Songs from the road

I have a reoccurring dream where I am trying to use my arms in what otherwise would be a very ordinary if not completely mundane movement.  It may be that I’m trying to throw a ball or turn a doorknob; the movement is not what is important in this dream, but rather it is the unnerving sensation of not being able to move my arms that catapults me into a state of panic.  Maybe you’ve had the dream of being chased by some malevolent force only to find that you cannot run because you are being mired in quicksand.  Either way, the feeling is the same.  Fear.  Frustration.  Helplessness.  I wonder sometimes if this is how my son feels when he’s awake.

Jonah came into this world through a nine-month haze of drugs and alcohol.  I marvel that he survived that journey.  Jonah is a miracle.  His trials have been many and yet when I look over these past six years I can honestly say that the moments of breakthrough have far outweighed the long hours of struggle.  I guess that is how life is. 

My dream of not having control of simple movements has given me a keyhole peak into life from Jonah’s perspective.  I cannot imagine fully what Jonah must feel like each and every day that he struggles to master things that children his own age take totally for granted.  And then, he will do things that amaze me.  Jonah’s first identifiable sounds were songs he would hum.  His first hum: the theme song from A Charlie Brown Christmas.  This soundtrack is one of my favorites – even when it isn’t Christmastime.  He must have heard the CD many times on our drives around town running errands.  I remember the moment so clearly because he was humming very confidently, hitting every note and perfectly on pitch.  I was so happy I cried.  He was a year and a half.  He could not speak decipherable words at this point but he could understand music, pitch, rhythm. . .all of it.  Growing up in a musical family I knew how vital the role of music was for me and I knew that music would be, for Jonah, an anchor in a world that was so unwieldy. 

Today Jonah is six.  He is repeating Kindergarten and his progression is slow, but we take the days one at a time and trust that God has a purpose bigger than we can comprehend.  The other day we were listening to an old Willie Nelson CD and when the song “On The Road Again” came on I found myself singing full voiced and with much animation (as I am apt to do when it’s just us in the car).  About 15 minutes later, the CD finished and quiet descending on the car as the other children played their video games, I heard Jonah start to sing in his sweet little voice, right on pitch, “On the road again. . . .can’t wait to get on the road again. . . “  I can't wait to see where Jonah's road leads.   

This ain't just whistlin' Dixie

In my mind, I feel like I am still in my teens.  My body, on the other hand, begs to differ.  So, at the fragile age of 41, my mind, in a furtive act of treason, convinced my body that, yes, indeed I could learn a new sport and thus, be able to keep up with my children as they advanced in skill, regardless of the fact that the only thing I would be advancing into was old age. 

I guess you must be wondering what the sport was that I chose to afflict upon my body (a side note: I have never been, nor do I claim to be, a person skilled in the arena of athleticism and so I apologize in advance to those of you who don’t see playing a sport as causing affliction).  For the past two winters, we had taken the kids up to our timeshare in Zephyr Cove near the Heavenly Ski Resort and while I enjoyed the winter wonderland of snow and sunshine, I secretly envied those snowboard-toting types, in all their gloriously goggled anonymity and waterproofed confidence.  But I will be totally honest with you. . . they just looked so cool!  The real problem, as I saw it, was that as each of my three children took their turn at the slopes, it became evident to me that I would be relinquished to the role of odd man out on the annual family ski trip.  This was just not an acceptable prospect for me; albeit, the idea of casually sipping on a hot toddy by a blazing fire in mammoth-sized, supple leather chairs with all my appendages safely intact seemed a much more appealing alternative.  And I believe this was about the time the teenage side of my mind convinced the more rational side of my mind that I needed to exchange my fear and trepidation for a warrior-like sense of confidence.  But who am I kidding?  I was terrified.  Despite the screams of my rational mind begging me to stop this nonsense and pull up a chair by the fireplace, onward I strode toward what would either be my glorious confirmation that I still had a small shimmering of youth in me, or that I was a complete and utter fool.

The day of my first venture into foolhardydom occurred just moments after settling into the idea of being 41.  My husband, a life long skier and not seeing how terrifying this prospect was for me (or if he did, pretending not to notice), took me up alone to our local ski slopes.  The kids stayed home with a babysitter.  There was a two-fold reason for this: one, we didn’t want them to be scarred for life if in the hopefully unlikely event of my death on the slopes, and two (and the more truthful reason), I didn’t want to embarrass myself in front of them.  We also had decided that I would take a lesson.  There are so many details of that day that have somehow got drawn into a type of memory-vortex where I have not been able to reclaim them since.  What I do remember of my lesson is that firstly, I was old enough to be the instructor’s mother and secondly, just because you can do something well doesn’t necessarily dictate that you can teach it well.  Despite his poor teaching skills and my equally (if not more so) lacking athletic skills, I managed to learn the basics enough so I could move on to the chair lift.

