Punished

Of Blessings and Punishments        

I wrote the following on a return. I thought I’d share. Beware: I capitalize the names of trees because I feel they earn prominence.

            Do you ever feel like you’re being punished, I ask of my little brother, as the red sun bleeds into a horizon only a handful of trees obstruct, in Somewheresville, Nebraska.  Jordan takes a more personal approach to disaster, ruin, or bad results, which he explains with thumb swipes of his phone and constant checking on the cats in the back seat. His ruin is laced with articles and research, and he goes on to quote from economists and philosophers.

Ruin, at least for me, is this trip, my husband claiming his new job, and because of it, moving me away from one of the most beautiful spots in the world: the Hudson Valley.  My husband went on ahead in the truck, with our meager belongings.  Jordan met up with me in New York, to help me drive the cats back to Denver.  Also, though, to roam the wonderland of New York City. 

            As we drive into open road, I remember my little brother at age four, rocking in a chair while six-kid chaos ensued as we got ready for high school.  Being the littlest, the giants of the house left him alone, in silence.  His innocence came out in his blond hair and ever frowning reflection that all good things go away.  It echoed in his response.  If things turn out wrong, he said in that even tone he now adopts at thirty, than it is all on him and he takes full responsibility for the decision that created his demise. 

            This is our last day of our three day traipse across I-80, from Beacon, New York to my previously lived in city, Denver, Colorado.  I explain that karma is getting me back, having to return to a place that words like “barren” and “brown” fit well.  (Any time of year, you can fly into Denver International Airport and view all the tones of sepia land below.) My year in Beacon fulfilled me too much, I report.  I watched an ancient Magnolia bloom on the corner of Cliff and Beacon Streets, a tree I knew only in my first twelve years in California. Also, the Mimosa on the corner, a weed tree in New York, the cartoony, and frilly blooms put forth dust-broom pink fronds.  I pulled them down, risking the neighbor’s scorn, and brushed them against my cheek like my sister and I did as kids. My feet attached hard and fast to Beacon’s supple landscape.  Hydrangeas and Rhododendrons overtook yards and reminded me that you can never have too much of a good thing.  Oh, your purple and pink Hydrangea is engulfing your garage? So sad. (One bush was engulfing a neighbor’s whole front walkway, and he let it, like allowing a Queen to step on your hand.)

            Some entity decided that I was having too much fun.  I’m convinced that an outside force gave my fiancé the job of his dreams elsewhere, and by elsewhere, I mean, if this state (where he got the new job, pulling us away from New York) could be likened to anything, it is a vast floor that kings throw dregs to their mongrels, Wyoming.  Now I will get flack.  But I’m willing to take it on.  My brother thinks for every action, there is a reaction that he deserves.  I cut off the last part.  I like to think I do nice things for people.  Maybe in Beacon I absorbed more of the Hudson River than my fair share?  Did I commune too much, listening intently to lapping rhythms of water, scrutinizing washed up and smooth branches, all bunched and moving en masse, so in tune with heartbeats and other such muted comforts? 

            While I packed up the last of the cleaning supplies on the back porch room of our Beacon house, through the glass door, my cardinal I had named Caravaggio, came to say goodbye. He landed on the fence, like he normally did, turning his head at the birdfeeder, his bed-head plume flattening in the breeze. Then he stopped and looked at me, turning his head sideways, listening.  I couldn’t control the sob that made me feel I was leaving behind a child.  My little brother hugged me.  The last time we hugged this way, I am not sure.  Perhaps when I was fifteen, holding him as a two year old, while at the supermarket, and people thought I was an unwed teen.

            My journal of Beacon, New York and our pilgrimage comes to an end and so do my roots that seem to only plunk down where water erodes us, our society slightly frayed, our bodies in rhythm.  As we’d entered Pennsylvania, the water inside me receded and that old midwest emptiness began to replace it. 

