I
was about to say to an older man one day, “Tell me about your childhood.” But I guessed
his answer would be, “Oh, it was fine,”
telling me nothing. So instead I
asked about a time when he had been deliriously happy as a child. He spoke of Christmas and a brightly colored
toy long ago, before his father died.
And then I asked about any other time when he may have been very, very
sad. His response was unforgettable.
“Looking
for my mother’s teeth,” said the man.
“Her
dentures?” I said, hopefully.
“No,
her teeth. My stepfather beat her awful,
knocked them out. I was still quite
young,” he said, “but I remember I saw a
bunch of them go flying. I got down on the floor when all the commotion was
over and tried to find as many as I could.
I wondered if teeth could be put back in. I found three or four and brought them to
her.”
He
sat there quiet, and after a few moments I asked, “Did she take them?”
“No,”
he said. “I guess she was dead by then.”
There
wasn’t anything I could think to say to him.
When we listen to ourselves try to comfort a person, we hear phrases
like, “it’ll be all right, time will heal, there’s nothing to be afraid of
…..” We speak words of hope, because
hope is what heals us. But often we can find
nothing to say.
An older woman dressed
in terrifically bright colors once told me, “I’m seventy three years old, and
they won’t give me another mortgage. How
am I supposed to live?”
“An apartment?” I
asked, carefully.
“What about all of my
art, my tools, my workspace?” she said.
“ How will I paint?”
I had no answer for
her. But I remember thinking that all of
her creativity and her sense for the beautiful would not solve the crushing reality
of getting old and being broke. I will
face separations one day, myself. My
wife and I brought up children while living not far from here on what’s left of
an old mountain farm. We put our hearts
and souls into the place over the years, makng it just what we wanted. I’ve lived there more than half my life and I
don’t want to leave. One day soon I will
go, but it will tear at my heart.
A young man and I
walked about the parking lot one morning when he felt too antsy to sit inside
our little building. It was in the spring
and temperatures had just warmed up.
"I've felt for
years that I am missing something from my life,” he said.
"What?" I
asked.
“I have lots of stuff,” he said, “even lots of
friends, but I don’t have any hope.”
“What do you mean by
hope?” I asked.
“You know,” he said,
“like when I was a kid, the future felt exciting. I didn’t have to know what it held, but I
somehow knew it would be wonderful.”
“And you don’t know
the future now, either,” I said.
“But now I find myself yearning for something
and I don’t know what it is,” he said
“I suppose,” I said,
“that yearning for the indefinable is like a spiritual journey.”
“Please,” he said, “no
God stuff.”
“Fair enough,” I replied.
“But there are those who think yearning represents a need to fill
something in the soul.”
I didn’t tell him, but
I often have the same feelings. And the
same questions.
A middle aged woman
sat opposite me on a snowy afternoon, her mood somber. Outside the window a naked tree, now dark and
wet and leafless, grabbed the falling snowflakes to cover itself with a coat of
innocent white.
“He kicked me out!”
she said, “my own father. Called me a
whore and dragged me out the front door and slammed it shut. And locked it! I was only 16, for god’s sake. My idiot mother stood there frozen like a
statue.
“That’s pretty awful,”
I said.
“It
was snowing, for god’s sake, and I looked behind me on the sidewalk and saw my
stuff coming down from the upstairs window.
He’s up there throwing my clothes and my dolls and my makeup and all my
stuff out the fucking window like a crazy man.
I went nuts. I started banging on
the front door and I kept it up until my hands bled and I screamed into the
windows and I cursed them and I threw up and I choked and I cried until I thought
I’d die, for Chrissake.”
She
became quiet as she stared out the window at the falling snow.
“What
happened?”” I said, after a while.
She
pulled her eyes away from the window and looked down at her hands.
“I
died,” she said quietly. “I think I died.”
All I ever wanted from my father was his hope for
me. Had he withheld it, I would have
been devastated. A child of any age
needs a parent to stand by her side, wishing for success and happiness. A man or a woman needs a woman or a man who
loves them unconditionally and hopes only for the best.
The
mountain above the village reminds me how solid we feel when we know someone is
on our side. When we know they can’t be moved in their devotion to us, perhaps
even when we are roiling in the agony of our self doubt. The mountain inspires hope that there are
people who won’t budge when we want to push them away. They stand there and love us anyway.
When
I first began to meet with people in the village, I told my friend Julia that
sometimes I felt I wasn’t of much help to them.
“You should have more hope,” she said.
“Sometimes
I don’t,” I replied.
She
looked up at me and said, “You have friends who will do your hoping for you.”
Julia
is an elderly Irish woman and a “solitary,” as she is called by the order of Episcopal
nuns she retired from. I call her a
hermit. She is an artist and lives with
her paints and pastels and chickens and a cat and a dog on the backside of the
same mountain we see in the village. She
is also a companion on my journey and I travel up to see her each month, even
in winter if the road to her cabin isn’t blocked with snow. We call the time we spend together spiritual
direction.
“What’s
your hope, Julia? Or are you too old to care?”
I said, just to needle her.
She
looked up from scratching the head of her cat who sat comfortably in her
lap.
“There’s
a scripture,” she said, “that says my name has been called and I belong to Him.”
*
“I’m
not very religious, as you know,” I replied.
She
snorted, knowing me well enough.
“Maybe
hope isn’t always natural to me,” I said.”
She
turned fully toward me and the cat jumped from her lap to the floor.
“Did
you love a girl so much your arms ached?” she asked.
I smiled.
“Or a woman so much my head ached?”.
“Did you love a child so much your chest
hurt?” she asked
“Yes,”
I said, “yes to both.”
“Then
you know what it is to hope with all of your being,” she said.
When
I left her that day and had walked a short distance from the porch, she called,
“David.”
I
turned around and looked back at her quizzically.
“I
can’t do it as well as the Big Guy,” she said, “but that’s the sound of your
name being called. You shouldn’t forget what it sounds like.”
copyright David Griffin, 2010
Obviously, for confidentiality reasons, the above are
compilations, not real people. I’ve
changed enough so that even those I had in mind might not recognize
themselves. Except for my friend Julia,
who with a name change played herself.
*"Fear not, for I have redeemed
you; I have called you by name, you are mine.”
Isaiah 43:1, RSV
The Windswept Press
Murrells Inlet, South
Carolina
