church congregation members sharing praises and prayer requests, joys and concerns.

It is November 1995, and I have been attending this quirky inner-city, inter-racial Presbyterian church for a little more than a year. Tucked between the university community and Pittsburgh’s Hill District—made famous in the 1980s crime drama Hill Street Blues— it is a modest cinderblock building that more closely resembles a Jehovah’s Witness Kingdom Hall than the hundreds of Gothic, steepled church buildings that populate this post-industrial city.

The wooden pews are five deep along three of the four walls of the sanctuary; we are a congregation “in the round.” I glance at the faces of these men and women—young and old, black and white, rich and poor—who are becoming more familiar to me, week by week. This is very much not like the homogeneous all-white, suburban, formal, upper-middle-class Presbyterian congregations I grew up attending.

The prayer requests begin.

A white female med school student asks us to pray for her grandmother, who has been diagnosed with breast cancer.

Mr. Chappelle, an elderly African-American gentleman with snowy white hair, raises his hand to remind us, as he does every week, to pray for “the homeless and the afflicted.”

A middle-aged white man announces, with a mixture of pride and bewilderment, that he and his wife are expecting their fourth child. It looks like a career change may also be on the horizon in order to support their growing family.

A young, skinny black woman thanks God for waking her up this morning and adds that she has now been clean and sober for 27 days. We applaud.

A black woman in her 70s is wearing her customary Sunday-best hat; she stands up and clears her throat. And then, as she did last week and will again next, she slowly and deliberately recites Psalm 23:

The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.
He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name’s sake.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil:
for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.
Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies:
thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life:
and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.

More requests and praises. Someone who arrived after the earlier greeting and announcement time tries to disguise a meeting announcement as a prayer request, and we all laugh. And then someone asks, “Has anyone seen Johnnie lately?”

Silence.

Johnnie is a tall black man with an infectious smile who has been attending Friendship Church since he was a child. Johnnie is also a drug addict. He hasn’t been in church for months now, but occasionally, someone will run into him in another part of the city.

We never forget to pray for Johnnie.

holding-hands-black-and-white-peopleAs we do every week, we join hands with the people on either side of us—if necessary, reaching for the hand of a person in front of or behind us—and Darryl invites us to “pray the prayer Jesus taught his disciples to pray.” We bow our heads and lift our voices:

Our Father, Who art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy name.
Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in Heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.
Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.
For Thine is the Kingdom, and the Power, and the Glory forever.
Amen.

***

It is November 2016, the Sunday before Thanksgiving, and we’ve reached the point in the worship service for the Call to Confession. A tall broad-shouldered black man stands and ambles up to the microphone.

“Good morning, Friendship!” he says.

“Good morning, Johnnie!” we answer.

Johnnie is a husband and a father and a grandfather. He is founder and owner of a construction company which provides job training for young black men, offering them a way out of the destructive lifestyle that he himself indulged in two decades ago. Johnnie is a gifted story-teller and a jokester and a hugger. He is a respected elder in the church of his youth.

And Johnnie is a recovering drug addict.

Nearly every time Johnnie gets up to call us to confession—which is most Sundays—he makes us laugh or cry, and often both at the same time. As he encourages us to prepare our hearts to confess our sins, individually and corporately, he reminds us with illustrations from his own life what it means to worship a God of second—and third and fourth and fifth and seventy-times-seventy—chances.

Johnnie celebrated 18 years of sobriety a couple of weeks ago. When someone pointed this out, we applauded, and Johnnie was quick to remind us where the credit really belongs.

I wipe my eyes and remember sitting in these pews more than 20 years ago, alongside people who are still here and many others who have passed away or moved on. We asked, “Where’s Johnnie?” and we prayed that God would meet him wherever he was and rescue him.

And He did.

The Lake House

I stand on the white planks of the dock, listening to the gentle sloshing of water against the grassy shore. The sun is setting behind me on this mid-August evening, earlier than it did last night, and the windows of the cottages on the eastern shore of Lake Chautauqua reflect its rosy glow.

Behind me, I hear the faint clink of wine glasses being refilled. The murmur of after-dinner conversation is punctuated with wild giggles from five-year-old Isaiah as his dad tickles him, doing his best to rile him up before bedtime.

lake-2016-bAs I walk back to join my friends on the shady side porch, I hear the teenagers laughing together from the kitchen. They have finished clearing the picnic table of ravaged corncobs and remnants of hamburger fixings, used paper plates and empty tortilla chip bags.

Once upon a time, I would have been the one standing at that sink, stowing leftovers, choosing dish duty as an introvert’s temporary retreat from the stimulation of too many people. But on this evening, I am content to lower myself into a cushioned deck chair and join the twilight conversation circle with my friends.

