My Life in Little Stories

Image: Portrait of Linda by Ron W. G.

My Life in Little Stories

“Be courteous to all, but intimate with few, and let those few be well tried before you give them your confidence.  ” —George Washington

The great spiritual poet and hymn writer, James Weldon Johnson, declared:  “I will not allow one prejudiced person or one million or one hundred million to blight my life.  I will not let prejudice or any of its attendant humiliations and injustices bear me down to spiritual defeat.  My inner life is mine, and I shall defend and maintain its integrity against all the powers of hell.”

And that quirky transcendentalist, Henry David Thoreau, averred:  “The squeaking of the pump sounds as necessary as the music of the spheres.”

I dedicate My Life in Little Stories to Mommy & Daddy

Helen Richardson & Bert Richardson

(June 27, 1923—September 5, 1981 / January 12, 1913-August 5, 2000)

“You’re my Family”

for Daddy

I remember that you used to get hankerings to go to Kentucky ever so often, but a lot of the time Mommy didn’t want to go, and so we didn’t go as often as you would have liked. But one particular time your hankering was stronger than usual, and you kept trying to persuade Mommy to go, but her wish not to go was equal to yours, and she wouldn’t budge. So you asked me to go with you. I thought I might want to go; I wanted you to be happy, but I wasn’t sure. I felt a little odd us going without the whole family.  So you kept asking me to go, and I asked you, “Why do you want me to go?”  And you said, “Because you’re my family.” That was the right answer—we went. 

Southern Woman

for Mommy

Through astral reverie, I visit your essence,
Lingering alongside that of your beloved father—
The grandfather who escaped this earth prison
Before I was sentenced to its concrete and bars.

You are the same small brown woman with black
Hair and eyes of fire that flash, imparting to me
You intuit I am near, perceiving you both—my first
Look at the Greek grandfather I never met.

Our Greekness on this planet has led
Us back to a logical legendary ancestor—
A strong Spartacus whose love of freedom spread
Even as he perished before Christ on a cross.

But you are a pure American South woman
And if any Kentucky woman deserves the title
Of steel magnolia, it is you, who through a frail
Body still attests the strength of a Sandow.

Your ethereal mind reminds me of the day
We saw those two turtles come into the yard.
Standing over them, we marveled, and I will never
Forget what you said: “If we had shells like that,

We would be protected from the dangers of this world.”
And I felt that I was in the presence of a wise master.
It was only later that I realized the full impact
Of what seemed a simple yet deep message—

We need a protective shell even more to shield
The heart than the head, for it is through the emotions
That we inflict enormous damage on our souls.  I am
Blessed and grateful to inform you I finally understand.

1.  My Earliest Memories

My mother, Helen Richardson, was a housewife, and my father, Bert Richardson, was a factory worker, who became a businessman–owner and operator of his own fishing lakes business that was first called Richardson’s Ponds and later renamed Elkhorn Lakes.  We (Mommy, Daddy, my younger sister and I) lived on a small farm (about thirty-three acres) eight miles southwest of Richmond, Indiana, and my father also did a little farming.  He raised some hogs, kept some chickens and some cows, and he planted some big fields of corn and watermelons.  We always had a big garden in summer, lots of tomatoes, green beans, peppers, sweet corn, cucumbers, okra, turnips, and we also had plenty of strawberries from our strawberry patch. 

My earliest memories are of our house before it was wired for electricity.  I remember the icebox and how Daddy would bring home a big block of ice to store in the top of it.  I remember a battery radio and how Daddy would bring home a new battery for it.  I remember how Mommy and Daddy would go out to the pump and pump water and carry it to the house, and it would sit on the cabinet with a dipper in it. I remember how Daddy would blow out the lamps every night. 

To wash clothes Mommy would build a fire outside to heat water.  To wash dishes she’d simply heat water on the stove, but I don’t remember what the stove was like.  I know at some point we got bottle gas, and maybe we got it before we got electricity.  But I just can’t remember if we had a wood stove or not. I remember that relatives in Kentucky had wood stoves.  My paternal grandmother had a wood-burning kitchen stove, and so did an aunt and uncle who lived near her (my father’s brother and his wife).  The relatives in Kentucky who lived in the city of Lexington (Daddy’s other brothers and their wives) had gas or electric.  They were much more advanced in modern civilization than the country relatives.  My dad said we got electricity in 1949, which means that those memories of the icebox, battery radio, and oil lamps are those of a three year old or younger, since I was born in 1946.

Update:I recently asked my aunt Veda about the kind of cook stove we had back then, and she said it was kerosene, and of course the lamps were kerosene too. 

2.  The Hog

Once I went with my dad to slop the hogs.  I thought a big spotted one was chasing me.  I ran down the hill and fell across a plow.  My belly turned purple and blue–the biggest pain I had ever felt.  And the hog wasn’t really chasing me.

3.  Almost Drowned

Once my aunt Freda, my mom, baby sister, and I went down to the river.  My mom stood on the bank holding my sister, while my aunt and I went out into the water to swim.  I fell under the water and saw bubbles. I was frightened and have always thought that I almost drowned that day.  I didn’t because my aunt pulled me out by my hair.

4.  The Snake

Once I handled a little snake to impress a boy who liked me.  I must have been about thirteen years old at the time.  I was working in the shack at my dad’s fishing ponds.  And there was no running water back then.  A customer came in and ordered a hot dog.  I made her the hot dog, took her money, thank you (actually I probably didn’t thank her–my dad was always telling me I should thank the customers, but I just couldn’t get the hang of it), goodbye.  The boy says, still in earshot of the customer:  “Boy, wonder what she’d think if she knew you’d just handled a snake before you made that hot dog.”  Well, I found out what she thought.  She stormed back in and demanded to know if that was true about me handling a snake.  I said yes, shame-faced.  She slammed down the hot dog on the counter, and stalked out of the shack, and went in search of my dad. My dad didn’t get too bent out of shape over it, but it embarrassed me painfully.  Especially because of the fact that handling snakes was not at the top of my list of pleasurable things to do, and pleasing or entertaining that particular boy wasn’t either.  This kind of thing has plagued me my entire life–doing stupid things against my own nature and then looking back on it, and all I can do is scratch my head and wonder what made me do them.

5.  A Drunken Fisher (Dewey Houser)

Once my mom and I stood in the living room looking down the hill at a drunk fisherman, trying to get to the bank from the wooden fish box.  The narrow plank and his extremely drunken state impeded his progress.  He’d take a step and weave side to side.  He edged out to about the middle of the plank, and then his right foot slipped off into the water.  He just sat there straddling the plank, weaving side to side.  He got himself turned around, but he was then facing the wrong direction.  So he shook his fist at the box then banged it on the plank.  Finally, he got himself turned around and crawled across the plank.  My mom hated drunks and sprinkled our observation with “Lord, just take a look at the drunken slob!” and “Oh, my, my, that stupid sot!”–while we both laughed at the spectacle.  The mystery of all this is that although he couldn’t see or hear us, he told my dad that we were up there laughing at him down there that day trying to walk that plank.

6.  The Date

When I was 13, my mom said I couldn’t date.  But when I turned 17, I said–yes, I can.  And so my first date went like this: A guy who’d come down to the ponds to fish asked me for a date.  Actually, he kissed me first then asked to take me to the movies.  We went to see “The Longest Day.”  All through the movie, he kept pulling me closer to him, and the arm of the seat kept gouging into my ribs–ouch, that hurt!  On the drive back, he said he was going to park off the road at the bend where a tractor trail veered off in the opposite direction and take my clothes off.  Wait a minute!–I thought.  And then I talked him into letting me drive–I had only a beginner’s permit and I needed the practice–I promise I’ll park in the tractor trail, oh please!  So he let me drive.  And rounding that bend, I poured on some extra speed.  After we had passed Casanova’s love nest, he looked back and realized that my clothes would stay on.

7.  The Joke

The first joke I remember hearing was:  Why did the little moron tiptoe past the medicine cabinet?  Give up?  He didn’t want to wake the sleeping pills.  I wish I could remember where I heard this, but alas . . .

8.  The Play

When I was in the first grade, I was cast in a role in a short Christmas play.  I cannot remember much about the play, only that several girls sat around a table talking.  Surely, we had rehearsed prior to performance, but my mind blanks it all.  One tiny detail haunts my memory.  Just moments before we were to present the play before a room full of parents, I scratched a scab off my leg, and it started to bleed profusely.  I just couldn’t go out there in front of all those people with blood running down my leg, so I refused.  I felt terrible about the refusal but worse about the blood.  I can’t even remember the excuse I used.  I know it wasn’t the blood, because I was too embarrassed about it.  Embarrassment was born to stalk me.

9.  Cake Icing

One time we were eating supper, and my aunt Lizzy and uncle Shadie came to visit.  They stood in the doorway of the kitchen talking to my mom and dad while we finished eating.  I was eating a nice sized chunk of chocolate cake, and I was eating the cake first saving the icing to last.  My aunt Lizzy noticed my method and said that Vicki, her older daughter, didn’t like icing either; she just ate the cake.  I wish I could remember what I thought at that time and what I did.  I loved the icing and what I was doing was far from “just eating the cake”; I was saving the best to eat last.  My guess is that I waited until everybody was out of the kitchen and then I went back for my icing.  I probably felt that I should leave the icing since Aunt Lizzy sounded as if she was complimenting me for being like her daughter. 

10.  The Telephone

We got a telephone when I was about ten years old.  Other kids in my school had phones, and I had heard them give their phone numbers when the teacher had asked.  The problem was that even though we had a phone, I couldn’t call any of the kids in my school, because it was long distance. Our phone had a Richmond number and theirs were Centerville numbers.  Once we were visiting my aunt Freda who lived in Centerville.  She had a phone so I asked her if I could call someone.  I called a girl in my class, because I remembered her phone number, and even though we had hardly ever talked at school, I seemed to feel that there was something magical about talking on the phone.  I found out that there wasn’t, because after the first Hello, this is Linda, how are you?  I couldn’t think of a thing to say.

11.  The Church Bell

Abington is the name of a very small town and the name of the school I first attended, grades 1 through 7.  We lived across the Whitewater River from Abington.  And although the distance to my school from where we lived was about five miles, the route the school bus had to take was about fifteen miles. I stayed all night once with a friend who lived in Abington, but other than riding through it in the school bus, I never spent much time there. 

The thing about Abington that images itself in my mind is the sound of the church bell—on Sundays I could hear the sound of the church bell.  From the Abington Christian Church, the ringing bell on Sundays impressed an auditory image on my heart. Years later, I would find my own spiritual path and remember fondly the sound of that bell and the feeling it instilled in me.

12.  The German Language 

My high school studies revealed to me my interest in foreign languages, and I chose to major in German in college with plans to teach.  I began that study at Ball State, transferred to Miami University, where I completed my B.A. degree.  I later completed an M.A. degree in German at BSU.  I discovered later that I did not really enjoy teaching a foreign language as much as I enjoyed studying it.

13.  Spiders

Until I was about seventeen years old, we did not enjoy the modern convenience of an indoor bathroom.  Instead, we visited the trusty outdoor convenience that we always referred to as the toilet.  It was a nice one–a one seater built by the WPA during the 1930s—or so I had heard.  Unlike lesser quality facilities I had experienced, it was solid with a cement floor, carved wooden seat, and a handy lid.  A thing about it was in summer one might peer down into its blackness and catch a glimpse of a snake.  But a worse fate was to sit down and feel the legs of a spider crawling up your exposure.  I became very wary about the spiders.  I’d look scrupulously inside the opening and around the seat before commencing operation relief, and to apprise others, I wrote in crayon on the wall, “Look before you sit!”

14.  An Old Coot

People who came down to the ponds to fish were sometimes funny and entertaining but seldom very intellectual.  So when a person occasionally showed interest in the life of the mind, I was interested in engaging in conversation with that person.  The summer after my graduation from high school, one such individual, an older gentleman who seemed above the mental power of the average fisherman, showed an interest in my education and writing.  We discussed philosophy of life and landed on a speculation about the nature of love, and I told him I would write an essay wherein I would expand and elucidate my philosophical stance on that subject.  I wrote the essay, and with great satisfaction presented it for his comments.  Instead of addressing the issues I had explored, the old coot accused me of plagiarism.  When I challenged him to name the work he claimed I had plagiarized, of course, he could not, but he insisted that someone my age could not possibly know enough about love to have those ideas. Happily, my dad sided with me, claiming that writers usually have more insight in philosophical subjects and can therefore exhibit more maturity than the average person their own age.  That my dad held such a view made me respect his knowledge even more than I had before.

15.  Miss Simpson

In high school I took the required two years of math for the academic curricula, algebra and advanced algebra.  I have regretted not taking geometry, but the rules had changed for the required math studies and we were allowed to take advanced algebra right after completing beginning algebra.  Not being a math enthusiast anyway, I just let my two algebra course suffice, since I could.  My algebra teacher for both courses was Miss Marion Simpson.  She talked a lot about “the new math” and the onslaught of computers.  She was a prim and proper lady, very strict, no nonsense kind of teacher.  And apparently, well ahead of her time in terms of feminism.  She told us that she registered for a math conference and the residential director of the housing unit where she was to lodge thought she was a man, because of the masculine spelling of her name–Marion instead of Marian–and she had been assigned to room with a man.  The director apologized and made other arrangements for her, but Miss Simpson reported rather matter-of-factly that she wouldn’t have cared.  It made no difference to her if she shared a room with a man. 

