Scenes from the Edge of the Universe: Aftershocks

First encounter: Report from the trenches by a working class, Hispanic man

I left for work quite late that morning, after a very restless, mostly sleepless night.  I was headed down the stairs to my car, and at the ground floor landing, there was one of the men who works in the apartment complex.  He keeps the place clean, and as usual he was cheerful in his greeting, which puzzled me, considering everything.  He asked me how I was doing, and I said, not so well and started to cry.  

He said, “How about that election?”  

I was beyond superficial politeness, and I said, “I’m devastated.”  

Then, he got real and dropped the “all is well/don’t mind me, I’m just the help” façade, and said, “I know, right?  Last night when I got home, the white guy who lives below me got drunk and started shouting at me, ‘Wetbacks, go home,’ and bragging about how now ‘we’ were going to get rid of all of the wetbacks and Muslims.  And then, this woman I buy tamales from in the building comes up to me, selling her tamales, you know.  She’s like 70-something and lives all alone, and I buy tamales from her every day—it’s a dollar a tamale—I try to help her out—she lives all alone.  The drunk guy sees her and starts cursing at her, calling her names, telling her to go back to Mexico, and he looks like he’s going to hit her, so I hit him and tell him to leave her alone, and the whole apartment complex comes out.  Somebody calls the police, and these 2 white cops show up. But everybody stands up for me and tells them what the guy did, and they tell me they would have hit him too, and they haul him off to jail for drunk and disorderly.”  

He said he was ashamed of himself for punching the guy, that it’s not who he is, and he won’t do it again. He showed me the scraped skin on his knuckles and said he hit the guy real hard.  He explained about how he was worried about his relatives who work in the fields harvesting food that people all across the country eat, and how hard they work, and the hatred they were now encountering from people and their fear.  

We cried and hugged.  I told him to be careful, and he said for me to be too, and we hugged again and each went on to work, as we had to.

Second encounter: An educated, progressive young woman

The next person I saw on my way into the office was a female student I know well.  A young, beautiful Jewish woman who is majoring in international studies and wants to work for a non-profit helping women and children. I had parked my car and was heading out of the garage, when she appeared.  

She took one look at me, and started crying, and we hugged and cried together.  She was so distressed, she said, that she had forgotten her wallet and couldn’t park her car without a permit.  I bought her a permit.  “Perfect timing,” she said, and it was for both of us.  

She said she had also caught her boyfriend of 2 years cheating on her a few days before and had just broken up with him.  I looked at her and said I was so sorry and thought about how her entire career goal and future was now threatened.  What would become of the world now?  My mind reeled at how much harder her life—and mine and all women’s and anyone’s life who was not a white, heterosexual male that supported the agenda of the incoming regime, and anyone who wanted to do anything positive in the world--had become over night.  

The man who was declared the winner of the election brags about cheating on women and about assaulting women.  He has been charged by 17 women with assault and is being investigated for raping a 13-year-old.  He also made anti-Semitic remarks and encouraged anti-Semitic behavior in his followers and is supported by the KKK, and is planning on appointing an anti-Semitic racist leader to his cabinet.  For starters.  

But she and I—at this moment, we were solid together.  She said she had not been without a boyfriend before, but it was okay, that she was going to work on herself and take some time for her. Then she went to talk to one of her professors (male, Asian)—another ally.

Next: Light

The next day, the campus was a little calmer.  The state of alarm and fear was still palpable, but the volume was dialed down a notch.  A female colleague and I acknowledged how we no longer felt safe walking to our cars on campus at night and hurried on our ways before it got dark.  It was already dusk. 

As I walked to the parking lot, I saw a light on in one of the classrooms.  Inside were 3 people huddled together:  2 young women, and a man with a hipster beard.  He was earnestly explaining something to them, and they were listening.  It was dusk, and the room glowed like an old master’s painting—a tableau of our global, multicultural world.  

I know the man. He’s a teaching assistant in our world history program, a gay man from a Mennonite background. He was meeting with these students to go over their first paper, which they had failed for not correctly citing their sources and were now getting to revise.  

The women were Asian international students, who often have a hard time understanding when, why, and how to properly cite sources—the concept of individual ownership of words and information not quite translating across cultures.  But here they were diligently trying to do whatever we asked of them so they could succeed.  

Meanwhile, we had just put a man in office whose theme song could be “I know you’re lying cause your lips are moving,” who is known for breaking contractual promises to pay people who work for him and suing them if they complain about it, who violates every rule of logic and argumentation that we teach in school, and whose wife plagiarized in at least 2 of her speeches in the campaign    .