One combination or another of us have been gathering in this place over the course of so many summer evenings over so many decades—since we were barely older than the teenagers who are in the house now. They are singing selections from the U2 catalog, the soundtrack of their young lives—a legacy from their parents and their parents’ friends.

***

I was barely 18 when I first visited this cottage on this lake.

It was mid-October, a little over a month into my first year of college, and the Christian fellowship group hosted a weekend retreat at Lake Chautauqua in western New York State, an hour or so away from my northwestern Pennsylvania campus. There were too many of us to fit into one house, so a student’s family offered up beds and floor space in their vacation cottage for the overflow.

Little did I know then that the student whose house this was would become one of my best friends. And little did I suspect how many times I would return to this cottage on this lake and be comforted by how little it changed, while so many other things changed too much.

***

In our 20s, our lakeside reunions were carefree and action-packed. After many hours spent on the water, skiing and tubing, swimming and sunbathing, mealtimes were dictated by our hunger pangs, and bedtimes put off as long as possible as we basked in each other’s company. There were often more bodies than beds, and so sleeping bags and tents popped up on the side lawn. Those of us lucky enough to end up on the living room sofa bed were the last to sleep and the first to wake, as early-risers stumbled into the kitchen for morning coffee.

In our 30s, we negotiated whose turn it was to go out on the boat by calculating the appropriate ratio of adults to children, and then negotiating whose turn it was on the skis or the tube or the raft. Others of us stayed on shore to stand guard during toddlers’ nap times or to keep dinner preparations on schedule for the sake of the little ones. Bedrooms were assigned based on family sizes and necessary floor space for sleeping bags. The grownups cooked and the older kids took turns cleaning up.

This is the place we celebrated college graduations and engagements and anniversaries—and mourned broken relationships and divorces and losses of many kinds. It’s where we laughed together over shared memories and oft-repeated stories. It’s where we comforted each other during hard seasons that seemed like they may never end.

And always, the twilight conversation circle.

***

Isaiah has been tucked into bed. The singing teenagers are still in the house, busy with projects which will keep them occupied into the wee hours of the morning and cause them to sleep until noon the next day. And we—the grownups—sip wine and solve the world’s problems by the yellow glow of a citronella candle.

Tonight, a month shy of my 50th birthday, I soak in the familiar summer ritual. I listen to updates about friends’ “kids” who once-upon-a-time were with us at the lake, but who are now newly married or starting a first job after graduating from college. We commiserate about the most divisive presidential race of our lifetime. We pass around smart phones to share photos—and drugstore reading glasses so that we can pull them into focus. We joke about graying hair and thickening waists and, with broad yawns, our regrettable need for a full eight hours of sleep.

I think about friends who aren’t with us this year and how I wish they were. I think about singleness and marriage and divorce and remarriage and blended families and grief and brokenness and love and redemption. I think about the ways life has turned out how we hoped it would and the ways it has not.

I think about the grace of another late-summer evening at the lake house.

***

Amy bio YAH

Open Windows

“Do you want to go back to bed?!? DO YOU WANT TO GO BACK TO BED?!?”

“Yes!” I grumbly murmured as I rolled over in bed and turned my back to the open window letting in the cool 5 a.m. August-air.

photo-1447154705288-7175737fb73cI was a couple weeks into my new apartment near Philadelphia. By now I was used to the 6 a.m. physical training drills as platoons of teenagers from the military college across the street marched to their practice field about 100 yards from my window. Five a.m. was new though. Someone must have done something wrong.

I knew my body well enough to know my night was over. I slid out of bed, trying to be quiet in case my roommate had managed to sleep through the earlier-than-normal P.T. routine. She’d be up early enough when they marched back to campus singing their cadence song in an hour or so.

I wandered into the kitchen to start the coffee and curled into the soft cushions of our couch, staring out the window into the front yard of the apartment complex until I heard the young cadets marching home again.

Leased from a local military college, my graduate school housing was a 1930s era apartment. Its wood floors were charming, and the sweetest floral pattern was etched into the bathroom mirror. The 1930s was the era of the fuse box which meant no air-conditioning and no window unit. So, we left our windows open.

Aside from the hot-July months when I had to escape to wander the mall all day lest I roast, I didn’t really mind it so much. I’m a couple years removed from that apartment now, and I rather miss needing to have my windows open. The always-conditioned cool air of Georgia summers seem rather stuffy in comparison.

Much of my graduate school classes focused on peace and non-violence. The irony that I was living on a military campus where teenagers marched by and sang about war on a daily basis was not lost on me.

