LIFESTYLES OF THE RICH AND FAMOUS…

…THE EYE OF A NEEDLE

I was almost successful once upon a long time ago in 9th grade.  I loved going to high school football games, and I loved to watch the cheerleaders bounce around having fun and doing the splits in the air.  Cheerleaders had fun, and every eye in the crowd was on them.  If not rich, at least they were famous.  I decided to go to tryouts.

In workshops for tryouts at the end of the school year we learned cheers, and I practiced each one of them to perfection in my backyard.  I struggled to perfect the splits, trying to get all the way down, straight-legged, to the ground, each of my legs pointing north and south.  All the while I wondered how Peggy could not only do the splits with her leg pointing front to back, but how she could also do them with her legs sideways, straight and stiff.  Why wasn’t I “as good” as she?  I practiced harder.  It never occurred to me that body type was a key factor.

When tryouts came, I put my best polished cheer forward and then joined the other hopeful girls in the locker room as girl after girl filed into the gym, each in her turn to yell, “Push ’em back, push ’em back, waaaaay back!”  After the last contestant performed, we settled down for a nervous wait.  Ten minutes later a real cheerleader pushed through the doors and called two girls back to perform again:  Cindy and me.  It looked hopeful.  Cindy and I, we cheered our best and returned to wait again.

Finally, the tense moment arrived, the squad leader came in to read the final list of next year’s cheerleaders.  Cindy made it.  I didn’t.  I was crushed.  But I was only a sophomore, and my near success gave me encouragement for the coming year.  I would practice harder.

The following year I prepared for cheer leading tryouts  with intensity, bolstered with the hope that last year I was only one person away from success.  “I could do it, I could do it, Waaaay to go!”

On the day of tryouts I took my place, as I had done one year earlier, waiting my turn outside the gym, trying to relax, mentally rehearsing.  Finally…I heard them call my number.

I entered the room, stood before the panel of judges, and clicked my heels in readiness.  I stared at them.  They stared back.

I wound my arms and began, “Push ’em back…”  My mind went totally, completely, utterly blank.  In a crouch, I was stuck…preparing to leap into the next position, stuck…waiting, and waiting…waiting for the words and actions to leap into me.  I stared at the judges.  They stared back.  I weakly rose and shrugged.  It was over.  I had failed.  There was no reason to wait nervously in the locker room for the final list of next year’s cheer leaders.  I had failed completely.  There was no slim margin of one to prove that I was almost successful.  I had wilted, skidded, thudded.  A failure!  I walked home in tears, devastated.

As an adult, Dad and I have tried not to fail.  We always knew we weren’t destined to be big successes.  Our house would never be featured on Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.  But we worked to find upstanding neighborhoods and to create homes of beauty that would catch the passing eye.  I surely knew what kind of home would mark us as failures in the adult world.  As a teenager I had called those homes tin cans.  We would drive by a trailer home, and I would declare that I could never live in a “tin can.”  I felt sorry for the people who lived like that.   How could they bear it?

That’s why I laughed when Jamie unexpectedly declared she would be glad when we left our own tin can home for our real home.  Boy, how my words had returned to haunt me!  More than that…I was also shocked to realize that I was on the other side of the “tin can” defense league by now.

Our Tin Can Adventure began one fine and bright Phoenix day when we had left our 2400 square feet home, packing all of life’s necessities into a 5′ by 8′ U-haul.  Fifteen hundred miles away, we had begged Ruby Dale to rent us a small single wide trailer home for three months in Tennessee.  I figured a person could endure anything for a short time…even a tin can home…most especially if you knew it wasn’t forever.

Ruby Dale, with the help of my Aunt Brenda, came through.  She located a two-bedroom home and rounded up the basics of furniture and cooking utensils.  We had one central living room with a couch, a chair, a Christmas tree, a dining table, and a kitchen.  The living room windows looked out on a hay field and a pond where Justin would fish for perch each day after school.  On the far end of the home, Jamie and Justin shared a bedroom.  And next to the kitchen, Dad and I had our master bedroom.

On a typical Tennessee evening, in the living room, Justin cleaned his gun on the couch while Jamie typed at the computer, while Vic read a book in the chair, while I quilted at the dining table.  Or perhaps I would be cooking dinner, while Vic, Jamie and Justin would be working a crossword puzzle out loud, calling words to me across the room, and taking turns combing the fur of our two cats.

During the days, housecleaning was a breeze!  There were only three rooms, and we didn’t have anything.  By 8:30 a.m. the kids were off to school, the kitchen was clean, and I was able to read, sew or write letters to friends back home.  Deciding what to wear was even easier.  I had brought jeans, sweats, and one all-purpose navy “church” skirt with one week’s worth of tops that could go with any of the pants and skirt.  I would just start on the left of my closet on Monday, wearing the closest outfit, and work my way to the right toward the navy skirt and Sunday.  Monday I would do laundry and begin all over again.