Postscript: The Bully

When I got home Wednesday night, I looked at Facebook, and up popped a post by a college-educated white man in his 50s, raised in the same Southern Baptist church in Zachary, Louisiana, that I was.  He is prosperous, fit, and has a job that carries weight and authority—a professional job. He hasn’t been threatened with deportation, or had his basic sense of safety eroded by having a sexual predator in the white house.  He’s not disabled in a way anyone can tell.  He is apparently straight and has been able to marry. 

Yet, here he was posting something on Facebook to ridicule a young woman who was actually threatened.  He had put up a video of an 18-year-old college student who identified herself as queer.  She talked about her very real fears now as a result of the election and her feeling that her country hated her and didn’t value her.  His response was to make fun of her and of her major—gender and women studies—and wonder what she’ll do with such a degree and complain about the state of education and that it’s publicly funded, as is the school where I work. 

Why would he ridicule this young woman who is in obvious pain and fear?  Why not be compassionate?  Why repeat these clichéd complaints?  Why not try to understand and learn?  Why so judgmental?  Where is his curiosity and desire to learn? 

What is he so afraid of?

I remember that he was always like that as a child. 

The racism, sexism, bigotry, xenophobia, and hypocrisy I saw in the world all around me as a child—and have witnessed in one way or another daily even as an adult in the most cosmopolitan places—hasn’t gone away—as any of us who are non-white, non-straight, non-mainstream people can attest and have been saying all along.  I knew it, but thought it was under control enough and that enough progress was being made that I could relax about it and enjoy my privilege and that we would keep making progress.  I was complacent and complicit. 

This election has brought all the ugliness and hate to the surface in a way that defies complacency, and I will not be complicit. 

It is painful.  It’s a big gaping black hole of a wound.  It could swallow us up.

We can be like the bully and try to defend ourselves from the pain and ridicule those who express it.  

We can be like another white, heterosexual male I know and gloat and blame anyone who feels pain for being negative.  

Or we can be like those who just want to go back to sleep and hit the snooze alarm forever—it will be okay, give him a chance, get over it, etc.

I prefer Barack Obama’s approach—look the hater in the eye and shake his hand—but make it clear where you stand.  I prefer the approach of all of us who are feeling the pain, reeling, and still standing up with more determination than ever for the values of love, equality, freedom, justice, and peace for all.  

May we stand strong.  May we stay alert. May we take wise, intelligent, decisive action when the time is right. May the hidden wounds of our culture that have been festering beneath the skin for so long be completely healed.   May we keep shining the light on them until they vanish.

Kimberly Gay Barnes Adkins

My sister Kimberly Gay Barnes Adkins passed from this world on August 21, 2016, in Midland, Texas.

Kim was born a year and a half after me, on February 18, 1960, and we grew up together, sharing all aspects of our lives.  We played house and dolls and chase and army and cowboys and indians together.  We shared puppies and kittens and climbed trees.  I defended her from bullies at the bus stop and on the playground.  She taught me how to be a girl.  I taught her how to fight.

We played softball in the backyard, football in the front yard, and threw the volleyball back and forth over the roof of our house, one of us in the backyard, and one in the front.  We drove all around Zachary, Louisiana, and the surrounding countryside, eating onion rings from Danny's Fried Chicken, and singing along to Dionne Warwick and Johnny Mathis and Elton John and Carole King and Roberta Flack at the top of our lungs--romantic songs. We showed each other our favorite houses and dreamed of our grown-up lives.  We explored the woods at my mom's parents--the Beyette estate--fishing on the lakes, and getting stuck in the middle of the lake in a rowboat we couldn't seem to paddle in the right direction.  We got locked out of our car in the woods when we went swimming on a sandbar on Thompson Creek, and had to bust the car window to get back home.  We fought and sang and played and talked and kept each other company in every way until we were established adults on our own.

Kim was my first partner in life, and she was a joy--fun and loving and challenging.

Here is Kim at 5 years old with the 3-year old Sharlon in a box:

Kim died after a long, arduous battle with cancer.  She was with her deeply loyal and devoted husband Court and beautiful loving children, Danielle, Jared, and Angelica.  The family gathered for her funeral and took great comfort in one another and in the outpouring of love and support from Kim and Court's friends in Midland, Texas; from the community we grew up with in Zachary, Louisiana; and from all of our friends now.

In thanks to all who have offered their support to her family, and in honor of Kim, I offer here her obituary, a photo montage that my brother-in-law John Johnson put together for her funeral (with some of the songs we used to singalong to), and a poem I wrote for her when she was first diagnosed.

