On Angels

I was brought up to believe in angels and, as a pupil in a two-room Catholic school, to pray to my guardian angel before recess each day. Like my classmates, I delivered the prayer in a rapid-fire monotone, but I was nonetheless praying to an angel.

 

In the course of our school lessons, angels came and went, appearing to virgins, wrestling with prophets, and even challenging the authority of God (and didn't THAT lead to trouble!). I don't remember any math problems based on the number of angels that could dance on the head of a pin, but we were just one step away from that.

 

Angels afford endless speculation to theologians of all religions. Christian theologians revealed a lot about themselves when they drew up their hierarchy of angelic orders, insisting that there were seven angelic divisions headed by archangels and categorically stating that the various seraphim, cherubim, and others added up to a total of 496,000 angels.

 

When I withdrew from my childhood religion, having chanced upon its enormous feet of clay, I threw out the baby with the bathwater. I renounced angels as well as the dogma that I found as encrusted with man-made rules as a sunken ship is with barnacles. Organized religion and its baggage were not for me.

 

Well, you can take the girl away from the angels, but apparently you can't take the angels away from the girl. When I began writing stories from my life, I gradually saw that the stories were connected by two themes: first, every story involved an automobile; and second, I was a lucky duck to have survived each event. It was not a great leap to realize that angels must have been involved. It couldn't have been coincidence alone that led to my escaping my just deserts so many times. The conclusion was inevitable: angels were in my life!

 

When these stories took place, angels were far from my mind. I neither believed nor disbelieved; I just didn't give them a thought. But it is clear from the stories that the angels were there. If you believe in angels, that is.

 

Now, I see that angels guide my life. Something kept me safe through that series of missteps, misadventures, and just plain stupidities. Maybe it wasn't angels, for how on earth can one tell for sure? For my part, I don't categorize my angels as the medieval theologians did. I don't even envision them. I just know that some energy, some spirit or being, has, many times during my life, turned away almost certain disaster. I have to admit that these may not have been MY angels. It's quite possible that they were protecting another person in my little drama: someone else, for example, in that car that spun off the road. So I won't claim any of these as my own personal guardian angel. But some force, some being or group of beings, has exerted a lot of effort over the years, and I certainly did profit from it.

 

So I say hallelujah!

 

Copyright 2009 Ann Tudor   

www.anntudor.ca
http://scenesfromthejourney.blogspot.com

Things That Get Lost

I've lost so many things in my life. For long periods of time I have lost the ability to be happy, though I usually find it again eventually. During the big move from Hawaii to Tennessee in 1961, I lost my most favorite pair of navy blue sling-back calf-skin pumps with three-inch heels. They had cost $25 before I went to Hawaii, and my father had been furious: "$25 for a pair of shoes!" he yelled.

 

We lose our direction, lose our goals, would lose our own souls if they weren't fastened to us with golden strings. We're careless with all our things, taking them for granted, assuming that we'll always have our health, our friends, our ability to live just as we want to. One look at the world around us should suffice to wake us up and make us treasure whatever we have: health, love, a mind that more or less works, stability.

 

But no-o-o. We consistently move into complacency, accepting all these gifts as a birthright. We secretly blame those not so gifted: if they had just been more like us, they would still have what they have lost. What arrogance! What arrant nonsense we allow ourselves to believe. Helen Keller has that wonderful bit about how security is not natural to man, that security is a foolish goal and striving for it distracts us from more important pursuits.  But do we heed these words? They come from someone who certainly knew about facing the world without security. And do we heed them? What do you think?

 

As I've moved on in this world of loss (oh, the things I lost in childhood), life has become a journey of acquiring rather than a journey of loss. With hard work, the grace of the Universe, and the help of a world of teachers, I've found more than I ever lost. I've found my self, my soul, my voice, my voice again. I've found my being. And as I settle in to this new-found-ed-ness, I begin to recover even what was once lost.

 

Memories of childhood days return, not lit by gold as one might have wished, but outlined boldly against the dying light. In fact, I've found most of what I'd lost, except for the navy sling-backs. Someone other than me got the box they were packed in, those beloved shoes, and I hope they enjoyed wearing them. Me, I've lost the ability to wear high heels of any kind, and that's a loss I don't regret.

 

Nothing is really ever lost at all. Life is like a big computer. It seems to gobble up what you've just written, but if you know enough (or know someone who knows enough and can teach you), you can always find that disappeared piece. It's just in hiding, taking a break, waiting for you to be ready to hear it again.