16. Two Turtles: A Dream

One rainy day we were running out of water in the house, but Mommy wanted to wait until the rain stopped before taking the water bucket out to the pump and getting a fresh supply of water.  The rain finally stopped and we started out to get water.  As we stepped off the porch, I saw what looked like two mounds of dirt slowing moving into the yard.  I ran to see what was going on.  Mommy yelled at me, “Linda Sue, get back here!”  And she dropped the bucket and came running to get me.  (Mommy was always very protective, maybe over-protective.  Not letting me out of her sight.)  She grabbed my hand and moved me back a ways, but then she saw that it was just two turtles that had ambled into the yard.  We moved a little closer to look at them.  I think she was now as curious as I was about them.  We stood looking at them for a few seconds, and I reached out to touch one, and they both quickly withdrew their heads and legs.  (This image appears in my poem, “Turtle Woman.”)  Mommy then said something that has stayed with me all my life:  “I wish I had a big shell like that.  That hard shell keeps them critters safe.”  Then she actually let me touch the turtle’s shell, and she was right, it was hard, and I thought something like “if it keeps them safe, that’s a good thing.”  I was two years old, but the dream is older than the centuries.

17.  No Negroes

My dad was convinced that the presence of African-Americans (called Negroes or colored people back then in the ’50s) fishing at our establishment would cause him to lose business.  He claimed that “their” money was as good as a white man’s, but he couldn’t “afford to have them around driving off business.”  It was, therefore, a rule that no “colored” people were allowed to fish at our ponds.  Actually, to be as fair to my dad as possible, I need to add that for a time he did experiment with letting “them” fish but decided that his best interest was to discontinue the practice.  So whenever colored people came in to fish, the ticket seller had the nasty task of telling them that they were not allowed. 

When the unfortunate ticket seller was me, I handled the situation this way: if the particular person of color asked me if he could fish, I’d tell him that my dad says he couldn’t; if the particular person of color simply pulled out his dollar and requested a ticket just like any white person would do, I’d sell it.  Both ways I felt damned, because I knew that as soon as my dad saw that obvious skin casting his fishing line into the pond, he would go chase him off and then upbraid me for selling the ticket in the first place.  And that I had to stand there facing a fellow human being and tell him he could not pay his dollar and go out and fish like those white boys did gave me a sinking feeling in my heart that still makes tears well up in my eyes even as I write this today.  (I might add here that those tears still well up every time when I go back and read this stuff.)

18.  Ordinary Days at the Ponds

My sister and I ordered cameras using a collection of Bazooka Bubble Gum wrappers.  We took all kinds of pictures at the ponds.  Mostly of cats, dogs, each other doing weird stuff like acting like we were puking coming out of a toilet.  Our most creative included a series of shots in which my sister is made-up to look like Cleopatra, eating a chicken leg, posing under an exotic looking plant, and blowing on her nails sitting on a barrel drum.  Our summers were never boring.

19.  Books

 I have bought a lot of books in my life time, but luckily I’m not a pack rat, so have cleaned house how from time to time, tossing out books that I no longer cared about.  Sometimes, I have regretted tossing some books, but over all I’m happy with my decision.

20.  Cows in the Living Room

My mom described our house as real rundown place when she and my dad first bought the land on which it sits.  I always remember her saying that the living room floor was just dirt and that cows had lived the house.

21.  Cousin Jimmy

When Aunt Freda married Barney Heavenridge, we got more than an uncle, we also got a cousin.  Jimmy was close to my age, about nine months younger, and we were around seven when we became cousins.  He’s always seemed just a much a “real” cousin as the biological cousins.  And while growing up, we always had a lot of fun playing at his house or ours.

22.  Bickering

Both my husband and I grew up in a household with parents who constantly bickered.  They didn’t exactly have loud, bitter disputes, just every little thing that could garner a rebuke garnered one. Ron’s parents would always end up fighting over Christmas decorations.

Daddy was never one to return his tools to the same place.  Usually, he would just toss them on the dining room table, that is, if he ever brought them back into the house at all; he was constantly having to buy new hammers and pliers to replace the ones he’d leave lying out by a fence post or near the tractor or wherever he last used it.  Or he would leave the checkbook on the dining room table.  He would leave his shoes sitting out in the middle of the floor. 

When Mommy would put the tools back down into the basement or the check book back into a drawer or his shoes back by the hall tree, Daddy would complain that she was hiding his things, because there weren’t where he left them.  Mommy would complain that he left his stuff out and that the dining room table was not a tool chest.  This is only one example, but multiply that by day after day of something to bicker over and you have lifetime of bickering.

Fortunately for Ron and me, we don’t bicker.  And whenever we visit a household whose spouses bicker right in front of visitors, we’re reminded of what we grew up with, and we feel so glad that we both lack the bicker gene.

23.  Salt Cake

One time my mom baked a cake that was just absolutely beautiful.  It was chocolate with a light chocolate, fluffy icing.  I couldn’t wait to taste it.  But when we did finally got to taste it, the pleasurable sight turned out to be quite deceptive:  instead of a sweet chocolaty cake, a great chocolate-looking lick of salt met our taste buds.  Mommy had reached for the sugar and grabbed the salt instead.

24.  Parts of Speech

For sophomore English I was in Mrs. Pickett’s class.  Mrs. Edna Pickett was a tough, meticulous teacher, who had been around a long time.  I had heard her name many times from older students, especially from my neighbor Ronnie Grimme, who rode the same school bus that I did.  So when I found myself in her class, I was uncertain but not too intimidated because school was my thing.  And one thing I knew was my English.  The first day Mrs. Pickett, who was not used to sophomores, having taught mostly junior and senior English during her thirty year tenure at Centerville, asked us to name the parts of speech.  She was exasperated when she could find no one who could do that.  Finally, I volunteered to name those things for the woman.  She was very happy to find that one sophomore had learned something from former English classes.  Before she had learned my name, she called me Abington, and that gave me a certain amount of pride that I had represented my little school by naming the eight parts of speech (there were eight back then) when the Centerville people couldn’t even come up with noun and verb.

25.  Piano Lessons

At Abington Elementary School, the music teacher, Mrs. Frances Frame, came every Thursday to teach piano lessons to several students.  I coveted the red book of music these students brought with them.  I could hear them at the lessons, and ached to be learning what they were learning.  The teachers were cooperative with this musical endeavor, allowing the students one by one to spend a half-hour of their study time learning piano. I loved piano.  I had loved piano for years, from about the age three or four, because whenever we went to Kentucky to visit my dad’s parents, my aunt Winnie, a teenager at that time, would play the piano.  Although we didn’t own a piano, I had had several toy pianos as I grew up.  So at age nine at Abington Elementary School, I decided I would join those other students and get myself some piano lessons. I got my dollar from my mom brought it to school and went to Mrs. Frame and told her I wanted to take lessons.  My dad reluctantly bought me a used piano. I took lessons for only three years.  The school board decided that they didn’t want Mrs. Frame using the school to give lessons, so she had to start giving the lessons in her home.  This meant that my dad had to drive me to her house once a week.  He did not appreciate that inconvenience and constantly complained about it.  My love of the piano turned out to be no match against his annoyance, so I quit the lessons.

My piano sat in my parents’ home for many years after I had moved out.  But recently I had it moved to my house.  I love playing it, and it may be just me, but it seems to me that pianos have a certain smell.  I suppose that smell reminds me of my first falling in love with the piano.  It’s a comforting feeling to walk past the living room and not only see my piano but also smell it.

Recently, I had the old piece of nostalgia moved out of my house and purchased a gently used Baldwin piano; it has a lovely tone.  I had come to realize the old Starr upright sounded like the tinkling of the pianos you hear in saloons in western movies.

26.  Vegetarianism

When I was in the ninth grade, I had a biology course.  Lucky for me, our school wasn’t equipped to offer dissection of animals, but my imagination was strong enough to allow me to visualize animal cells and plant cells as the teacher lectured about them.  Plus the diagrams he gave us were very helpful.  The information about how cells work made me realize that animal flesh was not for human consumption.  (I know many people still do not believe that, but many do and the number is growing.)  So I became a vegetarian.  This practice was difficult, not because I craved animal flesh, but because no one in my family supported it.  They thought I would die from lack of protein. So they hassled me constantly about food.  My first phase of vegetarianism lasted until I was nineteen, at which time I took up eating meat again.  I resumed eating meat so that I could feel closer to my family.  I felt so alienated from them psychologically, and I felt that at least that one aspect my life could parallel theirs.  They were glad.  But, in fact, the practice of eating meat did not really bridge the deep chasm that separated us spiritually.  My discomfort with the practice of eating meat grew until 1978 when I returned to vegetarianism, and then thirty years later moved on to veganism.   

27.  Mrs. Pickett

I had heard a neighbor, Ronnie Grimme, who rode the same I rode to school talk about certain teachers.  He was about three years ahead of me.  One teacher he mentioned was Mrs. Pickett, and from his description she sounded rather strict.  So when I found out that I would be in Mrs. Pickett’s English class as a sophomore, I felt a bit apprehensive.  But she turned out the be very good teacher, and I learned a lot from her.  She, along with Mr. Sedam, influenced my choice of a literary path as a vocation. 

28. Foreign Languages

I enjoyed studying Latin as a high school freshman, and I found I was very good at it.  So I took Spanish the next year, then both Spanish II and Latin II my junior year, and then French my senior year–the first year French was offered, and my former English teacher, the wise Mrs. Pickett taught the French class that year.  

She had prepared by taking a trip to Paris the summer before she taught the class.  I loved all the languages I had studied, and I even studied some Italian and Brazilian Portuguese on my own. But then I majored in German in college.  Often have I wished I had stuck with Spanish, but then life has a way of nudging us in certain directions.

29.  Spartacus

When I was a sophomore in high school, our English class went to Richmond to see the movie Spartacus.  The movie amazed me, partly because I had not been to many movies, but also because of the effect it had on me.  

As Virinia leaves Rome with her baby, she sees her husband, Spartacus, hanging up on a cross along with all the other slaves who revolted against the Romans.  That scene slashed across my heart, and I found swallowing difficult.  

I didn’t want the other students to see me cry, so I forced my tears to contain themselves.  That scene made me aware of a level of pain that until that time I had not realized humans could endure or even were required to endure.

30.  Miami

After studying for four quarters at Ball State Teachers College (later renamed Ball State University), I transferred to Miami University in Oxford, Ohio.  Miami, although out-of-state, was about thirty miles closer to where I lived than Ball State was.  One of the reasons I transferred was so I could live at home; I liked the idea of being a commuting student instead of a residence hall student, as I had been at Ball State.  Actually, I had lived in two residence halls at Ball State, and my final quarter I lived off-campus in a house owned by an elderly woman who rented her upstairs rooms to students.  There wasn’t much difference between residence hall living and off-campus living.  I still had to share a room, and I felt I had no privacy.  The commute to Miami at Oxford seemed exciting, stimulating, offering me time to think on the 30-minute drive down. That’s about all that was stimulating about Miami for me. The school seemed so bland.  The campus was and is beautiful, but I was insulated from real activities that might have been interesting to me had I participated.

31.  Big Mistake

Three days after I graduated from Miami University, I married.  Big mistake.  Luckily, I corrected the error nearly five years later.

32.  Poetry

When I was a junior in high school, my American history teacher was M. M. Sedam, a poet.  His main interest was poetry.  After each day’s history lesson, he would read us his own poems, and poems of E. E. Cummings and W. H. Auden, who was his favorite.  I became very interested in the art of writing that year.  And I have tried to write real poetry ever since.  I have even published some of my poems in small literary magazines.  One time I won $40.00–second prize–in a poetry contest.  It was the Royalty Memorial prize for poetry at Ball State in 1977.  I was a graduate student in English, and I immersed myself in poetry that year.  I have studied about and written poetry for about 50 years.  But I consider myself a private poet.  I used to send stuff out and have published some, but I now just write primarily for myself, and I place my stuff on my Web site.  I might start sending stuff out again—but probably only online.

33.  Professor (Sort of) 1983-1999

I teach in the Writing Program at Ball State University, the institution from which I have earned two masters degrees and one PhD.  I am not a real professor; my rank is contractual assistant professor, which means I am hired year by year, and have no hope of promotion and tenure, and my salary is about half that of the regular beginning tenure-track assistant professor.  I teach English composition, mostly to freshmen, who need to improve their writing skills.  But the real advantage of teaching the levels I teach is that I get to learn about what I am really interested in as far as the life of the mind is concerned.  I am interested in improving my own writing of poetry, short fiction, and essays; my mind satisfies its yearnings by writing in these areas and reading literary journals such as Poetry, The American Poetry Review, Poets & Writers, The American Scholar, Story, The Explicator, and many others. 

I do enjoy the rare occasion when a student really learns something.  Most of the students who sit for my classes do not fully understand how to read.  They think they do not understand poetry, but the sad truth is that they do not even understand how to read prose.  The main goal of my teaching is to help my students learn to pay attention to the printed word in order to understand what a text is saying.  The complexity of this undertaking boggles the mind.  And deep in my soul I think it is impossible.  In the composition courses I teach, students are required to compose expository essays that state a claim and back it up.  They are so unused to thinking for themselves that this exercise remains incomprehensible to many.  Some do catch on and once in a while one will exceed the basic requirements of the course, and that student makes the drudgery pay off, because from that student I also learn.

34.  Ordinary Days 1993

I get up at 4:00 a.m. every morning.  I go to bathroom, comb my hair, and rinse off my face. Then I go to my study where I perform my meditation routine for about an hour (I’ve practiced yoga since 1978).  After meditation I go to the kitchen where our little Beagle dogs, Wendell and Alex, usually sleep; they squeal at me to say “good morning, where’s the food,” and I let them out, while the tea water is heating.  I make a cup of herb tea, sit down to read or write in the family room.  I am usually reading a biography of a poet or a religious figure; or I read literary essays and poetry. Sometimes I review my yoga lessons, before reading secular material.

About an hour after I’ve sat reading or writing, drinking tea, while the dogs have settled down to a before-breakfast nap, my husband gets up if it’s a work day for him; if it’s his day off, he sleeps an hour or two longer.  If he gets up for work, I fix us breakfast about a half-hour after he comes out; if he gets up later, I usually have had breakfast already and he eats later.