Obituary for Kim

Video photo montage for Kim

Afternoon Delight

 (for Kim)

When we were young, my sister Kimberly loved

Mrs. Strohschein’s pansies too…

And the big Magnolia tree in the front yard

And the swing off to the west side of the house

And the mimosa tree in the back yard,

Where you could sit in the bowl of the tree and twirl bright pink puffy mimosa flowers and tickle your nose.

I loved all of that too, and

Stripping the mimosa leaves off their stems,

Feeling the skeleton of the leaf and the bump, bump, bump of tiny little green leaves popping off, one by one

And sitting in the Lancaster’s tree next door and twirling mimosa flowers in my nose, and dreaming of the day I would rule the world with love and be free to roam wherever I pleased,

Especially through the bamboo forest between our house and the Andrews’

And into the tiny windows at the base of the Southwestern Bell building across the street, where the men came and went every day in their big mysterious trucks with all the tools and ladders and ropes,

And under our house, crawling in the vast expanse of cool, dark earth

And playing in the church’s gravel parking lots, next door and across the street, right after it had rained,

When the dirt smelled so fresh and rich and new, that we could feel the universe in every particle and see our history in every trace of sea creatures across the tiny pebbles.

We would walk through the live-oak and crepe myrtle lined streets,

Twirling mimosa flowers in our slender, young fingers,

Sucking sweet tender honeysuckle flowers through our teeth,

Singing childhood rhymes, church hymns of love to God, and pop songs of desire—they were all afternoon delight,

As we played games of make-believe and fun and chattered gaily among ourselves, like little birds. 

“His eye is on the sparrow, and I know he watches over me.”

The whole world sang to us and through us, and it was all love.

Sermon # 1: Appreciating Energy

I am happy to be here. And I am happy you are here.

A few months ago, my acupuncturist William Potter said to me, “You know, I just woke up this morning, and thought ‘Forget Love!’  If I can just appreciate something for 10 seconds, 20 seconds, a minute, I mean really appreciate something--that would be good.  So that’s what I’ve been doing.  You know appreciate anything--even things you don’t like, and what it took to create that, to bring that into the world.”

I immediately thought of a certain politician—you can fill in your own blank—and said to myself, “Even that person? What it took to create that person?”    

And suddenly in that moment, I felt it—what it took to create that person. 

Then from there, my awareness expanded, and I thought of what it took to create tons of toxic coal dust, to remove mountains, to produce floating islands of plastic waste, to destroy so much of this planet, and to create the human equivalent of these toxic dumps.

I thought of recent experiences where someone I trusted told me lies and half-truths, making a stressful situation much more stressful and creating an atmosphere of bewilderment and distrust and taking advantage of me. 

I thought of all the situations in which people abuse other people and the enormous energy such abusers expend on creating toxic rather than nurturing atmospheres.

Then I thought of my jaw.  An orthodontist once told me I was stronger than I realized, that it took enormous power to hold my jaw so tight, one of the tightest jaws he had felt, and in such a small body.

Since 2009, I’ve been studying a Tibetan Buddhist text—“The Aspiration of Samantabhadra”—translated and commented on by Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche.  

Samantabhadra is the primordial Buddha, not the historical one, but the energy from which the historical arose. 

The opening lines are “Ho! All that appears and exists, all of samsara and nirvana,/Has one ground, two paths, and two results.  It is the display of awareness and ignorance.”

“Ho!” Is an expression of the inexpressible delight and wonder of awareness of the “inexpressible ground” of all being.  It’s an expression of appreciation, wordless wonder, and non-dual awareness.

Suddenly in hearing my friend’s statement, and in hearing my own thoughts in response to his words, the first 2 lines of “The Aspiration of Samantabhadra” floated up again to the surface of my mind: 

“All that appears and exists, all of samsara and nirvana, has one ground.” 

Samsara is suffering; nirvana is bliss.  They have the same ground. 

If we can appreciate the energy it took to create the toxic waste dumps of this world—and the beings and actions we don’t like—then we are appreciating the ground of being, rather than the illusions and delusions and stories we as confused beings create from the raw materials of existence.

Meghan told me to say that line again, so I will:  if we can appreciate the energy it takes to create something, even things we don’t like, we are appreciating the ground of being, rather than the illusions and delusions and stories we as confused beings—I know I’m confused, anyway--create from the raw materials of existence.

Even a fleeting appreciation of this pure energy unwinds us from the toxicity that is being generated and places us right in the center--if even for a moment--of the energy of life, and enables us to detach. 

Detachment in this sense does not mean to ignore, to bury, to excuse, to approve, to judge, or to condemn, but to see the energy involved as energy and to appreciate the energy, rather than get involved in dramas of attachment and aversion to what the energy is used to produce or destroy.

