Author: Tamara Belanger (Page 6 of 73)

I sit across the room, music narrating the early morning mood. Rabbit Room 2018 is playing on Spotify and I perk up when Mr. Rogers’ theme starts playing, sung by JJ Heller. I bought myself a small jar of pre-brew cinnamon coffee spice and a bag of Michigan cherry coffee beans yesterday and saved it till today to grind up a small cup of joy to sit with and savor. I smile to myself at how much gratitude I feel at buying myself such a small thing. It isn’t lost on me, those small graces that are completely superfluous in this world of need versus want; that I can reach up and take it off the shelf and buy it. I start to think this morning of those who have no shelf to reach to. It stirs me up inside, as I look out the window, and think of the world on the other side of the glass.

The chair in my view catches my attention. I found it in a small antique store across the street from my house several years ago. It used to live in a downtown hotel in Cincinnati, the Vernon Manor, which has long since disappeared; the same hotel in which part of the motion picture Rainman was filmed. Somehow, this little chair wandered into a small shop in a small town in Kentucky and now sits here with me keeping quiet company, it’s memories held silent. I want to interview it but I can’t figure a way to get a chair to open up and speak.

Empty chairs make me wispy. I think of all it’s eavesdropped on, through no fault of its’ own; who has sat in it, who isn’t sitting in it now, who will never sit in it again. It’s remembering standing and looking me right in the heart. And it’s longings still to be fulfilled, holding up a hand to pull me towards and past the window. I want to carry that chair with me so that, wherever I go, someone will have a place to sit and catch their breath from a life race they’re running. To be able to sit and whisper the scary thing they’re afraid to say out loud to the world in case the thing hears them and gets scarier. To show me pictures of the birthday party or the vacation of a lifetime or the child who graduated when they thought they’d never make it out of school. To laugh at the time they tripped and EVERYBODY saw it. To hold their heart in their hands because it’s falling apart and feels like it’s out of their body. To be a person who is seen and heard. To sit in a comfortable chair. Just for a minute, if that’s all the time they can spare.

To wonder aloud with them….how the matter will turn out. And to watch and wait and keep company together to make the wondering less alone.

Ruth 3:10

“Sit still, my daughter, that you may learn how the matter turns out.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3FoMegk7xg

I was awake earlier than I needed to be on this Sunday morning but I was ok with that.  It gave me a chance to talk, this new day and I, to our common Creator.  I moved slowly in my kitchen, the year-long white Christmas lights strung around the ceiling simmering warm hues.  The girl slept upstairs.  The snap of the glass carafe told me the water was heated and I poured it over my coffee and breathed in the steam.  I have my grandfather’s chair in a corner of my kitchen.  I got it for him at a yard sale in his neighborhood in Illinois years ago when I was visiting him.  He replaced it with the one he already had in his living room because it was easier for him to get out of, his arthritis making his thin frame stiff and uncooperative.  It sat in the same spot for years.  I have a picture of my two oldest children, one still in diapers, sitting on it.  When he died, it was the one thing of his I wanted.  There is not a single time I sit in that chair that I don’t think of him.  Not one.  This morning was no different.  I sat in silent memories, content with the sound of silence, grateful for the heritage I have in grandpa.

Right about then, I heard a sound that I couldn’t recognize outside and I pulled the curtain aside.  My eyes surveyed the yard.  Nothing to see.  Curtain dropped.  Then, there it was again.  I peered beyond the curtain again and saw a black choreographed whoosh of black in the sky and grabbed my camera and ran for the front door.