The apartment buildings was surrounded by the military college and their football field, the parking lot for a large church (that was also a school), and a golf course. The golf course was mostly quiet.  

On Friday evenings in the fall, the football field filled up with high school sports. A marching band walked past my window, drumline in full performance. For every touchdown that the home team cadets made, a cannon blast pierced the air.

The cadets began the daily symphony early every morning and by 9:00 am there were sounds coming in from every direction. Children’s laughter from the church’s playground bounced across the mostly empty parking lot straight into our windows. On the other side of the road the bells of the college chapel began to ring on the hour at 9 a.m. and went until 5 p.m. Sometimes the bells counted the hour, sometimes they played a hymn.

On days when I had no classes these became familiar time-keepers, keeping me focused and paced as I read book after book after book after book. You don’t need any sort of advanced intelligence to attend grad school. You just need lots of time to read.

More often than not, I read past the end of the daily bells and was still working when one lone bugle broke through the dark night sky and played Taps. It’s the sound for lights out. I know it most from movies where it’s played at military funerals. And so my night often ended on a somber note. Not that I minded, I’ve always had an odd love for sad movies or songs or books. 

Every once in awhile there was a special evening conclusion to my daily concert. On clear nights, after the sun had set, there would be the faintest sound of bagpipes. I’d close my book and sit and listen to the peaceful tune as the crickets outside joined the song. This final piece of the day’s symphony would often go on for hours.

Throughout all of this – we grew skilled in making our own noise. Loud family dinners of neighbors and friends were rich with full-bellied laughter. We hooked a projector and speaker up to a laptop and watched movies or the latest episode of Sherlock in a volume that was probably too loud for the neighbors who didn’t join us. One summer, we streamed the World Cup games from the laptop and loudly cheered on the home teams among our group: Cote D’Ivoire, Ghana, Nigeria, and USA. Some nights we quietly listened to each other and shared our stories (to the soundtrack of bagpipes when we were lucky).

The golf course across the street had one noisy night a year – July 3rd – when they put on a fireworks show. The first year it surprised me and I ran to the window when my living room lit up bright red after a loud explosion. I had a perfect view from the second floor window. My last summer in that apartment the July 3rd show was rained out.

A few weeks later my roommate and I packed our cars and moving trucks full. All that was left in the apartment was the dorm-issued furniture and a small overnight bag. We were leaving bright and early the next morning.

As we prepared for bed, we heard a crack and boom and saw the flash of light outside. We moved one of the beds directly in front of the window, and sat next to each other as we leaned in towards the screen, listening and watching in delight as our neighborhood gave us a grand, thunderous, farewell.

 

*************************

Nicole bio YAH

 

Comfort Food

“We thought maybe you ate too much and couldn’t fit through the door.”

My face blushed red and I turned away from my 5th grade classmates in shame. After being out sick for a couple of days, I had returned to school. A friend walking beside me turned around and yelled with fiery authority, “Shut up!” at the giggly boys who scampered away.

*************

I’d worked all day at a job that was a daily test in humility as I earned a paycheck far below my skill, experience, and Master’s Degree education level. Many of my coworkers at the big-box retailer were in the same situation. I was at the end of a seven day stretch of work days, three of them starting at 4 a.m. My sleep schedule was irregular, I was fighting off a scratchy throat that usually signals that I’m about to be knocked out for 24 hours, and my feet were killing me. The day had been typical – it was spent climbing tall ladders, lifting heavy boxes, and having people 10 years my junior instruct me on how to properly put products on a shelf.  

I was physically exhausted. I was mentally exhausted.

SaladOnce home, I pulled a metal pan out from the cabinet, filled it with water, added quinoa, and set it to boil. From the fridge I pulled an assortment of leafy greens, strawberries, feta, lemon juice and the jar of minced garlic. I grabbed a grapefruit from the counter; walnuts, red wine vinegar, olive oil, and spices from the pantry. From the cabinets I grabbed mixing bowls and cutting boards. I did not really know what I was making, but I needed to chop and simmer and stir. I needed fresh flavors to mix together to enliven my senses.

The lemon juice and vinegar and oil were whisked together with honey and seasonings. I tossed kale and arugula with feta and walnuts and sliced strawberries.  Small segments of juicy pink grapefruit plopped atop the mix of greens.  When the quinoa was done, I spooned in the filling grain and then tossed it all in my home made dressing.

Here was my comfort food. I relaxed into the smooth wooden dining chair I had picked up at a yard sale a few months ago. It’s an old office or library chair – with an extra wide seat and a sturdy frame.  The meal was delicious and full of just what I needed to feel calm and at rest after a crazy, exhausting week.

