Seashells and Elephants

            A warning for the faint of heart: yet another long walk down memory lane follows.  Apparently I am currently living in the past, unless, of course, that is a complete oxymoron.

            My grandma had plenty of fire and vinegar in her.  She was known to send teenagers away with a bee in their ear on Halloween, berating them for taking the candy intended for children.  A boiled egg had to be peeled with a spoon, or you were doing it wrong.  A roast had to be cut a certain direction.  When my dad was five and faced bullying, she told him in no uncertain terms to fight back.  She was quite a tartar, really.  Particularly after having lived through WWII and the depression. 

            She was also practical and canny.  She even got the better of a slot machine.  When passing through Vegas with some friends after finishing nursing school, they walked through a casino.  She stuck a nickel in a machine just to be able to say she had done it.  “Sucker,” a man in her group taunted. 

            The machine spat out twenty dollars.

            “Now you need to put another nickel in,” the same man urged.

            She shrugged.  “I'm not that much of a sucker,” and she never gambled again.

            She had quite the sense of humor.  Like the time she told one of her nurses to “go take a long walk off a short pier,” and another nurse laughed hard.  She absolutely loved that laugh.  Her favorite stories were funny ones.  Talking about when she was a girl she said:

“I was in the kitchen making pancakes, and my uncle walked in just in time to see my throw one away.  He asked what was wrong with it, and I replied ‘I just didn’t like the shape of it.’  A few minutes later he came back in, and said ‘you know, I gave that pancake you threw away to the dog, and it just rolled over and died.’”

She told us about the time she came running into the house in a panic, yelling that the henhouse was on fire.  Her parents and uncle were ready to run out to meet the disaster when she suddenly located the source of the smell she had mistaken for a henhouse burning with all its contents.  It was her uncle’s cigar. 

Technology was never feared, but sometimes a source of mirth.  Such as the time my dad brought his laptop to her apartment to help her set something up online.  They finished what they were doing, and my dad logged off AOL.  “Goodbye,” said the computer voice.  My grandma burst out laughing, and laughed until she almost cried.  “There it was, not making any conversation, and all of a sudden it says ‘goodbye.’” 

Or when she was a child, and her father commented on what long legs she had.  Her retort was that at least she had come by them honestly.  Telling me the story her eyes still sparkled remembering how he had laughed.

When I was a child I would go stay at her apartment, and she would go through the contents of the precious china cabinet with me, telling me the stories behind each gold-filigreed plate and paper-thin teacup, almost no two alike.  But the most memorable things in her apartment were always the elephants and seashells, which were everywhere.  Seashells because they are beautiful things made by nature.  She had ones bigger than my head, small spiny ones, and two containers full of them just for her grandchildren to play with.

Why elephants?  Because once when she was young and in the hospital a visitor came by and asked what she liked.  Before she could reply, her mother said “elephants,” which was news to my grandmother.  But the woman gave her an elephant, and she collected them ever since.  Big smooth wooden ones that sat on a shelf, tiny pink quartz ones the size of a pinky finger that nestled in a tiny box, stuffed ones, and everything in between.  

Sometimes I would spend the night with her, which was mostly wonderful.  She believed a piece of chocolate before bed was as good as medicine.  We didn’t always talk a lot, but we got along splendidly.  It was only not wonderful once the light was out.  Her apartment was always warm, and I would sleep in her big queen bed with her, under her big fluffy down comforter.  Once in place, I was afraid to wiggle around too much for fear of waking her, but too warm to sleep.  So I was left to look at the looming shape of the indoor exercise bicycle, and try to reassure myself that it was still a bicycle, and hadn’t become a monster.  I never quite managed.  There was always too much of a sliver of doubt at the back of my mind that maybe tonight it really was the monster it looked like, and it really would eat us this time.

When I was twelve she got the flu.  Already in her eighties, this was no laughing matter.  My dad filled her apartment with humidifiers to help her breath.  When we went to visit, I refused to leave.  I didn’t want to leave her alone, with her breach wheezing in and out, and her face looking so odd and pale.  The second night of my stay she slipped out of bed, and was falling to the floor, her descent slowed by the clinging sheets.  I got underneath her and caught her, but I couldn’t get her back in, and was panicked.  It was the middle of the night, and she was muzzy and not quite aware of what was going on.  I called for help, and it came, and she was hoisted back into bed.