In the car, my brother and I pray that the cats don’t go number two in their box.  It’s squished between the driver’s seat and the back seat.  At one point, my brother has to rescue the old cat from sleeping in the litter.  We are both ignoring our keen knowledge of germs, crossing our fingers that we endure this three day excursion without any bacterial injury.  We ruminate on old memories, when we dressed my brother up as a little British boy, asking him to repeat the line from the satirical movie Yellowbeard, “Please, Sir, three farthings for a lump of shit.”  How he’s taking a class on how to become a master student, and how it really expands to becoming a master person. 

            My thoughts are only the bitter match between our family leaving the Mimosa trees and frigid yet rich water at Santa Cruz to the lawn-less and prickly landscape of Tucson, Arizona when I was twelve, which feels the same as leaving the Hudson Valley for the place where tumbleweeds could be harvested, if so desired, in Denver.  It really feels the same, but I am now an adult, and should be able to let the feelings wash over and through me, where I finally stand outside myself without the tantrum reaction.  Instead, though, I am reminded of our move to Tucson, where my brothers and I dug through our backyard’s hard ground with a kitchen spoon for a match box car extravaganza excavation.  I haven’t learned a thing, I admit.  Instead, I’ve been sucked back in time, to a place of water, lying dormant and guarded within me. How to mitigate the inner tantrum?

            In a New York spring, the cardinals sit high, surveying the tops of trees for their one true love who, with her brown and red camouflage, blends in so well with foliage.  I’ve described my cardinal’s call as a torpedo, cutting through morning haze, yet still a gentle yearning to wake me in romance.  His urgency ignites mine and in my office, we both searched for that spark, the flame that kept us plodding forward, hurling out our dreams in song, or for me, the written word. 

            My love affair with the Northern Cardinal will only strengthen as my brother and I duck the silver Saturn under the Great Platte River Road Archway.  Out here, in vast acres of last year’s cut corn, still dying back, barn swallows’ aimless zig-zagging sometimes ends at the hard and fast windshield.  We pass teepees, I say to remind us of our unfair past, where we decimated an indigenous culture.  I reflect on the pictures that made me weep in an undergrad class when the book was passed around, photos of a chief with whole headdress and hand-made leather opposite his “gentrified” self on the next page, wearing a page boy hair cut, parted down the middle and a dark, 1920s suit.  The fear and misery in his eyes burned off the page. 

            In Denver, the house keys are no-where to be found, all of our belongings are dusted with cat litter, and our wish for a shower is even more palpable, as we constantly dust our hands off on our pants and take another load of clothes filled trash bags to the front porch.  For the first three days, I note the definitive lack of torpedo morning calls.  My old house rejects this east coast, watery version of myself.  I have brought too much Hudson with me, its mystery clouding my head, my body rocking as it leaks slowly from me in the dry night. 

            Flea exoskeletons reveal themselves on my back patio as my un-wrapping reveals my Beacon things.  A Japanese beetle jumps out and won’t last long in this heat.  I put him out of his misery in the toilet and apologize to the entity and humidity that procured him.  As I take my little brother back to Loveland, where he has lived most of his life, I ask him if he’d live in New York.  It’s a hard call, he answers.  He’d love the access to all kinds of Asian food, which we’d let drip down our faces in frenzy just a week before in Chinatown.  He’d love to keep seeing stuff like the Renaissance portraits we’d witnessed at the Met, our mouths dropping at the realness of yellow braids, wishing we could touch them.  But what would Mom and Dad do? 

            Just last week our seventy-year-old Dad needed help lifting the toilet out to secure new flooring.  Also, so many times, our mother cooks for him, the meals of our youth, polenta, savory or sweet, frittata, with or without cooked potatoes.  I even have a request.  The mustard sauce she made up one day, inspired by a recipe but making it her own to drizzle over a plate of corned beef, cabbage and potatoes for St. Patrick’s day.

            I admit, I can’t wait to go eat at our cheap Mexican restaurant, where an overloaded plate of taquitos, burrito and enchilada costs 5.99, an unheard of spectacle for New York.  I also admit, I suck at gardening in New York, the soil so wet, all my Colorado stand-by perennials died, soaked and moldy. 

For today, I need to duck away from my punishment and just go buy a birdfeeder.  Perhaps I will fall in love with a Colorado backyard bird.  Who knows what could replace the flash of red that skimmed my car often, reminding me of miracles and pockets of this life that burst randomly, out of nowhere, to bless me.

