STRIVING AFTER THE WIND

Thank you all for reading my little novella, Out of the Chute in Azalea Heights. Perhaps someday it will be published between physical covers made of paper to be held in physical hands made of skin.

Now we will return to more spiritually stimulating words. The next blogs will be my work toward my second devotional book-- a sequel to Broken Jar:365 Days on the Potter's Wheel--entitled, perhaps, Still on the Wheel.

1.

“I have come that they might have life and have it to the full.” John 10:10

So many people, sadly even Christians, go through one shipwreck after another searching for an elusive thing called peace. We think we have found it in a certain new possession, hobby, philosophy, or relationship, only to find that with each new second wind there lurks— and usually not far behind— another wall. We smack into these walls time and time again, but often, even before the bruises can heal from one disaster, we have taken up yet another trivial pursuit with reckless abandon, believing this time will be different.

Ecclesiastes testifies against this kind of false thinking. This “Preacher” (v. 1), whom most believe to be the luxuriously wealthy King Solomon, expounds for most of the book’s twelve chapters about the intense frustration of looking for peace in all the wrong places. His words are meant to save us the time, trouble, and heartache of continuing to put our eggs into flimsy baskets. He warns us that although work is better than idleness, knowledge is better than ignorance, sufficiency is better than destitution, even such exalted qualities as these— a good job, a sharp mind, and financial independence—must ultimately conclude as a meaningless “striving after wind” (1:17; 2:17) without the proper attitude about God: “The conclusion when all this has been heard is fear God and keep His commandments, because this applies to every person” (12:13). My guess is that the reason He says “to every person” is that he wants us not to have the mistaken idea that beauty, riches, or intelligence will make any of us the kind of a person whose life has enough meaning to foster an abiding peace.

Solomon had learned that a life without meaning was a life without peace. Jesus tells us in John 10:10 that this God Solomon warns us to fear and obey sent Him “that we might have life and might have it abundantly.”

Surely what Jesus meant by abundant life was a life characterized not by vain strivings but by peace. Unless we first take the time and trouble to pursue real answers –the Truth— about the meaningful kind of life Jesus came to give us, our pursuit of peace will lead us down one dead end road after another.

“You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart. ‘I will be found by you,’ declares the Lord, ‘and will bring you back from captivity.’” Jeremiah 29:13-14

ARRIVING AT ELEVEN

(I am so sorry it has taken me so long to publish this final chapter of ...Azalea Heights! We have been moving, and I have been scattered, to put it mildly. Thanks so much to all of you who have persevered in checking and waiting. I love and appreciate you all. Jan)

The firecrackers Coy and Babette had used on me were leftovers from our latest holiday, Independence Day, July 4, 1961. But the day before our country celebrated its birthday every year, I celebrated mine. On non-leap years, my birthday falls on day 183 of our 365-day year, which means that my birthday is one day more than exactly midyear. But even more significant than being midyear is that my birthday is pretty close to midway through summer vacation. It seems like every summer somewhere around daddy’s birthday, the 14^th, which is two weeks before Julie’s which is the 28^th, we all start talking about school starting back up again. The past year is officially over, and the present is quickly becoming the future.

Until my birthday came marking that gearing-back-up time, the next school year seemed a far away and unimaginable thing to grab onto. Until that time, my identity was bound up in being a ten-year-old fifth-grader in Mrs. Gravitt’s room since I was a first-year band student. Now that I was eleven, I was looking back on that fifth-grade year; it was no longer my present reality. Somehow, I had made it out of Mrs. Gravitts’ room, and what was most shocking about this was that I had not shot my way out of there like an outlaw at a bank robbery or thrown off the cowboy and stomped him in the dirt like a bucking bronco fresh out of the chute. Somewhere along the way, I had been tamed enough to be able to think about some things.

I realized that Mrs. Gravitts, one of my main riders, although a little grouchy and persistent in her rules of fifth-grade behavior, really sorta wanted to like us. I got to noticing that on those days when she managed to make it all the way to 3:30 without whipping any of us, she looked sorta happy, like she had just won something, not mad, like she hadn’t gotten to have what she came for that day. I had always thought she lived to beat us, but that wasn’t true. She was just as relieved as we were when she could leave her board right there in the closet beside her purse.