After I have breakfast around 6:00 a.m., I get some poems ready to send out or I write poems or work on my “Little Stories.”  I do this until about 8:30 a.m., unless it’s a day on which I have to take my son to class.  If it’s such a day, I run him in about 7:30 a.m., then when I return I try to get some more writing done.  On days that I have essays to grade, the essay grading takes the place of writing

On days that I work, I eat lunch around 9:00 a.m. this semester, because my schedule runs from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m.  I like a later schedule, from 12 N to 5 p.m., but this semester I didn’t get the later schedule. Anyway, so after I go teach, I get home about 3:30 p.m.  After teaching, I don’t do anything very taxing.  I might do some computing, tune in to Prodigy, or lie down for a few minutes.

Around 4 p.m., I watch TV–sometimes I start with Oprah Winfrey or Phil Donohue.  If these don’t seem interesting, I read, or look at the newspaper.  By 5:30 p.m. I am ready for nothing but some mindless TV viewing: 5:30 “The Wonder Years,” 6:00 “Roseanne,” 6:30 “Cheers,” 7:00 Bill Cosby’s “You Bet Your Life,” and sometimes I can stay awake for “Murphy Brown” at 7:30, but usually I head toward bed at 7:45.  Actually, I don’t go to bed then, I do my meditation routine first, and get to bed around 9:30 p.m.

This is an ordinary day as of 21 February 1993.

35.  An Ideal Ordinary Day

So if the above is a “real” ordinary day, what could constitute an “ideal” ordinary day? I would like to wake up and feel truly that I had God-union.  My meditation would be a mere formality.  My mind would not crave any physical or material substance.  My first contact with morning would be the sun pouring in through an open window.  No need for food or drink–no need to visit the bathroom, no need to splash the face.  And the dogs would be attuned to my high spiritual state and would welcome me with a quiet knowing bow.

Perhaps I have gone a bit too far into the ideal.  Let’s bring it down to earth a bit.  Within the next four years, I would like to retire from teaching.  I would like to write full time.  Mornings would still be the same–I’d rise at 4 a.m., or perhaps 3 a.m., go to the bathroom, splash my face, comb my hair; then meditate for at least two-four hours.  Then off to the kitchen where the dogs will still squeal and need to be let out.  My tea ready, I’ll still read, make breakfast for my husband on days he works.  But my son will have his own car by then and will be used to getting himself to school or work or wherever he needs to go, — no, ideally, he will be out of the house by then — and from 6:30 a.m.  to noon, my time is completely my own to work on poetry, stories, essays, to research, to read, and to write.  

After a leisurely lunch, I will look after my houseplants, walk outside in the yard, which by now is a luxuriant garden–notice that these ordinary days are always spring and summer–planting, pruning, and watering. Some days I will go shopping between writing sessions for an hour or two, and even have lunch out.  By 2 p.m. I will be ready to research, read, and write again. And I will not be interrupted until my husband gets home around 5 p.m. at which time we will have a lovely supper, walk in the garden, watch some TV, talk, or go for a drive.  Around 8 p.m., my husband and I will watch a rented video that we picked up during the drive.  At 9 p.m. I will say goodnight to my husband and retire to my meditation room for a two-three hour deep and soothing meditation.  I will go to bed around 11 p.m. or midnight, and be perfectly rested, ready to start another “ideal” ordinary day by 3 a.m. the next ideal morning.

36.  Benches

When Ronald was in the army, we planned to go to a movie one Saturday on the base, Fitzsimons Army Medical Center, where he worked in the Ear, Nose, and Throat clinic.  I had not been to an army base movie, and I had asked Ronald what they were like.  I wondered, for example, if you could buy popcorn and candy, and if the seats were nice.  And he told me that you could not buy anything to eat at an army base movie house, and he added that the seats were just benches.  That’s why they were so much less expensive than civilian movie houses.  So when Saturday night rolled around, we went to the movies and I found out that Ronald was just joshing me.  He thought it was pretty funny that he had managed to fool me into thinking that army people had to sit on benches to watch their movies.  For the next few years every time one of us managed to pull one over on another one, we’d call it “benches” and get a good laugh at it.

37.  Lynda Grimes

When my daughter, Lyn, was four years old, we moved to Brookville, where I had been teaching.  We were living in a duplex apartment in a nice subdivision across the Whitewater River from the small town of Brookville.  We had a rural mailbox on which I applied the name Ronald W Grimes, whom I had recently married.  Lyn was out in the yard playing one day, and the mail arrived.  The mailman asked Lyn her name, and she told him it was Lynda Grimes.  Actually, she had not yet become “Lynda Grimes,” because Ronald’s adoption of her had not been finalized.  When we asked her why she said her name was Lynda Grimes, she was quite practical about the matter: she wanted to match the mailbox.

38.  Rodney Grimes

We expected him on 31 December 1973, but he arrived on 22 December 1973.  He arrived in time for Christmas.  Ronald’s mother gave me a Santa boot with a philodendron in it.  I now have enough philodendron to fill dozens of those Santa boots.  I call it my Rodney plant in its several locations.  It has been with us in 12 different residential dwellings.  Rodney has always been a dog man.  He knew the names of all the dogs that lived in the Fairview subdivision across the river from Brookville, where we lived for his first six years.  But because we moved so many times, he wasn’t able to have his own dog until he was fourteen.  About a month before we moved into our home, he got his own dog.  He named his dog Wendell, after Bill Wendell, announcer on David Letterman’s Late Night; the lady who sold us Wendell told us the dog was a boy, and we didn’t inspect closely and believed Wendell was male.  About three days later, we took Wendell to the veterinarian for a check up.  Boy Wendell came back a girl.  We were pretty dumb, I guess.  It sure looked like a penis to us.  

39.  Happy Tail

Having one dog is like having one child, so we brought Alex into our home to accompany Wendell.  Alex was Lyn’s dog, and even though she’s married now living in Indy and is the proud companion of two cats, Lucy and Hobbes, she still considers Alex her dog.  While we bought Wendell at a pet shop in Muncie, we got Alex free from Ronald’s brother, Chuck, whose dog, Lady, gave birth to five or so puppies.  At first Ronald was scared silly about having two dogs, since Wendell had claimed the living room as her favorite dumping ground.  But after the puppies had spent about eight weeks with their mommy, we took Alex home with us.  He was so docile as Rodney severed him from his family.  I felt so sad for him, until in the car on the way back to Muncie, I looked around at him at saw him wagging his tail.  That wagging tail made me feel so relieved; Alex was ours and he was glad.  From then on I have called Alex’s happy states “happy tail”–when he wags his tail so hard his whole back end wags.

40.  Confrontation

When I was a senior at Miami University, I was required to do several hours of observation of classroom teaching, as part of the program to get a teaching license.  Because I was training to become a German teacher,  I arranged to visit the classes of the German teacher at Richmond High School.  The day I arrived to observe her teaching,  the woman showed films for the entire morning–4 class sessions.  She knew I was coming that day; we had made specific arrangements.  But there I was watching the film, and the film was not even about Germany; it was shown by the French teacher, who had invited other FL classes to watch his European vacation.  So we were not even in the German teacher’s classroom; I had no idea which students were hers.  The whole experience seemed pointless, so after the second viewing of the film I told the German teacher that I had to go and that I would see her Monday.

When I arrived on Monday in her classroom, she threw a fit.  She said that no college student was going to come in there and use her to get hours of observation when they didn’t even stick around to observe.  She demanded that I go to the office and get permission to be in her classroom.  That was quite strange, because I already had her permission.  At the office I just explained that I was there to observe the German teacher’s classroom a part of my requirements at Miami University,  and they told he to go ahead.  So when I went back to the classroom, I apologized for upsetting her, and in as sweet a voice as I could muster, told her that I didn’t realize that my not watching that film four times would upset her and that I would claim only two hours of observation for that experience.  I also assured her that I really did want to observe her teaching.  I wanted to be a German teacher, and I really would like to get some pointers from a seasoned professional.  She changed her demeanor completely and became a sweet little woman in charge of helping this poor college student earn her stripes.  She even let me “teach” the next day. 

I learned something very important about myself through this encounter.  I have seldom had confrontations outside my family that angered, bewildered, and disgusted me like this one did.  But instead of demonstrating anger, bewilderment, and disgust, instead of meeting her fiery fit with my own, I found that I grew calm and dignified and truly “turned the other cheek.”  I did what the woman told me to do and apologized for upsetting her, although, I firmly believed that I had done nothing to her that warranted an apology; actually I would argue that she, in fact, owned me the apology.  She had wasted my time and then accused me of a misdeed.  But somehow–and I don’t feel that I had total control of the situation–I behaved quite differently from the way those emotions in my consciousness should have dictated.  Since that event, I have been able to achieve similar results quite consciously, when irrationalists would try to ruffle me to an excited state, I refuse to ruffle, and I conquer with calmness and meekness, usually.

41. My First Flight

In 1985, while I was completing my dissertation on W. B. Yeats at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana, I applied to deliver a paper at a Yeats conference (“Yeats and Eastern Philosophy,” Yeats Literary Symposium) at West Chester, PA.   I was writing my dissertation on how Yeats actually misinterpreted certain aspect of Eastern Philosophy in his works.  I sent off my précis and was amazed and delighted that my paper was accepted.  I had to travel by airplane from Indiana to Pennsylvania, and that was the first time I had flown.  Interesting, I flew “Eastern Airlines” a company that no longer flies.

42.  My Second Flight

Interestingly, my second travel by air also engaged the services of the now defunct airline, Eastern Airlines.  Again, I traveled to a literary conference to deliver a paper.  This time the subject was T. S. Eliot and the conference was held at the University of New Hampshire in Durham in 1988, three years after my first conference and air flight.  The title of my paper was, ““T. S. Eliot, Spiritual Dryness, and Strange Gods.”  I enjoyed the conferences and learned a lot about academic writing as I listened to the many and varied presenters.

43.  Poems, Essays, Prayers 

During my senior year, I studied in a creative writing class with the poet/playwright, M. M. Sedam.  On mornings when the bus got us to school a few minutes early, I would take my extra writings to let Mr. Sedam offer criticism.  I would take him poems mostly, but sometimes my offerings included essays and prayers.  He was usually very positive regarding the poems, offering useful advice about consistency in image and metaphor.  He also offered useful criticism about my essays, helping me understand the difference between mere opinion an informed opinion.  About my prayers, he quipped, “Maybe you should hold off on the prayers until you choose a religion.  Your prayers are the standard fair of the begging cup.  If you find a religion that satisfies your soul, then you’ll automatically find your voice for prayers.”  I’m just guessing the actual words here, but the message was spot on.

44. “You’re Dreaming”

When I was around eleven years old, I fell in love with Phil Everly. Actually, I fell in love with a voice, a picture, certainly not a real flesh-and-blood person, because I had never meet him. I knew him only as a performer, half of my favorite pop-singing duo, The Everly Brothers. I bought all of their records, joined their fan club, read everything I could find about them, collected all the pictures I ran across, looked for them eagerly on television shows like The Ed Sullivan Show and Dick Clark’s shows. 

Although I’ve always thought Phil was the more handsome Everly brother, it is also likely that part of the reason I chose Phil as my love was that Don was married, so I felt that I probably had a chance and besides I was not a homewrecker; the thought wouldn’t have occurred to me to fall in love with a married man–not at age eleven.

I didn’t discuss my feelings for Phil with anyone. I just carried them around with me for about five or six years. But I remember one time my mom and I were in the shack, and I was looking at a magazine,  and I made some comment about Phil—think I simply asked her which one she thought was better looking—,  and my mom said, “Linda Sue, you’re dreaming.” I just ran out of the shack. I could not discuss these feelings with her. Surely, what I had said must have been some attempt to open a discussion of these feelings, but my greatest fear was realized when she said that, that I just ran because I knew I could not face those words or my feelings.  

45. The Pop Man’s Son

His name was Earl, and he helped his dad deliver pop to the shack every Saturday. I had a mini-crush on him because he reminded me of Phil Everly. Even though I never talked to him, I always tried to be in the shack when he and his dad brought the pop. I took particular pleasure from the fact that someone had reported to me that he thought I was pretty. 

Remember that my mother had told me when I was around thirteen that I could not date. She never gave me an age when I could, but during my early and mid-teens, I never questioned her on this. For some reason, I couldn’t discuss this with her. I was probably around fifteen when I got this crush on Earl, but I had no idea about how to go about having a relationship with a boy. Earl must have been shy too, because he never tried to initiate a relationship with me, even though, and I had it on good authority, he thought I was pretty.

46. Jerry and Benny

Jerry and Benny were about fifteen and they came fishing down at the ponds. I was about fourteen and Jerry reminded me of Phil Everly, so I fell into a mini-crush with him. I am sure that Jerry did not return my crush, but I told him my birthday was the 7th of July and that day he bought a Reese’s cup and gave it to me and said happy birthday. I was very embarrassed because my real birthday is the 7th of January, and although I always considered the 7th of July my half birthday, I admitted to Jerry that it was only my half birthday, but he didn’t care, he still wanted me to have the candy. 

Little interactions like these account for most of my relationships with the opposite sex during my teens. I could never figure out how to be a boy’s girlfriend. Of course, I knew it wouldn’t matter, because my mother had told me I did not have her permission to date. Perhaps, a part of my mind kept my behavior from signaling to potential boyfriends that I might be interested, and my love for Phil Everly kept that a fact as well. I always had the dream.

47.  The Little Coke Bottle

My aunt Freda was living in Richmond in a small apartment at the time; she was married to a man named Wayne, whom I don’t remember at all.  One time while my mom went to a doctor’s appointment, and my aunt Freda kept me and my sister for a couple of hours.  I found this little coke bottle, that is, it was tiny and looked exactly like a coke bottle; I think it was a cigarette lighter.  I played with it the entire time I was at my aunt’s.  She took us to a little park near her apartment and took some pictures.  So fascinated by that little coke bottle, in every picture, I am holding that little coke bottle up next to my face.

48.  Fatso

I was a fat child; kids at school called me fatso.  One time on the bus, there was a strange spewing noise, and this one kid, who was particularly made gleeful by calling me some fat name, looked around and said, “I think somebody punched a hole in fatty back there.”  I always felt very embarrassed when anyone made such a remark, but that time it struck me as quite funny.  That remark, I guess, seemed more clever than the usual taunting name-calling that kids indulged in.

