Broken Eggs

The year was 1979, deep summer in Alabama.  It was lightening bug weather and the rolling lawns of the homes along Highland Avenue looked photo-shopped green. Ratchety sprinklers filled the air with their rat-a-tat-tat sounds. Mimosa trees opened their pink skirts and closed them again.  Magnolias left their lemon scent on your nose long after you moved in for a deep sniff.  I was wearing a nice pink suit with a striped silk blouse, dolman sleeves and tiny cuffs.  The skirt swept nearly to my ankles and the jacket was cut asymmetrically.

            The women of St. Mary’s on the Highland Episcopal Church had invited me to tea.  They wanted to take a look at me.  I was, after all, getting ready to enter the seminary and they were not at all sure about it.  So I was summoned.  I don’t mean to imply that it was a particularly hostile audience.  It wasn’t.  It was a curious one. 

            In the reception room large vases of flowers sat on the mantle and the serving table.  The silver service was polished and the cut glass punch bowl had an ice ring with raspberries and mint frozen in it.  Lemon squares and pecan tassies filled silver trays.  Cucumber, cream cheese and olive and pimiento cheese finger sandwiches lay under a damp towel that was whisked off only when the trays were passed.  The women all wore their Sunday dresses.  No hats or gloves that I recall, but you could tell that some of the women pondered that decision hard before they came….phone calls back and forth…”What about gloves?” “I don’t think so.  She’s so young she probably doesn’t even own a decent pair of gloves.” (I, by the way, did too own a decent pair of gloves back then.)

            The bishop was there and everyone deferred to him sweetly.  He greeted each woman with a warm two-handed clasp.  I paddled in his wake as he introduced me to first this one and then the next.  He prayed over our refreshments and for the next hour I mingled.  Mingling is one of the things at which I am totally inept; an occupational deficit to be sure.  But I girded up my loins and proceeded to be as charming and respectful as I could possibly be. I was both wildly uncomfortable and deliriously joyful.

            After the mingling time, the bishop asked me to say a few words about my sense of call and why I was pursuing the priesthood.  So I did.  It all started, I told them, with my very first memory.

            The memory goes back to my grandmother’s funeral.  In those days in south Alabama, people were often buried from the home.  Such was the case with my grandmother.  She and my grandfather bought the home on College Street when they were first married in 1903.  Built in 1855 it is a wonderful old home with high ceilings and heart pine floors.  It is the home in which my father was born and in which he died 88 years later.  But I get ahead of myself.

            Somehow the decision was made that I was too young to stay home for the funeral so I was taken across the street to my cousins’ house to play with their new electric train set. 

            Here is where my memory comes in.  Just after crossing the street, I turned to look back at the house.  I remember the mourners coming up the sidewalk and across the porch to the open front door.  Both the men and women wore black suits and hats.  A few had plates of tomatoes or deviled eggs.  I watched them for a moment as they entered the house.  Then suddenly I saw an indescribable bright golden aura around the house.   I knew instantly that it was God and my journey toward ministry began right then. 

            I went on to tell them other moments that had led me to be there in a pink suit sipping punch on a Tuesday afternoon.  They regarded me quizzically.  Asked only a few of the questions so obvious on their faces and then began to collect their handbags and cake plates to go on with their summer lives.

            As I stood at the door and thanked each woman for attending, one grabbed my hand and would not let it go.  She was small and wiry.  Her nubby suit smelled faintly of closet and her salt and pepper hair was wound in tight curls all over her head.  Her eyes were a nearly invisible blue.  They looked like fire in ice, like an opal in the right light.  “Eugenia,” she said.  “Don’t blow it.  All our eggs are in your basket.”  It took my breath away. I gasped, audibly I think, and took a frantic breath like the way it is when the door closes one of those machines for lung testing.  “I’ll do my best,” I said, thinly, afraid.

