Frozen on the Stage and on the Page

When I was studying ballet in college, I also took a few modern dance classes. They were always more fun than ballet, and much less painful on the toes. We could leap and twirl, slide and fall, instead of just practicing the formal steps the ballet teacher called out.

But in the modern class, sometimes the teacher would say, “Time for improv!” and we were all supposed to make up whatever we wanted to do to the music. This was hard for me, because I had never done it much. Sure I would put on Tchaikovsky at home and prance about the living room when no one was home, but in a class I worried what others would think. Usually, we did this as a whole class, and since everyone was dancing around me, no one would notice my awkward efforts.

One side of the modern dance studio was equipped with black stage curtains so we could use the room for performances. Once, the teacher was excited to have us perform our improvs in front of the class, one by one, on the “stage.” He put on some music and each of us was to take the stage and dance for a few bars of music, then the next one would take over.

I stood in line watching as each dancer came on stage, whirling and kicking and bounding in their turn. My heart started beating fast, my stomach clenched. The person in front of me finished with a flourish and it was my turn. Somehow I walked out on the stage, but then, I found I could not move. Not at all. The teacher smiled at me encouragingly as he continued to count out the beats of my music. I stared back, frozen.

The counts of my turn on stage were over. I walked off and sat down.

I think about this experience sometimes. What was I afraid of? Why couldn’t I move? I loved to dance—why not dance so others could see it? I think back and wish I had danced as I knew I could.

I think about this when I am afraid to try something new. I thought about it a lot when I was thinking about writing a blog. Sometimes I felt frozen, my fingers unwilling to move, as I sat at my keyboard and thought about setting up the blog.

But then I did it. Six months ago, in a burst of New Year’s Resolve, I set up the blog and started posting. Sometimes, as my finger hovered over the “publish” button, my heartbeat would increase and I would think, “Oh this is not a good one. No one will like it.”

Then I would think, “Oh well. It’s something I wrote and cared about and if no one likes it that’s OK.”

And you know, it has not been nearly as scary as I expected. Even on the pieces I thought were not so good, you, my friends, have been kind. Thank you to all who have so generously read my writing and let me know you like it. That feedback has taught me much.

It’s taught me that sometimes I am not a good judge of what will touch others. It’s taught me that my honest experience is like the experience of others and that we have much more in common than we think. It’s taught me to share what I have because I have something to share.

Sometimes you just have to dance. Maybe it won’t be good. Maybe people won’t like it. But you have to dance if you are going to get better. You can’t share what you have or improve what you have if you are frozen in fear.

So, now, I want to try and fail and get up and try again, until the dancing begins to feel right. In all I do, I want to dance with joy.

For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind.

 2nd Timothy 1:7 

Work will Work While Wishing, Whining, and Worrying Won't

My sister remembers this story about me. Evidently the whole family was out working in the yard one Saturday. Everyone except me. Patty came in to get a drink of water, saw me on the couch reading a book and asked why I wasn’t working. I said, “It’s OK. I’m not good at stuff like that so it’s OK for me not to do it.”

Did I mention I was the youngest?

I have no memory of this happening, but I have no doubt it did. I was a total slacker. My parents encouraged it too, I’m afraid. My mother would say, “You don’t need to help with the dishes. Go study. You’ll have plenty of time to do dishes when you grow up.” By study, I assumed she meant go read your book.

Still, I think she knew I had a problem. When I was asked to give a 2 ½ minute talk in Sunday School, my mom suggested the topic of “work.” She handed me a book of quotes on the topic to get me started.

Luckily, I had great role models: parents and older siblings who worked hard. And eventually I got a job and went away to college and got married and had children. I learned to work.

One day when I was a mom and also teaching at BYU,  I was sitting in the Marriott center listening to a Devotional talk and heard this maxim: “Work Will Work When Wishing Won’t.” I just now did an internet search and evidently this is a common proverb, but I heard it first then. Perhaps the speaker was Thomas S Monson, before he was president of the church; according to my search he often used this quote, sometimes as “Work Will Work When Wishy-Washy-Wishing Won’t.”

In any event, from then on the adage became my mantra. Stack of papers you wish were graded? Get to work! Dishes piled in the sink? Work will work. I typed the saying up and hung it on the fridge. When my children complained of homework or housework or whatever, I’d point them toward the fridge—Work will work! In time, I added more Ws to the phrase. Whining doesn’t help, worrying doesn’t help.

Work will work when wishing, whining, and worrying won’t.

Last Mother’s Day, my kids even gave me a sampler of the proverb. (See photo above.)

