Trouble!

I am having big issues with Blogger. Three times now the Prelude has failed to post. So I'll be on hiatus until I get this fixed. So sorry.

Happy birthday, Nancy and Collie.

My birthday is tomorrow, and I always think of Nancy and Collie on my birthday, because Collie's was  August 19 and Nancy's was August 20. They were both my best friends at different parts of my life, and they are both gone. I still miss them.

The first birthday I remember is my third. What I remember -- and know full well may not be entirely true -- is that there is a cake on a card table in the driveway, and that there are children around it, and that when the candles are lighted my cousin Peter, who was five, blew them out. I cried and it did not console me that the candles were lighted again.

There was another birthday, probably four, when the party had a cowboy theme. I have pictures of this party. I wore shorts and a striped T shirt and a bandana around my neck and a straw cowboy hat. Someone gave me a doll with a cloth body and a plastic face, and my brother bit the face so that it got all caved in. I'm not doing so well with birthday parties.

Until I turned five. All I wanted was the Cinderella wristwatch that came in a glass (plastic) slipper.
 And I got it! I was over the moon. I don't remember another thing about it, except that the cake came from Hough Bakery, and there was nothing in the world like a Hough Bakery birthday cake. It was bore little resemblance to the frothy, styrofoamy, crisco-and-sugar cakes we get today. It was rich and light and everyone in our whole family ate cake for breakfast until it was gone. It was so good that when I went home for my 25th high school reunion our class got one and devoured it the same way we did when we were five.

Nancy North was my soul sister, though of course I didn't have these words then. I like to believe that were she alive we would still be fast friends. She was one day older than I and a smidge taller. She had curly brown hair and I had stringy dark blond hair. We were too young to sleep over, but whenever we were together it was as if we were complete. She learned to skip before I did but did not brag about it. The day we started nursery school she and I holed up in the very cool loft and watched the other children cry. We had no clue why they were crying. I knew she adored me as I adored her.

The only clue that I had that Nancy was sick was that one day my father brought home one of the very first television sets. It was a rather small box with a round screen, and it sat on the kitchen counter. We all crowded around it to watch Howdy Doody. Suddenly it disappeared. My mother told me that they had taken it to the hospital so that Nancy could watch it.

I had a little bit of a cold, so I had to stay in the car when we took Nancy her birthday present. She couldn't come to my party. She died before kindergarten started.

My mother is changing the sheets in my parents' bedroom. The windows are open and the sunlight pours in from them onto the bare mattress and the sheet, which floats like a sail on the breeze. Somehow I have accidentally overheard my mother talking to someone about the fact that Nancy had died. I confront her in disbelief. Maybe it was my five year old version of denial. What my mother actually said and what I heard were very likely different things. What I remember is that Nancy had gone to heaven to be with the angels, and that she would have to be perfect or they would kick her out and she'd be born again as another baby.
Mother tucked the sheets in. 

I ached with the absence of Nancy. I wonder if there is another person alive who remembers her. I'm guessing her parents are dead by now. They were Sally and Bill. They lived at the end of our street, but I don't remember seeing them a lot after Nancy died. She had a brother, Billy, who was a baby when she died.
I learned later that she had had bone cancer and that it was likely the experimental treatment that caused her death.

I met Collie on a phone call. I don't remember whether I called her or she called me, but somebody told our mothers that we needed to meet each other. We had both just moved to New Orleans, newly married, and she had just had her first daughter and I was  pregnant with our first son. I loved Collie before I even met her in person. It was as if we had known each other forever. She had huge wide-set eyes and was warm and exuberant, and we shared those days of early motherhood with crazy joy. We walked the streets of the Garden District and we had each other over for dinner. She had a slow, Georgia way of talking and an easy, slightly cynical way of seeing things, and a huge black lab that shed incessantly all over their tiny walk-up apartment. One day I was taking care of Jennifer for her. Jennifer was just over a year old, and we were in a fabric store, a cavernous place where she realized that her voice echoed, and she sat on my hip yelling at the top of her voice, "Shiiiit! Sheeeyit! Sheeeeet. Sheeeit!" I knew for certain where she learned that.