            For years I dreamed of her, felt the weight of those words, the weight of ‘firsts’.  I tried so hard to be the best at everything.  I wondered what it would take to ‘not blow it.’  I wondered what the ‘it’ was that I had been so prophetically ordered not to blow.  I got an ulcer.  I changed my hair. I hid.

            As it turned out, no matter how hard I tried to live up to a those hope-filled expectations of me, no matter how hard I tried to juggle that basket, I rather spectacularly broke all the eggs in it eventually.  A broken marriage, a feminist bent.  There were lots of reasons, but suffice it to say the Episcopal Church and I disappointed each other and moved on.   I found my happy tribe among the Presbyterians…a stalwart sticky fingered lot who for thirty years have sweetly picked out the broken eggshells of my life’s messes and made a yummy omelet of it all. 

            Theologians talk about the upward fall.  In short that seems to mean that it was a great and wonderful thing that Adam and Eve screwed up so badly because that meant we got Jesus.  I cling to that.  My life has been one wonderful and ragged upward fall, each crashing moment leading to an unexpected grace that could have arrived no other way.  Broken egg by broken egg.

Nadia: The Woman with the Impossible Eyes

            “My name is Nadia,” she said as she moved through the thin curtain into the interior room where I sat shivering in a hospital gown on an unusually soft and comfortable examination table.  “Are you Mrs. Gamble?”

            “Yes,” I said, glancing at her nametag.  Her name bore faint resemblance to Nadia.  Twelve Letters. There was an ‘n’ in there somewhere.  “How kind of her,” I thought, “to offer a name I could pronounce, one I could remember.”  She smiled.  I smiled back.  Her eyes were large, the stuff of Bollywood, with natural kohl lining. They were elegant, soft, young, unafraid eyes.  They were so beautiful that, for a second, even this aging Baby Boomer wondered if I, too, could achieve such a smoky eye look with enough Mary Kay intervention.  That idea, mercifully, was gone in a blink.

            “Where did your family originate,” I asked as she tore into packages of electrodes and cotton gauze. 

            “Sri Lanka,” she said. 

            “Have you ever been there?” I asked.

            “Yes,” she said.  “Last summer.  My grandmother still lives there.  It was beautiful.”

            “Beautiful,” I tried to imagine it, blue ocean never more than a moped ride away, women in bright colors, long hair flying behind them.  All I know of Sri Lanka is the picture I have on my desk of my Child First sponsored child, Nipun, standing with his family in front of the project school with the camel colored yard swept in circles.  Nipun is not good at ‘maths’ but he loves to dance.  Sri Lanka.

            Nadia was the second person to greet me as I settled into the Echo Lab at Stanford Medical Center where I have been sent to see if the ‘brightest and the best’ the world of medicine has to offer can determine why, for no simple and obvious reason, the air that I breathe refuses to do its magic and fill my blood with oxygen.

            Choon was the first to greet me.  She was cheerful, eager.  “Hmmm,” she muttered slapping at the veins in my inner elbow.  “They are superficial.” Superficial? Like a stolen lunch at Marshall’s on the way to take home communion? The chick lit of veins?

            “Ah,” I said as she patted and tightened the tourniquet looking for a suitable vein that would not be needed for other tests later in the day. 

            “I need a pediatric needle,” she said scurrying from the room. 

            “Appropriate,” I thought feeling like a child, like the young child I had been 50 years ago with cut downs in her little legs and an old oxygen tent fuzzying the view from the windows of Stabler Hospital.  Suddenly I was that child again, closing my eyes and listening to the little box record player one of my mother’s students had brought to me.  It played 45’s.  Tab Hunter.  Red Sails in the Sunset.  Over and over.

            “You are hard to stick,” Choon said as she threaded the pediatric catheter that would push bubbles through my heart.  She attached three small syringes to the tiny needle and left the room again.

            “Why the bubbles,” I asked Nadia.

            “We need to see if something has been broken,” she said.  “We can see the bubbles going through if there are holes.  It will look like lace if it is broken.”

