Working as a shop girl at the store on Main Street has helped round out my view of things here in Duncan-confirming much of what I remember as an accurate representation of my childhood including the religious indoctrination I got at home. Gosh. I just reread that last sentence and it sounds a bit cold and clinical. Basically, now that I've been back here for a while, I've found that my memories still seem pretty accurate. I'm feeling a lot better about myself, the mistakes I've made, and the ways I've gone about trying to figure out how to function in this life. I'm learning to forgive myself for being such a fuck up. And...there it is. 

    I'm NOT a fuck up. I know that. What I meant to say is that I'm finally able to forgive myself for the choices and decisions I made that didn't fit in with or result in the more traditional path toward wholeness. There I go sounding all clinical again. I guess it's the unrealized diagnostician in me. I always loved meetings with the diagnostician when I was teaching. I attribute that to a diagnostician named Freddy. 

    Freddy always wore a brightly colored dress suit, but my memory sees her in yellow, with reading glasses hanging from a pretty chain, pens and pencils at her ears, and always a giant lapel pin of what may have been a bee or a dragonfly-I just know it was a flying insect. She was exactly the sort of professional Texas woman I enjoyed observing during my early years of teaching in Granbury. I loved going to the meetings that everyone else hated simply for the experience of watching Freddy in action. She was gregarious and had an infectious spirit. She'd describe a student's "little IQ" using those exact words, and somehow no one was ever offended or "triggered." It was a term of endearment and had nothing to do with the kid's intelligence. Sure. It's reprehensible, NOW. I do think it was eventually brought to her attention and she stopped. I don't know. It was a different time. Back then, Granbury was just a little lake town south of Fort Worth with one hanging stop light across a two-lane highway. You know, the good ole days in the mid 80s when you could still refer to a child's "little IQ" and get away with it. Freddy wasn't perfect. No one is. But she was learning just like we all are. Learning brings new awareness, and we go forward in that knowledge. I'm so thankful that she was one of the many wonderfully unique and intelligent women I was lucky enough to work with during those Granbury years.

    I guess I say all that as a way of saying that I think the most important thing is to keep learning from whatever place you find yourself. Living here has reminded me of where I was at the beginning. The prehistoric years of my life. When I reflect on my decisions with a full knowledge of my upbringing, I'm reminded of the words of Dr. Phil (who I don't think I'm supposed to like anymore), "I don't ask why, I ask why not?" I moved forward with the intel I was given. And here we are. It could always be worse. 

    I do sense that a higher power has guided me along. I've not become such a heretic as to let go of my belief in some form of eternity. Being a heretic, like everything else, is on a spectrum, and I willingly embrace the fact that I am one. And that's why it feels uneasy to live in a town like Duncan. This is the place where the indoctrination happened, and from what I've observed, the plague of fundamentalist religious thinking has only gotten stronger in the 40 years I was away. They're everywhere. I'm talking about people who see the world ending,-and it could happen at any moment- with Jesus showing up on that horse my daddy's taking care of and obliterating anyone not covered in the blood of the lamb. They take that literally.

    But, it's all in their head, and I can function quite nicely thinking and believing whatever I want. Right? I mean, isn't that what our country is all about? Let's hope so. I guess we'll see. Like I've said before, I keep my head down and go about my business, and I've very much enjoyed working as a shop girl on Main Street for the last year and a half. It was a great way to exorcise a personal demon, I made great friends, and I've confirmed that, in many ways, things are pretty much the same as they always were in Duncan, Oklahoma. 

Thanks for reading!

Peace and Love,

grace

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    When you land on "go back to start" in The Game of Life (I mean the actual board game), you just have to see it through. It's not uncommon to make tremendous comebacks. In fact, it can sometimes be an advantage to drive your little plastic rectangle car with your plastic stick pin spouse and your pink and blue stick pin kids back to start. Your very next spin could land you on a square bringing you the instant success and happiness that having a spouse and a car chocked full of kids couldn't bring on its own. Which means there's really no such thing as starting over. It's all just moving forward in the end. 

    I've finally come to realize that one big reason living in Duncan seems like starting over is because it looks and feels so much the same. All around me I see the sites of my upbringing. Sure, a lot of the buildings serve different purposes than they did back then. The downtown Goodners grocery store is a church, the library is an insurances office, and Otasco is now a "fully integrated multidisciplinary clinic." But the buildings still exist in the same spot they did 40 years ago sparking my imagination and taking me back to another time. 