Appreciating this creative energy without attaching to the results is not taking a bland, disaffected, cynical stance that disconnects from reality and that doesn’t care about anything.  It does not mean to excuse behaviors that hurt and actions that destroy or to deny our own values and judgments.

It does mean to disengage with whatever energy is disturbing us, so that we don’t fuel it and sink into it.  It is finding some space in the experience to step away from the drama and see the energy as energy, fulling feeling the power of the energy without making it good or bad. 

Every time I am able to detach in this way and appreciate energy as energy, it fills me with joy and a deep sense of freedom and confidence.

It’s relatively easy to detach in this way when I am not threatened, and it gets harder and harder the more personal the threat.  

For example, in my job as a teacher and administrator at UCSD, I regularly meet with students who have plagiarized in other teachers’ courses.  It is very easy for me to see how misdirected their energy is, and to discriminate what is true and what isn’t without getting caught up in their stories, because nothing they do is a threat to me.  They aren’t even my students.  They do, however, astonish me with their actions. 

Take, for instance, the young man who was caught and punished for plagiarizing 2 years ago, and then shows back up in my office for resubmitting the same work that got him caught 2 years ago.  First, he tried to get out of the appointment 2 times.  Then he actually stole the offending paper from his teacher’s office.  I asked him to email me a copy of the paper since the original was no longer in his teacher’s possession, and he did that.  Finally, he met with me, and before I could say a word, he straight-up admitted what he had done and took responsibility without any attempt to excuse himself, other than that he was having a very hard time personally and just wasn’t thinking straight. 

He could have not turned in the assignment, or just deleted the offending 2 sentences, and he would have had no problem at all.  Or he could have met with me when I first asked and not stolen the paper back from his teacher.  He had to actually expend more energy to do what he did than he would have to have done nothing or to have done a little editing of his paper.  

It took him more energy to self-destruct than it would have to self-construct. 

I marveled at the energy he spent working himself up into such a state that he would have done such a thing in the first place, and then all the energy he spent trying to weasel out of the situation.  I could feel him relax when he came clean, and we all had much more energy available to deal with the consequences, once he did.

But I find it much harder to appreciate the energy of an action, when the action is horrific or threatening to me or others.  For instance, I went to graduate school with a man who turned out to be a killer and abuser of multiple women.  

I had spent hours talking to him one semester and thought he was the brightest person I had met in grad school and smarter than the professor in the course.  I had no idea that I was talking to a serial killer and abuser of women.  I thought he was a nice guy!  It’s much easier for me to talk about any politician, than him.  

Even to this day, even now that this person is dead, having killed himself in prison, I get chills of fear even thinking about him.  He’s come back to mind as I’ve been working on this talk, and after 2 months of sitting with the memory, I can honestly say, I can muster a second or two of appreciation before the revulsion settles in.  But that second or two of spacious appreciation definitely helps defuse the fear that only feeds such horror and helps me be able to talk about it. 

Can appreciation of even the most toxic and reprehensible things we can think of begin to offer space for healing by recognizing and appreciating the energy? 

Can it take away the mesmerizing power it takes to destroy?  

For instance, if we appreciated the energy it took to create Darth Vader, would he begin to relax a little and feel his energy appreciated, and so give an opening for light? 

It’s hard to imagine, and it definitely didn’t happen in the last installment of the Star Wars saga in which Han Solo and Princess Leia’s son is trying to be the new Darth Vader and kills his father Han, when Han reaches out to him in peace.

But maybe that’s not the point.  Maybe that’s too attached to results, especially too attached to the results of others’ actions.  

Maybe the point is that we would at least be able to relax into our own power and the creative energy permeating all and overcome his darkness with our light sabers? 

And if we did, would we be able to appreciate something, even if it’s toast or a tiny square of unleavened bread, with our whole being, as if it were indeed the body and the blood of the lamb, as if it were sacred?  Because in this sense, it is.  

Maybe that’s what transubstantiation means.

Could we disconnect for a moment from the fear that fuels the haters of this world, and instead fuel ourselves and love?

This past week as I was preparing for this talk, I got a very bad sore throat.  I was raised to see illness as a sign of personal defect, and so I have a deep, knee-jerk tendency to feel badly about myself when I get sick.  It’s a hard habit to kick, but I do know better.  Deep down, I know that when I get sick, it’s just energy that is being directed at fighting off something that I don’t want in my system anyway.  And that, I, like people everywhere, sometimes get sick when my system is overwhelmed, and that it’s nothing to take personally.