I realized that when I was with Betsy and Babette, I might have acted like a good sport and entered into some of their shady activities, but secretly I was a little bit glad and relieved when I could just crawl between the covers and lie there in the peaceful darkness and say my prayers without having to wonder if God was sticking His fingers in His ears due to the way I had pretended He didn’t exist that day. I kinda liked the idea that He was up there inclining His big ear in my direction, being the Great Listener and the Great Advisor, not just the Great Whisperer. I kinda liked the idea that the Great Whisperer wasn’t just whispering to hear Himself talk, like I usually was, but because He knew that by myself, I had no idea what I was doing or where I was going. Shoot, I didn’t even know how to stop and think. Everything I did was from the seat of my pants. Somehow, though, He had gotten my attention, and there were a few things He thought I needed to know.

All my life I had seen my parents as perfectly composed, mature authority figures in their public, daytime lives who ripped off their masquerades at night. But somewhere, miraculously, in the throes of all my fifth-grade hoodlumism at the end of this first decade of life, I began to see my parents in a different light. I began to think of them as people just like me only a little bigger and further down the road — people tempted by selfishness and jealousy; by weakness when they should have been strong, and by boldness when they should have been humble; by impulsive words when they should have been silent a little longer, and by weary, silent tongues when they should have taken more time and energy to communicate and explain. Selfish kids go out and steal pens, and shoot ink on somebody’s new coat; impulsive kids call a fight in the woods, and when the fighting escalates beyond their expertise, scared kids look around for a pipe to go tightrope instead.

But I began to see that grown-ups couldn’t do stuff like playing hooky and hiding out in a ravine when they got fed up with their real world, and they wouldn’t’ find the mercy of the judge if they went crazy and shot out all the lights at the courthouse. When their duties were difficult and complicated, like math was for me, they couldn’t just tell all their clients and employees to go jump in the lake and then take off and explore the cotton gin at ten-thirty in the morning. And when boredom breathed down their necks or they felt their lives getting into a rut, they couldn’t just throw off their high heels and white shirt in the middle of the stream and go build a trolley in a pine tree…or at least they didn’t think they could.

Really and truly, they might have been better off if they had just hauled off and smoked a cigarette in a ravine or climbed up a pine tree and slid recklessly down a rope, but they really didn’t think they could; they needed to act like adults, not kids. I guess Daddy sometimes resorted to this sort of thing with his out-of-the-blue motor scooter and freakish fighting rooster, but not even he,with his high level of innovative thinking and unpredictable shenanigans, could manage in the end to scale the high walls of complicated adulthood. And never having a trial run at being adults, just as I had never had one at being a ten-year-old, they were handling life in the way that seemed right to them at the time.

They, probably much like Mrs. Gravitts, got up every morning and went into their day knowing it was brand new and offered all kinds of new possibilities. They didn’t set out to be jealous or angry or selfish or weak or any of those other ways that caused them to unravel with each other at night. They washed their faces every morning, looked in the mirror, and told themselves today would be better than yesterday, and that they would do something different today from yesterday to cause that to be the case. They probably heard the Great Whisperer telling them, “Yes, this is the right path,” or “No, don’t head off in that direction; you may become lost.” And just like me, sometimes they’d listen, and sometimes they wouldn’t.

I wondered what eleven would bring. Would I keep on trying to look beneath the surface of people, or would I become distracted from all this deep thinking by some new, irresistible adventure somewhere around the next bend? Would I learn to stop and listen closely every time God, my Great Whisperer, spoke to me on a boring Saturday with nothing to do or in the pages of the Bible that Julie and Mr. Pete read to me, or would I outrun Him in an effort to learn to play stupid human games like “hard to get”?

I’ll bet if I had been paying more attention when Julie read about the heroic rescues of Daniel and his buddies in Babylon and Isaac and Abraham in Israel, it might have dawned on me a lot earlier that their Great Rescuer was one and the same as my Great Whisperer, and was probably still around, even right here in Azalea Heights, showing up in ways sometimes more audible than visible—maybe whispering messages on the wind at the playground at the elementary school or through an old aunt’s voice late at night at Flat Fork.

And so even without a map, I showed up somewhere. Anyone would have sworn at the beginning of fifth grade that it would have been the Shelby County jailhouse or six feet under in a Crocker plot at the Tenaha Cemetery, but instead where I showed up was at eleven years old still alive and outside in the free world. Sixth grade and Band 2 awaited me just around the corner.

