Pine-scented walks, an early memory: a writing exercise

To encourage my brain to continue to play with words and to encourage me to keep handwriting things, I attend writer's workshops whenever possible. Today I want to share a special exercise I wrote from the workshop I went to today. The prompt was: Where and when would you go back in your past to visit a memory and why? 
(*Note: This is dedicated to all mothers, and especially my mother. She is also a writer and lives in the same city I do, so we attended the session together. Of course, I read it to her.)
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Perhaps I would go back to an early memory of walking to preschool at St. Pat’s Catholic Church, three blocks from our house, hand-in-hand with my mother. My, my, I must have been young. Four years old, I think? It’s a very simple memory, almost like a dream…

At the dead-end of the street at the edge of our neighborhood in Wisconsin, a stand of carefully planted pine trees stood tall, already old, forming a wall of protection between that quaint, safe neighborhood and the business part of town. Just on the other side was the Catholic church, joining that protective force, standing on its own, apart from the cluster of churches on the opposite side of town. Just the church and the pine trees. We weren’t Catholic, but it was a happy place to attend preschool, which I remember fairly well.

But the walks… Mornings of pine-scented quiet, so close to home we just walked each day, but me still too young to go by myself… and we didn’t have to hold hands, but we did. (Is it one memory or a composite of several ones?) I liked that there wasn’t a sidewalk at the dead-end. We just stepped over the curb and onto the dirt deer path the last twenty feet to the parking lot. The empty lot led to the back door of the church where my classroom was.

I’ve always liked trees… and maybe those trees started it all. They probably seemed even taller to my young eyes. They were majestic and special, like Heidi’s, the Swiss girl of literature, the swishing of the needle-laden branches in the breeze a very nostalgic sound. Those who grew up near the coast may fondly remember the pleasant white noise of the ocean, but I, a Midwest girl through-and-through, remember the pines.

Maybe I would go back to this memory just to squeeze my mother’s hand again, look up and say, “Thank you for this walk. Thank you for your part in my love of trees, morning walks and quiet neighborhoods.” Perhaps I’m choosing this moment in my life because it was an end of an era of me living at home, leaving my special last-kid-at-home relationship with Mom. It was just before my entrance into a much longer era of fulltime school attendance. But, perhaps surprisingly, given the era’s classic sentimentality, my memory is not ever of her crying, not of holding me back tightly from more hours away from home and from growing up, but rather of quietly holding my hand… taking me there.

Selah.

The result of a fun writing prompt.

Especially pertinent to this blog's title, I am sharing the result of a prompt from a writer's group I attended today. We free-write for all prompts, so that means you keep your pen going, you don't cross out and you don't judge what you wrote. Except for a few minor edits, I have left it alone. For this particular prompt, we had 10 minutes for "You were just told that a spaceship crashed into Cristo’s Over the River drape in the Arkansas River." Read on for my fictional, satirical, locally-relevant work. (For my sake, imagine that OTR is already built):

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Who knew a spaceship would become a rivership?

Upon hearing the news, I imagine the catastrophe in my mind’s eye: a ripped drape, a broken spaceship, the gawking tourists. Karma had struck Mr. Cristo and the heavens had spoken: no Over The River project would be blessed.

As I inwardly survey the wreckage, questions fill my mind and the gaps. Are there people aboard this ship? Or is it a UFO, now clearly identified in the light of day? Will traffic be stopped in the canyon for days, like seems to happen often? Can rafters get out before the swift current smooshes the raft and dumps out its contents?

Of course, the hullabaloo in Salida will be the Over The River wreckage, the political aftermath, and more local fighting to ensue. The town of Crestone had begun séances, the informant told us, to plead the universe to bring peace as well as protection from extraterrestrials.

Traffic would be bad because of the tourists, not just efforts to clean up the mess, and all the reporters staking out to catch a glimpse of any survivors on board. I want to see the carnage myself, to not rely on secondhand information, but inevitable traffic jams stave off my impulse.

Of course, economically, the local commissioners secretly couldn’t be happier: all those reporters, extra tourists and the opportunity to erect a someday-historic sign: “Site of the 2012 spaceship crash”. Maybe the Mayan’s were right: there’s something strange about this year.

 
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Everyday Sanctuary

We ride in the car: I'm in the passenger's seat; he drives. A Christian song we both like is playing, and we nod our heads, tap our fingers, sway our shoulders. Yes, Lord.
Thoughtful, my friend comments, "The inside of my car is the closest thing to what my personal sanctuary would be."