I went to see William Potter, the very same acupuncturist I quoted at the beginning of this talk.  He set the needles in all the right points to get my chi buzzing quite vibrantly, and I said, “I’m all abuzz!”  

He said, “Well, appreciate that energy!  It’s your immune system kicking in.  Every time you feel it, be grateful and thank your immune system for being so strong.”

It might take me awhile to truly be able to appreciate the energy that creates even beings and actions I don’t like, but I am starting here with myself and the sore throat and my immune system.

How do I know, though, when I’m really appreciating the energy of my immune system or sore throat or whatever the object of focus, and not just thinking I’m doing it or trying to do it?  How do I know when I’ve got it?

When I feel joy and ease and confidence and freedom as I am present with something, then I know I’m there.  When I feel like it’s an effort and I’m straining, then I know I’m not there.  It’s a visceral experience, not a concept.

When I was a little kid, we were taught to sing in Sunday School, “When you’re happy and you know it clap your hands.”  It’s like that: you know it because you feel it.  I think that’s what “Ho!” means.

And when you don’t feel it … 

“The Aspiration of Samantabhadra” describes that feeling well: “Through the habit of developed dualism,/ From the agony of praising oneself and denigrating others,/ Quarrelsome competitiveness develops/….One falls to hell as a result/. . . . Through the distraction of mindless apathy,/Through torpor, obscurity, forgetfulness, Unconsciousness, laziness, and bewilderment,/One wanders as an unprotected animal as a result.”

I have been there!

The prayer--the aspiration--that follows is: “May the light of lucid mindfulness arise/In the obscurity of torpid bewilderment./May nonconceptual wisdom be attained.” 

How is that possible?  By recognizing as the text says that, “All beings … are equal to myself, the Buddha, in the all-ground./  It became the ground of mindless confusion./  Now, they engage in pointless actions./  The … actions are like the bewilderment of dreams.”

That means Donald and Hillary and Bernie and every one of us are equal in the “all-ground.”  

How do we wake up from the “bewilderment of dreams” and stop the pointless actions?  What do we do?

I return to the beginning of the “Aspiration of Samantabhadra:”  “All that appears and exists, all of samsara and nirvana,/Has one ground, two paths, and two results./It is the display of awareness and ignorance.” 

Every moment, we have a choice—awareness of the ground of existence or ignorance of it. 

We can be connected to the ground through appreciation, or cut off by fear and loathing, anger, resentment, pain, heartache, any host of emotions, but the ground is always there. 

Maybe if we appreciate the energy it takes to loathe something or someone, such as a political candidate we don’t like, as well as the energy it takes to be that person we don’t like, we will find the ground to create something new and wonderful, a space in which to expand awareness, be happy and free, and act effectively. 

Maybe that’s what “May the force be with you” means?

Walking my Cat on a Leash

Every morning I brush my cat Nobiya's teeth, put on his leash, and take him out for an adventure.

He bolts down the stairs, straining at his leash.  When he reaches the first floor landing, he comes to a full stop.  Pauses.  Looks around.  Smells the air.  Contemplates where to go, what to do.  Then gradually, gradually begins to explore the world outside his window.

He has favorite paths, but he's generally in no rush to explore them.  He may spend 5 minutes smelling one spot on the cinder block wall by the path.  Or he may bolt up the path, stop at a spot that looks like all the other spots and poke around for a long time.  Sometimes, he simply meanders along at a leisurely, but consistent pace, sniffing along the way.



Occasionally, he freezes, absolutely still in his tracks.  Sometimes it's a dog.  He knows when the nasty Schnauzer is going to appear minutes before I do.  He tenses for that one.  For the friendly labs, cocker spaniels, and border collies, he stops and watches, curious but slightly wary.  Sometimes they get close and sniff one another.  Sometimes they just walk on by.  Other times when he freezes, it's a bird.  For birds, he hunkers down in the dirt, tail swishing, absolute silence, preparing to pounce.  Or he chatters softly at them.

For a few weeks, a huge raven followed us around, cawing very loudly from tree to tree, insistent and a bit threatening to my ears.  The bird was bigger than Nobiya and came too close for my comfort.  Nobiya just stopped and watched and listened, and then moseyed on.

Nobiya loves to eat grass.  And throw it up.  I try to wait this process out so that it all happens outside.

Nobiya also loves to sit by the pool.  

His preferred walking paths are the 1.5 inch wide wooden borders around the landscaping.  If there's a tiny ledge to walk on, that's where he's going.

He also likes to pause on these narrow wooden borders, STRETCH out, and sharpen his claws vigorously on them.

