Peoples and Cultures
Solace. Wikipedia. A woman’s hands.
The grass harp / El arpa de hierba (Photo credit: Sofía)
When a writer makes me feel welcome and acceptable and a little bit wonderful despite it all, I almost cry.
The best I can do to thank and honor that magnificent storyteller is to tell other people, read this book.
So here I am telling you, asking you, pleading with you to read “The Grass Harp” by Truman Capote. The book was first published in 1951, but can probably be found at just about any local library. If you’re lucky, you might find a copy at a used book store for $2 even. The book is worth buying even if you find it new.
Do you remember pressing your pencil onto Kress paper? Or climbing up into a tree house or building a creek fort for summer days? Maybe remember the pink fuzzy blooms of a mimosa tree and the dark red pomegranates spilling out black seeds strange and bittersweet like many human relationships.
The late Truman Capote, born Truman Streckfus Persons, helps me remember and get through. I wish he could have been my friend. Capote has died, but he left us his very heart in his books and in his characters like Dollyheart and Catherine and Riley and Judge Cool.
When I consider certain passages, my heart stirs with the precious recognition that I’m not alone, that someone went before and knows what it’s like to feel different. And don’t many of us feel different, somehow defective, at one time or another?
Here’s Judge Cool explaining Spirits to Dolly and when I got done reading, I hoped it meant I was one of the Spirits instead of just plain difficult or crazy. “Spirits are accepters of life,” Judge Cool tells Dolly. “They grant its differences–and consequently are always in trouble.”
Trouble yourself, if you can even call it that, to read this long-ago book by Capote, who took his stepfather’s surname after his mother married a second time. When Capote asks you, through the voice of orphan Collin, “When was it that first I heard of the grass harp?,” I’m betting you will want to know the answer.
English: The healing of the paralytic : wall painting in the baptistry of the domus ecclesiae in Dura Europos. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
That lavender wool jacket and that pearl gray sweater don’t fit anymore.
Other blouses don’t fit either. But the clothes are still useful and would look good on someone else.
When the petite woman saw me carrying the clothes near my apartment, she smiled and said hello when we passed each other. Breathy alcohol. That’s how it was when I drank. She’s trying. Hope for her. She can quit. She can. If she can’t, God love her. God loves her.
I went to the used shoe store because this check has to last another week. The big black and white sign in front said: “Smile. You’re on audio and video surveillance.” The sign didn’t feel good.
Having feelings for others is being like God. Empathy means feeling something, mercy or sorrow, on behalf of someone else. In Jesus, God put Himself in our shoes. Jesus knows how everything feels and how sometimes it feels good and sometimes it feels bad. Jesus is touched with the feeling of our infirmities. The best translation I’ve read is that Jesus understands our inability to get results.
At the shoe store, the background music pleaded, “Cry Out to God.”
O God! Let me not fail so often to put myself in other people’s shoes. I failed this very hour at the library. I got annoyed because that particular problem isn’t mine, although it used to be. I used to be afraid of germs, too. God, help that woman. She’s trying to be perfect.
English: Raw material for coleslaw This crop of white cabbage is being harvested. Looking seaward from the sea wall. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Over at Cameron’s Restaurant in Cleveland, Tennessee you can find food your mama warmed up for you with love and light or maybe duty and distraction, but that’s okay.
There are so many dishes to choose from, everything from salad and strawberries to butterfly shrimp and “Cleveland’s Biggest Biscuit,” so don’t worry about leavin’ hungry.
But if you go to Cameron’s on a Friday night, you might leave crazy if you don’t try the deep-fried catfish and the coleslaw. Make sure you let the sweet milk from the coleslaw run underneath the crispy catfish and put one bite on the fork so the flavors mix together. You’ll get the perfect-to-the-teeth texture and the outlandishly good sugary-salty taste to your distinguishing palate.