She recovered.  I was relieved she was well again, even though I hadn’t comprehended the danger she had been in. 

But she always took more care of us than we could give back to her as she got old.  She was a caretaker at heart.  When she was a nurse one of the young soldiers she was nursing regained consciousness, looked up at her, and immediately asked “will you marry me?”

Her reply?  “Lets talk about it when you feel better.”

Or when she was a young woman and nursing a Jewish girl, and urging her to eat.  The girl refused the pork chop on the menu, as not being Kosher.  My grandma asked her what she would like instead.

“Oh, a peanut butter and bacon sandwich.”

At finding my grandma surprised, the girl defended it as a favorite sandwich at her high school.  My grandma got her the sandwich, and never mentioned where bacon comes from.  We still eat peanut butter and bacon sandwiches to this day.  They are actually pretty good. 

When my dad was in high school he came home exhausted one day and flopped on the couch.  Feeling sorry for him, my grandma decided to go gather the eggs for him (his chore, and not a small one since they had hundreds of chickens).  When she got out of the henhouse the sight that met her eyes was my dad, running laps around the farm with his long leggy stride.

As a child, she would often climb a tree, but be unable to get down.  She would call her sister Beverly, and Beverly would lift her to the ground, scolding her for climbing up and getting stuck yet again.  But grandma never stopped climbing.  Not even when Beverly threatened not to help her down the next time.  Beverly was as good as her word, and my grandma eventually jumped painfully down.  But she still didn’t stop climbing. 

When I was between one and two, I tumbled down the stairs, and she reached out and caught me.  The whole episode was fortuitously caught on video.  She exclaimed “you fell right into grandma’s arms!”  I cried a little, stopped crying, and climbed up again, showing off the genes she gave me.   

Not cool. Awesome!

            Being epically awesome is not cool.  No, not even a little bit.  In fact, it is totally looked down upon.

            We even have a whole arsenal of negative terms to describe people who are awesome in some way.  Like nerds, geeks, dweebs, techies, and even jocks. 

            Lets explore some definitions:

geek |gēk|noun informal1 an unfashionable or socially inept person.• [ usu. with modifier ] a knowledgeable and obsessive enthusiast: a computer geek.

nerd |nərd|noun informala foolish or contemptible person who lacks social skills or is boringly studious: one of those nerds who never asked a girl to dance.• a single-minded expert in a particular technical field: a computer nerd.

dweeb |dwēb|noun informala boring, studious, or socially inept person.
techie |ˈtekē|(also tekkie or techy )noun ( pl. techies ) informala person who is expert in or enthusiastic about technology, esp. computing.

jock 1 |jäk|

noun informal

1 a disc jockey.2 an enthusiast or participant in a specified activity: a computer jock.• an enthusiastic athlete or sports fan, esp. one with few other interests.
                  What all of the people sometimes described by these terms have in common is a lot of enthusiasm for some subject.  Jocks of course are the least abhorrent of all these classes of people, because usually their thing is sports.  A lot of people like sports.  

        

                   What gives?  Why do we label and try to hermetically seal away enthusiastic people with strong interests in a subject?  For sure it isn’t because they are boring.  In fact, usually they have a lot more to say about a much more diverse range of topics than your typical “cool” person.   

Actually, lets look at that word "cool" a little more.  Here are a few meanings:

cool |ko͞ol|

adjective

• showing no friendliness toward a person or enthusiasm for an idea or project: he gave a cool reception to the suggestion for a research center.

• free from excitement or anxiety: he prided himself on keeping a cool head | she seems cool, calm, and collected .

• (of jazz, esp. modern jazz) restrained and relaxed.

2 informal fashionably attractive or impressive: I always wore sunglasses to look cool.

• used to express acceptance or agreement: if people want to freak out at our clubs, that's cool.