Maybe this year I would read “The Courtship of Miles Standish” by Mr. Longfellow, about both our relatives, John Alden and Priscilla Mullins, who came over on the Mayflower. Maybe this year I would learn how to subtract a little better so that I could take a whole dollar to the Rio. Maybe I would ask Julie to explain some of what Rudyard Kipling was trying to say in that poem “If” that Daddy was always trying to make me memorize to show off to his friends. Maybe I would even let him make me a memory magician using his Balls and Bats system that he had used to learn all the presidents and vice presidents in order. I might start praying at odd times of the day like Janie, and maybe in those prayers I might mention poor Mr. Gravitts and his wife who had to get up every morning and go corral a bunch of rowdy hooligans who shot spit wads at her every time she turned around to write on the blackboard. Maybe I’d go confess to Tina Farnsworth that every girl in the whole sixth grade wished their eyes were just like hers because she was a lot prettier than Jacqueline Kennedy whose eyes were so far apart it’s a wonder she could make both of them focus on the same thing at the same time.

And maybe if I started trying tomorrow, in about twelve years I might be able to smile at Travis Wayne. And maybe, just maybe, if I started listening to Mr. Pete instead of daydreaming about my b-b gun and back flips off the diving board, Janie Simon’s mother would change her mind about letting me be friends with her daughter.

It looked like I would more than likely stay out of the Shelby County jail and probably make it to high school. I could even imagine marching across the stage at graduation and possibly making it intact all the way to adulthood.

And there was an outside chance that one day — way out there in the 1970’s — I might even bolster myself up, brave the deadly minefields of matrimony, and have a couple of kids that I could teach how to pole vault and tell stories to about when I was “a little boy” in Azalea Heights.

From Out of the Chute in Azalea Heights, chapter 20 (final chapter)

SHOW BUSINESS

I don’t know how long I’d have stayed in Cayuga and what all would have happened to me at the hands of Babette if it hadn’t been for Tops for Toys the next Saturday on channel six.

Julie and I were performers. For as long as I could remember, we had been featured at least a couple of times a year at the Azalea Heights Music Study Club and had been a regular act at all the talent shows all over the Shelby County area. We’d go to Tenaha and Joaquin and Shelbyville and San Augustine and perform at the high school where there was always some money awarded at the end to the best act according to a panel of local judges. Julie played her pearl blue accordion while I sang and danced and snapped my fingers in my bobby socks and saddle oxfords. Sometimes we would harmonize, with Julie singing alto and me singing soprano. Mother always had the numbers all lined up and about a week before the performance, she’d make us start practicing. We never really had any say about the numbers; it was always something cutting edge that nobody had ever heard anybody do yet except the singing stars on the radio or Ed Sullivan’s t.v. show. We’d learn a few and then just use those four or five everywhere we went the rest of the year. We finally got to where we could do “Boom Boom Ain’t It Great to be Crazy,” “Sweet Old Fashioned Girl,” “Sad Movies,” and “Tan Shoes and Pink Shoe Laces,” without even thinking about it. I’ll bet we could have successfully walked the dog with a yoyo while singing those songs and never missed a beat at either task (except that Julie would have had a little trouble balancing the yoyo-dog on the string and playing her accordion at the same time.) After a few years of this we didn’t even know what stage fright was. Most of the time we would win, but Daddy would always make us turn around when the man would give us the money and hand it right back to him. Julie would have to say, “My little sister and I would like to donate our winnings to be used by your school as you see fit.” (This was a stupid thing to do as far as I was concerned, but Mother would tell me that we could get something special the next time we went to the Green Stamp Store.)

Sometimes they would call for an encore, and we always had a few religious numbers ready for those who needed something a little heavier. “Out of the Ivory Palaces,” “Mansion Over the Hilltop,” and “I Saw A Man” were our standbys. Because of these religious numbers, somebody got the idea that we needed to be invited to their Sunday afternoon singings out in the woods under a big roof with no walls. One Christmas for the Music Study Club, Mother came up with the idea for Julie to play “Silent Night” on the piano while I recited this poem called “Happy Birthday, Jesus.” This was a big hit, and blue-haired ladies would cry and delicately dab their eyes with their lacy handkerchiefs and hug us as though we had been inspired and made the whole thing up ourselves.

Somebody heard about us over in Shreveport and invited us to come be on their t.v. show called “Tops for Toys,” so now I was leaving Cayuga to go back home to get ready for our first and only t.v. appearance the following Saturday morning at 10 o’clock. I figured that this was probably the Great Whisperer’s way of rescuing me from Babette, especially now that she was all fired up from successfully handcuffing her first niece to the schoolhouse.