49.  Spot

My mom and I were outside walking in the yard one warm summer morning, and we saw what we thought was a hog lying outside the gate.  We walked over to look more closely and discovered it was not a hog, but a Dalmatian dog.  We named him Spot and kept him for the next twelve or so years. 

50.  Pudgy

As a companion for Spot we adopted a puppy that was part Cocker Spaniel.  We named him Pudgy, and I have no idea why.  I didn’t know that Pudgy was a synonym for fat.  He was just blond and cute and looked like a Pudgy.  So Spot and Pudgy were our dogs for long time. 

51.  Flies

I had to ride a big yellow school bus to school.  The bus picked me up first, so I had to ride for about an hour.  The bus driver would wait and wait and wait for every kid who was late.  The rule was that he had to wait only three minutes for the first passengers, then none for the rest.  And he was always quoting that rule but never enforcing it.  I hated riding the bus for many reasons, but one of the worst incidents was when a swarm of flies decided to make the bus ceiling their rest stop.  A bunch of disgusting boys took the notion to kill the flies, and they began swatting at will, and the fly bodies showered everybody.

52.  Driving a Stick

When I was a sophomore in high school, my Spanish teacher took me over to Earlham College to take a Spanish test.  I was impressed by her car, a Volkswagen Beetle and wanted one very much.  It was several years before I got one and the experience turned out to be a sour one.  I was then commuting to Miami University in our ’61 Ford.  It was the summer of 1965, and the Ford was wearing out, and my dad decided that it was time to get a different car.  We went to look at cars and decided to take a chance on a 63 VW Beetle.  The big problem was that I had not learned how to drive a stick shift and at that time Beetles came only in stick shifts.  My dad tried to teach me on the way home.  I wasn’t very good at it; I kept killing it.  But I thought I might be able to do it.  That night I seemed to dream over and over the procedure for starting and shifting at every stop I would experience on my way to Oxford.  So when morning rolled around and it was time for me to leave for school, I went out and tried to start the bug and the battery was dead.  My dad had left the key in the wrong position on accessories and subsequently the battery died.  I lost my cool.  The fear of trying to learn to drive a stick shift had worn my nerves.  I felt the car was jinxed.  So I insisted that I needed an automatic.  With much cajoling from my dad and the car salesman, who offered to come and teach me how to drive a stick, I grew only more stubborn and fitful tears of pain and obstinacy spilled over the event.  My dad finally consented to get me an automatic, complaining that the deal cost him a lot more than it should have.  He liked to point out that other girls drive stick shifts.  Years later my dad continued to tell that story and always seemed to enjoy belittling me for my failure and tears over my inability to drive that car.  

But the challenge took hold.  In 1979 I did learn to drive a stick shift, and I have driven one ever since.  It’s probably pathological that I refuse to own a car that is not a stick shift.  But the challenge to my failure at that time of vulnerability spurred me to overcome and once I overcome I have to keep on overcoming.

Update:  I have now overcome to need to keep proving to my dad that I could drive a stick. We now buy automatic transmissions with glee.

53.  No Sharks

I had noticed that the big, flat rock was missing from the metal sheet that covered the hole but didn’t ask my mom or dad about it.  Then perhaps a week later I noticed it again, and a flashing headline loomed on the screen of my mind, “Child drowns in well,” but still I felt no need to ask about the missing rock that for years had lain on top of the metal sheet.  I dismissed the passing question about the rock and the strange mental vision, but they hid themselves away in my brain, hidden but certainly not forgotten.

On a cloudy, chilly day in March my three-year-old son, Rodney, and I decided to go visit Granny and Grandpa Richardson.  Rodney loved to spend time with Granny and play at her house, because she kept her upstairs rooms filled with every old toy and piece of junk she ever owned. Rodney spent a lot of time up there among Granny’s treasures, but he also loved the rest of the old homestead, a farm-turned-fishing-pond business, and of course, he loved playing down at the ponds as well as outside in the big yard that surrounded the house that sat on the hill overlooking the ponds.  Rodney’s cousin, Kelly, lived in a mobile home just across the ravine on another hill; Kelly and Rodney were only five months apart in age, and they enjoyed playing together. 

On this particular day, my mom and I were walking through the house and she was showing me her many houseplants and talking about them.  I didn’t usually discuss her plants with her, but today I was especially energized, and instead of sitting down immediately as we usually did, we walked through the house, looking at the plants and talking about them.

Rodney and Kelly had gone outside to play, and I thought I heard a noise, like a ball hitting the house, but I wasn’t sure what it was.  My mom and I continued to look at plants and talk about them, but the noise seemed to bother me and I had to go outside to see what it was.

I hurried out the door, ran around the house, and as I was running around the house the flashing headline loomed again on my mind, “Child drowns in well.”  But even though my heart began to race, I pushed the vision aside; and then running back around the house, not seeing my son yet, I noticed again the metal sheet and that the rock was still missing from it.  But I refused to let myself worry yet, because the hole that the metal sheet and rock covered was not really a well, it was a cistern.  Sure, it had water in it and a child could drown in it, but….  Kelly was standing about five or six feet away from that cistern hole, and the metal sheet was still in place.  I was certain neither of them had moved it, so I asked her, “Do you know where Rodney is?”  And she shook her head yes and pointed to the metal sheet.  I rushed to the metal, lifted it—not totally believing, not wanting to accept the information that little girl’s pointing finger had reported to me—but there he was, down there in that cold, black water.  His eyes looked like pale, frightened marbles, I thought.  I yelled, “He’s dead.”  I think I kept repeating it.  My mom and dad rushed out to see what was going on.  The chaos in my brain still surrounds the memory of this event: I see my son in the water; I’m stunned and stupefied; time seems to stretch out and then contract like an accordion, and I have no concept of how long my son might have been in the water.  But while I fidget and cry and mumble, my mother brings me back to some kind of awareness by saying, “Look, he’s moving on his own, he’s all right, Linda Sue.”  And my dad ran to the barn to fetch a ladder. 

But before he could return with the ladder, my mom had calmed me down, and she held my feet while I reached down and grabbed my son out of the water.  Not only was he not dead, he had no water in his lungs.  He was, however, ice-cold and shivering, and his skin looked extremely pale. We took him to the Pediatric Center for a check-up, and he was fine. 

I’ve asked Rodney what he thought while he was down in that cold water, and he says the only thing that was on his mind was the possibility that sharks might be in that water, because he thought that cistern was connected to the fish ponds.                                   

54.  A Circle of Friends

My quirkiest episode at Ball State University began in the fall of 1976.  I lived about seventy miles away from Muncie at that time, and therefore, I had to reside on campus to attend the classes and teach the one English comp that comprised my duties as a graduate assistant.  The bizarre thing about this episode was that I actually had a “circle of friends.”  All during high school, and  the undergrad days at both BSU and Miami University, I never really associated with other students.  But this time, I hung out with a group of six or seven other grad students:  we partied, we went to dinner together, went to poetry readings, and we drank at the local pub.

I’m glad I had the experience, but I can say with assurance that I had not really missed anything of importance by not so engaging earlier.  It’s always nice to discover, though, that one’s path is not so off the beaten.

55.  Wayne County Lincoln Day Dinner 

Our government teacher took a small group of students to the Lincoln Day Dinner at Earlham College, and I was fortunate enough to have been included in this field trip.  Indiana Representative Charles A. Halleck spoke.  I don’t remember much about the event or what Rep. Halleck said, except that Rep. Halleck had a very red face.  At the time, because I was studying government in a required class, I had gotten somewhat interested in politics but later abandoned that interest after I started studying foreign languages, Latin, Spanish, and German.

56.  Two Dead People

Mommy and Daddy became friends with a couple who came fishing down at the ponds.  Their names were Don and Daisy May Wehrley.  Theyowned an apartment complex in Richmond, and we would go visit them just like we’d go visit my aunt Freda who lived in Centerville.  They had two girls named Sue and Charlotte.  Don and Daisy had some bad luck with their apartment complex.  A couple of people—a man and a woman—who had rented one of their apartments were found dead, apparently from carbon monoxide poison from a small room heater.  It was in the newspaper.  Daisy showed us the apartment.  And the whole thing was a grisly affair.  Not long after the incident Don and Daisy sold the apartment building and got out of the landlord business.

57.  Twin Pines Nursing Home

For a number of years as I was growing up, my aunt Lizzy and uncle Shady owned a nursing home in Economy, Indiana.  We visited them often there.  It was filled with old people.  My aunt Lizzy was the chief caretaker.  They did have on hand one nurse.  But the nursing home scam that became a scandal a few years back had its representative in this business.  My aunt and uncle took in major bucks from these elderly people, and there is no way they could have given the deserved and much needed care.  I remember my mom telling me that uncle Shady plunked down cash for a new Buick Skylark.  The nursing home business has long passed out of their hands.  The building has vanished from the face of the earth.  A few years ago, one could see that Buick Skylark’s rusting body sitting alongside the home. 

58.  The Mandrill

While attending the Wayne County 4-H Fair, my mom, my aunt Freda, and I went in to see the Mandrill.  He sat up in a cage and peered out at us as caged animals are wont to do.  And as we looked at him, my aunt began to comment on the animal’s looks.  And she began to comment openly to him; she said. “You’re ugly.  You are about the ugliest thing I’ve ever seen.”  The mandrill then turned around and patted his butt at her.      

59.  Wild Blossoms

“Wild Blossoms” is the title of a piece of sheet music that when I was taking piano lessons from Mrs. Frame, I heard played by a student who had her lesson before me. Her name was Betty Meek.  And she was practicing that piece.  Betty’s sister, Joanne, had recently been killed in a car wreck.  And Joanne was pregnant at the time.  As Betty played that tune, the sadness of the death of her sister seemed to wash over me.  I wondered how Betty could play that tune when it seemed to be so closely associated with her sister’s death.  Of course, it was only associated with Joanne’s death in my mind.  But the feeling I had as Betty played was just so melancholy, so unutterably sad and now as I play that piece I always think of listening to that piece and feeling that unutterably sad feeling.  Such a feeling I think is an integral part of me.  I don’t understand it, but from time to time I experience it. 

60.  Pictures

My dad gave my mom a camera for Christmas one year, and she took pictures from time to time.  That one camera is the only one I remember her using.  At first, I don’t think she really liked it, because it wasn’t more “personal.”  A few years before, my dad had given her a pair of boots for Christmas–he was very practical minded–so I think she was rather suspicious of his gifts after that.

61.  The Garden

When I was growing up on our small farm, we always had a garden.  My mom and dad planted a large variety of vegetables: tomatoes, green beans, corn, green peppers, onions, okra, asparagus, lettuce.  

For a lot of years, we also had a strawberry patch at one end of the garden.  When I was still a toddler, while picking strawberries, my mom would situate me in a spot and tell me to stand there and wait for her; that way she could keep her eye on me and not have me trampling the berries.  I remember clearly, that I got miserably hot just standing there in the sun waiting for her to pick strawberries. 

My dad always had a great time mocking me while telling people that I would stand there and whine, “Mommy, can I come over da?”  He seemed to enjoy making a performance telling about my foibles.  

But I’m sure he meant well.  And later on, he continued to keep my ego in check.  He knew I had a voracious appetite for learning because I always did well in school.  But he didn’t want be the agent that gave me “the big head,” so he struck down anything that could puff up my ego.  I have to be eternally grateful for that.

62.  Right Now

Right now is always the hardest time to find.  All my dreams and aspirations seem to be located somewhere in future time, but “right now” — the eternal now of Zen — is the only time I have, we have.  I want to know my own soul, I want to know who I am, why I do the things I do, why I feel what I feel.  I want to know everything.  I think everyone wants that, but that fact has nothing to do with my own progress or lack of progress.  I wish I could live a totally cloistered life, but since that is only a wish, it is not likely to become a reality until God wants it for me.  Just wanted to get this out.  Not much of a story here.

63.  On my Teaching Position at Ball State University

I wrote the following to a listserv called adjunct-faculty and got no response, so I signed off the listserv.  But then I decided to sign-on again.  I will probably just lurk.  I can’t really identify with what they say.  I feel silly that I posted this, but it does show my concern about my position; I am still confused about it, and it is one of the demons I need to slay:

Hello, 

       My name is Linda Grimes; I teach English composition as a contractual assistant professor at Ball State University.  I completed the PhD degree at BSU in November 1987.  For a semester I taught at a small college in Virginia, but I returned to BSU, because being a contract faculty member at BSU is much superior to being tenure-track at that particular school: their job description did not match the job I encountered.  I was assigned to teach 5 sections of composition with an enrollment of about 170 students.  At BSU we teach four sections, scrupulously limited to a total of 100 students.

        I have taught at BSU off and on since 1970.  And I completed my freshman year at BSU in 1965, when I transferred to Miami University in Oxford, OH, and finished my BA in 1967.  I earned my MA in German in 1971 and my MA in English in 1984 from BSU.  I have strong attachments to this university.  My husband earned his BSN here in 1987; my daughter her BS 1991, and now my son honors these halls with his presence.

        However, my intention was not to remain here after completion of my PhD and after my husband completed his BSN.  I assumed I’d seek a position somewhere warm and sunny, probably to teach in the area of British Literature, because I wrote my dissertation on Yeats.  But now I have become fairly comfortable teaching my comp courses.  My work as comp instructor complements my own writing of poetry.  I enjoy teaching the comp courses, because I think I have actually gotten good at it, and I learn things. One comp course (English 104) even affords me the opportunity to focus on poetry.

        Although I consider myself a practicing poet, I have no interest in teaching creative writing nor have I any interest in teaching literature courses. I feel I have become quite professional in teaching my composition courses.

        I tend to lack the desire for things like promotion and tenure, which I doubt really secures one’s job anyway.  But I feel a stigma attached to my position as merely a contract person.  And with this stigma I share the concerns of all contract or adjunct faculty.