*************

I’ve always loved cooking and food. As a child I poured over the American Girl cookbook for Kirsten Larson and made a Swedish feast for my family. I remember many mornings with my elbows propped on the table in my grandmother’s farm kitchen watching her cook for hours. I have read cookbooks cover to cover as if they were a novel.

There were many years where I was ashamed to admit my love for those things. I was afraid that it would surely lead into a fat joke of the “of course she does!” variety.

Here’s the thing when you’re fat: you’re not sure if you’re supposed to love food, or hate it. There are the caricatures of fat people and food.  One is the abundantly joyful fatty who drools over the mere description of food. The other is the sad fatty who forces herself to eat salad in public but must certainly binges in private. Most of us are given only these two pictures of what it looks like to be fat in relation to food.

For the longest time, I didn’t know I liked food. I just thought I needed it, the way an addict needs a fix.

I was in college when I realized that I really didn’t like chocolate that much.  I wasn’t just pretending not to like it to try to somehow make myself appear thinner by declining sugar-heavy sweets, I really didn’t like chocolate that much. (Then later I discovered dark chocolate, and yes I like that chocolate!) But, if I am hungry and tired and want something that is going to give me energy and make me feel satiated – I will most likely crave something like my kale, quinoa, and grapefruit creation.  

Yet, there are times when the sweet warmth of an apple crisp is what is desired. And sometimes the celebration of cake and ice cream with the smell of blown-out-candles wafting through the air is just what the occasion ordered. And those are things that fat people can enjoy without shame as well. 

*************

One of my grad-school roommates peeked around the corner into my door and asked with a expectant smile, “I heard tomorrow is Lent. Is there anything that you are giving up that you’d like to pass on? Get out of your cabinet? Sweets? Are you fasting sweets?”

Another roommate called out with a laugh, “I don’t think you will get anything from Nicole. She doesn’t do sweets.  Next time ask her for veggies.”

 

*************

Nicole bio YAH

Find more of Nicole’s thoughts about life in a fat body at Fat Faith

 

An Unmatched Life

At 15, I read in a home décor magazine that you were only supposed to fill things two-thirds full in order for it to look neat and orderly. So when I got my new bedroom at 16, a room I helped build on to the house, I intentionally left some of the walls and closet shelf space empty to try and create that feel.

Once the room was finished, I picked a blue-floral bedspread and curtains from the J.C. Penney catalog and took a pillowcase to Home Depot to have the color matched. I sponged the gray-blue paint onto the baseboard and molding before we nailed it to the walls.

I was trying to keep it all together, I think. Trying to make it right. I am the child of a parent with chronic mental and physical illnesses. As a child, that meant taking on the responsibility of taking care. I wanted things stable and orderly and, above all, correct.

For a few years before I moved to college my junior year, those empty spaces and coordinating color scheme were a retreat. The aesthetics calmed and centered me.

************

 

bedroom

My first apartment

After landing a full-time job after college, I moved into my first all-my-own apartment. I dove into decorating it just the way I wanted. Things matched less, but they still coordinated. I bought sofas and curtains, lamps and end tables brand-new from the store. I wanted it decorated and soon. I bought fabric and made my own upholstered headboard and hunted down antique picture frames for the walls of my bedroom.  I took a page from an interior design magazine and recreated a wall collage behind my dining room table.

When Christmas came, I bought new decorations that sparkled and shone in perfect complement to my décor.

It was common for me to lock myself in my apartment from the time I got home from work on Friday until I left for work on Monday. “Introvert re-charge,” I would say. And sometimes that is needed. But in truth, it was easier to just stay in, not interact with anyone, and piddle away on some new home décor project. I even started a short-lived blog full of recipes and decorating tips.

************

When I was 29, I moved into graduate on-campus housing, complete with an R.A. and roommates. The apartments were built in the 1930s and, aside from the random rules that come with campus housing, I rather enjoyed the cozy wood floors and the old bathroom mirror with the flower scroll etched across the glass.

Perhaps the thing I was most nervous about as I prepared to move to grad school was that my home would feel like a dorm. That I would feel like a kid. I was afraid of ugly furniture and plastic storage bins and cramped spaces. I was afraid it was all going to feel like a mess.

And things didn’t matchexcept for the industrial, boxy, bedroom furniture. My bedspread was black and white, my roommate’s was bright neon colors. The bathroom linen closet was stocked with a haphazard collection of multi-colored towels in various states of wear. The empty wall of the small galley kitchen was a jigsaw puzzle of mismatched shelves holding extra dishes and cookbooks and pantry staples. Every third of the bedroom walls were lined with furniture. Desk, dresser, bed, repeat. Shelves were stuffed full of textbooks and binders and picture frames of family and friends in other states. There was no money to spend on new, matching furniture. There was too little space for all of my things.