Hmm. My writer's mind grabbed the moment and stored it for later. "Personal sanctuary." Interesting how a word that I associate with church--"sanctuary"--was paired with "car". Take it as a sign of my generation. And coming from my friend, who especially likes to drive, it makes twice as much sense. Although I don't like to drive nearly as much, I could identify with his words as well.

God is everywhere--in majestic churches and in mundane cars. That my friend and I tend to worship in both those places shows how He is smack-dab in the midst of everyday life. It's a personal space, because, at least for myself, I'm most often alone in my car. I'm not embarrassed to sing along with music, comfortable because no one can hear, free to be earnest. And my prayers spoken out loud there sound like conversations, probably more than any other time. It's easy to imagine Jesus close by, sitting in the passengers seat.

(Momentary soapbox here: The main Christian radio station that comes into my area is KLOVE. I have to say right here that I'm not a big fan of their overall choice of songs, their annoying talk shows, or the biannual fundraisers that seem to go on for ages... However, they do seek to edify their audience, so when I turn on my car and catch the verse of the day, for example, I am often encouraged. I won't complain about that! So that also contributes to creating a personal sanctuary in my car.)

A sanctuary is a special, physical place that is used habitually for spiritual awareness and worship. That's my offhand definition anyway. With that meaning, other locations such as my bedroom, the living room couch, the spot at the piano, and the Remote Outdoors in general also qualify as personal sanctuaries. I've been well aware of those locations. And please understand: I still enjoy church sanctuaries. Gathering a group of believers in one place to worship is important and powerful. But this was a new thought, so just add my personal list, "inside of my car". Hey, why not?

Can you relate? Where's your personal sanctuary?

Musingly yours,
Ellen

A Think-Write.

A Think-Write for a couple of minutes.

I would time it but I don’t want to bother. I can’t remember what you call it when you write exactly what you're thinking for a set time but a Think-Write-So-It-Flows seems to work. I know what I’m talking about anyway.

I just read and looked through the college yearbook Grinnell College--1966. Did you know that they used to not offer credit for working on the publication of their very own yearbook? Crazy. Two of the student staff flunked or were put on academic probation just because their classwork suffered due to their hard work on this yearbook. Then it wasn’t approved by administrators, so it wasn’t published until 20 years later. 20 years! My host father gave it to me to read this evening and it’s made me thoughtful.

Black and white photos, every one. [The photos in this entry are mine.] Controversial because of stating opinion that wasn’t shared by faculty or administrators nor all of student body. Controversial because not everyone in the senior class is shown, and no head and shoulder shots are given. It is a roughly chronological, photographic-masterpiece of a year at Grinnell.

I don’t know anyone who has gone to Grinnell, but the college and town name are familiar to me. I’ve never seen the campus, but I wish I had, because then I could compare it to the photos I saw in this book. I’m sure lots of things have changed tremendously.

Controversy over boys and girls visiting each other after hours, etc. So much call for change, for the ability to change things… but in the end, the admins have the say and the money. They actually sent out letters to parents discouraging student drug use, student sex, etc.... but these pictures tell the (alleged) majority student opinion: Mary J isn’t so bad (my peers still say the same today! Does anything ever change?), couples are fact of life, and boys will always be the slackers compared to women, at least in big groups.

So all this subversive journalism and photography in a yearbook that was banned makes me think. Makes me wish that my peers and I were living for something that means something, in a political-academic-cultural way. I don’t mean the religion part right now, but I do mean the good humanitarian part. I’ve never even seen my university's yearbook—was there one?—but I’m sure it is nothing like this one and it looks nothing like what I knew of it. Granted, it’s hard to sum up for each student what they did and lived and felt in college. But still. Did the student government do anything? Did the student newspaper—high quality though it is—put an urge in me to stop sitting around and to think hard about what I’m doing with my life?

Oh, believe me there was plenty of drinking and lazing around pictured in those pages. But these were people who also felt deep in their gut that they wanted to mean something, and be able to cause change. Be able to cause change.

Yeah, that’s it.

Dramatic paragraph with [Enter Key] because this warrants it.

No wonder people don’t change things; no wonder because my peers don’t even know enough to change things. We have to know first that it’s possible! That if we have a cause that lights our fires; that we have a way to go about it. We are the students, after all, the ones who are the lifeblood of a university.