    Last summer, I was painting for a local teen theater camp and spent some time getting to know one of the volunteers. She was a young public school teacher who grew up in Duncan, currently teaches in Lawton, and very much enjoys the diversity of her student population. I surmised she's a good teacher by the things she chose to focus on as we talked. She had what I believe are the most important qualities a teacher can possess - a genuine like for kids and learning and an awareness of her own place in the world as a life-long learner. I always believed that the person doing the most actual learning in any classroom of any sort should be the teacher. As long as a teacher is willing to learn, the teacher will be able, somehow, to get students to do the same. I told her I'd moved back to Duncan after being gone for 40 years, and she said, "Oh, it must be difficult coming back here and everything is so different." To which I replied, "No, it's the opposite. It's difficult because things are all exactly the same." She seemed to pause and shift, as if she immediately saw me in a different light, then she opened up to me a bit about some of the obstacles she faced growing up here. It felt good to have that connection with her. Of course, many of our personal struggles were different, but Duncan has more than its share of peccadillos when it comes to being the setting of one's childhood experience. A whole bunch of peccadillos over an 18-year stretch of human development can make quite an imprint. Go Demons!  

    I say all of this with a great deal of love in my heart for my hometown. Duncan, Oklahoma was a great place to grow up. I could give you a list of reasons miles long, and maybe someday I will. But not today, because today I want to talk about something else. I've revisited and redeemed one of the disasters of my youth. No, I've not fallen into another sinkhole and landed, once again, on the front page of the Duncan Banner. Have I mentioned that from the back windows of my current home I can see the 4-way-stop where that unfortunate occurrence befell 16-year-old me? Well, I can. But no, it's not that or any other of the many calamities of fun I got into with my little red car. I don't really consider any of those incidents disastrous. It was all great fun and definitely one of the major upsides of growing up in a small town like Duncan.

     I'm talking about an experience that felt truly disastrous and heartbreaking to me at the time. We all have experiences like that as teenagers. The ones we reflect on with cringe in our hearts. We do our best to cast it in a humorous light, but the disappointment we feel lives on inside us. Be that as it may, I'm happy to report that I've faced down and defeated one of my teenage Duncan demons, and I did it in very nearly the same location where it happened 44 years ago. What did I do? I became a shop girl. 

 

    For the last year and a half I've spent a couple of days each week helping out at a store on Main Street called Distinctive Decor.  I say helping out because when compared to 31 years of public school teaching, my small town shop girl tasks are much more like a day off than what I've come to consider a work day. In fact, I do a lot of the same sorts of tasks as a small town shop girl I enjoy doing at home: moving things around from one visually pleasing setting to another, lighting a few candles, making a pot of flavored coffee, dusting, and even cooking a meal since the store has a full working kitchen smack dab in the middle of it. My favorite thing of all is unboxing merchandise, and it's not just because it's fun to see what's in the boxes. I also enjoy the textures, shapes, and sizes of cardboard and paper packing materials. It all looks like creativity to me. As a kid, there were very few things that could get me more excited than a giant cardboard box. It was like getting a passport to another world. 

  I don't think, at this particular stage of life,  I'd enjoy doing the shop girl thing in a big city or crowded mall environment, but here in Mayberry RFD, being a shop girl a few days a week has been exactly what I needed to get my bearings about me and figure out where the heck I am and what the heck is going on. Not to mention the fact that I've finally redeemed the disastrous experience I had as teenager.  Distinctive Decor at the corner of 9th and Main has been the perfect place to do those things, and I'm so grateful for the opportunity I've been given there. But it's all coming to an end because the store is closing. In the words of Tom Petty, "It's time to move on, time to get going. What lies ahead I have no way of knowing. But under my feet baby, the grass is growing. Time to move on, time to get going."

    I have much more to process and say about my experiences as a shop girl on Main Street and particularly about the wonderful people I've come to be friends with while doing it, but for now, I have painting to do. I make wooden peg dolls and sell them in an Etsy Shop, and I've self-commissioned a few I'll be gifting to some of the wonderful people I've come to know and love at Distinctive Decor.

