Dear Friends, Family, Neighbors, and Those of You I Don’t Yet Know —
This week’s issue of Odd Company begins with “Beautiful Dawn,” performed by the Canadian folk trio The Wailin’ Jennys. They are one of my favorite groups, partly for their beautifully matched voices, but also for the depth of their musical choices. They perform covers by many different songwriters. But this one was written by one of their own, Ruth Moody. I don’t have much information about the song beyond that. It first appeared on the album “40 Days,” which won a Juno Award in 2005. So it has been around at least that long. Listen closely to the lyrics. If you have trouble hearing them, you can find them in text at azlyrics.com. They cover shame, forgiveness, apology, the healing power of nature, and more. “There’s only one way to mend a broken heart,” the words go. Moody was certainly on the right track with this one. I think she’s been there and done that. As Desmond Tutu says, “We heal the world by healing each and every one of our hearts.”
I spent the past week looking for stories of forgiveness from my own life. You may have noticed they’ve been kind of conspicuously missing so far. Theo mentioned it, noting that personal stories have added a lot to past issues of the newsletter, and there’s no better way to illustrate a point. I suppose I’ve shied away from my own stories of forgiveness because they’re hard to talk about. There’s guilt and sometimes shame. They always involve other people as well as me, and most don’t like reading about themselves in public. I have plenty of stories to choose from, believe me, but it’s been a little tricky picking out a couple. I’ve decided on two — one from my childhood, and a more recent one I’m still working through.
When I was a kid in Reno, we lived a block away from my best friend, a boy I went to school with. Let’s call him Davey. I was eight or maybe nine years old. Davey spent a lot of time at my house, and I spent a lot of time at his. He had two younger sisters, and I had one. The group of us played together most days, and were often joined by other kids from the neighborhood. This was in the days before supervised activities became common. We played games of Wiffle Ball, kick ball, damsels and knights. We built clubhouses and climbed trees, rode our bikes up and down the quiet streets, and occasionally went as far as the local drugstore, where there was a full-service candy counter. Our mothers, busy with household duties, trusted each other to keep an eye on us. Predators were pretty much unheard of. The moms thought, and they were right, that as long as no one was screaming in pain, everything was pretty much okay.
Another marker of the times was that people still got deliveries of milk, cream, and cottage cheese. Several times a week, a guy from Model Dairy would go door-to-door, dropping off orders. Davey’s mom was a talented watercolor artist who sometimes got pretty wrapped up in her work, so, if the weather was cool, as it was on the day in question, milk sometimes sat on her porch for an hour or two before she came out to collect it.
We had been running around all morning (and I do mean running), and we got thirsty. Davey ran to his front door, picked up a bottle of milk, pried off the top, and took a big swig. He offered it around. A couple of other kids drank from it. At our house, we were never allowed to drink milk from the bottle. According to my mother, people could get sick and die from drinking milk from the bottle. So I said, “No, thank you.” Davey put the cap back on and put the bottle back. I was horrified. I didn’t want anybody to die, so I took the bottle out to the gutter and emptied it there when nobody was looking. Or…I thought nobody was looking. Davey’s mom had seen me. “Hey, what’re you doing?” she cried.
I was afraid to stick around and find out what that angry mother was going to do to me. So I ran for home as fast as I could. Straight from the frying pan into the fire. Davey’s mom phoned my mom, and my mom was waiting for me. First I got a spanking. Then I had to explain myself, which I did to the best of my abilities. “I poured out the milk so nobody would get sick and die,” I said. But my reasons didn’t change the fact that I had some apologizing to do, no excuses, and a replacement bottle of milk to deliver. Humiliated and tearful, I walked to Davey’s house and knocked on the door. His mother answered. She looked so serious I wondered if I was going to get another spanking, but there was nothing to be done. I had to forge ahead.
Holding up the bottle of milk, I said, “I’m sorry I poured out your milk. I made a bad mistake. Here’s a new bottle.” Then something sort of miraculous happened, at least it seemed that way to me.
Davey’s mom bent down, took the milk from my hands, and said, “Thank you. It took a whale of a lot of courage for you to do this, and I appreciate it.” She said it just that way. A whale of a lot of courage. It made me wipe my eyes and smile. Not only was I not going to get a second spanking. I was forgiven! And she thought I was brave! It’s hard to convey how completely those few unexpected kind words transformed everything, especially my broken heart. What a wonderful lesson that was.
The second story happened recently, and I will supply fewer details, because this one I’m still working my way through, and it’s a hard one. I had a good friend. We’ll call her Joan. She and I were in the habit of meeting once each week to go for a walk together. These walks usually lasted for an hour-and-a-half or so, and we spent them talking about nearly everything under the sun — books we’d read, TV shows we liked, movies we’d seen, stories of our lives, problems we were dealing with. We did this for three years, week in and week out, 90 minutes at a time. It was hard to believe we had any secrets from each other, but we did.