            To see if something has been broken.  Could it be that broken hearts could actually break hearts?  I remembered sitting in my friend Lynn’s living room in a rocker, no I think the chair was steady, retro polka dots. I was the rocker; the chair my anchor to the earth. 

            “It hurts,” I said, arms so tightly around my chest they nearly met in the back.  “Oh God, it hurts.”

            “I know,” she said.  “It’s awful.” 

            Could I at that aching moment have burst a stitch, unraveled a tiny creation stitch that bubbles can now go through? 

            I remember my ancient neighbor when I was a child, Mrs. Lee, tatting on the front porch.  She tatted lace for pillowcases and summer dresses.  She made me a set for my first wedding.  She could catch up any dropped stitch no matter how much time had passed.  Where was she when I needed her?

            “You are being very brave,” Nadia said.  I teared up a little. “Not brave,” I said.  “Yes, brave,” she said.

            I thought of all the centuries of brave women.  I thought of Queen Dido flinging herself from the great cliffs near Carthage.  Was she defying patriarchy?  Was she succumbing to a broken heart?  It depends on whom you read.  I thought of Perpetua and Felicity in the arena facing down the mad heifer, pinning up each other’s hair so no one would think they were grieving.  And of Rosa Parks who was just bone tired.  And all the ones before, between and after who somehow knew the power of a woman’s protest, of a woman’s blood.

            Does that power still flow through my maybe lacey heart?  Are there worlds yet for me to shape?  Words yet for me to tat together?

            “You are having a good day,” Nadia said as I gathered my things and left the room.  “Best luck to you.”

            “Thank you,” I said.  “And to you.”

            And now we are home.  The long drive is done for this week.  Robbie, the man who stitched up my broken heart is lying beside me playing solitaire on his cell phone. 

            “You were brave today,” he says, not looking up from the screen. Again I get a little teary.

            “I am brave,” I think and say a small prayer of thanks to God for Robbie and for the woman with the impossible eyes.

            Who has reminded you that you are brave?

The Rhino Sisters

On Wednesday, Robbie and I visited the Safari Park of the San Diego Zoo.  I had been looking forward to this for weeks, so much so that I was eager to get up early (for me) so that we could head out into the hills to be first in line at the park before the August sun drove us and the animals indoors. I managed to get up, dressed and into the car with only the merest pinch of whining...and that all for show.

The park is about an hours drive from San Diego, up in the camouflage colors hills near Encinada.  When I first moved to California the summer hills, all camel and worn out green looking, made me think of a dog with the mange.  They looked like their hair had fallen out in tufts and that they had a distinctive and unpleasant itch.  I see them differently now, at least a little.  The tans and camels are not all the same.  The greeny black splotches are little oasis of shade for the creatures that scratch out a life there.  I can even see in the grasses a gracefulness, the capacity to move freely, that the lush undergrowth of my home state does not allow.

Anyway, we made the drive easily, traffic parting like the seas, and turned off onto the country road that lead to the park without so much as another car in sight.  We passed well watered vineyards, dilapidated sheds with hand painted signs for ostrich eggs and local honey.  The road almost seemed sticky with it. I was in a foreign land.

The park was everything I wanted it to be.  The early crowd was thin.  Misting stations sat next to ice cream stands.  Impossibly crowned birds peeked from behind bushes and one, an elegant crowned tinamou, even allowed us a peek at her jade green egg.  Robbie and I were caught trying to poach a feather by a wonderful keeper named Tom who showed us the egg.  (At the end of the day, when we came back for one more peek at the tinamou, Tom, surreptitiously tucked a small ibis feather in my pack. It was an offering.)

The reason I write tonight, however, is to tell you about the Rhino sisters.  We took a special cart safari that allowed us a close up look at some of the animals out in the wide spaces habitats.  There, bunched up together under a sturdy shade tree, sat about six female rhinoceroses.  Our guide, Casey told us that they were a part of conservation project to help to save the rhinos.