Caravaggio

Two Worlds

Me, boy cut, Natural Bridges

My first memories of the ocean, the way my skin absorbed the salt water, even after the twisty ride home on Highway 17, ocean air still present in the car’s fabrics while I slept, the whole car peppered with sand and my gritty toes trailing it into our house, to prove its insistence in our lives, is a memory that has followed me far into adulthood. I look at this photo and feel proud and a little angry at the same time. Shouldn’t I have been asked when we moved from San Jose, CA to Tucson, Arizona? Didn’t twelve-year-olds have a say in their future?

Reading through my father’s journal, apparently he was escaping a life redolent with debt. He swore in his journal, “Now, through the Lord’s guidance, we won’t borrow. We’ll plan and budget.” Ironically, a few pages and a half a year later, our growing to six-kid family, was again facing debt. He lamented that he had to borrow money again. He couldn’t shake his demons. Recently I challenged him, “Dad, why did our electricity go out sometimes?” His answer, “It was only a handful of times.” I responded, “And what about people who never have their electricity go out?” “What a boring life?!”

My mother was raised on a farm in Almaden. Our Italian, homesteading, roots of Palo Alto, should have tethered us to the area forever. But my father’s struggle to leave Judaism behind him and take all of the family into the deepest desert the US offers was a cutting off of identity. My parents cast themselves (and me, specifically) out of their heritages, looking both for validation, but also for emotional and financial support. They loved the casserole culture of the Mormons, where one member was sick and a slew of food was dropped off, no questions asked.

When I think of where I am from, my parents split the world. Religion and real life (grandparents, friends, ocean). Since they were groupies of anything beautiful, my parents were poised in a particularly beautiful place on Earth (Northern California) to follow their hearts to nature. Nature with a big N. I think my father wanted to procure anything for my mother, eager to produce a utopian life, a sliver of my mother’s Almaden farm pastoral where she grew up. Much of that utopia was expensive. The ocean was free. My parents almost celebrated a redwood tree as much as God. Tucson fed their sense of adventure, but to me, it seemed that they were looking for beauty in all the wrong places, as if they wanted a challenge. Moving to Colorado after that, meeting snow when we didn’t even own jackets, was the biggest of the challenges. I never was able to enjoy snow, the ocean still running through my veins. But at least I found some jackets to wear.

Ghosts

Me and dad.

I’m watching the Netflix series Surviving Death, which kind of sounds like an action movie that should take place in Prague with an ex-Marine driving his mini down narrow canals to escape the bad guys. But – it’s about Near Death Experiences.

Apparently there are so many levels and extreme layers to how people have come back from death and can continue to receive a kind of connection with the spirit world. I’m enjoying the show and have something to label my three sightings of my dear old dad now. In the three sightings, he’s been a white personage out of the corner of my eye. The sightings have also been followed by a song from Queen, his way of talking to me through Freddy Mercury.

Yesterday, I saw a white head and torso floating in my hallway but nothing else and this morning, I woke with Bohemian Rhapsody blaring in my head. The other song he puts into my head out of nowhere is Mr. Fahrenheit. His message: don’t stop him, and don’t sweat it. He’s having a good time.

I told him out loud: “Dad, you weren’t supposed to die so suddenly and at 79.” In the last luxurious, two-hour conversation I had with him in March of last year, I told him, “Dad, stop talking about your death because you have to live to at least 83.”

He asked me why, even then, and I said, because I needed him around, at least until after I defended my PhD in June. He said he was already proud of me. “Bad answer. Bad Dad,” I said.

Because covid came, I never went down to see my parents in person but at least I got him for our last two-hour marathon conversation. My pop was a Renaissance man-meets Mr. Rogers-meets the Buddha–meets Mary Oliver’s little elf on the shelf. He was Mormon and so believed in the power of prayer. This he gave to me. Even though now I pray to a diffuse Goddess-Earth energy, I do believe in the quiet and the intention and the dedication to those two things. If I say God to you, I am acknowledging your faith and belief in that personage, that power, and that manifestation in your life.

