Grocery shopping

One thing about living in a small town is that a trip to the local grocery store becomes a tour through a rogue’s gallery of sorrow and angst. After awhile, you simply acquire too much information about people. That man has pancreatic cancer, that woman had an affair with her friend’s husband, that man just got laid off, that woman’s daughter was killed in a porch collapse. Perhaps that’s one reason, besides the produce, that I prefer doing my weekly shopping at the Whole Foods that’s 10 miles away. I rarely see a familiar face there, other than the cashiers and baggers. I can buy my organic brown rice while cloaked in anonymity, surrounded by other anonymous shoppers with stories unknown to me.

Today I had to go to the local Jewel, though, because there was a snowstorm, which made the roads too unsafe to drive very far – the wail of sirens has disrupted the quiet of the snowfall several times today, presumably to clean up crashes – and I needed a few staples to sustain my little family unit for the next 24 hours. Once I got to the store, I found myself sitting in the parking lot, avoiding the inevitable, to listen to a song that had just come on the radio -- The Shins’ “Kissing the Lipless:”

But you've got too much to wear
On your sleeves
It has too much to do with me
And secretly I want to bury in the yard
The grey remains of a friendship starved.

Hearing the song was like unexpectedly running into an old, dear friend. (Ironic, given the lyrics.) If anybody had noticed me sitting alone in my car, belting out the words, they would have thought I was crazy. In fact, it’s likely that somebody did notice (it wouldn't be the first time I'd been busted rocking out in my car), and that my tenuous mental state is already working its way through the gossip network. Another thing about living in a small town is that you need to develop a suit of armor against the slings and arrows of speculative chit chat. If the idea that people might sometimes talk about you bothers you too much, you will need to work very hard to stay under the radar and avoid a lot of authentic human contact.

Music is one of my defensive weapons against small-town angst. In fact, it’s my weapon of choice against all kinds of trials and tribulations. Unfortunately, I don’t play an instrument and can’t carry a tune, but even my musician husband admits that I have a pretty good ear. I can usually name that tune in three notes, and I can identify the influence of one band on another (“Did you hear that riff? That’s from ‘Sweet Virginia’!”). A missed note makes me wince. Going to see a live band is more than recreation for me; if the performance is good, it verges on a spiritual experience. I’ll never forget the transcendence of a Sufjan Stevens concert several years ago. His crystalline voice soared above the audience, while the vocal harmonies and sparsely orchestral arrangements synchronized perfectly with the poetry of his lyrics. I think Sufjan was self-consciously aiming for some kind of sacred communion with the audience; he and his band members wore giant angel wings. This probably sounds very cheesy, but it worked for me.

I think having a strong connection to music must be hardwired into some peoples’ brains. Some people connect to sports or painting, I connected to music. I didn’t grow up in a musical home. I was offered piano lessons from a little old lady in a smelly house full of cats but otherwise wasn’t encouraged to pick up an instrument. The only music I remember my parents listening to was the soundtrack to “Saturday Night Fever” with a little bit of Abba sprinkled in. Somehow, thank God, I found some of my own music to listen to when I got to junior high – The Who, the Police, and yes, I must admit, Styx (Paradise Theater!) were my saviors in seventh grade. From there I moved on to the Beatles, Stones, and the Grateful Dead, learned about jazz, classical, and Elvis Costello when I got to college, and then discovered Nirvana, Uncle Tupelo/Wilco/Son Volt, and Pavement soon after graduation. My taste now runs mostly to lo-fi indie rock, but every once in awhile I like to mix it up with a little funk (The Meters), R & B (early Ray Charles), techno-dance (MGMT), power pop (New Pornographers), or classical (Mozart). And of course, the Stones and the Dead always sound good.

I’m happy that my kids seem to have inherited a musical gene, or at least they have been effectively indoctrinated. My son just started taking piano lessons (here, at home, not at a smelly cat house), and he sits at the piano to practice without being reminded or nagged. He knows way more than a six-year-old should about Wilco and the Stones. My four-year-old daughter doesn’t like to rock quite as much as my son does, but she sings as if she’s on a Broadway stage, with heartfelt emotion and confidence. I know I won’t be able to protect them from all of the problems that life has in store for them. Life is hard. People get hurt, and people die. But, if my kids can rock their way through it, life may be a little bit easier.

Blue Christmas

I just saw an article today in the newspaper about a church that will hold a “Blue Christmas” service this week. The minister will wear blue, and all of the members of the congregation are encouraged to wear blue jeans to church. The point, according to the minister, is that you can’t and shouldn’t try to force jollity during the holidays. This time of year is difficult for people who are going through hard times, who recently lost a loved one or a job, are facing a crisis, or who are feeling just generally down in the dumps. Even when things are going well, something about the holiday season brings out the stress -- too many obligations, too much money to spend, face-to-face interactions with friend and relations who are easier to deal with over the phone or not at all.