Cameron’s, located at 140 Dooley Street, opens the Catfish Bar Fridays, 5-8 p.m. The restaurant, decorated hodgepodge and friendly as a good family reunion, starts early Monday through Sunday. The doors open at 5 a.m. every single day except Sunday, then try 7 a.m. Weekdays the doors are open until 2 p.m., Saturdays ’til 1 p.m. and Sunday until 2 p.m.
People can watch television, play the lottery or listen to the jukebox.
Here’s a side from foodtimeline.org. Many historians agree that the Dutch brought coleslaw to America when they brought over cabbage seeds and settled in the New Netherlands which became New York State. The Dutch grew cabbages along the Hudson River and when somebody thought up mayonnaise in the 18th century, we had the ingredients for coleslaw, which literally means “cabbage salad” from the Dutch word “koolsla.” The Dutch added mayo and spices and maybe some vinegar and served the side dish cold.
It’s not easy to find a real good dish of coleslaw, but I found one at Cameron’s one Friday night in February to go with that catfish and it’s all you can eat.
Here in the South, we especially like coleslaw with barbecue or catfish like the deep-fried treat at Cameron’s. Stop on over at Cameron’s. Carry-outs are welcome. They gave me extra Sprite with ice to go.
Firefighters (Photo credit: thomaswanhoff)
It’s not possible to go bravely all the time. Sometimes we must go afraid. I read that phrase “go afraid” in a Guideposts magazine article many years ago.
The story was about a group of people trapped inside a burning building. Firefighters struggled valiantly to rescue the people so they wouldn’t die. The firefighters got the group to start moving to safety, but everyone had to cross a scary barrier. One woman balked. The fire terrified her.
“I’m afraid,” she cried to the fireman.
“Then go afraid!” he shouted. Still feeling frightened, the woman crossed what seemed an unsteady support. But when she obeyed the expert, despite her fearful feelings, he was able to help her.
Our fears can be different types, with different levels of danger. The writer Anne Tyler, in her book “Celestial Navigation,” described a character who carried herself like an over-filled teacup. That’s what it’s like to be overwhelmed, to feel exhausted or fragile. Or to feel afraid of something, like fear of criticism or rejection or ridicule. The fears, some more serious than others, multiply until we may say inside, “I can’t go. I’m afraid.”
But there’s something good to read about feeling fearful or being “Exhausted But Pursuing,” by Gary Wilkerson, in the February 6, 2012 World Challenge Pulpit Series. The encouragement is at http://www.worldchallenge.org.
On the back of the newsletter are words from Isaiah 43:1-2: “Fear not…when you walk through the fire, you will not be burned, and the flame shall not consume you.”
It’s so difficult to go afraid. But God promised. Somehow, God will help.
A bowl of tomato soup (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
The vegetable soup needed a little something. What about a little sugar? It worked. That soup was good enough for Goldilocks.
If you like soup and like to cook, there are so many places to find soup recipes like verygoodrecipes.com, mealplanningmom.wordpress.com or adollopofcream.blogspot.com and many more. Also you can open good cans of soup from the grocery store.
If it’s okay, try clear wine glasses. They have them at the Dollar Tree. Ice cubes are pretty in the glass and the black tea and orange pekoe tea with that lovely mahogany color. The warm soup in a pretty bowl. There’s a whole set of dishes with a two elegant blue stripes, or another color, for a really good price at the Habitat ReStore.
It’s not really that inviting to eat alone but it helps to put the soup in the lovely bowl with the lovely tea. A shaft of light may fall onto the missing chair place.
You may notice the green beans and carrots and peas and potatoes all delicate in just the right tomato-tasting broth. Sometimes the hunger really goes away.
Trouble breathing this cold gray Valentine’s Day. It’s impossible to love everyone, or anyone, enough.
Went to the bank to get quarters for the Laundromat. Friends’ husbands had given them flowers for Valentine’s. Roses and lilies and wildflowers. I felt glad for my friends and for getting to see the flowers. Flowers never grow routine.
