Monthly Archives: March 2012

“Thank you, God, for allowing me to serve.”

It wasn’t so much the words that were strange.  It was that it was four in the morning, and these were the first words in my day, floating up from my subconscious dreamy state.  I suppose I could call it a prayer.

I’m no stranger to service.  I got my father’s DNA.  His life, from community councils to volunteer fire departments to the National Guard, was a perfect model of service.  Since high school when I was a “candy striper” in a local hospital, I’ve volunteered for neighborhood cleanups, helped teenage moms, taught elderly people to read, and participated in scores of projects throughout my adulthood.  But this prayer was a surprise.  Some subconscious part of me was so moved that it was expressing gratitude.

The evening before, my trio had performed.  As I looked out into the audience I saw that people were having a real good time.  This was not a drunken bar audience.  A couple of people told me later that they had been moved to tears.  Others laughed and clapped.  Happiness reigned.  Once again I realized the power—and, for me, the purpose—of performance art.  One of my brothers calls it the “human to human” connection.  It’s also, I think, the magic of service.  Happiness reigns.

What if it’s true?  What if our real purpose for being born is to serve?  What if—whether we believe it or not, whether it fits our spiritual and political beliefs or not—we are here only to take care of each other, to nurture each other, to make the world a better place moment by moment?

What does it mean to serve?  Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said about service:

“Everybody can be great… because anybody can serve.  You don’t have to have a college degree to serve.  You don’t have to make your subject and verb agree to serve.  You only need a heart full of grace.  A soul generated by love.”

I was driving a shuttle between a hotel and a retreat site where I spent a lot of my time.  This was my service, and my task was simple:  pick people up at the hotel and take them to the retreat site.  Folks were arriving from all over the world.  Some spoke English well, while others struggled to make themselves understood.  Some seemed perfectly at ease, and others seemed hesitant; they had come very far for a new experience, but weren’t sure what to expect.

Everyone was connected to his or her own story.  I was focused on my task, ensuring the comfort and safety of passengers, but I had stopped smiling.  I felt disconnected and sad.  I felt like I was using up precious air, taking up valuable space on earth.  Looking back, I can see that I felt unworthy of the task of greeting so many people from so far away.  I had always loved volunteering, but I felt my anger and impatience growing with the chattering adults and noisy children.

At some point, a beautiful woman from Hawaii climbed into the van with her two children.  She sat beside me in the front and began to talk and ask questions about the retreat site.  She’d brought the Hawaiian sun with her smile, and her laugh literally filled the van.  Throughout the ride she talked about her life, her children, and why she was so happy to be at the retreat.  Her joy was contagious.  I looked around and saw that other folks were drawn in and were feeling at ease.

When we arrived at the retreat, she said goodbye and lifted her children from the van.  She started down the sidewalk, but suddenly stopped and came back to the van.  Looking me in the eye, she said, “I’m so glad you’re here.”  She smiled and was off.

I began to cry.  Hers was the heart full of grace.  Hers was the true service, and her kindness brought me back to the reason I was driving that van in the first darn place.  To serve.

The task doesn’t matter.  It can be driving, performing, painting a school wall, mowing a lawn, or reading to an elderly person in a nursing home.  Tasks are endless.  What matters is how I serve.  True service is a matter of the heart.  True service leaves love behind when the server herself has left the scene.

This world is full of pie (as opposed to what some other folks would say the world is full of, and it’s not a pleasant word).  The world is saturated with a dizzying rainbow of crusty confections with meat, nuts, vegetables, and fruit. Who could turn down a slice of color in the form of cherry, blueberry, lemon meringue, or lime pie with a dollop of rich vanilla ice cream on top?  Admit it.  You love pie.

There have been moments when I allow myself the fantasy of peace through people taking time out of their busy days to join a friend and make a pie.  What a lovely thought.  I imagine a world where people settle conflicts by getting together to bake pies.  How can a person fire a weapon when her hands are covered with dough, his face is dripping with peach juice, and there are peach pits in the middle of their tongues?  Peace In Eating.  Pie.

As a young girl, I learned to bake good pies after discovering that I was horrible at baking cakes.  Those three-layered or square-shaped dough concoctions were too unpredictable; like people, you couldn’t control them.  It didn’t matter if they were pound or angel or chocolate layered, my cakes inevitably fell in the middle or broke in half as I iced them.  Worse yet, I would go to read a book and smell burned cake, a pitiful result because the cake would be inedible and Mom would be furious.  My cakes and biscuits met the same fate.  The biscuits were embarrassingly hard little pieces of rock that could kill a chicken with one throw. It was sad.  After all, I was born to a legacy of cooks who could probably make rock soup taste like a five-star menu item.

But pie was different.  I don’t know if it was the concentration and rhythm of fluting the crust, the sensuality of juicy fruit in my hands, or the smell of cinnamon, nutmeg and other haunting spices.  There was some mystery about pie that calmed me down, made me feel, um, competent.  Maybe it was because in learning to bake pie, I learned focus and patience.  I learned how to follow directions.  I learned to measure, to take my time.  Of course, I haven’t always fallen back on the things I learned.  My life might be very different if I had.