Thanks for reading. I'll hope to write more before another entire month passes.

peace and love,

grace 

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No Regrets

   I've always had a complicated relationship with regret. One the one hand, if all learning happens through reflection, at least a little regret is necessary for making any sort of progress in any area of life. If you can regret something and still be grateful for the experience doesn't the gratitude cancel out the regret? Maybe the problem I have is that regret sounds too negative and too strong a sentiment for major life experiences. I can regret eating pizza late at night or not taking a jacket on a cold day. I'm fine with those. Those are things I can and want to correct.

    I think the problem I have with regretting major life choices, like marriage, is that the idea of going back and correcting those decisions would change way too many wonderful consequences. How could I regret something that also brought me such joy, laughter,  love, and beauty? Isn't the entire point of "all things work together for good" that it includes ALL things? 

    Today is my 62nd birthday. My overall sentiment about life in general is that I've not made things easy on myself, and I know I made things harder for my boys than it had to be. I do regret that. I'd go back and change parts of that if I could but not the whole thing. I think of all the things I've done in my life, and I mean ALL of them, the greatest and most important thing I ever did was teach grace to my sons. You can only really teach grace by example. Words just don't cut it. It makes me think of a bible verse I've heard thousands of times growing up in evangelical church-always before an offering of some sort. Always. Go figure. But I don't see it as a verse about money at all. It's about love, grace, peace, joy, etc... All the important things. Not money.

Luke 6:38 -Give, and it will be given to you. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together and running over, will be poured into your lap. For with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.”

Paul McCartney said it like this: 

"And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make."

    My boys are good humans. They're not perfect, but they're full of grace. I experience that grace firsthand every time they hug me, or say "I love you, Mom," or basically just continue to desire a relationship with me at all. So many parents don't have good relations with their children. I am blessed beyond measure on my 62nd birthday, and I doggedly refuse to see it any other way. 

No regrets.

Thanks for reading!

love,

grace

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Thomas Merton Tracks

    It is a truth that real, authentic learning can only happen through reflection. You can't skip that part. I know that. I'm a teacher; it's what we do. 

    So I've finally mustered the courage to start looking back at some of the posts I wrote while I was married to tdub. There are not quite 200 of them which means it would be a pretty quick read if I were able to plow through it all in one sitting. I'm glad I'm not able to do that because there's a lot of stuff there I need to revisit, feel, and process. Sometimes it feels as if another version of me is moving through my body like a wave as I read. It puts me back in that moment, but going back is necessary because when you mess up at anything you have to take time to figure out the why of your mistake so as not to keep repeating it. And I'm not talking about the mistake of marrying a closeted gay guy. I mean, all things being equal, if you're going to marry the wrong person it may as well be a closeted gay guy. I've never had a problem with gay people, even at the height of my religiosity. For the most part, I find them delightful and, due in large part to the religious trauma of my youth, I feel a strong kinship with gay folks. I'm talking about not demonstrating an ability to make decisions in my own best interests as it pertains to relationship. I see now that I've been avoiding the very thing I most need to do if I plan to keep learning, growing, and improving. I'm about to turn 62, but I see no reason to let that deter me from my endeavor. In fact, it's more imperative than ever that I finally figure this shit out. 

     Being back in Duncan with my boys has given me the strength to do it. Go figure. I guess the best thing about Duncan being pretty much exactly the way it was when I grew up here 60 years ago is that it puts me back in that time and place much like reading the blogs about life with tdub puts me back in that time and place. It's a lot. It's been a lot. But I'm getting there. It's like I had open heart surgery as a child and the doctor botched it up. And somehow, in this, choose-your-own-adventure video game of life the rules state that the only way to move forward is to go back, untangle the mess and get your heart, mind, and soul functioning correctly. I don't remember who said it first, but if we're not learning we're dying. Obviously, I'm not done learning.

    The blog post I read today was from July 2006. I felt huge waves of comfort and strength as I read it. It moved me to tears. I may have been living in the middle of a slow motion train wreck back then, but I was always searching for meaning, trying to make sense of things, and basically just doing the best I could in my current state of growth. I posted it less than a month before tdub came out and our marriage ended. It's a Thomas Merton quote, and it resonated with me in a deep and profound way then just as it does now. I have a different view of it now, particularly the Jesus parts, but the words and the sentiment move me still. Thomas Merton tracks. Here it is:

    "My Lord, I have no hope but in Your cross. You, by your humility, and sufferings and death, have delivered me from all vain hope. You have killed the vanity of the present life in Yourself, and have given me all that is eternal in rising from the dead.