Admittedly, there are clearly problems that work cannot solve. But still, doing something—anything constructive—can often help. When my daughter’s husband was diagnosed with brain cancer, Emily immediately went to work finding the best possible oncologists and surgeons. When a friend was struggling to know how to help a daughter with mental illness, she began meeting with a therapist herself so that she could work to become a strong support to her daughter. When my father died, my mother took comfort in working on a scrapbook about his life.

I have heard that when you don’t know what to do, do something. Anything. Even kick a stone. The worst thing is to do nothing, to feel that you are helpless, that there is no way out.

And that advice holds for even minor problems. One day I stepped out of the shower and found I had forgotten to bring a towel into the bathroom. I stood there and whined to myself yet again: “Why didn’t Paul design this bathroom with room for a linen closet? Why doesn’t Paul build a shelf in here to store towels? Why do we still, 30 years after building this house, still have no storage for towels here?”

Then I thought, “Work will work. Do something.” So (after I found a towel and was dressed) I opened up the cupboard under the bathroom sink. The space was packed with bottles of shampoo I didn’t like and gadgets I never used. I pulled them all out, trashed what I knew was useless and found other homes for what I wanted. Within about fifteen minutes the space was clear. Five minutes later it was stocked with fluffy clean towels. We had a space for linens, after all those years of whining.

Ta dah! Work does work when wishing, whining, and worrying doesn’t.

On Blue Lake

           

From Minneapolis we headed north on Highway 169, past Anoka, Elk River, and Milaca, rounding curves, past fields of corn and soy beans and woods of birch. Dad was driving the green Rambler station wagon. Mamma was next to him. Kay and I shared the back seat, and in the cargo area behind were suitcases, boxes of food, and library books. We followed the shore of giant Mille Lacs Lake, then took Highway 6 to Crosby. The traffic thinned and the highway lost lanes, until we were driving on two-laned blacktop through the little town of Emily. Finally we followed a narrow road through thick birches, glimpsing the blue of lakes at every curve in the road, until we slowed, looking for the right turn-off, and there it was, the cabin on Blue Lake.

            The cabin belongs to a business acquaintance of Dad’s.  We borrowed it several times each summer.  We started going when I was about 11, and stopped—I can’t remember when. In my memories I think I am always 11.

            The cabin is magic in my memory. At home we were usually busy with our separate activities: Daddy working at General Mills or golfing or working in the yard or watching sports on TV; Mamma teaching at Fern Hill School or cooking or cleaning or ironing or sewing; Kay with her friends or at Edina High School or in her room studying. Patty was in college by the time we moved to Minnesota, and soon was married and living in Utah. We had left Richard and his family back in California. On Idlewood Drive in Edina, I spent a lot of time alone. But the cabin was different. We were alone together, with no TV, no phone, no jobs or responsibilities, on the shores of Blue Lake.

            The cabin was not rustic—more like a small house.  You entered from the driveway into the kitchen, a narrow corridor, very shiny, with blue metal cabinets, a stainless steel sink, white oven and fridge.  It had fully stocked cupboards, with smooth blue Melmac dishes.

            Left of the kitchen was the main living area:  a table closest to the kitchen door and sofas surrounding the fireplace at the north.  To the west were two small bedrooms, each with twin beds, with a bathroom between them.  To the east was a screened porch, overlooking the lake.

            When we came, Mamma would start putting away groceries while Dad, Kay and I would head down to the dock. Hundreds of wooden steps led down the steep bank to the shore. Beside the dock, upside down in the weeds rested the heavy wooden rowboat. We tugged and pushed to overturn it, and pulled it out to the water. Dad showed us how to fit the oars in their locks and Kay and I gingerly boarded. Dad took us out from the dock, demonstrating rowing techniques. Carefully trading places in deliciously delicate balance, Kay and I both learned to row.

            I loved to row that old wooden boat. I was a skinny eleven-year-old, last pick for any sport on the playground, the slowest runner in my class, a bookworm. Rowing was something I could control, a power over our movement. Facing the stern, I loved to feel the pull of the oars against the water and see the heavy boat scoot along with each stroke. I loved to turn the boat, pulling on the right oar to turn left, the left oar to turn right, or pulling the two oars in opposite directions to spin in circles on quiet Blue Lake.

            Probably at least 1000 of Minnesota’s 10,000 lakes are called Blue.  But this was our Blue Lake.  It’s a small, calm oval, nearly private.  We think there’s another cabin across the lake, and a lodge of some kind at the south end, but we never see anyone.  Once, someone took a motorboat out on the lake. “What a racket!” We complained. The gall of anyone invading our lake!