Sure makes me hate rich admins all the more. Sure makes me hate bigger and bigger classes each year, and those fundraising campaigns. What is that money for? I suddenly feel like I’ve been scammed. Like the university life is one expensive way to give more money to someone else than back to me, the one in need of a degree to do something with my life. What was the point of the liberal arts college experience—besides put me into debt and my many friends into much greater debt?

…Where was I going with this? I’m just kinda nostalgic and kinda upset. But I can’t pinpoint why or how exactly.

I wish I had tried to photograph the sunlight that filtered through trees into the piano practice room in the basement of Music Hall at my own university. That would have summed up much for me and my experience.

In fact, I wish I knew enough about photography to produce pics that I actually like… and not just of people or random snow scenes that don’t convey any emotion.

Why was that moment (or was it moments?) in Music Hall so crucial to me? Because it meant that I was thinking on life, becoming someone rich and deep, that I loved life and it’s natural beauty… that I was in tune with campus, not trying to escape from it, yet not in one of the commercial, “sellable” aspects of it.

I’m so glad I found a piano on campus. Ha, no, rather, pianos. Many quiet friends in protected basement rooms with beautiful, leaf-filtered sunlight for years to come.

“There are some things in life that money can’t buy,” comes the commercial motto of MasterCard. Or is it Visa? No, MasterCard. That’s what I’m feeling right now. Just what did my money (or rather, my parents’ money) buy when I signed up for roughly 4 years? And are those years in context of the rest of world history for me to reflect on later? Just as the Grinnell yearbook had many hints to the Vietnam War going on, I want my memories (which will apparently have to replace a yearbook since I never bought one and probably can’t justify the money to buy one now even if I could) to be in context. President Obama was elected, I remember that. Michael Jackson died. …Um…

Kirk went and came back from modern war in the Middle East. People came to Christ. Students died, from explained and unexplained causes. I learned that I know almost nothing about financial things and I am soon going to need a credit score in order to really make it in life… By the way, I think financial class should be required for freshman and/or seniors, ALL of them, at all colleges. Ha.

One last comment. Near the end of the yearbook, I thought it was very honest and realistic for the editors to write that graduates sleepily got through the commencement ceremony, said some goodbyes,and then “the class of ‘66 scattered.” How anti-climactic yet honest is that? “Scattered.” That’s exactly what we’ll do. Just like in high school, but even more, because we didn’t come from the same place in the first place. But how bitter. All that joy and change and boredom, and all those smirks and kisses and interesting lectures and pretty photos to capture it all… and they scatter. An unplanned force came together in 1966 to actually realize that something isn’t right and things need to change at Grinnell College, but things didn’t because they couldn’t and everyone leaves anyway because college isn’t a lasting thing. So we scatter.

That leads me to this thought: what am I going to do in this life? Yes, I want to encourage people toward Jesus. But I also want to improve this world practically, to show my respect for the good in it. I want to be a relevant, thinking Christian who made it through a 4-year, secular liberal arts college with a degree, and cares about the world around her because she cares about the scattered people around her. What am I going to do? What will my niche be? Or not one, but multiple seeds cast be?

For some reason, I think of the futility brought up by the song “Fix You”:

When you try your best, but you don't succeed
When you get what you want, but not what you need
When you feel so tired, but you can't sleep
Stuck in reverse

And the tears come streaming down your face
When you lose something you can't replace
When you love someone, but it goes to waste
Could it be worse?

That’s about how I feel right now. That, and Ecclesiastes’ reminder (or is it a warning?):

“Nothing is new under the sun.”

Nothing is new. Grinnell Yearbook – 1966 taught me that. Not the pot smoking nor the liberal attitude felt by its users. Not the generational gap on moral/sexual beliefs and practices. Not the pocket-lining administrators who live in a different world than the students on their campus. Not the beauty of the experience of acting even though it's just an extracurricular activity, nor the desire to change things that’s common among publications crews. Those things aren't new.

Oh, ha. You know, the chorus lyrics say “Tears stream down on your face” but before reading the lyrics, I thought they said “It’s history there on your face.” I liked the latter better, and that makes more sense right now. It’s history, Grinnell, right on your face, finally published, and you can’t fix it. 

I can’t fix you…

but I’ll damn well try.

—Ellen—

“When you're too in love to let it go…
But if you never try you'll never know
Just what you're worth”