From Out of the Chute in Azalea Heights- Chapter 19

CHAINED UP AND SHOT AT: A LESSON FROM JACOB

It was July, so I was off to Palestine to my cousin Betsy’s house for two weeks. Betsy was a year older than me and lived with her divorced mother who was running a beauty shop built out of their garage and going to college at the same time to become a school teacher. Needless to say, with Aunt Leona either working, going to school, studying, or sleeping, she needed to be able to trust us when she couldn’t keep a watchful eye on us. I don’t know how anybody smart enough to get a college degree and run a beauty shop singlehandedly could have been so deep in denial as to believe that when she wasn’t looking we were behaving in a respectable and honest way, but it seems like she did.The kind of adventures I indulged in in Azalea Heights were questionable, to say the least, but the things my cousin Betsy thought up put me in the shade. Shoot, next to her, I was a model citizen. She had so much trouble waiting in the wings that she was eager to get into that she didn’t even have time to sleep. Last summer when she took me out to the lake to spend the night with her dad and new stepmother, she pulled me out of bed in the middle of the night and threw me on the back of a moped with no lights and drove us all the way around Lake Palestine where two boys I had never seen met us in a hayloft in the top of a random stranger’s barn. One of them was her boyfriend, Dwight, and while they held hands and kissed in one corner of the barn, I was left alone in the dark to talk to some faceless boy named Donald Ray. It was so dark that he could have had fangs, three orange eyes, and an ear in the middle of his forehead, and I’d have never even known it. Finally she let us leave, but on the way home we ran out of gas, so we had to walk the moped for four or five miles back to the house.

This particular year as soon as I got to her house, she pulled me into the bathroom and told me that tomorrow night we would wait until her mother got home and sneak the car out of the driveway and go have some fun. I couldn’t help but remember last year’s moped incident and how I was so tired by the time we got home that when Aunt Leona took us the Green’s Pool the next afternoon, I nearly fell asleep and drowned while floating on my back, so I wasn’t shot in the head with another nighttime adventure with Betsy. But since I was a year younger and couldn’t stand the thought of her thinking I was a baby, I pretended to be excited and fell right back into the deceptive routine we had perfected a year earlier. Sure enough when her mother went to bed, Betsy pulled me out the back door, stationed me in front of her mother’s Buick, climbed in, put the gearshift into neutral, and told me to push.

Another thing you need to know is that besides my age, I had eyebrows that were working against me in a serious way. After about a month of swimming everyday and having my blonde eyebrows bleached out to the color invisible by a combination of sunshine and chlorine, Mother decided something had to be done, so she took me to her beautician and had them dyed black. Doris told me to sit real still and try not to even breathe much or she might slip, and I would go blind. So even if I had decided to throw a fit to keep this from happening, I couldn’t without spending the rest of my life in utter darkness, so they pretty much had me over a barrel.

Since Mother had only my eyebrows dyed black and left the hair on my head blonde, I had a startling appearance, even to myself, who was not very discriminating about looks. I thought I looked remarkably like Evil-lyn, the witch with the wicked laugh that came on TV at midnight every Friday night. Sometimes kids would stop and stare at me, and the little ones who didn’t know any better than to be rude would ask me which of my hairs were the color I was born with, my head hairs or my eyebrow hairs. All this caused me to feel nervous about myself, especially around kids that were older than me, so I was even more willing to try to do anything it took to prove to them that I wasn’t really strange or different; I just looked that way.

So when Betsy told me to push her mother’s Buick out of the driveway in the dead of the night, I didn’t ask any questions. Once she got both pairs of our shoes up underneath her so that she could see over the steering wheel, she wasn’t such a bad driver. She drove down to the school where we picked up the same two boys that met us in the barn last summer, but this time they weren’t just faces in the dark; this time they were faces in the dark that were telling us that in the sack they were carrying were some cans of beer. Beer was something that I absolutely hated, and I knew this because Daddy had given me a sip of his when I was about five, and it tasted worse to me than the rotten Kennel Ration that I had accidentally taken a bite of when I mistook it for leftover meatloaf when we were at home with a babysitter.

But what could I do? There I was looking like a little kid blonde-headed witch-freak who was so short that I wouldn’t have been able to see over the steering wheel even if we had put six pairs of shoes under me. So I held my breath and took a swig of beer. Since I was in the back seat and it was dark, Betsy couldn’t tell that I was fake-drinking it, and as soon as we got to Brush-a- Creek to our deceased great-grandparents, Mama-and Papa-Over-Yonder’s, old deserted dog-run house, I opened the door and poured the rest of it out and then burped real loud to throw everybody off.