I stood in the center of my yard, overwhelmed by the symphony of birds in every tree I could see playing tag, swiring and dancing in the sky, calling to one another and, it felt like, to me to join in.  The noise level rose as other flew in to join them on posts and pillars.  And then the Conductor of it all stepped up to the podium to usher in the magnificent crescendo.  The sun illuminated the clouds with cotton candy colors and the bells in the church steeple down the street began to gong, gong, gong……!  I felt like Cinderella at the ball.  I tore myself away to run in the house and up the stairs to tell my sleeping girl to wake up, wake up, wake up!  I didn’t want her to miss it!  LOOK!  LOOK! I gasped to her as she came to the door, half awake and nodding compliantly before she turned and crawled back under the covers.  I felt disappointed.  I wanted her to seize the moment,  this moment that would never come again, to get that, really get it and hug it hard so she could remember later when this morning’s creation performance is long gone and she may be sitting in my grandpa’s chair remembering one day without me and smile.  But, she’s a brand new 19 and sifts things through youth and hormones and morning sleepiness and seemingly endless days.  She hasn’t fully grasped the gratitude moments like sprinkles on ice cream.  She hasn’t seen the first scrapings of the bottom of the dish yet that tell her to savor it slower and more intentionally.

The girl goes back to bed and I go back outside and the sky’s canvas was waiting on me.  It had another parting gift before the day took hold.  I stood and looked, the colors and clouds forming a visual surround sound.  Coram Deo, I said out loud to the Lover of my soul;  living before the face of God.

I was wearing mint green “baby doll” pajamas, the kind that have the matching shorts and flowy, crepey short top that shows them off.  They were popular then, like the Brady Bunch and harvest gold kitchen appliances and shag carpet were popular.  I was 5 days into being 11, all gangly legs and cats eye glasses and still growing into my teeth.  Crystal Blue Persuasion by Tommy James was number one on the radio.  I knew that because my babysitter loved it and I always wondered what those words meant and thought they sounded very grown up and mysterious.  And love was the answer.

We were at my grandparents in Springfield, IL celebrating a family birthday trifecta; mine, my mother’s and my grandfather’s.  We did it most every year.  I was an only child so I loved the feeling of being more surrounded by family than usual.  My grandparents’ house was simple, earned from the hard, steady work of my 6th grade educated grandfather and his wife.  Every summer I’d walk behind my grandpa as he tended to the small garden beside his house.  I can still smell the tomatoes and the soil and see his gnarled up hands from arthritis reach out for the smallest of weeds.  It reminded him of his early days, a husband and a father, working on another man’s farm to make money.  These summer visits, I’d sit under the big tree in his yard on the cheerful colored metal lawn chairs that felt cold on my skin.  I’d listen to his stories and run my toes through the thick grass that felt like carpet and wonder how he got it that way.  And I’d imagine what he was telling me in pictures in my mind.  The screen door of the kitchen hissed open and shut as my grandma came out to join us, tucking her ever present kleenex in her house dress pocket.  These times felt like childhood and it filled me up full.

July 20th was on a Sunday.  We’d been to church that day and I sat next to grandpa and listened to his shakey voice belt out the hymns he loved.  We’d had relatives over in the afternoon.  I went to bed that evening content.  And only marginally aware of what else was going on in the world.  At 10:00 p.m.  my daddy burst into the room to wake me up.  The first man on the moon was about to step out of the lunar module and he wanted me to see it as it happened.  I went into the living room, chilly from crawling out from under the covers and curled up sleepy on the couch.  My dad was so jazzed, so excited, so present in the world.  He stood amazed at life.  I barely remember going back to bed or if I fell asleep and was carried back.  But I woke up the next morning and smelled sausage and coffee and looked forward to the day.  And the beat went on.

Yesterday, I took my daughter to see First Man; the movie telling the story of Neil Armstrong.  We gripped each others’ hands tight and thought we couldn’t breathe when things went wrong in the rocket.  We learned that Mr. Armstrong had lost a little girl a few years before, and he thought of her as he stood in the moon dust.  And as I sat in that dark movie theatre, a wave of emotion washed itself up onto my shore and I was surprised by my tears.  The memories flashed and disappeared into the next with that whooshing sound from the movies when things warp by in your mind too fast to hold onto.  My July 20th, 1969 collided with Neil Armstrong and a silent snapshot abruptly halted my mind.  It’s my dad, standing in front of the t.v., dressed in his black pants and white undershirt, turning from me to the t.v. screen and back again, excited to share the man on the moon with me.  And I suddenly realized what a treasure that night was for us all.

Thank you,  Mr. Armstrong.  Thank you, dad, for waking me up for that.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fz01MkVczjY