Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow

The other night, I journeyed to DC to attend my cousin's concert.  Will Clark Green  takes his band on a big black bus all around the country and if you get a chance to go, it's a fun show.  I recommend listening to his songs ahead of time, so you can sing along with the crowd favorites: Ringling Road, Rose Queen, and his most requested song and the grand finale, She Likes the Beatles.  If you don't know the other songs, it doesn't really matter, because he's having such a good time playing with the band, you will too. 

I've never been a big Country Western fan despite my Texas roots, but maybe because it's family, Will's songs pluck my heart harder than others.  I know the land he's singing about, and people who fit the stories. His songs bring me to Beaumont, to the swampy parts of life, of childhood that I don't often stop to recollect because there's so much life today that needs tending. 

My kids don't know that beach the way I knew it, because it isn't the same beach and won't be.  The beach house of my childhood lacked even one television, and no phone until 1984, and that made it a place to discover how not to be bored when you're bored. It meant you visited with cousins and brothers and fished and read and reread comics and played cards even when you'd played cards for hours.  It meant you asked what you could do to help, and took naps. It meant you found yourself staring at a fire until it wasn't, and found somewhere in that process, something warmer than the flames.   

Every place on Port Bolivar now has air condition and wi-fi, so the capacity to relate will have to compete with the temptation to distract. The beach I knew may be gone but Will's songs pull me back to a place I can't get elsewhere and to people I can only meet in prayer or memory this side of the veil. 

What sounds, smells, tastes and places will pierce my own children's hearts with a sense of belonging and longing that pulls them into the past to be with certain experiences and people if only for a moment? I worry it will be when they're trapped inside a mini-van in the back seat while someone else has control of the radio and thermostat while eating fast food. Except there's today, and today is an opportunity to imprint yet again on their hearts, something of the salt, sweet, warm and wonderful of life outside of what all the world offers.  I go back to my list. There's laundry, dishes, paperwork, IXL, summer reading.  So much that needs tending.  I put on the timer and scratch two off the list and add two more.  We're making BBQ and I'm taking them to the pool. 

To me, that's the purpose of music, of summer, to burn into hearts, memories of the more. 

Reflections on the Mound that was Caplen, TX

Yesterday, I returned from a four day hiatus from being a full time hands on Mom.  So what did I do on my vacation?  I went to visit my parents, my brother and my sister and her family.  It was weird to be just an aunt.   I loved it. My niece is adorable.  But I felt smaller.

What did I learn?  That I need my nine children to mask my personal character flaws or rather to reveal how they aren't actually flaws but necessary traits. 

For example, I'm hyper.  I talk loud.  I laugh loud.  If I've had even a smidgeon of something to drink, I tend to slap down on the table like my dad does, as a means of added emphasis if I find something funny.  With nine children, all that energy and brightness and bluster gets filtered into a proper context.  No one notices how loud I am as a strange thing, they view it as a survival skill.  I'd tell you this was a calculated evolution born of practical maternal need, but that would be lying.  

I don't sleep much.  Absent a reason to stay up to get things done, I still stay up.  Absent a reason to get up at six, I still wake.  My bio rhythms are set to engage in an aircraft carrier type full scale launch every morning and so I rise fully ready to take on the day sans any coffee by seven.  If there's nothing to do, I start almost bouncing on my feet ready to go go go.  Where? I don't know but I'm ready.  All that energy gets harnessed in the course of any given school day that otherwise idles waiting for something to do. 

On Saturday, we went to the beach where the beach house once stood and I walked over the mound, all that remains of what was a house that stood for almost 85 years.  There was rope and debris imbeded in the sand.  There were shards of what was tile in the bathroom with its distinctive honeycomb pattern. 

Mound to the right is where our beach house was.  Gully where another beach house used to be. 

Two summers ago our beach neighbor and his wife taught my children how to crab and now opened their new house by the shore to us on this windy afternoon. They had rebuilt and collected "storm wear," things that survived Hurricane Ike intact. 

We took a bowl that I remembered.  It had once held gumbo cooked all day, or home made fudge sauce over bluebell cookies and cream or jalepeno cheese grits.  Now it held sand.  I decided it would be cruel for a bowl to survive a category 4 hurricane and get crushed en route in the cargo hold of a plane so I would give it to my sister to keep.   Then I collected some shells for my children, avoided the washed up man-o-wars and filled a water bottle with some of the Gulf of Mexico.

I stepped into the water. 

It was about 25 degrees below what I expect when I see the beach, as was the air.  My life memories of the Gulf almost never included April.  But the beach is still the beach and even though the beach house is gone, the essence of what I loved remained with all its wild growth glory.  The gnarled trees that seem to scratch the air as they carve and twist their way up out of the ground still scattered about the landscape.  Wild flowers with their garrish deep orange, bright yellow and blood red petals and politically incorrect names dotted the grass.  There were stickaburrs and driftwood and people walking with old dogs.   They didn't know us but still stopped to say hi and begin sharing stories.  The neighbors who had saved the crockery invited everyone in including the blind 17 year old dog. 

What did we talk about?  A 4 thousand dollar broken part of a plane that became a clock, the way things looked at the first flyover, about selling a business and finishing a deck, about back surgery and the reality that everyone suffers, rich, poor, everyone, but how you respond is what matters.   We talked about what they remembered, what they saved, why they were staying and what they hoped. "I wish you could stay longer."  the former King of Mardi Gras and neighbor said.  They offered drinks, even dinner.  That' is the essence of the beach, you always welcome everyone and you always wish everyone could stay longer.  It's my vision of what being Catholic really is. 

Looking at the ocean and the sun and feeling the wind even as I was told it was time to go, I wanted to walk the shore for hours like I used to, and like then, if time had allowed I know I would have not felt tired until I was dehydrated and sunburned or stung in a careless moment.  Most likely, all three. Only then would I have felt I'd gone far enough to turn back.  Most of the time, my life, my home, my mind and my body are busy. The beach, that beach, was and remains a place where my life, home, mind and body would quiet even as they kept doing. So I miss more than the home that celebrated most of my birthdays, I miss the opportunity for those seemingly timeless walks to nowhere that weren't for fitness and weren't to get to a destination.

(Yes, that's what it looks like but this was a pre Ike photo posted on the Facebook Bolivar You Have to Love it to Like it page).

On the way back to Pearland, I bought a pint of Pralines and Cream (my favorite) and ate more than most of it. (I shared a little with Mom.  Dad had fried chicken).  When I got back to Maryland, I took my husband outside and rolled up his jeans.  I poured the Gulf on his feet and he smiled.  If we could not get to the ocean, the ocean would come to us.  

"Did you have a good trip?" He asked.
"Yes. I did."

But I found I'm more myself here than anywhere else.  Everywhere else, who I am doesn't make as much sense, nor does all of me fit.