Am I grateful to my father popping up with song and messages? Yes. Even though the spirit who keeps showing up is a little frightening, I’m trying to handle it because I so appreciate any bread crumb from that vast afterlife of energy. I’d love to believe in my own Katoon and thank Brit Marling’s OA heartily for one of the most brilliant renderings of the afterlife I could ever imagine.

I wouldn’t say I’m obsessed, but I miss my Dad and when he died, I couldn’t help feeling that my entire childhood died with him. The image that came to mind was of a huge ship filled with me and my siblings (of which are five, Mormons tend to have kids) and the masts have folded and we didn’t know that the ship had been sailing our entire lives through the clouds and stars, alternating. Now we are plummeting to Earth…and that’s the rest of our lives: plummeting.

So I talk to him a lot and feel the answers. When I told him he should have lived longer, he answers in my head: “What’s the point? What would it have brought you that was any different from what you had of me?”

“More time,” I answer.

He told me that my answer was an oxymoron where he is. There isn’t more time. It’s constantly fluctuating.

When I said I wanted to watch movies with him and share this amazing YouTube channel with him (The Netherlands Bach Society), he said that I already had shared them and that I continue to share these with him as I experience them.

Do I believe it’s him. Yup.

I know he forgives me for not being Mormon and that in the afterlife, religion is just a diffuse feeling. Spirituality is key. Insight rules the day. We have it here and access to it looks different for everyone.

Thanks for being here, Dad. And thanks for trying not to be scary. Keep the music coming!

Hermeneutics of Mormon

I’m reading Jonathan Edwards. Not his “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” but some other shorter pieces for class. The one we studied about conversions sent me spinning for a few days. There’s a causal chain that the congregation has to prove. In order to show one went through a conversion, there had to be a physical manifestation to it. I thought of the time my sister wanted to go swimming on the sabbath – God’s day – Sunday. My parents had a pat answer for us when  we were about to break the law of the Mormon Church: “We don’t have a good feeling about it.”

This phrase lingers over me, a doom-cloud, the angry God’s hand at junctures in my life. What did my sister end up doing? She swam on the sabbath. What happened to her? Sure – she hit her head on the side of the pool and needed stitches.

Did my parents think that this teaching moment would scar my future, autonomous, god-decentered, life? Did they ponder over it affecting me while reading Protestant narratives in my PhD program? Did they feel like God’s disciples?

I am reading how Protestants settled in the United States but I am not of them. Even though I am so very familiar with their teachings as handed down, washed up and revised for a Mormon population, I come from immigrants.

Perhaps having this blood inside of me keeps me from despair?

Latvian, English, Scottish and Italian. These are the immigrants who brought me to the United States. I am not connected to a Mather by blood — only by ideology, and that, I shed daily.

Crosses: an Abomination

The Mormon part of my life only comes up randomly. Recently I presented on King James and his version of the bible. When I read about what the Protestants wanted for the church at the time I couldn’t believe how Mormon in doctrine their goals were. A protestant priest in 1607 wrote a pamphlet that denounced wearing crosses as idolatry. The name of the pamphlet was “A scholasticall discourse against symbolizing with Antichrist in Ceremonies: Especially in the sign of the cross.” My whole life came tumbling back at me starting with that wish to have a rosary, to pet it and own it and wear it. My neighbor was Catholic and knew how to hold it when she introduced me to her rosary. But the cross in any form to the Mormons is seen as an “abomination” and I think that began in 1607. Truly, though, this Mormon law wasn’t appropriated by Mormonism until Joseph Smith got his hands on it. Rooted in the King James version of the bible, this decree was amplified somehow and put into Mormon law.

Crosses of any kind have become more than a fascination for me. I have glittery pink ones and somber silver, a glass blown one, my favorite, from Murano, Italy. Crosses have given my life meaning—a way to claim some corner of earth as my own, a way to go far back to the three-year-old who lost her heritage in a heartbeat the day her parents converted to the Mormon church. If I would have been born just one generation on my mother’s side, say my grandmother’s, I would have gone to an all Catholic girl’s school, probably in Lucca. If I would have been raised like my father, I would have gone to church on Saturdays, and been immersed in Judaica. In a single swing to know their own truths, my parents white-washed my roots. We cut the moor of the ship and sailed off, six kids in a pre-fab wish to become something new…except the wish was never mine, and I was painfully aware of that my entire life.