            The lake was ours when we were there.  One morning early Daddy and I were up before the others.  The loon was calling his eerie laughing cry from the north end of the lake.  We descended the steps down the steep bank, past the dense undergrowth and birches to the boat tied at the end of the narrow dock.

            We rowed towards the loon’s cry.  Dad would row, and then we would, carefully, in the bobbing boat change positions, so I could row.  My palms grew calluses at Blue Lake, as I pulled the oars through the smooth resistance of the water, ripples forming, spreading, and receding, and forming again in mesmerizing symmetry.  As I rowed I felt strong-- the maker of ripples, the mover of boats.  The boat moved smoothly along and we marked our progress by the trees along the shore.  “Yo ho heave ho,” we would sing.  “Yo ho heave ho. See that birch tree drawing nigh.  Soon that birch tree we’ll be nigh.”

            Soon we reached the water lily fields at the shallow end of the lake.  White lilies on the flat green leaves surrounded the boat.  I reached out to touch them, smell their waxen scent.  We drifted among the “pop weed,” the water reed that popped apart like pop beads.  I pulled them up and made necklaces.

            As we rowed back, Dad talked to me.  He asked me what I wanted to do, and took me seriously when I said I wanted to be a writer, though there I was, only eleven.

            Home at the cabin we climbed the wooden stairs, and opened the door to the smell of Mommy’s pancakes on the table, and the others all gathered around.  I think Richard and Cathy were there, with the babies Douglas and Suzanne. Everyone was talking and the babies were crying, and I was so happy to be there with my family.

            What did we do during our days at Blue Lake?  We came prepared with stacks of library books.  Mamma and Daddy would both read in on the screened porch or in the living room.  At the cabin is the only place where I remember Mamma reading in the middle of the day.  We would eat and read and sleep.  When Patty and her husband were there once they got out the cards and played canasta with Dad.  Canasta was a family game from before I was big enough to play, so I never did learn how and felt left out.  But Patty taught me how to play solitaire, and best of all, how to shuffle the deck, then bridge the cards back into a pile.  I could do that for hours.  Mom and Dad sometimes went for walks, along the country roads, but I never joined them.  I was old enough, I wanted my own space.  When they walked, I stayed at the cabin to read, or went down to the dock to lie on my belly and watch schools of minnows dart and turn and dart again, all in startling uniformity.

            When I did go walking with them, we always had tick check on our return. One by one, we would strip down in the bathroom and check every inch for those determined critters, who would cling on, their heads buried deep in the flesh unless they were surprised out by alcohol or a match. One particularly enterprising tick lived happily on my scalp for several weeks after a Blue Lake trip, only to be discovered by the hair dresser when I went in for a trim.

            When we were bored with the cabin and the lake, Dad would load us in the car and we would go for a ride.  We’d go into the town of Emily for supplies at the little country store, or we would drive further, to Bemidji to see the huge Paul Bunyan statue,  to Duluth to see the rocky shores of Lake Superior, or far north to International Falls, on the border with Canada.  At a gift shop there I bought an eight-inch long canoe, made with real birch bark, decorated with real porcupine needles.  I have it still, and with the real obsidian arrow head we found in the woods near Blue Lake, treasures my children all took for Show and Tell when they studied the Native American unit in kindergarten.

            Sometimes we brought visitors to Blue Lake.  Patty one summer had a college friend named Carmen come to stay.  Carmen was having some trouble or other, and needed a place to come to.  But I didn’t concern myself, at age 11, much with her past.  I just fell in love with her.  Carmen stayed home and played with me while Patty went to work.  We went for walks, exploring the neighborhood.  Carmen found adventure around every corner.  And she teased me.  “What?! Don’t you know what’s on TV now?  Surely you must have the TV schedule memorized?  What’s the matter with you!”

            When we took Carmen to Blue Lake she thought it was crazy that we had that lovely blue water and never swam in it.  Never mind that the brush grew not only up to the lake, but in it, filling the shallow water with slimy weeds and stickery branches.  Carmen got us all out in the water in our shorts, clearing out all the plant life.  “We can do it!”  She called, “Don’t give up.”  She laughed and talked and kept us working all through the bug-filled afternoon.  And we did clear it out.  But the next time we came, those tenacious plants were back.

            Joe Naylor was Kay’s friend.  She met him in England.  She was on her way home from Study Abroad in France; he had just completed a mission in England.  He went home to Texas, but soon came to Minnesota to see Kay.  Joe was tall and lanky.  He could eat incredible amounts of food, hunched over his plate.  When Kay and I did the dishes, he would hang around the kitchen finishing up all the leftovers so we wouldn’t need to put them away in the refrigerator. 