My entire “office” fit inside one small dresser drawer, envelopes, stamps, pens, and address book.  If we didn’t have it, we most likely didn’t need it.  Besides, we would be going home at the end of three months.  Then we could get “it”…whatever “it” might be.

One day in my cozy Tennessee tin home, I was completely startled when I realized I was dreading the approach of our scheduled return to Phoenix.  I sat back and began thinking.  What was back there, at home, 1500 miles away?  What did I need?  I couldn’t even remember what we had left behind in our huge 2400 square foot home.  An immense desire came upon me to call our neighbors, tell them to sell everything, close it all down, and send us the check.  I was in heaven.  I didn’t want to leave.  I could live in my little tin heaven for the rest of my life.

It was with the greatest regret that we answered the call of “reality” and returned to Phoenix.  We had our regular, comfortable and secure paradise.

But I now know that I will someday return to the heaven that still calls to my heart…a small paradise…tin, clay, or brick…a paradise cozy, and filled with love.

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One of the games I like to play in downtown Phoenix is Dress Up, Dress Down.  I think my experience as a Poodle inspired this game.

Downtown Phoenix, like many state capital cities, is the home to courts and financial institutions.  For this reason, impeccably dressed men and women walk briskly across crosswalks, swinging their expensive leather briefcases.  They are going places.  They have appointments to keep,with  schedules and destinations.

Again, like in other large state capitals, Phoenix is fighting deterioration and inner city blight.  There are also shopping carts parked in alleys, the moveable homes of men and women who walk aimlessly during the day and seek the shadows of night.

On frequent visits to downtown Phoenix, with time on my hands, just as I was transformed into a poodle after a one hour visit to a “beauty” salon, I pass time mentally creating a transformation of people walking the downtown streets.

A neatly groomed tweed-suit lawyer crosses the street – I imagine him with a longer, shaggier beard.  In my mind, his crisp tweed goes limp, bare spots and stains just showing under a flapping oversize torn overcoat.  He crosses the street with a slow, halting gait, and stops as he reaches the curb, seemingly uncertain which direction he wants to go.  Of course, it’s only a mental game.

Somewhere further down the sidewalk I will mentally dress up a street person.  Clipping and trimming his beard to a mustache, I hand him the crisp tweed suit I plucked from the attorney.  I give him an urgent appointment and a dark brown briefcase filled with legal briefs.  Immediately, his posture straightens and he quickens his pace so as not to be late.  Of course, it’s only a mental game.

But it reminds me that much of what I have taken seriously in life is only mental, too.  We succumb to the media hype that causes us to be impressed by people who do little that is impressive.  We allow people to validate their existence with the money they get from bouncing basketballs and taking off their clothes, money that buys tweed suits, Mercedes Benz, and $400,000 weddings…money that makes our eyes pop in envy.  It’s really only mental, and it starts in our minds.

Do I look beyond the house, the body, the clothes?  Do I only see the poodle hair, the cute cheerleader, or the fancy house?  I’m afraid that often I do.  For myself, long hair or poodle hair, I was the same person underneath.  My students were kind enough to realize that.  It’s a lesson for me to remember.

Still…do I allow myself to idolize “successful” people who are merely identified as the rich and famous?  How many true heroes walk the sidewalks hidden in their anonymity, no crisp tweed suits to give me a clue, heroes completely unknown to me?  Fathers who support their families?  Parents who struggle to work out marriage difficulties to fulfill their vows with love and honor?  People who give up their vacation time to help build a medical clinic or work to save people from a bombed out building?  Teenagers who resist the terrible temptations of our society?  Who are my heroes?  And how do I sing their praises?

Like being a poodle, nobody “fails” forever.   I have many years left (I hope) to reach for success.  The bigger challenge for me today is to keep my eyes on the kind of success I seek.

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HOLY BIBLE – NEW TESTAMENT

1. Matthew 19:24
   Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.”

   Matthew 19:23-25 (in Context) Matthew 19 (Whole Chapter) Other Translations

2. Mark 10:25
   It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.”

   Mark 10:24-26 (in Context) Mark 10 (Whole Chapter) Other Translations

3. Luke 18:25
   For it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.”

   Luke 18:24-26 (in Context) Luke 18 (Whole Chapter) Other Translations

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

I AM A ROCK, I AM AN ISLAND…

…NO MAN IS AN ISLAND

My two children accuse me at times of being too soft, too sentimental, too sensitive.  My standard answer is, “You’re right.  I’m a sensitive person.  Be careful with me.”  This wasn’t always true.  I used to be a rock.