        I would like to know why our courses are not considered as valuable as the literature, linguistics, rhetoric, English ed.  In these areas people hired by the department are all hired in as tenure-line.  But no one hired to teach only English composition is hired as tenure-line. No one who teaches only English comp has ever been offered a tenure-line position.  Two former contract teachers had their positions converted to tenure-line: one joined the American literature faculty and one joined the creative writing faculty.  But still no tenure-line for anyone who teaches only English composition in the Writing Program, the General Studies Program.

        I suggest that the failure by the department and university to recognize full-time comp teachers as deserving of promotion and tenure implies that we, as well as the courses we teach, are not considered as valuable to the department and university as the tenure-line teachers and their courses.  I would like to know why.

64.  Rustic Vegan Cooking

An important part of my spiritual quest is caring for the body temple. Throughout my life, I have experimented with varies food regimens.  My mom and I became very interest in Jack LaLanne, watching his TV show which ran from 1951 until 1985.  We watched it probably around the early ’60s.  We bought his book and tried the recipes he recommended. 

I followed a vegetarian diet during most of my teens, resuming meat consumption at 19, then returned to vegetarianism when I was 32.  Now for about five years, I had followed a vegan diet.  I have become very interested in cooking.  So I have started a Web site “Rustic Vegan Cooking”–part of my literary home here at Maya Shedd’s Temple–and I am planning a cookbook to offer the experimental vegan cooking. 

65.  A Quaker

When I was in first or second grade at Abington, I had a friend, who at recess one day at the swings, wanted to confide something to me, and she wanted me to keep it secret.  She said I probably wouldn’t believe it, but she still wanted to tell me.  I encouraged her to tell me; it seemed exciting and interesting to be getting some kind of secret information.  So she whispered in my ear, “I am a Quaker.”  I had no idea what that was.  I thought she was saying she was magic like a fairy or an elf or something.  So I said, “Well, do something to prove it.”  It was her turn to be confused then.  She just looked very solemn.  So I asked her to do something else to prove it.  I can’t remember the rest of this, but the point is that I was so ignorant about religion.

66.  My Religion

We didn’t attend church, because my father had grown up hating church attendance.  He said his mother used to dress up the children in uncomfortable clothes, and then they had to sit on hard benches for what seemed like hours listening to the preaching.  My mother was a Baptist, and she said she had felt that she was saved when she was younger, but she backslid as she got older.  By backslid I guess she meant because she didn’t continue to go to church.  But I grew up without any kind of religious education, and until I was about thirty, I never gave religion much thought. 

In 1977, I purchased a book that changed my life: Autobiography of a Yogi.  Actually I purchased it for my husband, because he liked reading biographies.  I had been reading mostly feminist literature and poetry.  I was heavily into feminism; I had just finished a tumultuous year taking courses toward an M.A. in English and teaching English composition at Ball State University.  This year had ended in failure; I did not complete my English M.A., and I was not successful in teaching the composition.  This meant a third failure as far as school was concerned.  I had been fired twice from Brookville–once in 1968 and again in 1973.  So I felt I was a failure at living because my first marriage had been a fiasco, and I was confused about what I was supposed to do with the degrees I had (BA from Miami 1967 and MA from Ball State 1971).  I felt that I was supposed to work and earn some money to help my husband.  My marriage to Ronald was wonderful, and my children were good, but I felt that I was a failure because of school.  I had always been successful with school, until that first time I was fired from Brookville.  I spent my days brooding about the mistakes and failures of my life: my broken heart at age 18, my mistake and embarrassment in marrying in haste at age 21, then the school failures.  Things just didn’t make sense to me.  I embraced feminism because I thought it helped explain that perhaps I wasn’t the problem, maybe society was; maybe the patriarchal society kept me down because I was a woman.

The confusion came from pain, thwarted desires, unattained goals.  Life seemed so hopeless, and I could not understand what the purpose was.  What was the point of living a miserable life, if all you had to look forward to was death?  What caused things to go wrong, when all I wanted was to be happy and to be loved, but even after I found my lifemate and was loved, that didn’t remove the other miseries of life. 

So it was with a great deal of confusion that I started reading Paramahansa Yogananda’s Autobiography of a Yogi.  Life simply did not make sense to me.  And when I thought in terms of some grand scheme of the universe, my mind was a total blank.  I felt that somehow I had missed something in my education.  I should know these things, but I did not.  But reading Autobiography of a Yogi helped me find a center.  It helped me realize that my confusion was shared by everyone. 

From Yogananda I learned that the real purpose for being here on this earth is to realize the self, to learn who we are—not just what we appear to be, but what the soul is.  We all come on this earth at different levels of soul-knowledge, but everyone’s purpose is the same, to become self-realized.  It takes some longer than others; some of us have to keep returning many times before we accomplish that goal.

The doctrines of karma and reincarnation are central to these teachings. I learned that we are exactly what we make of ourselves, that reaping and sowing is a real principle at work in our lives.  I had no one to blame but myself, and if I could bring pain and confusion into my life, I could remedy that. 

Yogananda’s teaching showed me that I had the power; I am not a puppet, not a victim; I get what I deserve–no more, no less.  I learned that God is the sum total of everything and every force—God is not a man behind the sky who will judge us on some final day and condemn us to burn in hell for mistakes we make here on earth.  Our mistakes can be corrected only by us—not merely punished by a super-judge. 

And it was this information that changed my life and gave me a solid reason for living.  Karma and reincarnation made sense, because they claim that there is a reason for everything; the buzz phrase of the day, “Life is not fair,” is shown to be inaccurate.  Life may be appear to be unfair, because we don’t know all the causes in our past that are taking effect now, but what kind of sense would it make that life is just from the beginning set up to be unfair.  Even as fallible human beings we don’t set up games that are unfair.  What interest would we have in baseball, football, or basketball if the rules were unfair?

All of our human institutions and organizations aspire to fairness, even though they may fall short on occasion through human error.  But that’s what karma deals with–human error, but error that can be corrected.  Bad things happen to good people, not because life is unfair, but because somewhere in a good person’s past he made an error that requires correction.  How could we ever learn to correct our errors if they are not pointed out to us?  That’s what bad things are, our karma returning to us for correction.  It would be grossly unfair of God to give us only one lifetime to correct our mistakes, so we have to return to this life again and again to correct our errors and become our real selves.  It’s much like learning in school—if we don’t make enough progress on a certain level, we have to repeat that level.

Yogananda’s book was not just filled with intellectual candy; it made me aware of the series of home-study lessons offered by Self-Realization Fellowship that would help lead me to that goal of self-realization.  These lessons teach very specific techniques for recharging the body with energy, and they teach how to calm to mind; the general term for these techniques is Kriya Yoga.  It explains that it is through our consciousness that we become aware of our divine nature; calming the heart and breath produces this state of awareness; therefore, more than merely believing in God, we have to practice God-awareness.

I have been studying the lessons and practicing Kriya Yoga for twenty years.  I cannot imagine having to live the past twenty years with that same confusion I had before I found Yogananda and Self-Realization Fellowship.  Reincarnation and karma explain why life seems unfair and why there is pain and suffering in the world—without those concepts I would not want to suffer through the agony of this world.  Knowing about these concepts does not eliminate all pain and suffering from the life of the Kriya yogi—but the concepts do explain why the pain and suffering exist, and I find a great deal of comfort in knowing there is a reason, and we are not just victims, vulnerable to the whims of a dangerous universe.  

I’m far from perfect, but I know that my progress is sure, regardless of how slow it may seem.  I know that my soul is immortal, and it has all of eternity to reach its goal–still I pray to the Divine Spirit that I find my Goal is this lifetime.  And I am thankful that I found my guru, who will help me reach that Goal. 

I finally realized that I have been carrying a big chip on my shoulder.  I have blamed my parents for not giving me a religious direction.  Now I realize that they actually did.  My father has always had a reputation for honesty, and the people he has associated with have always held him in high regard. He did, in fact, allow me to do all the things that were truly important to me, even though I chafed under his initial naysaying and his lack of enthusiasm for my interests.  Still I realize now that I learned to think critically from arguing with my father.

From my mother I got hymns.  I have two books of hymns and recently I have been playing them, and I have found out that I know so many more of them than I thought I did, and it is because I heard my mother sing them.

Also from my mother I got the first concept of spirituality.  She had a vision of her father after he died.  And she told me about it many times.  She told about this experience with complete conviction, and I have never doubted her, even though I had no understanding about such things until I read Yogananda’s explanation about how we consist of three bodies, the physical body (which dies), the astral and causal bodies (which do not die).

My parents did indirectly point me in the religious direction.  And quite possibly I am able to embrace a religion because a narrow view of religion was not forced upon me.  I was never coerced into accepting metaphors and traditions I could not understand. 

67.  Star of Bethlehem

Despite my flop as an actress in a Christmas play in first grade, by third grade I was ready to make a stage appearance again. So I accepted the part in the play as the Star of Bethlehem. We, of course, had to make our own costumes and props, so it was up to me to convert my fat body into a star. My mother was equal to the occasion. She bought a huge piece of shiny blue cloth that I draped around that pudginess, and she fashioned a huge 5-point star out of cardboard and covered it with aluminum foil. I don’t remember if I had any lines. I just remember standing on stage holding that big star in front of me—I was the sky and the star.

68.  Leyna Becomes a Land Animal and Then a Boy

On Monday, March 27, 2000, Lyn brought Samantha to us around 10 a.m. and went for her doctor appointment. She called us about 2 p.m. to ask us to bring Sami home around 5 p.m., so around that time we gathered up Sami’s gear and piled into the car to take her home.

Lyn had been having contractions since Sunday, March 26, and at this Monday appointment Dr. McCain said Lyn was 4 centimeters. And now Lyn’s contractions were about eight minutes apart and lasting about forty-five seconds. We all thought she might go that night. Mark expressed more certainty than the rest of us. So we sat around discussing the possibility, and we finally decided we’d take Sami back home with us. No point in dragging her out of bed at 2 a.m.

So we took Sami back to our house around 7 p.m., and put her to bed around 8:15 p.m. We were in bed by 10 p.m. At 2:38 a.m. the phone rang, and it was Lyn telling us that they were on their way to the hospital, because her water had broken. I got up, got ready, and left our house by 3:15 a.m.

I arrived at the hospital a little before 4 a.m. As I entered Lyn’s room, the nurses were doing the usual nursing-type things and paperwork for admitting Lyn. I asked Lyn how she was, and she was a little panicky, saying she couldn’t relax. She was lying on her right side. Her contractions were severe by this time, and she felt she couldn’t rise above them. After the nurses finished getting the IV and belly belts attached to Lyn, she got up on her hands and knees to get more comfortable.

Mark asked the nurses to get Lyn some water. While Mark was out of the room for a while, she said to me that she couldn’t do it; she wanted something for pain. But I told her she could do it. We took all those classes, and she had researched natural childbirth, and she could do it. Not only could she do it, she was doing it. I kept repeating that to her. I reminded her to let her belly sink down. Let those muscles do their work. Leyna will be here soon.

Mark returned and reminded her to put her mind in a happy place. We both reassured her that she was doing great. Mark continued telling her how great she was doing, how proud he was of her. And that Leyna would be here soon.

Lyn wanted to go to the bathroom, so we helped her walk over to it. She sat on the stool for only a moment; then she felt that she needed to get back to the bed. On the way back she said she thought she was going to faint. But she didn’t, and we got back to the bed all right.

Lyn felt that she couldn’t do it, because the contractions didn’t let up. She had been in the hospital less than an hour, and she had been 5 centimeters upon arriving. She thought something was wrong, because she thought she was still only around 5 centimeters. But since her contractions were not letting up, she started to get the urge to push. Doctor McCain arrived and checked her and found that and she was 9 centimeters. She was definitely in transition, and I think this information helped her relax a bit. Now she could start pushing. Mark and the nurses raised the bed to get her in a better position for pushing. The nurses also installed a bar across the foot of the bed, so Lyn could put her feet upon it to help her push.

After she began pushing, she was able to lie back between contractions. She thinks she was a wimp, but she did a great job. Mark coached her, telling her when to take a deep breath and when to exhale. She yelled with the contractions and did some solid pushing. She looked relaxed between contractions, even though she thinks she didn’t.

At one point Dr. McCain checked her and found that the cervix had swollen a little, and she asked Lyn not to push for the next couple of contractions. Lyn did this perfectly. And when the doctor checked her cervix again, she told Lyn to push again with the next contraction. It took only a couple more contractions, and Leyna’s head was partially out. Lyn didn’t realize how close she was, but she reached down and felt Leyna’s head, and then a couple more contractions, and Leyna’s head was all the way out. In the films we saw in the Bradley classes, usually when the head pops out, the baby just slips right out. But Leyna’s right shoulder got stuck, and so the doctor had to dislodge it. It seemed to me that this procedure took a long time. I was anxious to have her out. But then suddenly there she was.

Dr. McCain massaged her shoulder and waited for her to make a sound. After Leyna started to whimper, the doctor told Lyn that she usually doesn’t wait for the cord to stop pulsating before cutting it, and Lyn said ok, so Dr. McCain asked Mark if he wanted to cut the cord; he said no. Then she asked me, and I said no. Then she asked Lyn, and Lyn said no. But then I decided, yeah, I’ll do it. She had it clamped in two places, and she showed me where to cut. It wasn’t too hard to cut it, like cutting through wax or soft plastic. Then she handed Leyna to Lyn, and Lyn welcomed her and then put her to the breast. Leyna opened her mouth, made a good effort at trying to nurse.

Dr. McCain massaged Lyn’s belly to stimulate the expulsion of the placenta. When it finally came out, Lyn said she felt much better. 

At age 15, Leyna became Charlie, transitioning to live as a trans male.  

69.  A Boy at School

When I first saw him at Abington School in the second grade, I thought he was the scariest looking boy I’d ever seen. On the Crayola boxes was the company’s name. Well, I scratched the name off the box, because it was the same as this scary-looking boy.