 

Snow: Nothing to do with Mormon

 

It’s old-school snowing today in Colorado. Global warming has changed Denver as a destination with 300 days of sun. When I first came as a lonely and estranged 17-year-old, straight from Tucson, I thought Colorado felt a lot like California. Lawns were the real symbol. And then when the snow came, I was proven wrong. It came – flocking onto our lawns, flocking into our hair and eyes. It crunched and folded into my shoes. It melted into a muddy mess, trekked into my new high school’s cafeteria. Boot leavings gathered under the toilet bowls in the girl’s bathroom. Don’t ever wear a skirt in that! I felt offended by this insidious icy rape. I wasn’t prepared for the levels of snow that remain. I had only driven up to the snow, waved at it, packed it into my brother’s shirt, and then by the time we got back down from Mount Lemon, it had all melted and we began to sweat again. Normal: sweating.

This wet to mud, this melting in all of its vague pools. There was never a time I was dry during winter in high school. My desert family was not prepared for winter.

My Parents, Good Mormons

As we were grilling last night, my husband’s mother comments, “Did you see your mother’s post today?”

I nod. “Something about God being there for his children?”

“Yeah. She sure is a good Mormon.”

(Notice, I’m tweaking my baby sister’s ear!)

It’s true. My parents found the Mormon church while they sat in Methodist, Lutheran, Episcopalian pews, searching for “the truth.” They told us this story growing up. Always looking for the one they would join, when their neighbor invited them to theirs: the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. They were shown the movie of the Sacred Grove where Joseph Smith fought with the devil and where God sent his angel Moroni to tell him no church was true and he’d have to create the only true church on earth.

When I first broke away and staked a claim in the free world of no religion, I kept feeling that creepy sinner guilt that envelops the stomach and then grips down in quiet moments. But I also remember feeling light, like I could do or say anything, that I could swear more, for fun. That I could go to the grocery store on a Sunday and I wasn’t driven into a dark cave in the crevice of an earthquake…Coming from California, I always thought Satan must certainly live where earthquakes begin.

I’m so happy my parents love their religion and that they continue to shine in God’s truth. I am also one of the lucky people, who despite my leaving, my parents still love and accept me for who I am: a wacky dissident, one of six other wacky dissidents.

An Outsider in My Own Family

I began to believe that maybe the world at large had something else to offer than Mormonism at about 7. As I was speaking with a friend about it recently, I told her about my memoir. “It’s not really about being Mormon. It’s about knowing I was an imposter and living with that lie for years.”

I’ve said it so many ways before…that I called BS on being Mormon because the doctrine said one thing and then I experienced something quite entirely different in “the world.” For instance, the whole word of wisdom thing. I saw that in my family we followed it to a “T.” Then, I’d spend the rest of the week in my grandmother’s halo of cigarette smoke  playing Spite and Malice, not going to hell but actually having fun.

I’ve called it a disconnect that widened as I got older but more than that, skating the line between pleasing my parents and pleasing myself became the new coping skill and then integrated into my personality. This human versus her society is not new, and it doesn’t have to be Mormon. Just in my case it was.

Ex Anything?

Taken from https://www.lds.org/media-library/images/clouds?lang=eng

I’m a member of two ENORMOUS ex-Mormon groups on Facebook. My best friend from teen-hood got me into them and I’m grateful – because the groups promote honesty. People pour their hearts out revealing shame, turmoil, drugs, imbalances, psychological problems, psychological help, hate, love, the blahs, and everything one can do to purge a soul in pain and bliss. It’s often cathartic to read posts that dismantle religion in lieu of science. It’s also hopeful to see those who were in Mormon families — and I wouldn’t say this is the “norm” — who had abusive relationships, come out and champion their lives, find a new way and get help amongst friends.