            Why is it that "cool" is how we express acceptance of a person or thing?  Cool has a lot of connotations of being restrained, unenthusiastic, not easily excitable, and unfriendly.  Basically, this is conformity on a stick.  Why is it cool to be cool?  Because it lets us all pretend to be clones of everyone else.  Not everyone loves marine biology?  That can’t be cool.  Those people who do are different.  Most people can’t really talk to computers?  Oh no, its not cool to talk to computers!  If you do that, you will stick out, and we will call you a nerd, a techie, or a dweeb.  You adore practicing with a katana?  It makes you feel like you are standing on a mystic mountaintop engaged in some epically fabulous cause?  Agh!  What a freak!  We can't eve begin to describe how much of a freak you are!  You trespass on our beautiful, beautiful illusion of sameness!  You are challenging our uni-mind world view!

            Basically, it is so much easier to be "cool," because it is opting out of all that hard work that goes into developing a strong interest in something.  Here is a new definition of cool for you: “the cowardly process of seeking sameness with everyone in your peer group in order to try to please the maximum number of people, with the least expenditure of effort.”  People who ardently pursue uncommon interests stand out against this Borg-like thought process.  Instead of trying to understand, we tend to laugh and categorize them, in a weak attempt to avoid noticing our own boring sameness with others.

           Clearly, we aren't boring, because we are coolly forging our own path, and sticking it to the man.  

        

            Here we have a classic example of something that was, for a time, really cool. 

            This style has been suggested to be, among other things, a rebellion against the nerd habit of wearing the pants high.  It is a rebellion against normality, a firm assertion of individuality, a major counter-culture rebellion.  We knew for a fact this was a major rebellion against normality, because so many cool people were doing it, (putting so many dollars into the pockets of clothing retailers.  http://www.pantsaggin.com).  

           Yay!  You have totally distinguished yourself from your uncle Bob and Grandma Sue, by dressing like every other person your age in your neighborhood!  How cool!  Surely no young person has ever been this cool ever before!  The thing is, it was cool.  Why?  Because it conformed to what everyone else was doing.   Now of course, almost everyone hates this, with the burning wrath reserved only for something that “has been cool.”  It is wrath that can only be raised by the shameful knowledge that yeah, we did that too.

            Now, this is not a suggestion that we take up mooing, or some other equally "uncool" thing just in order to assert our individuality.  Not at all.  Rather, I suggest that if something tickles our fancy, whether it is cephalopods, beach volleyball, clowning, or sure, even mooing, we go for it.  At no point should we sit there and ask “is this cool?  Will people look at me funny?  Will they put me in the nerd box, or the geek box, or worst of all, the box of miscellaneous un-filed incomprehensible people?” 

            Nah.  Just go for it.  These are our lives.  Lets make them epic.  And in the words of the ancient Chinese philosopher, “there is no charge for awesomeness.” 

Climbing

           I climbed a tree today.  Coming back from a walk, my mind slowly emptying of the sunset and filling with home things, there it was: a tree I had passed a thousand times before.  It was standing as a gift beside the path.  I extended both my arms up to the first branch, a convenient nub of bark lifting my foot into the air.  My feet off the ground, I stopped thinking about what I was doing, didn’t worry about where my muscles were or whether they were strong enough or not and just climbed.

            Kids don’t worry about every action like adults do. They fall down a lot more, but they don’t worry about that either.  But anyone will tell you, they learn to ski or ride a bike of roller-skate ten times faster than any adult—without that uncomfortable sense of dignity to get in their way.

When I was a child, I climbed all the time.  The tree in back of my grandma’s must have felt very loved.  It was a small tree, with purplish bark.  Not one of the grand sweeping trees that take you to the sky.  But every time we visited grandma, I visited that tree as well. 

Up the tree, in this time, I sat and watched how the light sparkled off green needles, and welcomed myself back.  Two people and five cars passed by.  I wondered if anyone saw me, my white shirt brutally conspicuous against brown bark.  Probably none of them did, certainly none of them looked up when they passed.  But I worried a little that someone I knew might see me and shake their heads.

As a child I looked to trees as heroes.  Particularly during those long church activities, I would slip away and go up among the rustling green leaves.  The tree would sway comfortingly as I slipped inside, the book in my hand not slowing me at all.  I could sit in that green place for hours as my mom talked about life and my dad talked about fences and boats.  No one saw me, except a few other kids, and they didn’t count.  Mostly they couldn’t follow me anyway. 

In this time I sat on a branch while the wind carried the smell of an ending day.  I hadn’t noticed the day’s aloneness until it was gone, removed by the tree and the wind.  There is peace up there, held by a friend between heaven and earth.  It’s quieter than being in love.