Then later, I got to thinking he was quite cute, and in high school I kind of had a crush on him for a few days. I guess we had been joking around with each other, and one day in the hallway he hurried by me and tapped me on the shoulder, and a friend who was standing near me saw it and made some kind of remark about the former scary-looking boy liking me, which embarrassed me terribly. I had no clue about how to like boys in high school. 

70.  On Leaving Ball State University

It began in September 1997 when I wrote the following prayer in my Devotional Connections journal:

11 September 1997

Devotional Connection 25

My Goal of Self-Realization

“I really want to see you, Lord.” –George Harrison, “My Sweet Lord” 

My one goal is God-Union, Self-Realization. I want to attain realization of my soul in this lifetime, and so I believe I have to work very hard, meditate long and deep in order to attain my goal. To do this I need time and silence; I need to be able to eliminate all the things from my life that impinge on my time and silence and quietness of body and mind. This is the only reason I want to limit my activities to housekeeping, writing, and music practice–in addition to, but far, far subordinate to meditation and spiritual study. Housekeeping, writing, music practice are my nod to the world.

I want to pass my life as “silently and unobtrusively as a shadow” (Paramahansa Yogananda, Autobiography of a Yogi, 255n).

It is to this end that I demand from my Heavenly Father, Divine Mother, Holy Banker-Friend the financial security to withdraw from worldly work—teaching at BSU. I do not ask for money for any worldly striving or enjoyments, nor for any material luxury. I ask—demand—only time and silence so I can grow a luxurious garden of meditation flowers to lay at the Blue Lotus Feet of my Beloved. 

God does answer prayers. This prayer was answered, but I didn’t quite understand the way it was answered. Here’s what happened:

Ronald accepted a job with HBOC computer software company in March of 1998, which gave him a $5000 raise. I had been making around $25,000, teaching English composition at Ball State, so his $5000 raise didn’t seem to be the answer to my quitting, and I didn’t even consider it at the time. But now I realize it was kind of a first step. 

Since I had begun teaching English composition at BSU in 1983 as graduate assistant until Fall of 1997, I had gotten satisfactory evaluations for my teaching. My student evaluations were good; I had no student complaints that I knew of. Then I submitted my annual report for 1997, and my evaluation was unsatisfactory. I was shocked and went immediately to the writing program director, Carole Clark Papper. She was very vague, telling me of a student complaint which she tried to look up but could find no record of. She said my student evaluations were below the department average, which I didn’t understand, since I was rated something like a A- or B+. I was baffled that the department average was higher then that, but unfortunately, I failed to pursue the issue, so I’ll never understand it. I left her office thinking that she was going to get back to me with more details. But she never did. I later learned from the department chairman that I could have appealed the unsatisfactory within two weeks, but I was waiting for information from the writing program director, before taking that step.

In my discussion about the unsatisfactory with the department chairman, I learned that he didn’t think it was important because a different committee might have voted otherwise. He did say that the contract evaluations committee chairman, had mentioned something about a student making some comment about my class. But that student had just been in my Spring 1998 class, and the evaluation was for Spring 1997 and Fall 1998, so that should not have counted toward my evaluation. Neither writing program director and the English Department chairman mentioned my annual report or anything that really pertained to my negative evaluation. I am certain that if I had appealed the unsatisfactory evaluation, I would have been successful. But also, with that success, I would have felt obligated to continue teaching in the department.

The unsatisfactory evaluation prompted an ambivalence that forced me to face what I really wanted: I hated the fact that my teaching, which had been satisfactory for fifteen years, was now labeled unsatisfactory, but the outrage and disgust encouraged me to say, “Well, enough of this! I will not continue in a department that is so fickle, vague, and unfair.” I had wanted to quit teaching for several years so I could concentrate on my own writing and especially on my meditation. But year after year I returned, partly because I felt we needed the money.

An odd thing happened that complicated my decision to quit, and that was in June, the English department chairman called me and asked me to teach a section of the poetry writing class. I was highly honored to be asked to teach that class, but it confused me also that he’d ask a person whose evaluation as a teacher had just been labeled unsatisfactory. Nevertheless, I taught the class and received good evaluations from those students. I think I would have truly enjoyed teaching those poetry classes, but I do still have some doubts.

On the contracts that we sign every year at the beginning of the semester there is a place to check whether we accept the contract or not. I always thought that was kind of late to be offering that choice. I fancied it would be cute to check the “I do not accept” line some time. And that summer of 1998 I anticipated doing that. But then when I got an email message about the difficulty the assistant chair was having with scheduling of classes, I decided I should just tell them I had decided not to return. It seemed cruel to throw them 4 unassigned classes at the last moment.

So I quit Ball State. As time goes by and Ball State recedes further and further into ancient history, I am realizing that my goal of becoming a professor was an unrealistic one. I still have not decided what I want to do when I grow up; I guess I’ll wait till I grow up and see what it is that I can really do.

The important thing about this leaving BSU story is that I know it was simply the answer to my prayer. I asked to be relieved of teaching and the conditions came about that allowed that. The unsatisfactory evaluation and Ronald’s job change. Leaving BSU would have been much more difficult, if I had had to remain in Muncie. Ronald’s job change gave us more money and the opportunity to live elsewhere.

71.  A Temporary Set-Back

After quitting teaching at BSU, I suffered immensely wondering if I had made a huge mistake. So in December I wrote the assistant chairman and asked if she had any courses for me to teach Spring semester. She did, so I decided to teach two classes. January 11 on a Monday, I met two English 103 classes. I met them again the 13th and the 15th. Then I got sick with laryngitis. That weekend I could not speak. The first time in my life that I had experienced such an illness. Nevertheless, I met my classed on the 18th, barely able to get through them. I went home and lay down for a nap. I didn’t see how I was going to continue; I was still very ill with flu and still barely able to speak. Now I was faced with asking to have someone else take over my classes.

72.  Ronald’s Crash

Around 2:30 PM January 18, 1999, after I had taken a nap, I got a call from the chaplain at Methodist Hospital in Indianapolis telling me that Ronald had been involved in a traffic crash and was in the hospital in fair condition. The chaplain didn’t know much about his condition, and he said that Ronald might have to have brain surgery. But when I got to the hospital, I found out that his head injury was no more than a scrape, and his real problem was his intestine. He was in great pain, and they took him to surgery to find out what was causing it. They removed a section of his small intestine. He stayed in the hospital until Saturday, the 23rd. 

73.  Ronald’s Crash and My Final Exit

After Ronald’s crash I called the assistant chairman again to tell her had to quit, because not only was I sick but Ronald would need a lot care the coming weeks and I didn’t think I had the energy to keep the classes. She said she would try to find someone to take the classes but added that if I changed my mind to let her know. So I thought it over and decided I would keep the classes. By then she had found someone to take the classes, Jeff Padgett, a friend of mine from grad school. She said she would ask the department chair what to do, but I told her to go ahead a let Jeff have them. I felt that he probably needed them more than I did.

74.  We Move to Tennessee

I don’t think my Ball State connection would have ever been broken had we not moved to Tennessee. As long as I lived in Muncie I would have felt obliged to teach at BSU. I’m sure I would have returned as a full time contract faculty member. But after Lyn, Mark, and Samantha moved to Franklin, Tennessee, in January 1999, and after Ronald’s crash, we started thinking about moving. Our combined reasons for moving had nothing to do with my Ball State issues, they had to do with wanting to be near our new granddaughter who was born May 16, 1998. We have lived here in Spring Hill since August 1999—today is January 16, 2002—and we love it here. Of course, I still wonder if I should try to get a job at one of the many colleges here, and I keep looking for suitable ones. I’ve even applied to Tennessee State University twice, but I get no response. I think God wants me to concentrate in other areas. I hope I start listening to God more.

75.  Cast Iron

I decided to go with Ronald to Atlanta on one of his business trips. We would travel by car from Spring Hill TN down I-24 toward Chattanooga. I had been looking for a cast iron dutch oven, and on the Web the cheapest I found was $22. Even the Lodge company that has been making cast iron utensils since 1896 was charging $28. While visiting the Lodge web site, I found out that the Lodge company is located in South Pittsburg TN, so I located it on the map and noticed that is right off I-24 down next to the Georgia border, meaning we’d be passing right near the factory. I didn’t really plan to stop though. But as we were approaching South Pittsburg, I mentioned to Ronald that that’s where the Lodge company was, and he asked me if I wanted to try to find it. I didn’t even know if they had a store; I just wanted to see if we could find the company. Anyway, we found it, and they did have a store, and I found the exact oven I wanted—a 5 quart—for only $14.45! I was so happy, and it was so nice to be able to get it from the Lodge company store. South Pittsburg is a cute little town. 

I love cast iron. I have been using two pieces for years—one is a skillet that I’m pretty sure was Mommy’s, and one is a chicken fryer that I use for rice. I have two griddles, a round one and rectangle. I also have two small skillets and an even smaller skillet, and a corn bread pan—it makes little corn bread sticks that look like ears of corn. I think Mommy had one of those too. I had two cast iron dutch ovens when I lived in Brookville, but I didn’t take proper care of them, and I thought they were ruined and threw them away. But after reading about them, I realize now that all I had to do was clean them up good and reseason them—they never wear out. I remember buying two sets of cast iron and each one had a dutch oven. They were from different companies, I know that one set was from the Lodge company. Anyway, that’s my cast iron story.

76.  Revising My Life

William Stafford said, “I think you create a good poem by revising your life.” Of course, Stafford meant going forward, not starting from birth, and he was speaking about the specific act of writing good poems, not necessarily about improving your life spiritually, which is my main concern now. But have you ever thought back about how your life would have gone had you made a different choice from the one you made? Actually, I have thought in little snippets about it, but never much in detail, until yesterday. Before I went to bed, I was sitting after meditation, just in a cogitation kind of state. And I drifted back to 1967 and just let myself go through how my life might have been had I not married. I would have still taken the teaching position at Brookville and probably have been successful at it, but after a few years, I would have discovered it was not really for me, and I would have become a nun.

77. Phil Everly at the Airport

Ron and I were standing at the baggage claim carousel waiting for our luggage. I noticed a man pulling luggage off the carousel, and I thought he looked like Phil Everly. Then I told Ron and he thought so too. And then I heard him say, “Donald.” Then we knew it was Phil Everly. It made sense he would be in Nashville, because it was early September and for a number of years the Everly Brothers had performed at a celebration in southern Kentucky. I thought about saying something to him, but then I wasn’t sure what to say. 

As we were about to leave the airport, I saw him standing by the door, and I decide to go for it. I went up to him and said, “Hi, my name is Linda Grimes, and I love you.” He touched my arm and said, “That’s sweet.” And then I think I said something about being on the same flight as he was, but I can’t really remember. My mind kind of goes blank after saying, “I love you . . . ”  

I wish I could have been more articulate: I could have at least told him how much I appreciated his music all these years, but then I guess when I said, “I love you,” that said it all.

The reader will remember that I lived my early and mid teens “in love” with Phil Everly. And that my mother ridiculed me by telling me, “Linda Sue, you’re dreaming.” So in a sense, my dream came true. I was able to tell Phil Everly face to face, “I love you.”

78.  Living in Tennessee

Moving to Spring Hill TN has turned out to be quite a blessing.  Perhaps the most important blessing is being able to attend Self-Realization Readings Services.  And I particularly feel honored to be able to play harmonium and lead the chants once, or more, each month.  The area where we live is beautiful and well maintained.  We think of it as “paradise” or a close as such a term can be applied to this great dirty ball of earth.

79.  The Coffee Essays

I like to think of my life as a spiritual journey, and on any journey we want to find the shortest route but also the most convenient, one that affords comfort and pleasure, but still one that moves us along toward our goal at as fast a pace as possible. On the physical plane we argue about the best route. I remember when my Uncle Walter and his family, who lived in Lexington, Kentucky, used to come visit us just south of Richmond, Indiana. My dad and my uncle would invariably get into a discussion about the route the uncle took to get to us. Usually, my dad knew a better way, but then Uncle Walter also thought his way was better. And that’s how it is with most human endeavors. And that’s why there are different religions: one way does not suit all.

My way is yoga as taught by Paramahansa Yogananda in his Self-Realization teachings. The center of this yoga way is meditation in order to quiet and calm the heart and lungs. Yogananda tells us that in order to realize the spiritual realm of being, we must quiet all physical and mental activity—not by force, but gradually with patience and practice. Paramahansa Yogananda does not lay down a bunch of rules; he tells us how the world works and lets us decide for ourselves how we will behave. At the same time he does emphasize again and again that we do need to learn to behave.

So what has all this to do with coffee, of all things? Well, coffee is a stimulating drink; that’s why it is found in just about every office or place where the work-a-day world is in session. Coffee is the great lubricant that keeps the wheels of the work machine turning. That drink is so engorged in our lives that we don’ t think about it; we just take it as a natural part of our day. But I notice it because I have tried to quit drinking it so many times. I want to quit because it is not compatible with my main goal—to calm my heart, lungs, and mind in order to realize the spiritual realm of existence or God.

I am addicted to coffee just as an alcoholic is addicted to alcohol. And I am writing this series of essays to explore that addiction. I’m hoping that exploration will help me stop the coffee habit completely. 

Coffee 1

Thanksgiving Day 1995

On Wednesday 16 September 1992, I decided to go cold turkey off coffee. My head began to ache around nine o’clock that morning, but I was feeling well enough to teach my eleven and twelve o’clock classes. Then by one o’clock my head felt as if my brain would thump through my skull, and I became nauseated. Between classes I dashed to the restroom and vomited. I made it through my two o’clock with my head and stomach rioting, threatening to shut down the rest of my body. After my two o’clock—my last class, thank God!—I rushed to the restroom and vomited again. Then I went to my office and called home, but no one was there; I kept calling, yammering into the answering machine that I was sick and needed someone to come pick me up; finally Ronald, my husband, answered and came. He thought I was having a stroke; I reassured him that it was just the effects of not having any coffee. I’ve always had a very low threshold for pain, so I squirmed and moaned all the way home. 