Along the way, Nobiya likes to HOP over certain bushes and garden hoses.

He particularly likes to jump from stone to stone on the hillside under the tall palms.  Or to rest above them.

Our walks, then, are leisurely.  I go at his pace.  I let him direct for the most part.  But when it's time to go in, I let him know, talking to him in a soft voice, or making soft clicking sounds, with a slight tug on the leash.  He tries to get a little more time outside.  I go to pick him up.  He doesn't want that, so he goes in the direction of home.  Sometimes, it takes several episodes of this re-directing, but once he's on the stairs, he generally trots right up to the door and waits for me to unlock it.

Every now and then, though, he surprises me by appearing to head up the stairs and then bolting off and jumping up on the stairwell railing, perching up on the ledge 2 stories above the ground.  Just to make sure I know who's really in control.

Postscript to "Standing in Line at the Omelet Bar"

Towards the end of the conference, I rented a car and drove to Tomball to visit my family’s graves at the Klein Memorial Cemetery.  I stopped at a service station just outside of Tomball.  The roads had changed so much and the town had sprawled and built up to such an extent, I had to ask for directions.  The clerk didn’t know exactly how to get to Tomball’s main street, even though he was less than 2 miles away.  He’d never been there.  We asked the female clerk, and she said just keep going on the road I was on, but she thought I had a long drive ahead of me.  It turned out I was a few minutes away.  The car rental clerk had never heard of Tomball or Magnolia either.  They were all from some place else and had just landed here in their service industry jobs, and they didn’t know where they were anymore than I did.  I saw the past everywhere I looked. They saw the job right in front of them in the place where they were, but they didn’t know where they were.  

I bought yellow roses and drove to Klein Memorial Cemetery.  It was easy to find my grandparent’s graves.  My grandmother had placed them together on the back property line, right next to the pine trees and placed a marble bench there for her to sit in the many years she tended my grandfather’s grave.  Close by were my mother’s, Aunt Cecile’s, and cousin Jodie’s graves.  I put roses on them all, and sat on the bench for awhile, remembering.

Then I drove to the remnant of the family property, bought by a real estate company and now for sale again.  It was the back part of the property, where my grandmother moved after my grandfather and cousin Jodie died.  I took the road past Beyette Road off of Highway 249.  The road ran around the ball fields where families were watching their kids play, and then curved around through the woods for a mile or so past a few houses and became a gravel road in the woods.  A few hundred feet later, I turned left into what had been my grandmother’s long driveway.  The road ran straight past new houses sprouting in the woods and came to a forked curve, one fork going to her neighbor Stan’s house, and one fork going to my grandmother’s.  I parked to the left of the skinny sweet gum tree in the middle of the fork and got out and took in the air--sweet pine and red dirt and humidity mixing all together in that familiar smell that meant I was home.

The gate to the property was locked, and no one was around, so I climbed over it, like I had done many times on many gates around the property when it had been much vaster and I was much younger.

The house was gone.  The large workshop gone.  But the water tank my grandparents had built was there, and my grandfather’s original welding shop was there in its expanded shape as an outbuilding.  I wondered if his mushroom cellar/museum was still there under an embankment by the back lake, but I didn’t venture that far.

It was enough for me to stand in the place where my grandmother’s house had stood, built by expanding upon my grandfather’s cabin, where he kept his flying memorabilia and old farm tools, another kind of museum.

I stood and looked out at the lake built by my grandfather and uncle and father. They dug it out around a natural spring on the property.  It was a pond really, but we called it a lake. They had also dug other smaller lakes on the property, but this was the main one, the most beautiful one, the one their house and the cabin, which my grandmother turned into her retirement home, had faced.

Grasses and wildflowers and bits of glass and leftover home dotted the ground. The grass was a little high, and I had worn sandals.  I thought of the many copperheads I had seen my grandmother kill and the water moccasins I had so often been warned about, and decided to simply take in the view.  

I remembered all the life that had passed there in my family, all of the generations that I knew, and how much I loved that land, that place, and those people, and how much fun it had been and how heartbreaking too, and I was grateful.  

Butterflies flitted.

A breeze blew up off the lake and up the slight rise where I stood.

The real estate flyer on the gate said, “One of a kind property!  Stunning, breathtaking views on this waterfront acreage.  Pond is huge surrounded by beautiful rolling terrain, trees, and an absolute peaceful seclusion while close to Magnolia shopping and all amenities.  View the wildlife, fish, listen to the breeze bustling through the trees, or take a horse ride. Building could be a workshop or finish out for weekend cabin or guest quarters.  Located at end of road tucked back among the peaceful ambience this beauty offers.”