Now, I could write a novel on chair lifts alone and the reign of terror they hold over so many people.  I know many who have completely forgone the joys of winter sports simply due to the fact that chair lifts are, at their very nature, a scary prospect for anyone remotely fearful of heights, or as in my case, afraid of being unceremoniously hurtled off into a hard bank of snow at the end of the line.  For skiers, the chair lift is no more frightening a prospect than taking an escalator up to a favorite floor of a department store; however, for the beginning snowboarder (and I don’t care how old or young you are, this is true for everyone at the beginning), the chair lift serves as an ever present reminder that gravity is an immutable law of physics.  A skier, when exiting the chair lift casually stands up and glides away in a most graceful and elegant manner.  Not so for the beginning snowboarder.  The feeling I had on my first exit off a chair lift was more of an out of body experience.  As we approached the point of egress, I realized how fast we were moving and that I was soon going to have to negotiate standing from a straight sitting position to a side position with one foot still strapped into this soon-to-be projectile of terror.  It was at this moment that both my teenage mind and my rational mind were screaming in unison, but there was no turning back.  Closer and closer we approached the end and literally, it felt like I would jump arms wide open into the clutches of the grim reaper.  What in God’s name was I doing on this chair lift, strapped to this board, unsuspecting husband sitting tranquilly by my side (completely unaware of the mental assault attacking all my senses) --- whose idea was this anyway??  Ah yes, it was mine.  Well, to heck with it. . .onward, tally ho! 

I can now say that I fully and completely understand what it means to be paralyzed by fear because that is precisely what I felt.  And as I was catapulted off the chairlift, because I hadn’t stood up quickly enough, I had a moment of clarity followed immediately by a moment of intense and icy pain.  Now my mind was screaming, “MOVE! MOVE! MOVE!” as I lay in the most unflattering contortion.  Quickly, I army-crawled, board flailing against my free leg out of the line of fire.  Gasping, sputtering for air, and taking a quick inventory of my condition, I suddenly realized, “I’m alive!!!!!!”  And surely I was!  I must admit, the chair lift was my nemesis that first season and, I won’t lie, I still have to talk myself through my anxiety every time I get on one. 

So, why do I put myself through all of this, you ask?  Well, I only have a simple answer: because I think I love snowboarding.  With any relationship, you have to spend time with the person before you can truly say whether or not this is a person to whom you would pledge your love and devotion, no?  And so it is true for snowboarding. . . or really anything you might want to try that is new and potentially terrifying.  I have had some really wonderful moments of progression, like the first time I was able to do a falling leaf or when I first was able to find my toe edge without face-planting, or when I first linked a turn.  The whoosh of wind and cold on my face as I slide back and forth. . .not always so skillfully, is a magnificent feeling that I find hard to describe.  I still have to use my arms to point in the direction I want to go and I haven’t mastered linking my turns yet, but I don’t give up because there have been those wondrous moments of “getting it” when I see the potential of where I can go and what this could be for me and for my family.  When I’m on that final run for the day and my legs are shooting flames high enough to ignite a forest fire and my brain is shutting down from the intense concentration it takes to remember what head, arms, legs, ankles and feet need to be doing at every moment of the journey, I have a flash of future rides down the hill with all my children whishing and whooshing past. . . laughter and pink cheeks at the end of a full day on the slopes with all of us together.  Those future images of mine could be their cherished memories of the past some day.  And what amazing memories those could be.  So, as I see it, I am courting this thing called snowboarding and hope that it will love me back or at least leave me with all my body parts intact if the love never comes to full fruition.  I can say this for certain, ‘tis better to have snowboarded and failed then never to have snowboarded at all.  Indeed!

Submitted for your approval

I grew up watching those classic black and white TV shows. . .watching Rod Serling surreptitiously glide onto the screen of our circa 1960's style television set, cigarette poised so sophisticatedly between his fingers, submitting plots for our approval.  I loved it; I loved the thrill of the allegorical theater Twilight Zone provided to my pre-teen imagination.  But even more than that, I loved the escape into the "what if's" and the "what could be's" of our oftentimes indiscriminate decisions. 

The world was so different back then, not just for me, but I think for many people who were born before the 1980's.  It just seemed more simple, less stressful, innocent.  I could ride my bike around the neighborhood during the summer months until the street lights would shutter their dim fingers of light onto the blacktop road that lead home.  I was never afraid; I knew all our neighbors, and as I would ride my bike along I would think about what it would be like to grow up and learn to drive a car (a much cooler prospect to me than my current mode of transportation, a dark blue Schwinn Stingray).   I used to dream about what I would become.  I loved stories and I thought that some day I wanted to write wonderful stories that would thrill my captive audience of readers.  And why wouldn't I think I could be the next Hemingway or Fitzgerald?  Everything seemed within reach. . .nothing was out of the realm of possibility.

But things change as so often we realize as we grow older.  I went to college, got a degree in English, went on to get my MA in literature only to have life lob a volley of circumstances that pulled me away. . .away from my dreams and into a far less idyllic reality.  So, here I am staring at middle age full in it's weathered face and asking myself, "Where did you go?"  Is it just me or did the tempo of life start to take on a more rapid pace from a slow waltz to a frenetic quick step?  So, what to do. . .I've decided to change the trajectory of my life and step back into a place that brings me joy: telling stories.

I think some of the best stories are the ones that aren't conjured up in the imagination, but rather are lived through -- hardily and with conviction.  These are the stories that remind us to laugh boisterously at the hilarity of life's circumstances or take us to those darker places of great sorrow, loss and pain.  The beauty of living is in the sharing of our lives with one another.  So, I submit to you, dear reader, my life in words.  It is not the life of a great person, just an ordinary one.  This is for my children and their children and the children who will someday only know of me as a name from a nearly forgotten lineage. . .nearly, but not entirely forgotten because words live on forever.