Yet, that apartment was home to one of my most well-lived years. There was nothing more satisfying than to find the sink full of mismatched coffee mugs, evidence of another night of friends studying together or talking.

Mismatched Dinner Table

An Easter table

On Sunday evenings, friends and neighbors gathered and we made dinner. One person would cook, filling the small sink of the small kitchen with pans and cutting boards and wooden spoons.Then we’d eatmismatched chairs crowded around a table with mismatched glasses in front of matching plates, the thin blue and white Corelle dishes I had inherited from my grandmother.  

As the year went on, dining together just became a habit, no matter the meal.  We had a French toast feast as the snow piled deep outside. On the days it never stopped raining, there was a crock pot of soup ready and warm.  We decided JFK’s Birthday needed celebrating, so we researched and recreated his favorite meal.  One warm night, we picked up a few “gourmet” ingredients from the grocery store, put on a record of classical music, opened all the windows, and laughed and talked and ate as the cross breeze drifted through our impromptu dinner party in that mismatched, unrefined, no-color-palette home.  

That year, we managed to live life together instead of just being roommates or neighbors. It happened with overcrowded shelves and walls and it never once felt like a mess.

**********

Nicole bio YAH

How to Eat a Burrito The Size of Your Head

I will never willingly choose to eat a burrito on a first date. If I ever suggest to you that we eat together at Chipotle, you should know that it either means that you are in my inner circle, or that I think that our relationship is doomed. It’s a beautiful litmus test, really. How many suitors or potential friends can continue to see me the same way after I have consumed a burrito the size of my head in front of them? It would be one thing if I could do it neatly, but I’m not sure that there is a person on earth who can eat a Chipotle burrito without dropping and dripping part of it, without guacamole oozing onto her hands, and black beans, steeped in the juice of two kinds of salsa, smearing the corners of their mouth. I know this at least, I am not that person.  If they still like me after seeing this it’s clear that they won’t run at the first sign of untidiness or disappointment, that our relationship isn’t based on my being put-together.

I grew up eating tacos at home a few times a week, first in San Diego, and then in Washington State, after we moved. My mother fried small corn tortillas and slightly larger flour ones in hot canola oil, folding them over halfway through so that they held their taco shape. I usually chose the flour ones because they got the most crispy, and I learned to pack them full of ground beef, cheese, lettuce, tomato, salsa, and avocado. On taco nights, we didn’t worry about staying free of debris. I waited until the end of the meal before I washed the salsa off my hands and cleaned off my face. Part of the enjoyment of eating tacos was the idea that there was nothing you could do to stay pristine. For a type A, list-maker who noticed when anything in her space was out of place, this was a safe way to stretch my comfort zone. This was a good place to be a little bit messy.

IMG_0710When I go out on dates, especially first dates, I think a lot about what we might eat. I blame this both on the fact that many of the men I’m dating ask me where I want to go, and also on my own tendency to overanalyze most decisions I make. Frequently, my inner dialogue revolves around what foods I can eat without making a mess. I can eat pizza with a knife and fork, but a hamburger just won’t fit in my mouth.

I know that for any kind of relationship to work, I need to be able to eat in front of the other person. I cannot hide away behind plates of pasta molded into small, bite sized shapes. Eventually, I will make my homemade red sauce in the blender, adding browned meat, and zucchini cooked soft. I will ladle it onto heaping bowls of angel hair and I will need to keep my cloth napkin close at hand.

Then, there are those sandwiches I make, more mustard than anything. I heap rounds of salami and cheddar cheese onto a croissant, sliced in half and cover it everything with plain yellow  mustard, and then the top half of the croissant. It tastes like Chicago in the summer, and also like living on my own for the first time in the late spring, finally responsible for all of my own grocery shopping. It’s messy like those days of learning to feed myself. Messy like the tubs of guacamole I bought for dinner at Trader Joe’s because I was tired and didn’t have a food processor. Messy like the sticky counter after I’ve gotten out twelve ingredients to make one cocktail.

I’m learning that good relationships are like homemade pasta sauce, overstuffed tacos, and cocktails. They are nourishing and take time and trouble, they don’t stay contained in the safe parts of your life, they can delight and intoxicate you. They’re a mess.

I can wash my blender and wipe down my countertops. I can eat the dropped parts of my taco with a fork. But I don’t stay neat, and neither do my relationships.