It was all true.

Standing in Line at the Omelet Bar

In early April 2016, I flew from San Diego to Houston for the Conference on College Composition and Communication.  The conference was held in downtown Houston at the Hilton next to the Convention Center, and thousands of writing teachers from colleges and universities were attending.  

On my first morning, I went down to the lobby to check out the food options.  There were two:  Starbucks or the hotel restaurant.  The line at Starbucks was out the door, and I had less than 30 minutes, so I headed to the hotel restaurant and plopped down $21.95 for the breakfast buffet and was grateful for my teacher's union’s funding of at least part of the cost of my breakfast.

The food on the buffet had been sitting for some time--most people were in line at the Starbucks--English teacher salaries, and all that.  But the cook at the omelet bar was cooking up omelets to order, and over I headed.  A long table was set up with bowls of spinach leaves, mushrooms, tomatoes, onions, olives, peppers, cheeses, broccoli, ham, chicken, tofu, and other delights.  I was to choose among these offerings, assembling the items I wanted on my plate to hand them to the cook.

As I grazed along the table, piling my plate high, a sign pulled me up short. 

There in the center of the table set up like a centerpiece on an altar was a tablet device, propped up as a display.  Was it showing delicious omelets?  No.  Menus or pictures of vegetables and meats?  No.  Flowers?  No.  Information of any sort, or at least something pretty?  No.  What someone at the hotel had chosen to display at that very moment on their newfangled tablet was a grainy black-and-white photo of a small-town street scene from the 1930s or so, barely a tree in sight on the street, a car or two, and not much else--it was a very plain town apparently, with not much to show for itself.  In big letters across the photo the word “Tomball” was scrawled across the top. 

I laughed at the randomness and weirdness of it.  How many people in this swank Hilton by the convention center in downtown Houston would know or care about Tomball?  What would it mean to them?  If they noticed it at all, these busy professionals from states like Ohio, Indiana, New York, California, New Mexico, Washington, Pennsylvania, Oregon, and Alaska, would probably just think it was an odd attempt to romanticize old Texas. 

Maybe some would even wonder why this fancy restaurant would put such a strange picture among the food offerings.  If so, they may have noticed other bits of Texas nostalgia among the decorations in the restaurant, and maybe they even saw through the pitiful attempt to make an otherwise completely typical American convention hotel be Texan, because everything in Texas has to be Texan--that’s the Texas way.

Texas may not have invented branding, but it had caught on and branded everything it possibly could.  The convention center was painted red, white, and blue, the colors of the Texas state flag, from floor to ceiling, every door, every nook, every cranny.  The hotel gift shop only carried red, white, and blue Texas branded tchotchkes and clothing.

Would anyone that morning even be able to guess from the photo that Tomball was the name of a town about 30 miles north of Houston?  Or would they not even see the name, or would they think it was a person with a possibly laughable name?

Maybe some force put the picture there for me.  Because even though I grew up in Louisiana, and have lived all of my adult life in St. Louis, New York City, and now San Diego, I know Tomball, Texas. 

To help me digest the picture and all it meant to me, after lunch I went to the park across from the hotel, took off my shoes, and stood on the grass, my feet connecting with the land of my birth, of my ancestors, on both sides of my family: my mother’s family—the Beyette’s—to the northwest of Houston in the piney woods of Magnolia, Texas; my father’s mother’s family, the Pollard’s of Edna, Texas, to the southwest of Houston; and my father’s father’s family, due west in central Texas—the Barnes’ of Yoakum, Glenrose, Hearne, Calvert, and unnamed spots in the road.  My parents met in Eagle Lake, 66 miles west of Houston.  I was born in Wharton, 60 miles southwest of Houston.

Tomball played a major role in this, my family’s story.

In the middle of the depression, probably about the time the photo was taken, my grandfather Cecil Beyette went to high school in Tomball and worked there, to put himself through school and support his family. His father and youngest brother had both been killed within months of each other.  His father, Thomas, was a deputy sheriff, and he was killed in 1930 by a prisoner he was bringing to jail for stealing tires.  His youngest brother, named Thomas after his father, was killed a few months later after diving into a swimming hole.  

Cecil’s mother Janie was traumatized and never recovered, and Cecil set out to support her, his other brother, and himself.  They lived in Magnolia, Texas, about 15 miles from Tomball.  Magnolia didn’t have a high school.  It was a sawmill town and a crossroads, with a few houses scattered here and there.  Tomball had a real economy with stores, gas stations, better jobs than those in the sawmill, and schools.  He worked his way through high school and got his degree.  He went on to be a daring pilot in the early days of Texas crop-dusting, helping to develop the Grumman Ag-Cat and serving as a flight instructor in World War II, among his many adventures and accomplishments. 

