You never know what we'll churn up in cleaning a stall
Sometime after the Twelve Days of Christmas end on January 6, we take our gingerbread decorations outdoors for the wild critters to discover and devour.
Here’s part of a village inserted into a pile of snow on a tabletop.
Looks like it belonged there all along. The squirrels, however, will soon be scampering off with the pieces.
In my Freakin’ Free Spirits novels, aunt Nita serves Cassia’s guardian angel.
Earlier, she had played a similar role for Cassia’s future father, from their college years together onward.
In fact, without Nita in the background, the daughter may have never come along at all, as she eventually appreciates in What’s Left.
Reflecting on my own life, I’m now sensing moments when someone stepped in, behind the scenes, to affect a change that opened an opportunity in my life. At the time, I was clueless. One led to a summer job and later part-time employment. Another, to my being able to transfer away to college, rather than continue at a commuter campus.
There were another attempts that were turned away, in my ignorance or incomplete understanding.
But there were also the other, more typical and ethereal guardian angels, the kind that kept me a brush away from death or serious injury, say being hit by a car or bus or finding myself in the deep end of the pool when I could barely swim or maybe even getting sexually involved with the wrong person.
Has someone in your life ever functioned as a guardian angel?
One of the many things I like about using the DuckDuckGo search engine as an alternative to Google is that its home page includes Pocket, an informative selection of intelligent, substantive articles, many drawn from magazine archives, rather than fluff about celebrities and sports.
This morning’s Pocket, for example, included a 2015 Narratively article by Lilly Dancyger, “Planning My Father-Daughter Dance Without My Dad.”
What especially caught my attention was the ways Lilly’s experience intersected with my novel, What’s Left.
Like Cassia in the book, Lilly lost her father to death when she was 11, and like Cassia, she dressed largely in black for years afterward. (Whew! Confirmation I had that part right.)
Unlike my novel’s character, though, Lilly dropped out of high school, sought relief in alcohol, tobacco, and other drugs, and embraced a dim future. The homeless were some of her favorite companions.
In contrast, Cassia had a large extended family that stayed with her, even when she kept pushing them away. Yes, she had struggles with her mother much like Lilly’s, and she skirted some of the self-destructive behavior, but each of the three aunts on her mother’s side of the family found ways during her difficult teen years to break through to her, as did several of her first-cousins. In today’s world, few are so fortunate, not with our fractured nuclear households.
Moreover, through her aunt Nita, Cassia also had her father’s trove of his professional photography to sift through, each shot reflecting his thoughts and feelings.
What Lilly presents – and I didn’t – is the workings of guilt within a survivor. As she declares, it merely “isn’t just about feeling unjustly lucky to have lived while someone else died; it’s guilt for going on without them, guilt for changing and growing and becoming a person they never knew. Any milestone is tinged with their absence, any joy feels like a betrayal, like you’ve forgotten them, if only for long enough to laugh at a good joke or enjoy a good meal. But as long as you’re in mourning, your life is still about them, and in that way, they’re still there.”
Lilly’s experience came to a head in planning for her wedding and trying to decide who would walk her down the aisle, if anyone, and who would share that first dance with her at the reception.
That wasn’t the case with Cassia, who instead chose to remain single. But Lilly’s words burn, all the same, as they point to another dimension my novel might have developed.
Yes, they’re sisters, and they’re our two adopted bunnies. Somehow, pets make a home more of a home.
Tell us something about yours.
MY SCOTCH: Grandfather Munro, on my mother’s side.
These days it seems everyone’s on a restricted diet.
Here are ten of them.
Are you observing any dietary restrictions?
In the decades since I took up yoga in the early 1970s, the movement has had its ups and downs. For a while, it looked like it was about to peter out altogether, especially as scandals hit many of the teachers or their organizations.
And then came the boom in popularity, far outrunning the earlier flowering.
Today, it’s hard to keep up with many of the trends, especially as they take on commercially branded identities. Back in the day, we knew it essentially as hatha, raja, karma, and so on … but not anymore. When you’re looking for a class, it can be rather confusing.
Here are ten on my radar. Many of the details come from Kristin McGee’s fine overview at the MBGmovement website.
Note that they’re all focused on physical fitness of one sort or another, rather than the meditative or ethical dimensions of the underlying religious foundation. Where are the swamis nowadays, anyway?
Jnana's Red Barn 