Storybelly Digest: What You Know First

and tenderness as "a defiant act of freedom"

Morning, Storybellers, Debbie here, thinking about anniversaries and personal calendars today. We have a gorgeous week ahead (according to the weather gurus) of high temps in the 70s (in Georgia! In May!), adequate rain, low pollen counts, and I am making the most of it outdoors. I’m pulling weeds and setting garden beds to rights (it’s so satisfying to do this after a big rain, eh?), I’m planting, I’m basking in the sunshine. It feels so good.

pink evening primrose, lamb’s ear, blueberry, black-eyed susan, heirloom chrysanthemum, ninebark, violets, day lilies, sunchokes, elderberry and pawpaw… for starters. :> And my gloved thumb on the right.

It’s also May, and in some ways it’s the beginning of my calendar year. Once I had children who were old enough for school, September became the beginning of my calendar year… everything started anew in September.

I got melancholy when my kids were all grown up and gone from home, after many, many years of daily, hands-on mothering, from the time I was 18 to the year I turned 50. That melancholy has subsided, though, I hardly dwell there now, in September, and, in some circular (probably age-appropriate) way, I am back to thinking about May and those original anniversaries, and how they grew.

So I’ll write about them, because I’m wondering if you have such anniversary thoughts as well.

He was dashing; she was beautiful; we were an Air Force family in Mobile, in Hawaii, in Washington, DC.

When I was elementary-school young, my yearly anniversaries were: Nothing happens from January to May except Easter baskets, but in May: Mom and Dad’s wedding anniversary, my birthday, Cathy’s birthday, Dad’s birthday, and then summer vacation, and it’s August: Mike’s birthday, Mom’s birthday, and then HALLOWEEN and Thanksgiving and Christmas. Done!

Likewise, the nightly prayer before bed that my mother taught me and listened to me recite at bedtime during my youngest years included everyone vital in my world at the time: God bless Mommy, Daddy, Mike, Cathy, Mamaw and Nanny, Peatoe/Flops/Amy, help me be a good girl, Amen.

The dogs rotated in and out. :>

That was it. That was my world, for so long. The first time I remember being afraid outside of my family structure was when I was nine, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, which I wrote about 40 years later, in Countdown. The next year, JFK was assassinated, then MLK, then Bobby, and I began to pay attention to an expanded worldview, partly because I was older, and partly because there was no denying that there would be anniversaries in my life that weren’t part of that closed loop I had grown up with.

"Childhood." It was a time. These are stills from scrapbooks in each of the Sixties Trilogy books.

I am thinking about all this in May, in part because yesterday was the 55th anniversary of May 4, 1970, the day the Ohio National Guard opened fire on students protesting the expansion of the Vietnam War at Kent State University, killing four of them, wounding nine more, and bringing a resounding “we’ll show you” end to the Sixties. “Killing our children in their schoolyard,” as I put it in Kent State. Some of them were only walking to class… those bullets flew hundreds of feet to find their targets.

I was 16 years old, living in Charleston, South Carolina then. My dad flew war supplies over to Vietnam and American bodies back. The anniversaries were piling up, so many dates to remember; moments, memories, and meaning to write about 25 years later, as I grew away from my family and toward the world, like all of us do, in some form or another.

We often say, in the US anyway, that the next generation — the young — will “save us,” as we’ve done what we could (or didn’t do it), they will be the ones to fight the good fight, win the battles, set things straight, give us our world intact… whatever that means.

trying to make sense of the world.... any myself in it...

But I know — and so do you! — there are those in each generation, since time began, who have never stopped saving us. The poets, the singers, the actors, the scientists, the engineers, the hunters, the gatherers, the makers, the builders, the farmers; the shapers of young minds and hearts — parents, grandparents, teachers, writers, artists, the activists; all those who remember and tell the stories that make change possible, contribute to our collective human story, inspire community, and embolden hearts. We are stronger together and across generations. And we know that.