Cecil married Eloise Williams, who he met walking on the sidewalk in Atmore, Alabama, where he’d gone to fly crop-dusters.  He thought she was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen, and a week after he returned to Magnolia, he sent her a train ticket and asked her to come marry him.  She did.  They had four children, naming their youngest son after the two Thomases, and their youngest daughter Cecile, after my grandfather.  Their first daughter and second born child was my mother, Gale Beyette.

Until 2009 when my grandmother died, I went to Magnolia, Texas, at least once a year, and every time I did,  I also went to Tomball.  It is vital to the geography of my maternal inheritance.

In 1996 I got my first real job in St. Louis, Missouri, when Bill Seyle hired me and trained me as a speechwriter, partially because his family was also from Magnolia, Texas, and our grandparents had been best friends.  His father told him that his earliest memory in life was when my great grandfather Thomas had been killed.  He said he woke up in the middle of the night to see his mother by his side holding a Colt 45 because someone had shot Mr. Beyette, and the killer was on the loose and the men of the town were all out looking for him. 

I met Bill in St. Louis, through Sharon Hall, who cut my hair and his.  I was looking for a job.  He was looking for a writer to help him with his overload of work, and Sharon thought we would like each other.  We did, and he took a chance on me, forever changing my life. 

Neither of us had any idea that we had a shared heritage until he asked me for writing samples and commented that I had Texas in all of them, and asked if I was from Texas.  He said he had never met anyone who had even heard of Magnolia until he met me.  

When we discovered we both had family there, he called his mother, and I called my grandmother, and we heard the family stories.  My grandmother told me she painted his grandmother’s kitchen, and that our grandfathers surveyed the land all around those parts together.  They probably surveyed land together in Tomball.  Bill hired me.

My job with Bill Seyle eventually helped me land a job with Information Builders, a software company in New York City, which eventually led me to where I am now.

The clock radio my grandmother gave me when I graduated from high school and which I took to college with me and used until it died about 25 years later came from Tomball, from Worthley’s store, where my grandmother bought her appliances most of her life.  The radio's alarm trained me to take 20 minute naps in college because it had the time marked in 20 minute segments on the dial.  It’s a skill I still use every chance I get.  I remember standing with her in the store many, many times. 

I also remember many occasions when my Aunt Cecile took my brothers and sisters and I to the big town of Tomball to one of the few eating establishments around--Dairy Queen--for their Dilly Bars, vanilla ice cream coated with chocolate.  

And I remember going to Klein’s funeral home in Tomball for my grandfather, my grandmother, my cousin Jodie, my Aunt Cecile, and my mother.

This is what I felt when I stood in line at the omelet bar, and the screen said, “Tomball.” 

There is a history there, and I know it.  It is not romantic. It is not nostalgic or sentimental.  It is real, and it is in my bones and in my blood. 

Sightings on the Edge of the World: Mothers and Children

Today, February 18th, is my mother's birthday.  Had she lived 2 more years in this world, she would have been 78 years old, and I am sure worrying all of her children to no end.  Instead, I miss her with all my heart and soul, in a way that I never did when she was living.  Most of the time I held her at arm's length and sought to differentiate myself from her.  Since she's been gone, though, I have felt how alive she is in me, and welcomed all the similarities, even those I disdained previously.  Now I love her the way a mother loves a child.

One recent morning as I walked on the cliffs above the beach in Del Mar, California, I walked past a mother and daughter in a perfect tableau:  The mother sitting on a bench facing the ocean, her small toddler age daughter sitting on her thighs, the two gazing in each other's eyes in perfect joy and contentment.

I remembered times when my mother looked at me that way, and I longed to return her gaze full on, like that little one did, and then for the two of us to sit side by side and look out at the ocean together, enjoying the clean, crisp, sweet morning air; the glowing pastel blues and pinks and yellows of the early morning sky; the roar of the ocean coming in and flowing out.

Here are a few photos to honor my mother, Gale Louise Beyette.

Mom and I

 Mom and Kimberly

 Mom and Sharlon

 Mom with Trevon on her lap, me, Sharlon, and Kim at the Pollard's, my father's family home

 Mom with Leyette and Kayla

 Mom with Emily, Trevon's daughter

 Mom with Kayla and Aaron, Leyette's children

Mom with Kimberly and her children: Angelica on Kim's lap, Danielle by Mom, and Jared

Mom with Jared, Kimberly's son

 Mom, Kim, and Trevon at the Beyette's, mom's family home