On a Thursday morning, we took our usual walk. She had just been through a difficult divorce, and as often happened, she hadn’t slept well. I listened as she talked about dealing with plumbing problems and trying to get her broadband service to work. She seemed tired. She knew I was a veteran of depression. “Does it ever get any better?” she said. “Of course it does!” I replied. “Sometimes we just have to muddle through as well as we can, and it’s not pretty, but time passes and things get easier.” We said good-bye. I thought about our conversation and decided she was probably okay. In her youth, she, too, had been depressed. I knew she knew to get professional help if she needed it.
The next afternoon she committed suicide. I felt completely stunned and crushed. What had happened? How could I have been so wrong as to think she was okay? It’s been almost a year now, and I still wonder if there was something I could have said or done that last time I saw her that might have changed her mind. Every time I walk in the morning and see a sunlit field or a hawk in flight, every time I come across a book I know she would have liked, or water the orchid she gave me, I find myself angry at her. The work I have to do is two-fold. I have to forgive her for not confiding in me. And I have to forgive myself for failing to understand the degree of her distress. This will clearly be a process of some length. Pretty sure I can do it. It will just take time. Telling the story here is a good start.
There they are, two personal stories of forgiveness. To these, I want to add one you might be familiar with. I recently listened to a reading of the novel, “True Grit,” by the southern writer Charles Portis. I was surprised to find that this book was first published in 1968. I thought it was much older. You probably know the story. Set just after the American Civil War, it’s the story of Mattie Ross, a 14-year-old girl who sets off by herself to bring her father’s murderer to justice. To help her with this undertaking, she hires the “meanest” United States Marshall she can find, one Rooster Cogburn. Cogburn drinks too much, but he’s a good shot, and he always gets his man. Together, they find the killer. There’s a scuffle, and Mattie shoots the criminal in self-defense, but in so doing, she loses her balance and falls into a pit full of rattle snakes. One of them bites her. During the race to get Mattie to a doctor before the venom kills her, Rooster carries her, first on horseback and then in his arms, to the nearest town, nearly dying of exhaustion in the process. And we come to realize that, whatever his failings, Cogburn has grown to love and admire the tenacious, spunky Mattie in his way. And in her way, Mattie loves and admires him. Mattie survives, though she loses her snake-bitten arm. And she is taken home by her mother to recuperate.
When the family’s lawyer hears this story, he rides some distance to find Rooster Cogburn and give him a thorough dressing down and threaten him with a lawsuit for making such an agreement with a 14-year-old child and allowing her to go along on such a dangerous journey. When Mattie is well again and hears what the lawyer has done, she explains that Cogburn didn’t want to take her along. She insisted, he agreed under pressure, and he was a man of his word. She also points out that Cogburn saved her life by almost losing his, and she still owes him the money he is due for his services. The contrite lawyer once again rides out and finds Cogburn, pays him, apologizes for casting aspersions on him. And Cogburn, in his turn, forgives the lawyer. Sometimes the clearest illustrations of wisdom can be found in the pages of novels. I recommend this one.
I hope everyone had a nice Halloween. Unsurprisingly, trick-or-treaters were a little scarce. But it’s one of my favorite holidays, so I dusted off my haunted typewriter (the one that types “Help Me” whenever anyone gets near it), got a few pumpkins, brought out my plastic rat skeletons and matching skeleton apron, plus my Day of the Dead skull candy dish. I also bought way too much candy. Oh well. MOOHOOHAHaha!
Now I am off to bed. This coming weekend is the final retreat and graduation ceremony for the Applied Compassion class. My intention is to keep Odd Company going. I’m enjoying it, and I still have a lot left to talk about! The Problem of Evil, for example. I may take a week or two off before the next issue, as there are some things I’ve been putting off since I started the class last January. Plants that need repotting, letters that need answering, visits to be made. But I’ll definitely be back. Till then…
LAST PAGE
Now the story of the Pain
whispers, nearly finished
in my unlovely hand.
Beyond the windowsill
-- stones and shells and prisms
of my time with a mad dog --
morning wind runs fingers
through what leaves are left,
raindrop bejeweled, and cats,
yellow, gray, sly,
haunt our ivy
though by now wise
mice and voles,
hide underground.
I have long choked on endings,
those small matters of lines
drawn in blue ink somewhere
because you can’t go on forever.
Just here I learned to smile
at damned dogs, at the autumn,
shadows, rain, drought,
those ghostly cats.
It was great to be reintroduced to this group since one forgets after a while. Thank you for sharing this painful story. I cannot imagine the pain of those lonely weekly walks, especially for such a good person as yourself.