We all traipsed around the house in the dark dodging holes in the floor for about thirty minutes and then went back to the school to slide down the fire escapes. Doing this at night was a pretty smart idea because as much tantalizing as those fire escape slides always looked in the daytime, we couldn’t have done it then even if we could have managed not to get caught because they were made of tin and would have fried our legs. I guess the only daylight time you really want to slide down these things was if there really was a fire up there on the second or third floor, and your only two options were burning all the hide off your legs or staying inside and having every bit of your hide melt into a puddle. After a while, we left the boys there and went back and rolled the car back up into the driveway.

After we got inside I noticed that my new Estee Lauder perfume had fallen out of my purse. I imagined it underneath Mama- and Papa-Over-Yonder’s house being swarmed by millions of Daddy Longlegs and crawled over by copperheads. This was the first time I had ever had any perfume of my own, and Julie had given it to me for my birthday only a week earlier. I don’t know why losing perfume would be so upsetting to a tomboy like me, but it could have been that I thought since I looked so freaky with my multicolored hair, at least I could compensate by smelling good.

After I left Betsy’s, I went out in the country to Cayuga to stay with my grandmother, Mama Leta. She was a widow trying her best to raise our aunt Babette, but this was not as easy as you might think. Just because someone is an aunt does not mean they are old and wise and responsible like the word “aunt” seems to suggest. Babette was wilder than even Betsy, and since she was also five years older, she was a lot smarter about ways to get into trouble than either one of us or even both of us put together. Most of the time I was safe because Babette would leave me at home when she went places with her friends, but the Saturday before it was time for me to leave on Sunday, Mama Leta talked Babette into taking me with her riding with her boyfriend, Coy. I don’t know why somebody who isn’t even a policeman would have handcuffs, but Coy had picked up a pair from somewhere, and he was chomping at the bit to try them out. There must have been a shortage of little kids to victimize in Cayuga, so when I ended up being part of their carload that day, they didn’t waste any time striking while the iron was hot. They talked me into letting them try the handcuffs on me, and the next thing I knew I was handcuffed to the back door of the high school cafeteria. Then to make matters worse for me but funnier for them, they started throwing some Black Cats at me that Coy had found under his car seat leftover from the Fourth of July. Something inside of me kept wondering if they would have done this to somebody whose eyebrows were not dyed black or to someone who was grown-up and sophisticated enough to carry her own bottle of Estee Lauder perfume around in her purse. After they got tired of laughing and throwing firecrackers at me, Coy tried to turn me loose, but the key he had in his pocket that he thought went to this pair of handcuffs didn’t fit this particular lock. It was the middle of July and there wasn’t even a breeze, and the longer I stood there the hotter those handcuffs got against my skin.

When they both left me there alone to go find the guy who had the other key, I started thinking about the story Mr. Pete had told us about Jacob. He played a mean trick on his brother, and for a while it seemed like he was just going to go on through his life without suffering for that, but then later on he got a big dose of his own medicine when he got scared stiff about meeting up with that brother and even a bigger dose later when his very own kids threw his favorite son in a hole and convinced him that he had been killed by a wild animal. I thought about shooting ink all over Tina’s coat and ruining all those eggs at Western Hatchery, about stealing the pens from Green’s Drugstore, shooting out all the county’s light bulbs on the square, and picking a fight with Kate just because she didn’t grow up in Azalea Heights. I thought about putting pennies on the railroad track, never considering the possibility of burning down a whole town until the train hit the penny and threw out a spark that ignited the pasture behind the Agnews’ house and required three fire trucks to put out the fire. I thought about diving into the swimming pool and ruining my Easter dress Mother worked so hard on and Betsy and me risking our lives in the middle of the night in my aunt’s car when she thought we were sleeping safely in the next room. All these things marched through my head like a parade as those handcuffs burned into my wrists, and I began to understand what Janie Simon’s mother meant when she would nod her head and say “Just remember. What goes around comes around.”

Yep, there were things that had been going around and around for years that I just figured were making their way steadily on out to the horizon, but now here they were coming marching back around like the Azalea Heights Rodeo Parade right up into my lap.

Right then I began to catch on to the reason for Sunday school: If I had paid more attention to what happened to Jacob, I might have been spared the trauma of being chained up to the Cayuga High School cafeteria in a hundred-degree temperature like some black-browed convict.

From Out of the Chute in Azalea Heights, Chapter 18