Collie and Lawton moved back to Georgia and we moved back to Shreveport. They invited us to go quail hunting with them, but it was over my mother's birthday, and she was visiting us.

She was pregnant with Wells, and I was pregnant with Tyler when we left New Orleans.

A friend called to tell me she had died. We had been on vacation when she had a seizure while taking a bath. They had already had the funeral. No one knew where to reach us. Collie hid from us the fact that she had had epilepsy since she was a child.

I would like to know that if she were alive today we would still be friends. I think she was 27 when she died.

This spring was my 50th high school reunion. I didn't got because it was the same weekend I was retiring from the parish I have served for the last nine years. I got a picture of the women who did go, and it was somewhat vindicating to me that they were all the same age as I am. Some look better than others. But we are all in our late 60's.

Collie would have turned 68 on Tuesday. Nancy would have turned 68 on Wednesday. I turn 68 on Thursday. But Nancy is five, and Collie is 27. It is a privilege to be turning 68. I wish I had a Hough birthday cake. I'm grateful that the love I felt for these two beautiful people has never left me. I can see their faces as clear as day.And I am five, and I am twenty-seven, and I am sixty-eight.

The Avowal by Denise Levertov

I remember so well the day I learned to float on my back in what is a small fountain, maybe two feet deep, at my school. It was during summer day camp, and I was four.

I hope you get to float on cool water under warm summer sunshine.


The Avowal by Denise Levertov

As swimmers dare
to lie face to the sky
and water bears them,
as hawks rest upon air
and air sustains them,
so would I learn to attain
freefall, and float
into Creator Spirit’s deep embrace,
knowing no effort earns
that all-surrounding grace.

Not exactly!

My friend observed to me this afternoon that I am woefully behind in posting to my actual blog. The Prelude is up to date, and the page on books I've been reading is almost up to date, but I'm not doing so well in this department. Or any writing department yet. I'm surprised at how daunted I am by the blank page. I intend to get over it.

Retirement is about six weeks along, and so far it is a whole lot of housework. Quite satisfying housework, but still it is all about transition. I'm told by my elders that it will take a while, so I'm not frustrated yet, and I have hope that when the dust settles, I will find my pace and attend to the creative sirens that lured me to take the step.

After seventeen years of first seminary and then non-stop parish ministry, this house needs a lot of my attention. There was not a spare bookcase anywhere, and 16 boxes of books followed me home from the church office, so I've given quite a lot away. I thought I'd feel all nostalgic and depressed about this, but I'm actually energized about it, imagining that I'm a seminarian who has come across this treasure trove of nearly new books. It's mostly preaching resources and pretty hard-core theology, and my attitude is that, except for the rare few I'm keeping, if I haven't read it by now, I probably am not going to. And that if I've read it once, it's time to read something new. 

Peter Walsh is my guardian angel in all this purging. He used to be on Oprah and is now on Rachael Ray a lot, and he sees clutter as a truly spiritual issue. Too much stuff robs us of the life we are meant to live, a life in the now rather than the past. The small areas of order I've managed to create so far truly are sources of inner peace. Walsh's first book is It's All Too Much, but the one I really like is Does All this Clutter Make my Butt Look Fat. Maybe it's just the title, but it's great. I'm getting to know the guy at Good Will pretty well. And I'm looking forward to more peace and order.

But in all this sorting I'm still making time for rest, exercise, fun with children and grandchildren, cooking (I''ll tend to that page next), and reading.

I"m missing St. Alban's terribly. Terribly. Really. The people especially, but much to my surprise, the weekly sermon writing and sharing. It's a gap in my schedule and my inner life. Saying that I miss the liturgy doesn't even begin to express that hole in my life. It's going to take time to find a new parish. We're giving it time.

I know that it was time to retire, but it still hurt. I need to be with the grandchildren before they are grown, not to mention John Bennet and friends. My blood pressure is down about 20 points. I need exercise and a better diet. And St. Alban's is so incredibly healthy and will find just the right person to lead them in the next phase of their exciting and blessed life.

So that's where I am right now. A work in progress. It's going to take a while, but it is good. Thanks be to God.