    Why should I want to be rich...to be famous and powerful? Why should I cherish in my heart a hope that devours me - the hope for perfect happiness in this life - when such hope, doomed to frustration, is nothing but despair?

    My hope is in what the eye has never seen. Therefore, let me not trust in visible rewards...Let my trust be in Your mercy, not in myself. Let my hope be in Your love, not in health, or strength, or ability or human resources." - Thomas Merton

    

 As always, thanks for reading! It feels good to write again. 

grace

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"The only way out is through." -Robert Frost

I have so much to write about that I often feel stuck or frozen. I started a post about how my mom served as the church secretary and how that impacted so many aspects of my childhood growing up. But it all turns into a jumble somehow like it needs to cook a little longer before it's ready to come flowing out of me. Who knows. I just know that I feel like I need to be writing, and somehow, hitting publish on these blog posts gives me a sense that I've done something worthwhile. 

The main thing I'm trying to unravel is exactly how the religious and cultural indoctrinations/lessons/experiences I had as a child here in Duncan impacted my ability to be successful in other aspects of my life. It's not about blame. It's about unraveling knots that happened, for whatever reason, and moving forward toward greater emotional health. Living here has literally forced my mind into this place because I'm surrounded by it. Like living at the scene of some sort of accident. It feels like I have no choice but pick myself up and to do it. And that's what I'm trying to do. 

And it's horrible. It's painful. It's excruciating. But the thing is, the fact that it's so painful points me toward the notion that it simply must be done. There's no way forward but to go right through.

So that's what I'm doing. Come what may. 

That's all I've got for now. But I'll be able to hit "publish" and move forward with today knowing that I did some writing. Thanks for reading!

love,

grace

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When a Cowboy Trades His Spurs for Wings

    

    My dad died on February 29, 2020. Leap Day. Departing on a day that only comes around once every 4 years suited his personality perfectly for he was a stoic man. The kind of man who'd appreciate the idea that he'd effectively quartered the number of days in our lifetimes that his death anniversary would pop up on our calendars. Pretty cool trick if you can pull it off. And he did. Of course he did. He may have been stoic, but he was far from dull or boring. He loved to laugh and make jokes, and he had a quick wit that made other people feel at ease and happy around him. I loved making him laugh more than just about anything. 

    I was several years into the process of religious deconstruction by the time Daddy passed which is fortunate because processing the musings of fundamentalist evangelicals as to his current whereabouts would have been all the more difficult to stomach had I not already come to find it all so ridiculous. So, when the Baptist preacher at Daddy's graveside service in Sulphur told the little crowd gathered on that sunny day in March of 2020 that my dad was so fine a man that those in his family were all certain he was now up in heaven taking care of the horse that Jesus would be riding in on at Armageddon, I didn't so much as roll an eye. Let them have their inappropriate apocalyptic fantasies. Disagreeing or providing a different point-of-view would, oddly enough in that particular setting and in this part of the world, make ME seem like the crazy one. Too smart for my own good and lost to the devil. Given over to a reprobate mind. Shit like that. Oh well. 

    The truth of the matter is that funerals are held for the benefit of those left behind, and far and away the majority of the people at my dad's funeral were completely in agreement about the idea of him tending to the horse of the returning King. I mean, when you put it that way, it does sound pretty cool and a bit Lord of the Rings. It's a compliment. I get that. A compliment based in a delusion, but still, they mean well. 

    For the record, my daddy was a real cowboy in every good sense of the word, so I'm quite open to the possibility and certainly the hope that wherever he now exists, and I do think the human spirit is eternal, that there are also horses of an eternal nature. It's not like I've given up entirely on the concept of an afterlife. I'm not an atheist. But I may as well be in the view of Christian fundamentalism. And I'm 100% okay with that. 

    My partner, bigby, played the guitar and sang at my dad's graveside service. It was so simple and so perfect. Nothing else that was said or done really mattered to me. It was a sweet, fitting service for a great man who I was fortunate enough to have as my Daddy for 57 years of my life. During the last years of his life, I told him about my changing religious beliefs. He always listened receptively, seemed intrigued, and never expressed any concern or doubt in my ability to figure it all out for myself. He didn't seem surprised by it. My dad was the kind of person who didn't have to fully understand you to love you, and I'm thankful every day of my life that I got to be here with him and be his daughter. 