Mom was specific about measurements.  Too much flour?  Put it back.  Too much shortening?  Take it out.  Work with the dough until the flour and shortening looked like uniform grains of sand.  Add water.

“No, not that much!”

Take it out quickly before you have to throw the whole lot away.  Learn how to salvage the good, to manage mistakes before they become disasters (relationships).  The ingredients (like relationships) were as precious as gold. Nothing could be wasted.  But taking the patience to add water, drop by drop, until the dough was ready to knead was another lesson. It takes time to do something really well.  Of course, I haven’t always use this lesson either.  I’ve wanted things to be resolved, fixed, changed, or transformed NOW.  Remembering patience, moment to moment, is a skill that must be practiced again and again–like baking pie.

Depending on the fruit–pears, apples, or peaches–I would peel the skins slowly, watching the skins form those little Shirley Temple ringlets that became the main ingredient for homemade jelly.  Peach pie was my favorite.  With the juice flowing between my fingers, I used precious moments to suck on the pits. Making a pie was focused work.  Sucking on peach pits was my reward.

Today, I still love to bake pies and, somewhere along the years, I have learned to bake decent cakes.  Cakes require the same focus and patience.  I’ve added a variation to my baking.  I have learned to bake vegan, and I do not add dairy or eggs to my cakes.  I no longer use shortening in my pies, and I’ve added fruits that we didn’t use when I was growing up.  Mango gives me larger and juicier seeds to suck on.  But the lessons remain.  There is still a mystery in baking. Time stands still.  I can live in the moment.  I can learn patience.

The other day a friend and I got into a fight.  I was very upset.  I felt like I wasn’t being heard, and my friend felt attacked.  It was ugly.  After spreading fury through my apartment, I asked myself the usual question.  What could I have done differently?  I talked to a couple of close friends and my sister.  After all the guidance (and evidence of my impatience) was gathered, I sat down to write about it.  I came up with the understanding that I was wrong.  I apologized.

Now, I am on my way to the kitchen to bake a vegetable pot pie.  Have a marvelous week.  Words, like pies, have delicious color.

I’m late with this week’s post.   I wish I could say that it was because of a blizzard that took out the DSL connection, but that’s not true.  I got nothin’.

Winter has been light this year.   Mid-Atlantic winters, like folks, are highly unpredictable; sometimes dramatic, sometimes heavy and aggressive, sometimes light.  This year, temperatures have been warmer than usual, and we’ve had few of the bitterly cold days and nights that we experienced over the past three years.  The two bags of rock salt, 25 pound bag of sand, and my shovel have been tucked away in the trunk of my car for over three months.  I’ve found myself using my thermal undershirts to protect my skin when I dye my hair.  No one will see the brown spots.  It’s an under shirt.

Last week’s ten minute snow gale was one of the strangest winter shows I’ve seen: blizzard for ten minutes, then sunshine.

“It’s too warm for it to stick,” said a woman standing next to me.

She was absolutely right.  But I was caught up in the “woe is me” of bad snow memories:  the D.C. winter when my toes went numb while waiting for a bus, a day that became the motivation for moving to California; my car buried in four-foot drifts–I could only find it because of the tips of the wipers black against the snow pile.  Then there was the day when my tires were spinning in the ice and snow at the curb, and men walked by as I poured sand and struggled with a shovel against the wind.  “How can this be?” I asked myself.  They were laughing as they walked.  I hope they were enjoying the snow.

I enjoyed snow once.  I remember Mom making ice cream out of fresh snow; those were the days before soot covered the window sills within two hours.  And I remember Daddy picking us up from school before a blizzard was in full swing.  There was my 16th birthday party–my only party–when my friends got snowed in at our apartment and their parents came to pick them up.  I remember watching the snow against the light of street lamps while midnight bells welcomed Christmas morning.  There were some good times with snow.

But then, there is the danger of snow.  On my first continental train ride from California to D.C., the train made its way through the Rockies with the cars creaking and moaning up the Colorado hills.  It felt as though we were moving at 10 miles per hour, the train carefully scaling the ice-covered tracks.  Inside the cars, there was total silence.  We all held a collective breath as we listened to the brakes screeching against the ice and gusty winds.  The cars started and stopped; started and stopped.  In my car, people stared out the windows.  No one read a magazine.  No one drank a beer.  Nobody slept.

We’d passed a field where two cows, seemingly lost, chewed slowly in the wind, kneeling and apparently unaware of the fact that they were freezing to death.  They could not see the train.  They were already in a place far beyond the icicles hanging from their frozen coats.  As the train reached the peak and began its increasingly rapid descent, we exhaled, picked up our food and drinks, and resumed our conversations.  Laughter–much too loud–accompanied the powerful collective thought– one could die in the snow.

So, it’s winter.  Sometimes harsh, sometimes mild.  This, thankfully, has been mild.  When I lived in California, I longed for the drama of robust autumn colors and brittle winds.  But, now that I’m here, I’ve been indulging in mental flailing about.  And that is today’s post–a mental flailing about with snow.

Have a great week.  Spring is on the horizon.