I hardly post in it because I’m more of a surfer and truly busy. And, I’m a surfer in the truest emotional sense of the word. I’m surfing in a sea of Mormon past and spiritual now. I’m thankful to the Jesuits. Teaching for them has given me such insight into the intimate relationship one can have with a higher power. They’ve showed me such dedication to an entity that is not proselytized or pushed on me. I have students who have revealed to me their deep spirituality. I have discussed my fear of what I call “Jesus Fingers” (stolen from Will Ferrell SNL skit from the 90s) with Jesuit priests which is basically when parents of deeply religious sects make stuff up and pass it off as God’s word. (Much like my mother speaking for God not wanting me to swim on Sunday). The Jesuit priests don’t recoil in shock when I profess to be afraid of religion. In fact, one priest told me while leaning back in his lovely office that overlooks the mountains, “It is one thing to be religious. It is entirely another thing to be spiritual.”

This resonated with me.  Why? I think of that causal chain of my childhood Mormon psyche. Sorry mother, but your voice comes into my brain, “If you swim on Sunday, God won’t be happy.”

That’s religion. But if you pray inward this prayer can be a snippet of hope floating from your loins to some vague power. It can be a ceremony with crones around a bonfire thanking the crackling usurper for not taking more than it needed. It can be a group of Mormon men and women who have traveled to the temple to pray for a list of souls who are going through tough times. (The Mormons do this!) These prayers aren’t lost. They are personal and grow inside hope – a curtain flapping on the EB White kind of afternoon of sun, greens deepen around you in spring. These are spiritual yearnings – and not religious.

I’m not an ex-Mormon in the religious sense that I was Mormon to begin with. I’m not ex-anything. I embrace.

I’ll have to quote Walt here.

“To be surrounded by beautiful, curious, breathing, laughing flesh is enough,

To pass among them or touch any one, or rest my arm ever so lightly round his or her neck for a moment, what is this then?

I do not ask any more delight, I swim in it as in a sea.”

Artifacts

I recently taught a class I felt I had no business teaching. The class was Communication, which the institution claimed was heavy on writing and therefore matched my expertise. To be fair, I did take a Professional Communication course in my masters and I’ve edited communication classes in the past, but every time I read theory to make it more hands on for the students, I delved into new territories. One theory stuck with me though, and it was this idea that the CEO of a company either directly or indirectly creates his/her artifacts of a company (Schiffer & Miller, 1999).

The theory states that either knowingly or unknowingly the furniture, art, rugs, uniforms, even what plays on the radio reflects the culture of a company. I thought about how I’m always accused by my husband of having “high” taste. I go for the expensive items that he didn’t even know existed. Recent purchase: imported French Dijon mustard.

I woke up this morning trying to place my CEO. Who are our personal CEO’s who created our artifacts as children and how do we acquire our surroundings?

The first thing I thought of was the sound of my clock in the bathroom. I bought it twenty years ago because it made the same sound as the one in my grandmother’s bedroom. If you want to compare the best sleep you’ve had in your life, I would have to go back to my grandmother’s lavender talc filled room, her clock, the old black and white TV we watched (Keeping Up Appearances) and the ten to twenty books piled on her nightstand. Best sleep of my life. Tick. Tick. Tick. That clock meted out the calmest time. I woke to mocking birds and a few hot rods pulling to a stop on Winchester Blvd. three blocks away.

My artifacts were a direct result of my Italian Grandmother. Dijon is used in salad dressings and slathered on saltless Italian bread. Garlicky roast beef follows. Mayonnaise. On the side, an artichoke.

I don’t think my artifacts are particularly “high” taste. They’re pretty simple. Some items might be a little scarce. I have yet to find a bakery that makes saltless Italian bread. I guess I’ll have to bake my own.

The point of all this is in the previous post I’d said that Mormonism swiped away my heritage but really, that’s a lie. No one can take away the artifacts we endeavor to live with. The clock is an emblem of sleep. In some instances, the past artifacts are negative — a cycle that might be unconsciously handed to us.  I know I have these, too.

In this small case, the best sleep of my life exists with my clock. The best food of my life involves Dijon.

What are the artifacts of your lives?

References

Schiffer B. and Miller, A. (1999). The material life of human beings: Artifacts, behavior, and communication.  New York: Routledge.