    I didn't feel like I could go on writing here without writing about my dad. I feel him near me quite often, and I'm not sure if it's just the part of him that lives on in me or if his eternal spirit is actually hanging around here somehow. Either way he's living on, and that seems to be the crux of pretty much all religion. 

Here's a link to the song bigby sang at his graveside. When a Cowboy Trades His Spurs for Wings

Thanks for reading,

grace

    

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Deconstruction Sucks. Yippee ki yay.

    

    As I mentioned at the end of my last post, I moved back to my hometown of Duncan, Oklahoma 3 years ago. Duncan is a small town in Southwest part of the state just 30 miles north of the Texas border.  I think it's pretty typical as far as small towns go, but it's not one of those "mind your own damn business" small towns like the one Tim Walz kept talking about during the presidential campaign. Oh, if only. Here in Duncan, minding other folks' business is 2nd nature for some and something of a hobby for others. I keep my head down and, as Tim would say, "mind my own damn business" pretty much all the time. 

    Duncan became my hometown in the spring of 1963 when I was 3 months old and my sister was 5. My parents moved our family here from the even smaller and more rural town of Sulphur, Ok, just an hour's drive due east of Duncan. I graduated from Duncan High School (#godemons) in 1981, and left for college that same year. 

    Flash forward an entire 40-year lifetime and BAM, it's September 2021, and I'm right back where I started. You might think after 3 full years of living life here, I'd no longer be stopped in my tracks by a sudden feeling of panic while driving down pretty much any street. But it still happens more often than I find acceptable. It's like my car landed on the "go back to start" square in the cosmic game of life. How did this happen? How did I end up back here??? What the heck is going on? Is this real????

     While everyone else at any given intersection may be simply waiting for their turn to proceed, I'm also reliving that time my 70s era, candy-apple red Toyota corolla fell into a giant sink-hole at one of the busiest intersections in town, or the time I rear-ended the car in front of me on Hwy 81 because my high school crush honked at me from the southbound lane, or the time I got stranded high-center on a mound of dirt in a construction area that's now considered one of the older neighborhoods in town.    

    My parents were only privy to two of those particular incidents, and I could go on with lots of others. The one where I fell in the sink-hole landed me on the front page of our local newspaper, and the fender bender smashed up the front of my beloved little Richard Scarry-looking car. While I consider these good memories that bring me joy and laughter in the retelling, especially when reminiscing with childhood friends, my state-of-being when they occurred was, as it turns out, not good. Being HERE physically somehow makes them more than just beloved memories. It throws my mind and body back into those moments in a way that feels uncertain and scary as if I'm actually reliving my childhood. 

    I didn't anticipate these feelings when I freely and willingly made the decision to move back here, but here we are. Because of this, I don't get out as much as I probably should. I'm not sure how long it will take or if I'll ever get used to being here, but I can't really worry about that anymore. I just have to do the work, continue the healing, and assume that the turning of time brought me here for the right reasons. 

    I've finally reached the point in my religious deconstruction where I can comfortably and wholeheartedly hold on to some of the truly helpful tenants of the indoctrination I received as a child. One of those is  "All things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are called according to His purpose." (Romans 8:28)  I may have a heretical view of a good portion of that bible verse, but the first 6 words are the most important to me. It will all work out for my good, eventually. I do believe that. But it still sucks to go through it.  

    If I showed you a few pics of the families of my two biological sons, including 4 gorgeous grandsons who live here, you'd understand right away what motivated my seemingly irrational choice to move back to Duncan. I'm here for them, and I have no regrets. The healing and deconstruction are just a bonus. Yippee ki yay.  

    In other news, and just to update a bit, t-dub and his husband miggs will be flying in from their home in San Francisco at the end of the month for our full family Christmas. All four of the boys, their wives, and all 5 grandsons will be here. I'm looking forward to it more than I can possibly describe. We haven't all been together at the same time in 2 years, and that's way too long. The important thing is that our family remains, and continues to grow and change just as all families do. And I'm not all alone here in Duncan. I have my partner, bigby, here with me. We've been together for almost 12 years, and I'm so very grateful for him. Particularly his willingness live in Duncan, and his patience with me as I continue the hard work of healing and deconstruction. Yippee ki yay.

More later! 

Thanks for reading,

grace

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