Drove to the coin laundry and put all the clothes in and started reading “Saving Grace” by Lee Smith, who is one of the best writers in the nation, maybe the world. Read this book or anything by Lee Smith if you can.
Saw a woman around 30 years old with black hair, black as a blackbird, doing her laundry. She had a small teardrop with a light-colored center tattooed just below her right eye. She said she and a friend did the tattoo themselves with a needle and black ink when she was 13 years old. The woman told me she put the teardrop there because she loves her Dad, but he went somewhere. She wants the tattoo off her face now, but can’t afford it. She said she still loves her dad.
A tall young man dressed in black and gray with a rhinestone in his left ear brought in his laundry with his friend. She sat at a laptop playing solitaire while he put the clothes in machines. He had just enough quarters but not enough.
He put out his hand and said, “Do you have enough quarters for these nickels?”
“Sure. Just take the quarter.”
“No,” he said. “I wouldn’t feel right.”
“Did you hear about that woman dying?” He was talking about Whitney Houston. We talked about Whitney Houston’s magnificent voice.
“People can be rich, but feel poor inside,” the young man observed.
He told me about having Crohn’s Disease and how all the medications damaged his heart. He pulled his knit shirt just a little and showed me the purple scar where doctors had cut him open to give him a pacemaker. He has to have another surgery next week.
My clothes got dry and I started loading them in the car. We need to pray for hearts.
When I pushed open the glass door, the young man with the broken heart leaned just so softly over his friend’s shoulder and said, “What are you worried about, sweetheart?” I heard him calling tech services. He never raised his voice.
We can all offer honor.
It’s hard knowing about how we humans dishonor ourselves and each other sometimes. So late this afternoon I looked for some sign of honor.
When I drove home past the chain length fence that encloses a workplace, a young man with somehow warm blue eyes looked up at me as he was closing the gate. He was wearing a gray toboggan and had a kind face when he nodded hello and pulled the gate shut to go home for the night.
I got out of the car with my bags and books and saw a woman with a wrinkled face like mine is getting wrinkled. She looked overloaded so I asked her if she needed help. ”No, honey, that’s okay. I can get it,” she said. She called me honey and it felt good and she smiled and she too had blue eyes, but with beautiful crinkles around them. I could have hugged her but she walked on to her car.
Then I started upstairs with those bags and books and when I took about three steps up, I heard a voice behind me. I looked back and an elderly African-American man stopped for a second on his way home in the next building. He really didn’t stop but slowed down long enough to say, “Be careful.” So I thanked him and said you too and this amazed me.
In quick succession, I saw three people doing honorable things. When we help and consider each other, that’s honor and it’s all around when we look.
Krispy Kreme Doughnuts Shinjuku, Tokyo (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
When we live among the ruins, we search for hope.
Our ruins are different. Things that ruin us include death; divorce; sickness; anger; bitterness; separation, sadness. Knowing that some things cannot be fixed now even when they could have been fixed then. The list of ruins never ends.
Today I felt sad in my ruins. Broken relationships hurt. First I cried but then got up and made coffee. Went to my parents’ home to pick up a letter and left a note for my mother signed love. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you Jesus said. He knows how selfish we are and how much more likely we are to do something if it benefits us even in a roundabout way. Motives are never perfect. We can only act.
Stopped by the convenience store and bought The Cleveland Banner and The Chattanooga Times Free Press. Bought two lemon-filled Krispy Kreme doughnuts.
Then when I pulled back into my parking space at home, three pennies fell out of the coin holder in my car. I picked them up, brought them inside and put them on the dresser near pictures of my broken family.
Whole websites, like The Penny Priestess and The Penny Catechism, are dedicated to information about pennies. There are certain conditions for a penny to be lucky, like picking it up with your dominant hand (I did that) and the penny is supposed to be heads up. (I didn’t notice). But my information told me a lucky penny is a sign of God’s presence. That’s what I was looking for.
February 29, 2012
Brook