Like in those constant taco nights from my childhood, learning to love the juicy salsa running down my arms, I’m stretching into the edges of my relationships. I’m saying words like “I’m lonely” and listening to words like “I don’t know what to do.” I’m opening my mouth wide to welcome a bite of burrito, knowing that part of it will fall and that the person in front of me will see the mess I’ve made. I’m letting the rich red sauce of relationship spread onto the table between us, enjoying the scent of freshly crushed tomatoes as it fills the air.  

cara YAH bio

The Apprentices

The peanut-gallery chatter was almost as entertaining as the 1970s-era slide show my dad was projecting on the wall. Not that I was surprised—I‘d expect nothing less when the Tennants and Sysyns got together.

Our two families have been spending time together since before my life began, but the regularity dipped considerably when us four kids grew up and started moving off on our own. Those stretches of years and miles made this particular reunion, in July 2015, especially epic: 14 of us from Illinois, Michigan, Arizona, and Oregon were gathered at a house on the Oregon coast. Our group represented three generations of two families: my dad’s and “Uncle” Pete’s, my dad’s best friend from college.

In preparation for the reunion, my dad—forever the obsessive photographer—had scanned five decades of slides to share. We watched the greatly-anticipated show our last night together.

photo 2 (2)The early 70s photos showcased my dad and Uncle Pete as beat-poet wannabes. Their weary faces suggested all-nighters spent drinking wine and listening to Miles Davis, scrawling verses in composition books and debating philosophy. But the scene around them tells the real story: four kids under the age of five, joining miniature forces to raise full-sized havoc. As adult versions of those kids, we laughed at the scene our little selves had created in the cramped apartment. Those poor beat poets had no idea what had hit them.

*  *  *  *  *

My beautiful picture

Pete (perhaps working on lyrics to the opera my dad scored).

Dad and Uncle Pete lived next door as college freshmen. Their love for the arts and their well-matched senses of humor sealed their friendship from the beginning, and they lost no time conjuring up the epic pranks they would one day tell their children about (again and again).

There was the time, for instance, when they changed the alarm clock of their dorm’s earliest riser, who had taken on the responsibility of pounding on everyone’s doors up and down the hall each morning to ensure no one overslept.

“You should have seen the guys all coming out of their rooms at three in the morning, ready to pummel poor George Lowe,” my Dad would say, hardly able to get through the telling of the story due to the laughter that erupted from within as he recalled the scene.

When my dad finds something really funny, he laughs in an extreme, choked up way, as if he’s on the verge of crying. My brother and I agree that watching Dad laugh is often more funny than whatever it is he’s laughing at.

The telling of the Alarm Clock Story was often paired with other classics, like the Co-ed Visiting Hours Story, about the time when my dad and a couple other guys on the floor managed to “lock” Pete alone in his dorm room during the university’s first ever co-ed open house.

“He missed the whole thing. We never heard the end of that,” Dad would say, his shaking shoulders indicating a level of laughter that was so extreme it was almost silent.

Not surprisingly, the hilarity at the core of Dad and Pete’s friendship inspired laughter and eye-rolling in the women who eventually married them, which later spilled over into our regular family gatherings each spring break, New Year’s Eve, and summer.

Soon us kids had a whole new generation of funny stories to recall together, from the dance routine we choreographed to the Xanadu album (one of my favorite gifts that Christmas), to the time our families met at a no-nonsense campground in Ohio late one night, unknowingly setting up our enormous shared tent terrifyingly close to train tracks. The rumbling and whistling of the train that woke us up in the dead of night set a new standard for a “rude awakening.”

*  *  *  *  *

The Epic Reunion slideshow continued, shifting from photos of busy toddlers and tired parents into a series of photos Dad and Pete staged for the singular purpose of annoying and alarming our mothers.

My beautiful picture

“Billy” on the brink of disaster.

“Look, there’s the time Billy almost fell into that canyon,” Uncle Pete said, pointing at the projected image of my brother’s eyes peeking over a stone ledge, apparently hanging on for dear life with his fingernails. “We were so relieved we made it back with him alive” Pete added in a stage whisper, ”We never would have heard the end of it from your mothers.”

Uncle Pete is the master of the elaborate aside, holding one hand flat along the edge of his mouth as if trying to keep what he’s saying from a select person or two. And my dad is the master of egging Pete on.

Together, they’re masters of laughter, and as the slideshow came to an end, I realized my brother and cousins and I have been their apprentices. I looked over at the faces of my own daughters—the third generation of this heritage of hilarity—and felt satisfied that our reunion week with the Sysyns had served as a solid orientation in their own schooling of stories and silliness. May they grow into adults who fully grasp the value of friendship, traditions, and pure, uncontrollable laughter.