My parents raised my sister and me to be independent thinkers, problem solvers, think-for-yourself kind of people.  This served me well at Arcadia High School.

In my junior year at Arcadia, I had felt honored and excited when invitations arrived in my first hour classroom singling out the “special ones” to join Delta – the Club of Special Ones.  A Delta Girl entered our classroom with envelopes in her hand, handed one to the teacher, and turned to walk out of the room.  All eyes in the room stayed glued on “the envelope.”  As the door closed behind the “special one”, the teacher looked to her hand and called my name.

I couldn’t wait for next year and the club meetings, to stay late and be one of the group, the Delta group.

My senior year arrived, and in September, I went to the first meeting. I grabbed one of the seats on the perimeter of the room and watched to see what would happen.  Today, I can’t remember anything of those meetings other than the feeling that I didn’t belong.  Some of the Delta girls who were friends of mine during my junior year had graduated, and as a senior, I felt isolated in a club of girls from the year below, my year, girls who were dating football stars and comparing clothes and dates.

Likewise, they didn’t seem to feel comfortable around me.  I didn’t see any sense in pressing it.  I was a rock.  After trying Delta for five meetings, I simply told President Donna I didn’t feel like continuing in the club.  She didn’t ask me to stay.  I never looked back.  I didn’t miss them, and they didn’t miss me.  I was a rock.

That experience told me I didn’t need to go early to college freshman orientation at Arizona State University in order to participate in Rush…sororities…sisters…and family.

What a week of frenzy–where all the campus sororities invited all the freshman women to 15-minute parties where you hurried to chat cleverly and quickly with a variety of “Delta” women so they would remember you when they sat with all the “Delta” sisters later in the evening, going over the lists of freshmen women who had come through the parties at their sorority house that day.

Their evening job would be to cross off the “dull” women.  Slowly but surely, party after party, day after day, until finally, on day number four,  they would issue their premium invitations to the select group of women who were invited to become college “Delta” girls.

My aunt Marla had belonged to a sorority when she was in college.  She had fond memories of it. In the quite days of summer before going to the university campus, talking with me about my plans for entering college, she asked me if I would be going to Rush. I tried to soften my distaste for sororities, even as she told me  about her best friends, her sorority friends.  Finally, I was pressed to explain my prejudices that were based on my few weeks of membership in Delta.  Aunt Marla accused me of being narrow minded.  So I showed her.

I went to Rush at the University.  Monday, with the list of sorority parties in hand, I made the rounds.  One day of triviality was enough.  On Tuesday, I dropped out, leaving me with a week to explore the campus.  I was a rock.  One of my best friends today was also a Rush dropout, another rock.

I had no reason to apologize to Aunt Marla.  The dominant memory of Rush forms one of my most vivid and worst memories of college.

But there were other girls, other dreams, and other hearts at play in that university introduction.  A dear, quiet Jewish girl had been sent to Rush by her mother to pledge to her mother’s Jewish sorority.  As happened with all ‘rushies,’ her party invitations decreased day by day as sororities crafted their final lists of invitees to pledge.

On the final day of Rush I found her in tears, alone in our room, wondering how she was ever going to tell her mother that she hadn’t pledged her Jewish sorority.  She had been crossed off everyone’s list.  She was alone, the rush girl that nobody had invited, even to her mother’s Jewish sorority, breaking an almost mandatory mother-daughter tradition.  She agonized.  What was she going to say to her Mother?

There was no way to console her, nothing to be said to take away the pain.  I cried inside for her and wished she were a rock, too.  Who needed them?  It was all silliness…unless you wanted to be part of the silliness.  And she did.  I hated Rush.

The rest of college suited me to a T.  Being independent and on my own as a college freshman was a high I have never since experienced.  My parents were wonderful to pay for me live in a dorm on campus, a few miles from the family home.  I asked them to let me stay full time on campus, not coming home on weekends, so that I could feel as if I had gone to an out-of-state college.  I would “fly” home in my powder-blue VW for Thanksgiving and Christmas, six miles away.  They respected my request to be a Rock.

Not everyone did.  I was shocked when several men friends trivialized my arrival at college by saying I was there simply to get my M-R-S degree.  ‘What kind of degree is that?’ I asked, sincerely wondering what field of study it came from.  ‘Mrs.’ they said.  ‘Get it?’  I did, and I was insulted.  Who needed men?  I didn’t.  I was a Rock.

America is a great place to be a Rock.  We can get lost in crowds, in cities, on computers.  We can demand our rights, our space, our distance.  But eventually, even rocks must melt.