One day a tree failed me.  A boy came up before I could ascend, introduced himself.  I knew him, he was the infuriating brat from a Sunday school class two years ago.  He had forgotten me.  Typical.  I had heard him asking Mandy two minutes before “who is she?”  Her response was crisp.

“She’s Marianne, don’t you remember her?  From Sunday school?” 

“No.”  He sounded dazed.  I wondered how many times he had been dropped on his head as a small child.  I shrugged, turned and went up the tree. A mistake.  He followed.  I tried to read to ignore him, but he talked and talked.  The tree was no refuge from this threat.  I descended and went to the swings; he couldn’t hover too close if I was swinging.  Instead he brought me an ice cream sandwich.  I was bewildered. 

Half an hour ago the bark crackled beneath my hand.  I sat on a big branch, only fifteen feet up.  Age has made me cautious.  My hair was tightly fastened in the braid I only learned how to form a year ago.  I used to shun binding my hair in any way.  Loose and tangled was fine.  Streaming in the wind like a dragon’s tail was better. 

In Montana there was a tree unlike others.  Majestic is not good enough, but no other word will do.  It was ready to be climbed.  Anyone could climb it.  It had strait branches perpendicular to the trunk that didn’t branch out into needles until the very ends.  One day, mom looked out the window to see us up the tree: me on top, then Lauralee, Paul, and little Allison at the bottom.  She yelled that we were never to go any higher.  I was pleased.  In the literalness way of a child, I always had the top spot after that.  But one day, all alone, I broke the edict.  I climbed past my branch that sat fifty feet up and halfway to the top.  I climbed up half of the half, then to the top that swayed back and forth in the wind.  I looked out at the field falling off down the hill the tree was on, a new green spotted with flowers.  I looked at the other trees, their roots higher on the hill, their tops swaying beneath me.  I usually took trees a few branches at a time, saving higher branches to enjoy on a later climb.  But I went up the last half of the tree in a single gasp that time.  I never could go up since.  I didn’t want to be caught, but more than that I was stopped by guilt.  Nothing else could have kept me away—the new perspective on a familiar place was intoxicating. 

That day and today, I came down the tree, from branch to branch, contorting to slip between branches, face up, spine bridging the branch below.  I reached the bottom, dangled, dropped, and came home from where two curving tracks of time and place surprised each other; and danced for a moment before shivering apart.

                       

Mom

My mother drove me crazy at times.  She had to talk to everybody, be it the mailman, the Schwann’s man, or the bum on the street.  She could strike up long convoluted conversations with absolutely anybody. Perfect strangers ended up telling her their life stories, their deepest fears, and their secret ambitions.  And she remembered it all.  Anybody she had ever talked to once could be sure of a warm greeting whenever my Mom ran into them, be it months or even years after their first meeting.  She never to my knowledge forgot a name.

All of this was highly irritating to a child of my particular temperament.  I was shy, and couldn’t remember who had been in my class by the next school year.  But it wasn’t envy that made me dislike my mother’s personability.  It was impatience.  Do you know how long it takes to go shopping when you mom insists on talking to everyone she runs into in the store?  And then has a ten-minute chat with the clerk at the register?

Getting to and attending church was its own adventure.  We would all get up on Sunday morning.  Eat breakfast.  Try to get dressed.  Lose our shoes.  Misplace our coats.  Run around yelling to everyone else to help us find our lost items—simultaneously.   Eventually we would all get bundled into the car, and after two or three of us ran back to get two or three forgotten items, two or three times each, we left.  It took twenty minutes to get to church, breaking the sound barrier all the way.  I never did find out how long it would take following the speed limit.  We never did get pulled over for speeding on the way to church, probably because any cop who saw us didn’t believe his eyes, especially when his radar couldn’t get a fix on our speed. 

We would then arrive for church, only five minutes late, and find that Paul had forgotten that he never had found his shoes.  Did you know that wadded up tinfoil, dredged from the depths beneath a seat and molded onto the foot, makes beautifully fitted, futuristic footwear?  It even serves the double purpose of assuring that aliens can’t tell what your feet are thinking.