 

Lost things aren't necessarily lost; they've just decided to belong to another person. My favorite beret, which I had trimmed with beads and buttons, is now on someone else's head. But that gives me the chance to make another one, using even prettier beads, taking even more time with it, making it more precious and admirable and mine. Until I lose this one, too (and that would be the third buttoned-and-beaded beret I will have lost) and it lands on someone else's cold head.

 

Everything lost is found again—by someone.

 

Copyright 2009 Ann Tudor   

www.anntudor.ca
http://scenesfromthejourney.blogspot.com

Working the Land

Once you get to a little clearing in the forest, you start cutting trees. Then you dig up the stumps and cull the boulders, rocks, and pebbles. Finally you're ready to make your garden.

 

I have a friend who has always been a gardener. In the early years of her marriage (husband in graduate school, two little children) they lived not in town with all the other graduate students, but on a farm. They always found some way to rent a house with enough cleared land for a farm. And my friend would grow the family's food.

 

Now, how did she come to know how to do this? I certainly didn't know (though, had I known her then, perhaps I would have learned).

 

We lived in two houses while we were in Tuscaloosa. The yard at the first house was only shade. Our lot had once been a stand of pines, and there were still pine trees everywhere. We could have sold off the timber and lived on the proceeds for months—if we had owned the property, of course.

 

After Baby Number 3 was born, we moved to a larger home, with a larger lot and five huge pecan trees that dominated the back yard. Since the squirrels were cannier pecan-pickers than we were, the only benefit we ever saw from those trees was using them to string clothes-hanging wires for drying the laundry. (And then there was the day when one of the trees was struck by lightening just as I was trying to unpin the sheets from the (metal) clothesline before a storm came. But that's another story.)

 

We did open up a little plot in the yard for tomato plants and maybe some peppers. We must have harvested something from those plants, but it couldn't have been much, because I have no memory of it. (We all see the fallacy in that reasoning, don't we? Given my memory of those days, we could have harvested bushels at a time and sold them to Del Monte and I still might have no memory of it. . . .)

 

My first real garden experience was with someone else's garden. Thelma, my mother-in-law at the time, was a country woman. She put in a good-sized garden every year, and she ate or put up all the food she grew. It was a huge and wonderful garden, and I, in my 23-year-old naivete, had no idea how much work her garden required.

 

My husband, Rolly, and I were between jobs (just home from Hawaii, not yet settled in Nashville) one summer, so he worked for his father, Morris, in the family dry-goods store. I don't know WHAT I did that summer. Did I sit around and read while Thelma worked? Sounds plausible, if embarrassing to admit.

 

At any rate, Thelma and Morris took a one-week vacation every year to go to Bethesda, a church camp in the east-Tennessee mountains, up near Sewanee. Our sole chore, while they were gone, was to tend the garden:  to water every day and to gather in the tomatoes as they ripened. (I think Thelma knew that it would not be in the best interests of the garden to ask me actually to tend it.)

 

So Rolly went to the store in Pulaski each morning, and I stayed in tiny Frankewing and played house, which probably involved a little cooking and a lot of reading. Each morning before work he would water the garden.

 

My job was to harvest the ripe tomatoes. The garden was about 20 by 50 feet. Tomatoes were planted in three rows, each 50 feet long. That's a lot of tomato plants. Because Rolly watered every morning, the soil between the rows was always muddy.

 

I would go outside every morning, stand at the head of a row, contemplate the mud, and imagine the effect it would have on my cute little sandals (or on my bare feet, if I were brave enough to squish my way through whatever bugs and worms were waiting to attack my little toe-sies).

 

I stood at the top of a row and peered at the tomato plants. Bending over, first to the left, then the right, I would look all the plants I could see from my position there at the top of the row. Peer. Peer. If I saw a bit of red within reach (on one of the first three plants of the row, say) I would certainly tiptoe through the mud to pluck that ripe tomato. But the rest of the row looked all green to me. I now know that any ripe fruit was, of course, hiding behind the flourishing green leaves, as tomatoes like to do. But how could I know that?

 

I saw no red tomatoes at all. I did wonder a bit that only the first three plants in each row were bearing ripe fruit. But I wasn't too eager to follow up on that thought, since it might have involved walking through the muddy path between the rows. The thought died on the vine, so to speak.

 

When Thelma and Morris returned a week later, Thelma found more than the usual number of ripe tomatoes, along with quite a few rotten or exploded tomatoes on the ground. I don't remember that she scolded me or even made any reference to my ineptitude. But she certainly never again left me alone with a garden.

 

Copyright 2009 Ann Tudor   

www.anntudor.ca
http://scenesfromthejourney.blogspot.com