 

The Divine Secret of the Ho-Ho Sisterhood

Their husbands didn’t get it.

Lauren, Mary, Suzy, and I made plans to meet at Beth’s house near Chicago for a long April weekend. Lauren would drive in from Indianapolis, and Mary could handle the six-hour drive from St. Louis. Naturally, Suzy and I decided to make the trip to Beth’s together, from Pennsylvania.

Which is why we booked flights to St. Louis so that we could drive north to Beth’s house with Mary. Because, road trip.

This is what their husbands (and probably mine, if I had one) could not understand. It’s all about the journey.

*****

Our story really starts nearly 100 years ago.

In the early 1920s, Peter met Catherine at a church picnic. Peter was a young Ukrainian immigrant coal miner. Catherine, twelve years his junior, was the oldest daughter of Ukrainian immigrant parents.

Peter and Catherine married in 1923, and over the course of the next three decades, they had 12 children. My dad, John, was number nine. They eventually welcomed 36 grandchildren—I am number 22.

Mary and Suzy are the daughters of number eight, Patty. Lauren and Beth were born to Sonia, number ten. All five of us were born in the mid- to late-1960s, and although we’ve known each other all our lives, we were deeply into adulthood before we took the initiative to spend time together apart from the rest of our families.

*****

hostess-ho-hosLauren, Beth, and I dubbed ourselves “The Ho-Ho Sisterhood” in 2002, after an ill-advised trip to a Hostess Outlet store near Indianapolis. We had gathered at Lauren’s house to help prepare for a family reunion, and while running party-related errands, we each purchased a box full of our preferred snack cake. We then challenged each other to devour its entire contents on our way back to Lauren’s house.

None of us succeeded, although Beth insisted that she would have won the contest easily had we stopped to pick up a gallon of milk to wash them down.

We all felt a little ill, and our sides hurt. I think I managed to ingest four or five Ho-Hos—which was clearly three or four too many. But the stitch in my side had less to do with the volume of snack cakes and everything to do with the laughter.

We later inducted Mary and Suzy into the Sisterhood, minus the disgusting initiation ritual.

*****

Our inaugural Ho-Ho Sisterhood gathering at Beth’s house fell, appropriately, around April Fool’s Day.

Suzy and I ended up with a two-hour layover in Chicago’s O’Hare airport en route to meet up with Mary in St. Louis. The next day, we would drive six hours. To Chicago.

At this point, we wondered if maybe the husbands had a point.

Then we dismissed that idea. It’s all about the journey. We made this our new mantra.

But it was really all about the laughter. It started early between me and Suzy. On our boarding passes, our names were in all caps, and our first names and middle initials had been condensed into a single word. Suzy thought I was nuts when I first called her SUSANE. To this day, she calls me AMYL.

Mary picked us up at the St. Louis airport, and promptly took me to a local Urgent Care to treat my brand new sinus infection. She was the one suffering a bad head cold, which would likely have prevented her trip altogether had we not planned our group pilgrimage to Chicago.

ho-ho-sisters-trollsSUSANE and I congratulated ourselves for our combined intuition and foresight in routing our trip from Pennsylvania to Illinois through Missouri. The next morning, Mary and her box of Kleenex climbed into the backseat of her sedan, and Suzy and I took turns driving north to Beth and Lauren.

The itinerary of our weekend ended up having very little to do with Chicago. We did eventually visit the city’s IKEA store—but only after a pilgrimage to Hebron, Wisconsin, where we posed for photos with trolls and visited The Mustard Museum, where we witnessed Mary’s commencement from “Poupon U.”

We ate giant cinnamon rolls at The Machine Shed Restaurant before returning to Wisconsin to visit The Mars Cheese Castle, where an older gentleman complimented Lauren on her beautiful blue eyes. The rest of us reassured each other: “And you have eyes, too!”

Beth’s husband, David, dubbed himself the “Ho-Bro,” and graciously served as our chauffeur and photographer throughout the weekend.

In retrospect, it seems evident that we were just following the example set for us by our parents at every extended family event we ever attended. Whether a wedding, a holiday, a reunion, or even a funeral, only one element is as omnipresent at Maczuzak family gatherings as pierogies and coolers full of beer.

The laughter. It’s the lasting legacy of Peter and Catherine.

*****

 

She Will Grow on Laughter

When my mother was pregnant with my older sister, she was a visiting nurse. She drove around Aurora, Illinois in her blue Plymouth Horizon, stopping at the Dairy Queen drive through on the way home from work. She’d slurp banana milk shakes while listening to the instrumental theme from St. Elmo’s Fire.