As soon as we got home, I went to bed, and got up only to vomit, or otherwise use the bathroom. Lying in bed was difficult, the headache was nearly unbearable, the stomach finally empty still kept threatening to exit through my raw throat. After much writhing and groaning, I remembered the relief I get from menstrual cramps when I simply relax my abdominal muscles, so I imagined my head and stomach as tightened muscles, and I began to relax them; I also practiced breathing exercises. These breathing and relaxation exercises did not eliminate the pain, but they lightened it and calmed me down. Luckily, I had no classes on Thursday. And Friday is a fog I cannot remember. I cannot remember exactly how I got through the next few days, weeks, months, because I do remember the pain, weakness, and queasiness quite clearly. I had a few tricks that got me through the ordeal: I’d sleep as much as possible, I’d eat as much as possible, and I would use the relaxation and breathing technique as much as possible. So I guess those “tricks” and my strong desire to quit coffee got me through it. 

I had tried to quit coffee many times, but it had been thirteen years since the last serious attempt. I had experienced the pain of withdrawal then, but like all the other times it was only headache and drowsiness, not this nausea and vomiting. 

In May 1979 after Ronald went to Ft. Leonard Wood for basic training for the army, I quit but took to drinking it again in July after we moved to San Antonio and started what was like a four-year-vacation for us; we ate out a lot and frequented doughnut shops and what good is a doughnut without coffee? And Ronald was an avid java-hound with no intentions of quitting. 

But I guess it makes sense—here I was, forty-six years old, and I’d been drinking coffee since I was about twelve years old. The habit was thirty-four years old, and it had no intention of letting go easily.

So with this latest attempt to quit the java habit, I didn’t drink coffee again for a whole year, and then October 1993 I decided just to have a little, and I did, and soon I was hooked again. But not quite so tangled up on that hook as before the year’s abstinence. Since October 1993 I’ve quit several times. I did experience another withdrawal in October 1994. I had begun to drink it regularly everyday in August and continued the practice until October, and sure enough I experienced the headache and vomiting and the sickness was nearly as bad as the one two years before. I stayed off the stuff until this past spring of 1995 when once again the temptation overcame me, and I started to take it every couple days or so. And once again by the start of school I was downing it regularly every day. And also once again I quit. On 24 August a Thursday—a day I didn’t have classes—I abstained. And I had been drinking it every day since the end of July. But this time I did not experience the torture that I had the other two times. Oh, sure, my head felt a little bothered, but I had no nausea at all. I abstained until the 4th of November when I had a cup in the library snack bar. And I have now been having a cup from time to time during November. In order not to get completely hooked, I’ve avoided it on days I teach—Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays—and I’ve avoided having it two days in a row. Except last weekend. Downed it both days.

Now we are on Thanksgiving break—today is Thanksgiving Day 1995, and I am having a cup. I did not have a cup yesterday, even though we didn’t have classes. I had some Tuesday. Twice.

So there has been an evolution in this attempt to quit coffee. Each time is easier physically. It’s the mental addiction that I am fighting now, and that one is harder. When I first go off the stuff, I feel clean and good about the fact for a while, but at the same time I have a continuous drowsiness about me that I know a cup of coffee would clear up. I am also quite sure that if I’d just let enough time pass, it would clear up itself. So there is more to it than the physical. 

In addition to the physical and mental addiction, there is an emotional attachment. I like drinking coffee. I like making it. I have a great automatic-drip coffee-maker that brews up eight great cups in three minutes. I also have another automatic-drip coffee-maker, but I don’t use it; it takes longer, and makes a lot of noise; I really don’t know why I bought it. I also have a four-cupper dripolator that I used before I turned electric automatic drip. I have owned percolators also, both electric and non-electric. And for a time I have even relied on instant coffee, regular and freeze-dried. 

My mother was a java hound; she had a cup of joe with her all day long, as she moved through the house and through her day, and she liked it strong. She had a special cup that she always used: it’s a thick china mug, and on its bottom is inscribed, “Wellsville China, Wellsville, Ohio” with an outline shape of the state. I also have a special cup, lifted from a monastery in 1977. I didn’t actually steal it, but I was an accomplice, if a shyly unwilling one. A poet-friend and I were there visiting a friend of his, and we somehow ended up in the kitchen, where a big table filled with cups and saucers, bowls, and spoons and forks offered itself. My poet-friend started stuffing cups and saucers, bowls, and spoons and forks into my big book bag, and there I was—a thief. But when I finally parted from this friend, I took with me only one cup. And I have cherished that cup knowing that it was sipped from by the lips of a monk.

As I move through buildings on campus, I smell coffee. On TV I am told, and I assure you I believe, “the best part of waking up is Folgers in your cup.” And although I am not much of a social person and almost never do it, I love the idea of “let’s go for coffee sometime.” 

Funny thing—now Ronald is drinking only decaf. He went off rather gradually, and he did experience headaches for a while, and he has been tempted to go caf again, but so far he has taken regular coffee only on two occasions—in 1994 and 1995 in May the mornings before running the Indy Mini-Marathon. He even drinks decaf Cokes. I know it hasn’t been a cakewalk for him, but he doesn’t seem to suffer from the obsession as I do. His habit isn’t as old as mine; he didn’t start drinking it until he was seventeen, and since he’s eight years younger than I am, his coffee drinking habit is thirteen years younger than mine. He happily drinks his decaf every morning and doesn’t complain. 

But decaf just does not satisfy me. It tastes close enough to the real thing, but it does not supply the buzz of the real thing. And that buzz is the main reason for my addiction—for me caffeine is the most addictive substance I have ever consumed (abused?). I smoked cigarettes during the years 1972-1973 but quit about mid-year 1973 without even thinking about it. Then I took up cigarettes in autumn 1976 and quit again by summer 1977—again, without giving tobacco a second thought. I can drink beer, whiskey, wine, and not get hooked. Only marijuana would come as close to hooking me as coffee. When I smoked pot, I loved it also, and if it were not illegal, and so expensive, I might be writing this about weed instead of coffee. I do have some addictive behavior with food—especially sugar, especially chocolate—but that’s a different essay. 

Coffee 2

September 20, 2002

The year is 2002. I just reread my 1995 essay about Coffee, which I shall now rename “Coffee 1” since I’m in the process of writing its sequel. The first upchucking coffee-quitting experience of 1995 was followed by two repeats; one is mentioned in “Coffee 1.” The last such experience was October 8, 1997. From that date I went two years without drinking any coffee, but since 1999, I have had some from time to time—never letting myself get totally hooked. But I know that I am tempting fate every time I let myself indulge.

I do feel that I will never be caught in the habit the way I have been in the past. And I’m making a concerted effort through determination to cut out the coffee habit once and for all. Coffee is truly my alcohol. For just like the alcoholic who must forgo even one drink, lest she fall into the old habit, I must now totally stop coffee—including decaf, because decaf always makes me want the real thing.

This year had been going well. I had not had any coffee or decaf since Christmas of 2001—then Ronald and I visited his mother and step-father in Indiana. They drink only decaf now, and they offered us some. And so I indulged. That was August 17, 2002; today is September 20, 2002, and I’ve been indulging in decaf almost every day since that August day. Plus on Wednesday September 18, I had the real thing, and today the real thing. Both days I buzzed like crazy, had tons of energy. It’s easy to understand why coffee addiction is so pervasive throughout the working world. 

Now I’m prepared to pay for that indulgence. I threw out the rest of the decaf, packed up the coffee makers I use, and I am making a solemn vow that I will henceforth never again swallow another mouthful of coffee—including decaf. I’m having a cup of peppermint tea to celebrate.

All those times I described in “Coffee 1”—the times of quitting I’d throw out the remaining coffee I was drinking. One of those times—I threw out all the coffee-pots, except the one Ronald uses (by the way, he went back on caffeine and has never looked back. He has no intention of giving it up again.) But anyway, I threw out all the pots and that cup I loved, the one that had been used by a monk. Why would a monk be drinking coffee anyway? Even a Catholic monk? 

But this time is it, and I know I will have to pay, with a headache and some drowsiness. It won’t be nearly as bad as those earlier times. But it won’t be great. It will take several weeks to feel free again. But this time, I am determined to achieve that freedom. And this time I will not look back. I will not allow that second negative thought—the one that says, “But other people drink it. Doesn’t Ronald’s coffee smell so good in the morning? Don’t you wish you could enjoy what everyone else enjoys?”

Those voices will be crying my ear, but I won’t listen. I want my freedom, and I am determined to earn it. 

Coffee 3

January 7, 2003 My Birthday!

In breaking a habit the goal is to get to a place where you no longer want to do the act. Before you start taking steps to overcome a habit, you do feel that you no longer want to continue the habit, but after you have taken the beginning steps, you start to crave your habit again, and every day the thought of the habit creeps into your mind. You wish you could have a cup of coffee (or a beer, or a cigarette, or whatever habit you’re trying to break). But your new resolve says no. Still the thought continues to creep into your mind, and you have to fight it. That’s what you want to get rid of at this step—you have to not want to do the act.  But how can you accomplish that? It’s one thing to say no; it’s a different thing to not be tempted so you don’t even have to say no.

This morning (January 6, 2003) my resolve to quit coffee was severely tested, and I made myself a cup. I drank about a fourth of it, and just as the buzz was starting, I decided I did not want that feeling, and I poured the coffee out and made myself a cup of my herbal coffee. Before today my last cup of regular coffee was 14 November 2002, which means I was off the stuff almost two months. Then yesterday at my birthday celebration at my daughter and son-in-law’s house I had about a half a cup of decaf. Decaf always makes me want regular coffee, so the thoughts of coffee overcame me, and this morning I gave in.

Right now as I write this I feel that the temptation is less, because I was able to realize that I don’t really want that coffee buzz. However, I don’t know if that situation will last. (Health reasons don’t prompt me to continue; they motivate me to start, but my habit-mind takes over after a while, and I start craving the habit again. The real reason I want to quit, however, is for spiritual reasons: stimulation such as that experienced after caffeine ingestion, is incompatible with my yogic goals.) At this point I can say only that today I do not want to drink coffee, and I would not have known that had I not tried some. Before I drank that fourth of a cup, I did not know that I would drink only a fourth and not want the rest. So I assume that I did the right thing, because now I definitely feel that I do not want to feel the coffee buzz. I do feel that buzz slightly, but I look forward to having it end. And I furthermore assume that now I have evidence to support my belief that I truly want to live caffeine-free.

I have recently read Stephen Cherniske’s Caffeine Blues, which reports all the mischief that caffeine causes in the body. The book is quite convincing, providing lots of research evidence to support Cherniske’s claims. However, there is another book that I want to read, before I decide to accept all of Cherniske’s claims; that book is The Caffeine Advantage by Bennett Alan Weinberg and Bonnie K. Bealer. At this point I’m very skeptical of the latter’s claim, but I want to keep an open mind. After I have read and compared the two views, I’ll report my findings.

Coffee 4

Today is October 23, 2006, and since I last wrote I have continued to have problems trying to quit coffee. I can’t even keep track of the episodes of on-again off-again. Those books I mentioned in Coffee #3 amount to little real help in the problem: Cherniske’s is too stilted toward the dangers, and besides he is promoting a line of products that depend on his overdramatizing the adverse effects of caffeine. The Weinberg/Bealer book has little to say about the so-called “Caffeine Advantage” except that caffeine makes one more alert. That’s common knowledge, and if there are definite disadvantages even to a moderate level, it would be important for them to mention those distinctions which they, of course, do not.

So those two books just cancel each other out. But my own reason for needing to eschew caffeine is still the only one that matter for me: it is incompatible with my spiritual goal.

My present status in this on-going saga is this: Last Christmas 2005 I gave in to the urge and began drinking coffee regularly. I continued the activity until July 2006, when I decided that attending Convocation 2006 would be much more difficult, if I were taking caffeine regularly. I would have to have it in the morning and several times a day, which would make me have to go the restrooms to urinate at inconvenient times. It would make attending the Kriya ceremony impossible, because I have to be able to go at least four hours without a bathroom break for that event. So I stopped in July and after indulging daily for those seven months, I went through those ghastly withdrawals of headaches and vomiting.

Nevertheless, I accomplished my goal of quitting for Convocation and was able to attend the Kriya ceremony. (Except for the first Convocation I attended in 1996, I just realized that I have been off coffee for each Convocation since 1996.) 

During Convocation I had decaf with Ronald one morning, and then at LAX waiting for our flight back to Tennessee, I had decaf with breakfast. Then lately at home I have been drinking decaf fairly regularly. It is nice to be able to not have to have it. On weekends I usually don’t drink it in the morning. This past weekend I didn’t have any until lunch Sunday; I could never do that with regular coffee!

Now today I talked myself into have some regular coffee, and I have buzzing from all that caffeine. Bad idea? No doubt. But I will report back in few days to see how I’m doing. Either I’ll be whining that I’ve done it again, or maybe, I’ll be able to explain what I’m hoping will be that I have managed it, and am not taking it regularly.

I have an idea that if I can substantially improve my meditation, I can finally kick the caffeine habit once and for all. Improved meditation is the panacea for all ills. Of course, it is important to make certain connections with regards to how the meditation is relieving specific ills. Caffeine stimulates the nerves outwardly or physically, and meditation calms the nerves internally which would result in the same, actually better, heightened awareness, but with much less wear and tear on the physical nerves. 

The problem is having the patience to continue the practice until the desired results are attained. Patience and practice—I must pray for those virtues. At this point if I don’t continue caffeine consumption, I will not have to suffer those headaches and vomiting, but if I do, I will. I know that tomorrow I will experience a let down, because I will have a comparison with today’s high caffeine buzz. God, help me not let it throw me!

Coffee 5

Today is July 30, 2008, and I am off coffee. My last stretch of habitual daily intake lasted from my birthday January 7 until about the middle of June. Again, it was Convocation that motivated me to quit. This time I followed the instructions on the herbal coffee Teeccino label to quit gradually. I mixed 3 tablespoons of regular coffee with one tablespoon of Teeccino, and gradually reduced the coffee as I increased the Teeccino. It worked quite well. I got down to a miniscule amount of the real stuff, about 1/12 of the usual amount, and then finally braved it totally with Teeccino and no coffee.