Personally, I am a little bit out of sorts. I’m still recovering from Thanksgiving with my family and anticipating another grueling weekend with my parents at Christmas. My post-family-visit recoveries invariably involve mysterious physical symptoms. Sometimes I get a pain in my chest, most of the time it’s severe gastrointestinal discomfort (you don’t want to know the details), but this time it’s an intermittent headache that concentrates just behind my left, but sometimes my right, ear. (I’m encouraged that the headache is bilateral; it makes it less likely to be brain tumor. I’m a bit of a hypochondriac, in case I haven’t mentioned it before.) I’m feeling broke, but I wish I could give gifts to my friends and to all of the underprivileged families that my church has available to “adopt” for Christmas. Home-baked cookies (especially the break-and-bake kind, which is my specialty) don’t really cut it for families who request clothes and shoes (but they may have to suffice for my friends). I also have a deadline looming for a pain-in-the-ass craft project that I let myself get suckered into managing for my kids’ school, which is ironic since, in addition to not being a baker, I am not crafty. A half-painted child-sized table and chairs sits accusingly in my garage, awaiting decoupage and child-size handprints, to be sold to the highest bidder at the school fundraiser. If I weren’t so broke I would just turn it in as-is and buy the damn thing myself.

Blah blah blah. My complaints and my pottymouth bore even me.

But, that’s not to say there aren’t some devastatingly wonderful moments. When I picked up my kids from school the other day, my four-year-old daughter ran over to me, caressed my cheek, and sighed, “You’re the best mommy in the world.” She is definitely in a mommy-loving phase, and I am loving every minute of it. I want to bottle it so I can take a swig when she is sixteen and telling me she hates me for taking her phone away. My six-year-old made me proud as punch today during his basketball practice, only his second one ever, with his Sisyphean persistence. He lacks some fundamental dribbling skills compared to the other kids, but he didn’t get frustrated or give up. He just kept trying, again and again, to run a zig-zag around the orange cones, each time losing the ball with a little bit less frequency then the last time. I was almost in tears as I looked on among the other proud parents.

Of course, these good moments have nothing to do with the holiday season, per se. They just stand out in stark relief to all the bullshit annoyances. Don’t get me wrong; I love the smell of the pine, the Christmas caroling, the twinkling lights, and the happy anticipation of Christmas morning. The good comes with the bad, but maybe that makes the good seem even better.

In fact, maybe that’s the point of the season. One of my good friends has invited me for the past couple of years to an all-women’s candlelight Advent service at her church. It is a beautiful, empowering service that celebrates our distinctive roles as wives, mothers, and friends. The readings at this service are surprisingly non-traditional for an Episcopal service. One of them celebrates the “goddess” in all of us and beseeches this “goddess” to help us celebrate and love our bodies. This seems subversively pagan to a recovering Catholic such as myself, and it makes me want to hug the minister who includes it every year. During the service, we sing only one hymn, and we sing it twice: “O Come O Come Emmanuel.” For a Christmas carol, it’s quite dark. I could be wrong, as I’m not a musician, but I think it’s played in a minor key, like a dirge, and the lyrics are written from the perspective of captive Hebrews who are begging God to send someone to save them from hellish tyranny. Even the chorus, which begins with “Rejoice, Rejoice”, sounds grim. By the end of the fourth verse, I was longing for a little “Joy to the World”.

Speaking of music, a funny thing happened during the service (well, funny to me). Keep in mind, the theme of the service was “Quiet”, as in “Let’s all share a quiet moment and appreciate the true meaning of the season.” There were signs posted around the vestibule saying “Hush, Quiet, It’s Advent.” We all entered the nave in silence, and the lights were dimmed to enhance the ambience. A line from one of the readings entreated God to help us to harness technology and not to be a slave to it. At the precise moment that this line was read, a cell phone, evidently programmed to high volume, rang out “I Can’t Fight this Feeling Anymore” by REO Speedwagon. The phone belonged to an acquaintance sitting directly behind me, who couldn’t find the phone in her purse, dropped it on the stone floor when she finally dug it out, and muttered “Oh my God” several times before she found the off button. The woman who owned the phone is not a close friend, but I know her well enough to suspect that she will continue to regularly replay this moment in her head for some time to come, and it will take her even longer to see the humor in it. I learned from another friend sitting next to her that a kindly older woman sitting directly behind her leaned over, put her hand on her shoulder, and whispered, “It’s OK. Let it drift away.”

It’s probably no accident that Christmas comes during the darkest week of the year (at least in our hemisphere), and has a traditional association with snow. The snow makes everything quiet and still, and it also serves as a blank backdrop, like a Hollywood green screen, onto which we project all of the noisy complications in our lives. Or, perhaps, like that wonderful final line of James Joyce’s “The Dead”, the snow reminds us of how close we are to the “descent of (our) last end”. Maybe we need to embrace the anxious moments inherent in the season, which are inherent in our human experience, to fully perceive the transcendent joy of Christmas.