While pregnant with me, she chased around my toddling sister. She exercised weekly at a local Christian workout class called “Believercise.” That is, until mom lunged too far, causing significant bleeding; the doctor ordered at least a week of bedrest. She had to pee in a bucket, another reason she’s the best mom of all time. In her third trimester, she survived summer days by scarfing down dripping slices of watermelon, a fruit I still consider to be one of my favorites.

There’s something sacred and terrifying about the way babies go wherever their mothers go. They eat the same foods, hear the same noises, and even pump the same blood. They can benefit or be harmed from the womb they inhabit, which is why pregnant women aren’t supposed to eat Subway or drink cocktails. Now that I’m pregnant, I worry my tiny has been anchored to a sinking ship.

You see, I’m not the best at being pregnant.  

For half my pregnancy, my body rejected prenatal vitamins. I either vomited them up in fits of sweats and shivers, or they seared my esophagus with heartburn, fighting their way down the digestive tract. Everyone offered solutions, chewables, more organic options, and even a liquid green sludge that needed chased down with orange juice, but all produced the same result.

My first trimester, I survived on a diet of brown sugar Pop Tarts and Barq’s root beer. When I tried to joke with others about my nutrition free diet, they looked at me like a candidate for a morning talk show featuring teen moms who aren’t fit to be mothers. Giving nervous laughs, their countenance seemed to ask, “should you be joking about this?”IMG_1291

People ask if I’m excited, and I choke out the right kinds of answers. When I was younger, I pictured myself wearing pregnancy like a veil of honor, rosy cheeks and a delightful little bump showing under a flowy peasant blouse, but it turns out, I’m not the glowing kind of pregnant.

Some days I’m a nauseous, sweaty animal, sprouting a new layer of acne on my back; on these days, it’s hard to put how I feel into a pleasant statement. Instead, I lead with my signature defensive humor and make offhand comments about the anti-depressants that I continue to take while pregnant. “I would drink an occasional glass of wine, but I figure the baby already gets the Zoloft,” I say with a wink and a nudge.

This punchline hangs in the air for a few moments of painful silence before I try to reel it back in, “but you know, the doctors are monitoring the baby, and I got a special ultrasound, and…” This is when the nice person who asked me about how I’m feeling smiles through anxious eyes and clenched teeth, nodding their head to try and keep things polite.

But among all the things that I know I’m already doing wrong as a mother, I’ve come to enjoy bringing the baby to the places I go. I may not do great with leafy green veggies, but my baby will grow on laughter.

My baby’s momma is a comedian. I perform in Chicago as a comedic improviser, staging twenty five minute pieces with seven to nine teammates. My three teams perform at several different theatres around the city, which averages out to two or three shows a week.IMG_2428

I take her with me to the bar for a drink with my teammates after a tough show with low audience attendance, trading in my gin and tonics for Shirley Temples and diet Roy Rogers. She gets the consoling pats on the back my castmates offer me, and I imagine they reverberate through my body and hit her like a wave of Vitamin D.

I take her on the stage to the sound of a quickening slow clap, which she must think is for her. Receiving biweekly applause has to be good for brain development. She goes with me into rehearsal rooms where we shriek, snort, and guffaw at each other’s moves. She’s the unseen tenth player on stage, kicking to be noticed during my scene work. I often hold my belly when I laugh, as if to make sure we’re both awake to the blessing of these joy filled spaces.

She is with me when we’re the only women on stage. As my body changes to hold her growing form, we shapeshift into diverse characters with their own points of view and treasure troves of specifics. On one night, I played a petite daughter stowed away in her father’s suitcase. I crouched low, tightening my body into a ball to simulate the cramped quarters and the baby tucked in to the warm curve of my body.

When I worry about the way my depression must seep into the womb, tears dripping through the umbilical cord and sorrow carried through my bloodstream, I revel in a night where I’m out late at a cabaret table, watching my heroes and friends on stage. Many of us are deeply sad people, but for a night, we are artists and poets who have discovered the hilarious underbelly to the tragedy.

So I’m glad  that as my baby grows to the size of various vegetables, that she is growing up with laughter, that her adopted aunts and uncles are some of the funniest people in Chicago.

When I fail in so many ways that I lose count, I know the baby must know well the vibrations of her mama’s laughter, punctuated with my drawn out snorts and the fog horn blats I let out when laughter catches me unexpectedly.

I cherish this special time when I take the stage with a tiny teammate. As my friends and I wait in the wings to make our entrance, we participate in the ritual of assuring one another, we’ve got each other’s backs. I place my palms over my growing belly and say to my girl, “We’ve got this WIlla.” Together we laugh and make others laugh, and for a moment in time, we have everything we need.

***

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