            In the evenings, he pulled out his guitar and wrapped himself around it.  He sang mournful ballads and happy lullabies.  When we took Joe to Blue Lake, he sang until I was lost in the music. “Wynken, Blinken, and Nod one night, sailed out in a wooden boat.”  Kay may have loved Joe, but I loved his songs and his instrument.  I knew I had to have a guitar; my life depended on it.  Before we left the cabin, I had begged Joe until he taught me the chords to my favorite of his songs. I practiced on his guitar until my fingers hurt. Then when we returned on Monday, Joe and Kay took me to music stores all over Minneapolis until he found me a decent instrument I could buy with the 30 dollars I had saved from my babysitting money.  I spent the next three years wrapped around the guitar on the living room couch, crooning ballads and folk songs.

            Blue Lake was the perfect place to become mesmerized by Joe’s music. Evenings are quiet there.  No TV, no radio.  Crickets chirping.  One night Mamma and I walked down the wooden stairs in the darkness, down to the boat tied on the dock.  Mamma, who couldn’t swim a stroke, was there to save me if the boat sank.

Mamma sat in the stern; I rowed out in the silence of the night, slipping the oars soundlessly into the water, lifting them slowly to watch the drops glisten in the moonlight as they fell back in the lake.  We reached the center.  The moon had risen, full and golden, spreading a clear path along the lake.  I turned the boat, and with my eyes on the glowing moon, rowed back, smoothly, to my family at Blue Lake.

            

Happiness and Poverty

“Buenos Dias!” Surprised, I looked up to see the Mexican lady standing next to me on the crowded bus smiling at me.  “De donde viene?” she asked me, Where are you from? “Los Estados Unidos,” I replied.

In fact, I had come from BYU in Provo, Utah, and was living in Mexico City for just a couple of months with a school study abroad group. Just 19, I was very, very homesick.

We lived in the LDS sponsored boarding high school campus, Benemerito de Las Americas (see the attached photo), and had an American professor and American friends, but still everything seemed so different.  I yearned for my comfortable home, for my friends who all spoke English, for food that was not primarily bean-based. I wanted to be able to carry on a conversation without feeling that I only knew about 10 words.

My new friend on the bus was patient though, and we continued our conversation, hindered by my bad Spanish and helped considerably be her wide, welcoming smile.

One thing that was especially foreign to me was the barrio surrounding the school. Covering the hill just behind the campus (and below the giant B) was a hodgepodge of tiny homes. We were not allowed to venture into that neighborhood. One time my much braver friend got me to sneak out to have lunch at a cantina down the street: litter strewed the lane, the building was little more than a shack, with corrugated steel for walls and ceiling and daylight coming through the cracks. In the mornings we heard the chickens crowing; on weekends fast-paced ranchero music blared day and night.

We shared a bus stop with the barrio, and my new friend’s home was there. I was on my way to tour the beautiful Basilica of Guadalupe. She was likely headed for the open air market, to shop or perhaps to sell.

As the bus bumped and swayed along the windy road, we continue to try to communicate. At one point, the kind woman asked, “So are you happy in the United States?” I’m sure I replied in the affirmative. But my new friend just grinned, “No, you cannot be happy in the U.S. To be happy you must move to Mexico. This is the place to be happy!”

I laughed, not having words to respond to that. But as I considered her smiling, kind face, and looked down at her well-behaved and cheerful children, I saw they were truly happy.  We reached the Basilica stop, waved our farewells, and I lost track of the good woman.

But I have never lost the impact of that conversation. Before, I guess I pitied the people that lived in poverty on the hillside. But in that short conversation, those people became—well, people. Like me. People who were happy.

Now I’m not saying that it’s good to live where there is not clean water or plentiful food or good medical care. I am not saying that those of us with means should not work to eradicate third world poverty. I’m just saying we need to be careful to see those who live in poverty as people like ourselves. And to realize they love their homes and can be as happy as we are, perhaps more happy.

Some twenty-five years later, I was on a Caribbean cruise with my elderly parents and brother and sisters. At each port, we would engage a van and a driver to show us around the island. On one island, we stopped to get some Cokes at a tiny shop in a small village at the top of a mountain.

From the shop, as we drank our cool drinks, we could see the river below us, and in the river women washing their clothes on the rocks while their children splashed and giggled in the water beside them.

The women laughed and talked as they worked. And then, the clothes clean, they gathered their children, hoisted  plastic tubs of wet laundry on their heads, and started up the winding path to their homes. As they walked they sang.