A couple of times I had to backtrack, like going from 1/8 back to a ¼, but after a few days I was able to continue lowering the doses. I felt some pressure in my head with the very low doses, and after I have eliminated the coffee, but I did not get a full-blown headache, and I did not go into vomiting fits. This has been the best time yet for quitting.

I am virtually certain I will not go back to drinking caffeine; I have become very sensitive in two major ways that tell me I cannot tolerate it: an sporadic sharp pain in my head, and violent heart flutters. Since I have been off the caffeine about a month now, the head pains are not sharp but just a dull ache and less often, and the heart flutters are less severe and less often.  

I think that at my advanced age, I have to be more careful of what I put into my body. So I am drinking Teeccino, and really enjoying being caffeine-free. I am hoping this case is closed.

Coffee 6

I have decided to drink coffee and not worry about it.

Coffee 7

Today is January 22, 2012.  Both Ron and I are now caffeine-free, that is coffee-free, for almost a year.  It is much easier for me staying off the stuff now that Ron doesn’t drink it.  He drinks tea with caffeine, but his intake of caffeine is greatly reduced, and I don’t have to be tempted by smelling coffee and having a coffee machine sitting on the counter.  I have some Teeccino now and then and have no cravings for coffee.  My meditations have improved, and the increased devotion to my spiritual goal helps keep me clean.

80. A New Toilet

We had an outhouse toilet until I was about seventeen years old.  I often found it difficult to use and was afraid of spiders.  So when I was about six years old, I invented my own toilet.  I took a tub and placed a board across it so I could sit on it.  I had been using my new toilet for several days, and as if happens an uncle had come to visit and we were having dinner.  I had to go to the toilet, so I left the table to go attend to business—using my new toilet of course.  This time things didn’t go so well.  The board slipped and caused me to fall into my toilet.  I yelled and screamed, and Mommy, Daddy, and my uncle all came running, finding me a mess after having fallen in to several days of doo-doo.

81. How I Invented Eggplant Hispaniola (Española)

My intention was to make eggplant parm.  So I made the sauce with the usual Italian spices, but I had only sundried tomato paste, which is paler than regular.  My sauce was looking a little anemic, so I decided to color it a bit with some chili powder, but I put in too chili powder, and the sauce no longer tasted like Italian flavored sauce but instead like enchilada sauce.  Oh, well.  I don’t mind a little variety.

Then I went to get my cheese and discovered I had no mozzarella—only pepper jack.  At this point, I realized that my dish was no long Eggplant Parmigiana but Eggplant Hispaniola.  I had discovered a new eggplant dish.  Or had I?  I go online and type in “Eggplant Hispaniola” and get only one hit from a site that features only a bunch of gibberish.  So, yeah, heck, yeah—I discovered a new Eggplant dish, and its name is “Eggplant Hispaniola.”

Toying with the notion of renaming the dish, “Eggplant Española.” 

82.  College

While I was still in high school, I was flummoxed because I could not visualize what a college classroom looked like.  The idea of living far from home and on a college campus also bewildered me.  I had heard teachers make remarks about college life, but nothing seemed to serve as any guide to what it would be like.  When I got my college application to fill out, it offered the choice to begin with summer quarter.  That suited me fine; that way I wouldn’t have to stew and wonder all summer what college was like.

83.  Field Trip to Ball State

Ball State University was Ball State Teachers College at the time which was in the spring of 1964, about a month before I graduated from high school.  Our creative writing teacher took the Creative Writing Club for a visit to Ball State.  I had been very apprehensive about starting college, and so Ball State trip was god-send.  It helped so much to get a idea of the place I would be going soon.  Also that happy fact that I could start summer quarter rather than waiting until fall helped. 

84.  Cousin Jerald Wayne

My cousin, Jerald Wayne Richardson, was about three years older then I.  He lived in Lexington, KY, and we didn’t see him very often.  I remember that he was kind of chubby around the age of 12 or so, but then we didn’t see him for a few of years, and I was shocked to see how he had changed.  He was tall and slender and looked very much like an adult.  He spent a couple of weeks with us one summer, and he told me that the TV show, “Gray Ghost,” was good.  I had seen the show listed in the TV Guide but had never watched it.  I started watching it after Jerald’s suggestion and discovered that it was, indeed, a fascinating show.  I later bought two books about John Singleton Mosby and found them very interesting as well.

85.  Aunt Winnie

Winifred Lucille Richardson is my dad’s youngest sibling and only sister.  She was only thirteen when I was born.  She played piano, and it was our visits to my dad’s childhood homestead in Sand Hill, KY, with its piano and piano-playing Winnie that made me fall in love with music.  Growing up, we didn’t visit Daddy’s side of the family as much as we did Mommy’s.  Mommy’s two sisters and brother lived much closer than did Daddy’s.  So we were always closer to Mommy’s people than Daddy’s.

But still, I discovered that my aunt Winnie understood me better than probably any other family member.  More than once, she has told me that I was different from the rest of the family and that they couldn’t really understand the creative spirit that guided me.  She knew this because she was also “different.”  There are other terms that uncomprehending family members may use to label those they do not understand, but I think “different” is the most accurate as well as the kindest.

86.  A Fictionalized Account: The Sparrow’s Nest

—based on #16. Two Turtles: A Dream

One chilly morning, the woodstove in our living room was coughing out its last embers, and Daddy said we needed more kindling before the cold sank into our bones. He wanted to wait until the wind quit howling, but the air was still sharp when he grabbed the old tin pail and nodded for me to follow. As we crunched across the frosty grass, I spotted a tiny bundle of twigs trembling in the yard. I bolted toward it, my boots slipping. “Linda Sue, hold up!” Daddy hollered, the pail clanging as he hurried after me. (Daddy, just like Mommy, was always watchful, his eyes never straying far from me, like I might vanish into the hills.)

He caught my arm and tugged me back, but then he saw it too—a sparrow, fussing over a nest half-tumbled by the wind. We crouched down, the cold biting our knees, and watched the bird dart and weave, tucking straw with fierce little hops. I wanted to scoop it up, but Daddy’s hand steadied mine. “Look at that,” he whispered, his voice soft as the dawn. “That nest ain’t much, but it’s her whole world. Keeps her eggs safe, no matter the storm.”

I reached out, slow this time, and brushed a finger against a stray twig. It was brittle but woven tight, like the sparrow knew every knot by heart. I was barely three, but that moment stuck, older than the mountains themselves.  

87.   Another Fictionalized Account: The Frog

—based on #4. The Snake

When I was fourteen, I scooped up a frog to catch the eye of a boy who’d been fishing at our ponds and hanging around the shack. It was a sweaty summer day, and I was stuck behind the counter in the shack at my family’s fish pond, selling worms, candy, sandwiches, and sodas. 

No air conditioning, just a creaky fan that stirred the heat. A prissy-looking woman came in and asked for a cold bottle of pop; customers usually just grab the pop themselves, since the cooler was within their reach. 

So I grabbed a bottle from the cooler, popped the cap, took her coins, and handed it over. No “thank you”—my dad was always on me about that, but the words felt clumsy in my mouth. The prissy woman shuffled out, and the boy, leaning against the counter, grinned and said, loud enough for her to hear, “Bet she’d flip if he knew you were just holding a frog.”

The woman stopped dead in there tracks, turned, and stomped back in. “You touched a frog? Before my drink?” Her voice was sharp, like I’d poisoned her. I mumbled, “Yeah,” my cheeks starting to burn. She slammed the bottle down, pop fizzing over the rim, and marched off to find my dad. 

But my did just chuckled, said folks overreact, but I was stung with the embarrassment. The thing is, I didn’t even like frogs—their slimy wiggle made my skin crawl. And that boy? He wasn’t worth the trouble. My whole life, I’ve done things like that too often, stuff that doesn’t fit me, just to play a part. Looking back, I just shake my head, wondering who I was trying to be.

88.  Bear Claws

While Ron was in the U.S. Army, we lived in San Antonio, El Paso, and Aurora, Colorado.  In San Antonio, we frequented a Dunkin’ Donuts that was just down the road a piece.  My favorites were the apple and cherry fritters, plus we all really loved the bear claws.  

One Friday night, I dreamed of huge bear claws at the Dunkin’ Donuts;  I mean they were dream-sized, humongously outrageous donuts.  In the morning, I told Ron and the kids about my funny dream, and we all had a laugh, and then we decided to go Dunkin’ Donuts as we were suddenly hungry for bear claws. 

We walk in and up to the donut case, and what should appear before our eyes?  The biggest bear claws we had ever seen. So we ordered a round, sat down, and began to enjoy both the bear claws and the apparent prophetic dream of mama bear.

As we are sitting having our donuts, we heard a customer standing at the donut case say, “Hey those are big bear claws today, huh?” And another one said, “Yeah, those are bigger than usual.”  Then we heard a Dunkin’ Donuts waitress say,  “Yeah, they turned out really big this morning.  You guys are in luck.” 

Coincidence?  If you believe in coincidence!  Otherwise, it’s just plain funny.

89.  The Make-Up Mirror

(In the little story, I refer to “God” with the masculine pronoun simply because that is the Western custom.)

I used to think that God interceded in our lives at only special and infrequent events, like birth, marriage, during church service, and death.  And the nature of that intercession depended on the morality of the individuals involved.  A high-moraled person would get good things from God, and a low-moraled person would get bad. 

Now I think that God is responsible for and is present during all of our activities.  God does not insist that we accept or acknowledge His presence, but He is nevertheless always with each one of us—offering guidance if we want it.  God even helps out in mundane matters if we let Him.

Let me tell you about how God helped me out in a very mundane matter:

My son and his housemate—two woefully underemployed college dropouts—decided to have a rummage sale.  So I gathered together a bunch of things for them to sell—some dishes, pots, pans, storage containers.  But most of the stuff seemed awfully cheap, and I wanted to really help them out by contributing things that might bring in some money.  

So in the lot of cheap things, I added an electric deep-fryer and two make-up mirrors, one of which was a nice mirror with adjustable lighting with home, office, day, and evening settings, and the one that I had been using.  But for now, I had been experimenting with going make-upless, and I figured I didn’t need the mirror anymore.

While my husband and I were in California for a week, my son and his housemate stayed at our house to feed the dogs and just generally keep the home fires burning, and during that week, they had their rummage sale.  They made $180.00.  But they didn’t sell everything, and they left some of the stuff in our garage and in my son’s room, which he had not totally moved out of yet.

A few weeks later after school started, I began to question my decision to go make-upless.  I have worn eyeliner, shadow, blush, and lip-gloss for about thirty-years, and the look of my naked face in the mirror is hard to get used to.  I wouldn’t mind it so much if I could just stay home and do my housework, but I teach at a local university, and I do not feel completely dressed and ready for battle without my war-paint.

I decided to add my make-up back.  But now I was without my make-up mirror.  I called my son to see if maybe they still had my make-up mirror, but no, it had sold.

Well, I thought, no problem, I’ll just go buy myself a new mirror.

My husband had to travel to Orlando, Florida, for a conference, and I decided I’d use those days as a retreat—I planned to concentrate on my meditation, housework, practicing my music, and writing—all the things I would do if I didn’t have to teach.  He left around noon on Saturday.  I had decided I would not go anywhere during my retreat days—Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday.  (I think it was because of the Labor Day holiday that I had Monday off.)  So I figured I’d get in my shopping after he left on Saturday.  

All I needed was the new make-up mirror and a few grocery items.  So I went to Target, thinking I’d get my make-up mirror there.  The only one they had was a small travel-mirror that required batteries.  I doubted that it would give off enough light, and I didn’t want to have to buy batteries, so I passed on that one, and next I went to Meijer, where I checked the cosmetics department and found lots of mirrors, but no lighted ones.  Next I hit Wal-Mart, again so luck.

By now after searching in vain at three stores, I was getting tired so I went home.  I thought maybe I’m not supposed to find a mirror because I’m supposed to stop wearing make-up, but my mind kept returning to the mirror.  I felt sure that I needed to wear make-up especially when I teach, so I decided to continue the search.

On Sunday, I called Revco and learned that they had lighted make-up mirrors.  I drove down and purchased one.  It cost only $14.95.  But after I got it home, I realized it would not do—its lighting was poor, and it had no switch; it had to be plugged in to be turned on.  So I took it back.

The make-up mirror I have now is exactly the kind I wanted.  It is much like the one that got sold at the rummage sale; it has different settings, and it gives off good light.  The sad part of this story is that I don’t remember where I got it or exactly when.  

I wrote the first part of this essay several years ago, I think, and now all these years later, I can’t remember the ending I had intended for it.  But I do remember that the main point of the essay was to show how God helps me in even mundane activities.

How did God help me with the mundane activity of finding a make-up mirror?  He led me to the mirror I wanted, and He gave me a few days to mull it over in my mind about whether I really wanted a new one or not.  I might have had a better explanation than that back when I first wrote the essay, and it might have been like this:  That I bought the mirror at one of the first stores I looked in.  Perhaps in Meijer—but in a different department.  Instead of finding the perfect mirror in the make-up department, I found it in the small appliance department.  That’s probably the way it really was.  

But it really doesn’t matter, because regardless of how or where or when I found the mirror, it was, in fact, God who led me to it.  God does what He does because He knows what is right.  He is always the doer, working through me and with me for my best benefit.  

So in this essay my purpose was to claim that God works with us and for us not only on momentous occasions such as weddings and funerals, but every day in every way, even in mundane affairs, even when looking for make-up mirrors.

90. Peace and Harmony Within
May we all realize that no matter what ravages the world visits upon us—unhappy childhood, miserable marriage, nasty children, annoying coworkers, political hacks trying to dismantle a well-functioning republic for their own personal gain—if we have peace and harmony within, we hold no animosity toward others, and we can achieve material and spiritual success. Would that we all attain that peace and harmony within that leads to perfect understanding. 

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