For years rhinos steadfastly refused to breed in captivity.  Every possible enticement was used to encourage it, but none of the healthy breeding pairs produced.  Finally, by happenstance, they learned that female rhinos, when deprived of the company of other females will suppress their hormones so as not to conceive.  They do this because in the wild they need to have several adult females to protect a calf from predators.  I mean why go through an 18 month gestation just to have the little guy gotten by a lion while a baby?  Without a 'sisterhood' they would have none of it.  When several females bonded into a group, called a crash (don't you love it), then they felt save to conceive, brought their hormones up to speed and had at it.  More than 50 of the endangered calfs have been born this way.

And there they were, a crash of rhino sisters under a tree in the summer sun, each taking a turn looking after the one young calf.  Huge, funny looking, 800 pound headed things, under a shade tree taking turns baby sitting.  It takes a crash.

As we lumbered around the park on our little cart with the impossibly bright, young, blond and beautiful Casey calling all of these amazing animals by name, I felt the truth of life well up in me.  The truth of this amazing life: it takes a crash.  In the very heart of creation lies the truth we all know, that without community, without others to share the load, without a tribe to call our own, ones who know all, see all and accept all, the tender young shoots of our own lives would be too vulnerable to bring forth either.
Without a crash, everything we are created to bring forth is stopped in its very tracks.  This is why I continue with church.  This is why I will go back tomorrow, after a long and luscious vacation, and take one more crack at it all.  Because it takes a crash.

Joanne and Johanna

I've started this blog to begin a conversation about the people, moments and stories that shape our lives, form our faith and give us courage and renewed energy and hope.  Especially the people.  Especially the women, those ones whose names go unremembered in the world, whose stories start small but ripple wide, who battered down walls when faced with them, who found a voice with which to face the world.  I'll be sharing about these folks here and hope that you will add stories and comments from your life as well.

Today I want you to meet Joanne and Johanna.  I grew up in the South, Alabama to be specific, in a Mayberry of a town with magnolia trees in the front yard, pine pollen coating the broad front porch and times full of changing winds.  More of those changes another day.

At any rate, I grew up an only child in the home my father was born in and died in.  Luckier than almost everyone I know, I grew up with a deep stability that my father by temperament and tenure imbued into me.  Except for the fact that I was sick all the time.  Very sick much of the time.  A preemie, my lungs have been my weak link all my life.  Much of my early life was spent in bed, creating kingdoms out of counterpane, struggling to breathe and spending holidays in hospitals with black and orange construction paper bats taped to windows and the hazy disorientation of oxygen tents.

When I was in first grade, I had to drop out of school and be tutored at home.  One memory that sticks out for me was of my mother's friend, Joanne, coming to the house to help me learn to read.  I don't remember my tutor, poor darling, the one who slogged it out with me day by day.  But I do remember 'Miss Joanne'.  There was something clean, no nonsense, calm and durable about her.  Dutiful, too, maybe.  "See Spot run" will forever be associated with her in bermuda shorts and a pressed blouse sitting next to me on my bed while my mother got a rest.  She helped to unlock a door in me: there were things on the earth that could run and words could make it so.  I thank God for Joanne.

Years later, battered not by illness but by church, I found my way to Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary and to The Rev. Dr. Johanna Bos.  When I left the deep south bound for seminary, disappearing around the tree lined streets and heading north, first to Sewanee and then to Lousiville, I had never seen a woman minister.  I thought that I and I alone would make up for the singular lack of leadership estrogen in the church.  I quickly learned how small I was and how utterly dispensable.  Until I got to Louisville and met Johanna.  How I got on her good side, I do not know. From the moment I met her she decided that I had a voice to unleash in the world and she pushed and tugged on me until I began to squeak it out for myself.  I don't think she ever used the words, but Johanna somehow told me that I was enough for my life, enough even for the church, just enough.  She believed in me, still does.  I thank God for Johanna.

'Miss Joanne' unlocked the world of others voices for me.  Dr. Johanna unlocked the world of my own.

Who taught you to read? Who gave you your first taste of 'voice'?