I am singing to the choir, perhaps. It just occurs to me today to think about those who came before us, and how, as imperfect as they may have been (aren’t we all), they tried. Tried in whatever way they knew how. As Maya Angelou said, “Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.”

I think of Steven Spender’s poem “The Truly Great.” Here is the beginning of it:

I think continually of those who were truly great.
Who, from the womb, remembered the soul’s history
Through corridors of light, where the hours are suns,
Endless and singing. Whose lovely ambition
Was that their lips, still touched with fire,
Should tell of the Spirit, clothed from head to foot in song.
And who hoarded from the Spring branches
The desires falling across their bodies like blossoms.

The next stanza begins “What is precious, is never to forget…”

Yes. Never to forget “all the messy glory,” as Uncle Edisto says in Each Little Bird That Sings, not to be captive to it, just to remember it as part of who we are, as part of a tapestry of what-was that informs what-will-be, if we have courage enough (and we do) to work with it.

I think of painter/author/poet John Berger saying, “Tenderness is a defiant act of freedom… it has an enormous amount to do with liberty.” Interviewed at his kitchen table in France in 2015, he talked about how life is full of pain — “not only pain, but it has a lot of pain… and tenderness is, in part, a response to that.” He also calls tenderness “a refusal to judge.” You can watch 13-min. of that conversation here (YouTube). It’s excellent, and it speaks to our time. Times. A clip on IG here, is also part of that conversation about the virtues of tenderness.

“Tenderness” makes me think about prayers as well. My bedtime prayer is not the same as the one my mother taught me to recite. I held that prayer close to me even when I was grown, and for a long, long time. It was a tender time, at my bedside as a small child, with my mother to myself at the end of a childhood day.

In some ways we are all still those small children, yes? Still in need of tenderness, that “human kindness, overflowing,” that we looked at last week in the Writers Lab Exercise, from the song “I Think It’s Going to Rain Today,” by Randy Newman. I recommend it to everyone this week. This version, or this one, or this one. :>

In the Writers Lab this month we’re playing with sentimentality vs practicality, what each of them gives us in our writing, why, and when to use them, balance them… or not.

Last week we wrote letters. This week we’ll move into the idea of tenderness and how its expressed in those letters, in poetry, essays, fiction, even non-fiction.

You can join us here. We’ve got a Lab Coat waiting for you. :>

All Exercises are stand-alone, so you can join us anytime, for a month, for a year, and come be part of a growing community of writers with all kinds of backgrounds and experiences, with makes the Lab so rich. Come in and out as you please, and come as you are. We are nice, tender even :>, and we welcome everybody.

What we have in common is our desire to tell our stories — write them, draw them, paint them, somehow save them as our legacy for the next generation of those who will be beacons to their next generation — we are multiple generations in the Lab.

At some point, what-generation doesn’t matter. We are all human! We have come this far, and at some point it will be up to the next and next and next clutch of humans. May they know our collective stories. We need all of our stories, now more than ever.

I think of my mother and father and their Greatest Generation, and how, as an adult, I realize I know so little about them when, as a kid, it seemed I knew every little thing about them, as they were my world, my all.

We find out, the world is big. We start out with those we know. As Patricia MacLachlan says, “What you know first stays with you,” and as we grow, we expand or lives out into multiple anniversaries and moments, memories, meanings. At some point, we look back and… what do we see? That might be a writing prompt for those who look forward to a “Write it or Don’t” on Mondays. Go for it! Share here, in comments, what you come up with.

There is so much tenderness in these books of mine, along with a fair share of pain and/or darkness. There is also a whole lot of humor and celebration, as, somehow, they helped to grow me up and teach me what I needed to know as I wrote each one. I feel great tenderness them. :>

As I say every week, I hope you connect to your own home and place in history — and tenderness — when you read and share these books. You can find out more about them at my website, here.

And that’s a wrap for Digest #12. I haven’t been numbering them lately, but this IS Digest #12 — a full three months of Storybelly now. I’m so happy you’re coming alongside — thank you!

xoxoxo Debbie