Before we entered the chapel, I was ready to leave.  I didn’t want to have to enter a chapel full of already seated, tidy people.  I didn’t want to be in the parade of six that was my family, squeezing past our immaculate neighbors to find seats, with out hair un-brushed and my brother modeling astro-boots.  But I went in anyway, blushed, squeezed and sat, while doing my best to avoid looking at anyone. 

I then sat and for ten minutes tried to listen to the speakers.  Uniformly boring.  I poked Allison.  She, of course, poked me back.  All-out war ensued, until ultimate peacekeeper mom stepped in, returning momentary order.  Then one of us would pick op a program, obtain a pen from Dad, and start to draw.  This would of course start a revival in abstract art, which in turn started a major wave of diplomacy unrivaled in the annals of history, as those who didn’t have programs or pens negotiated with those who did.  There was usually about one program and two pens (this being the number our Dad carried in his pocket to church—why it was always two when there was one of him and four of his children I will never know).  The one available 8” by 5” program would eventually be torn in anywhere between two to fourteen unequal pieces, depending on the respective bargaining power of each sibling, and the stubbornness of the program holder.  All in all, sacrament meeting on our bench rather resembled a year in central Africa, only with rather more violence and political coups. 

You may wonder why I was so embarrassed to enter church, yet entirely unembarrassed to behave this way once seated.  That is probably because you have forgotten the law of invisibility of children.  Once a child is seated in a large room full of people who aren’t doing much of anything, they of course become immediately lost from sight.  NOBODY can see them.  Obviously.

But after church was the worst, so far as my mother’s amazing sociability went. We always went to my grandma’s house after church, where she had four perfectly evenly divided dishes of candy laid out, one for each of us.  The image of that waiting candy seemed to taunt us as we waited between an hour and two hours for mom to stop talking to everyone in the building.  She simply had to find out how everyone’s grandparent’s or child’s cold was doing.  My philosophy was that if anyone had perished of a sneezing attack, we would have found out already, and that if there was plague in someone’s household, you had better avoid them to keep from catching it.  But no, we could only leave after practically everyone else had already gone home, probably much later than they would have if my mom hadn’t been there.

We would eventually get to grandma’s house, where mom would sit in deep conference with grandma.  But that was okay.  I had my candy, and as the second oldest I got the small sheet of funnies first, and the large sheet of funnies second.  But even the Sunday funnies must come to an end, a characteristic unfortunately not shared by my mom’s talk.  It went on and on well after all the funnies had been read and we were reduced to poking each other to distract ourselves from our sugar headaches.

Then one day she was gone.  Dead in the water without a sound on a boating trip.  Sudden heart failure.  A great black hole opened in the sky and threatened to consume the world.

The funeral home was bathed in flowers.  They spilled out of the chapel and down the hall.  Afterwards, the extras supplied flowers for all the churches in the city and filled our house.  Everyone sent flowers, even the clerk from the store checkout line, though I don’t know how she even found out.  The Billings Montana florists must have been left without a rosebud.  Out of all the bouquets one stood out.  It wasn’t terribly attractive, having nothing but maroon roses.  It wasn’t anywhere near the biggest, though there were over four dozen flowers.  The thing was that to each rose was tied a note, all from the women and girls of our ward.  The notes weren’t written to my dad, or to us kids.  They were all written to my mother.  “Karen, you always listened to me.”  “Dear Karen, you always seemed to know when something was wrong, and you always knew just what to say.”  “Thank you so much for everything you have done for my family.  We were really struggling when we first moved in.  You made us feel like we really were home at last.”  The notes went on and on.  I wondered what these people were thinking.  The woman they addressed in their notes could never read them.  It puzzled me.  It was as though they wanted one last chance to give the thanks they had held back one day too long.  They wanted one last chance to say something to a woman who had always listened to everything they had to say.

Nine years have passed since I last read those notes.  I’ve gotten older, and I understand a little better now what my mom was trying to teach us all those years before she died.  And sometimes, when someone wants to talk and I don’t feel like I have the time to listen, I remember those notes and I make the time.  Mom’s influence didn’t end when she died.  She touched everyone around her, in a way that will last long after her memory is gone. If there is anyone who would care enough to come down from heaven to read the things her friends so badly needed to tell her, it is my mom.