Everything I Ever Wanted to Know, I Learned from Woody

 

On the first morning of Summer Break, I found “Toy Story 3” on our DVR and pressed “start” on a whim.  As the movie played, there were dishes in the sink and laundry to be done.  I never intended to sit down and watch the entire thing that day.  What’s more, I never dreamed my two-year-old would have a long enough attention span to sit right beside me and do the same.  (What kind of toddler sits for 90 minutes?) Three weeks later, my son and I are still performing this daily ritual: Get Mommy’s pillow.  Get G-Love’s pillow.  Get Blanket.  Press start.  Say, “Pixar.”  Say, “Oooh…Disney World.”  Then “Here comes the train!” and we’re off...  Big Daddy is not so sure this is a good idea.  G is becoming possibly obsessed.  But, I’m not sure which one of us is more enthralled by this film.  In the three weeks we have performed this routine, the Disney Pixar “Story” has revealed some deep truths to me and I think I might be unlocking the secrets of the universe from my living room chair. Here are the revelations I have come to understand, in the order in which they were gleaned:

Week 1.  We should recycle. 

Simple stuff.  Everything we own exists to serve.  Our possessions have a purpose. If we have outgrown something, we should donate it to an individual or an institution. Our stuff doesn’t want to die. It can make someone else happy.  (Note: This mainly applies to objects with a face.  If it does not have a face, let your conscience be your guide, but feel free to chuck it if you must.)  This week was easy.  I mastered understanding around Day 2, and the rest of the week was pretty much review.

Week 2. God loves us.

Ok, y'all.  Week 2 is when it started getting real up in here for me.  We have a benevolent caretaker who holds us in the palm of his hand.  He is represented by Andy in the movie.  Woody represents the son of God, the chosen one.  He reminds the others that their job is to “be there for Andy.”  Buzz represents the Holy Spirit.  He swoops in and makes the impossible possible in the nick of time.  The attic is our idea of heaven: safe, but boring.  Most of us give lip service to the idea that one day we will go to the attic and it will be fine, but in all honesty, nobody wants to go.  We cling to what we know, and feel scared of what comes next.  Sunyside is the world today. Woody must go to Sunnyside to be with other toys in order to “save” them.  Lotso has turned away from God.  Lotso says, “We’re all just trash.  Waiting to be thrown away!”  Lotso is not the Devil, but man’s own fear.  Oprah would say I had an A-ha Moment here, and I ain't talking about no 80s Norwegian pop band.  Lotso endeavors to control his environment on his own because he has lost faith in others.  Faith in our purpose and sticking together are the two things that give our lives richness and meaning.  Even before the fires of doom, if we all hold hands, we will be ok.  The claw can come and save you at your darkest hour. Sometimes you’re under the claw. Sometimes you are operating the claw for others. Say that again. Sometimes you’re under the claw. Sometimes you are operating the claw for others.  We take turns saving each other from the inferno.  Hell is not the inferno.  It is being strapped to the front of a truck. This was an emotional f#@&ing week.

Week 3.  Heaven is a place on Earth. 

Belinda Carlisle was right! I am reminded of a story I have heard that made a big impression on me:

A certain saint asked God to show him the difference between heaven and hell. So God sent an angel to take him, first to hell. There he saw men and women seated around a large table with all kinds of delicious food. But none of them was eating. They were all sad and yawning. The saint asked one of them, “Why are you not eating?” And he showed the saint his hand. A long fork about 4ft long was strapped to their hands such that each time they tried to eat they only threw the food on the ground. “What a pity” said the saint. Then the angel took him to heaven. There he was surprised to find an almost identical setting as in hell: men and women sitting round a large table with all sorts of delicious food, and with a four-foot fork strapped to their arms. But unlike in hell, the people here were happy and laughing. “What!” said the saint to one of them, “How come you are happy in this condition?” “You see,” said the man in heaven, “Here we feed one another.”

Sunnyside is Earth.  Much like the large table laden with delicious food, the feast is what we make of it.  In the immortal words of Ken, “Sunnyside could be cool and groovy if we treated each other fair.”  The afterlife is like nothing we can imagine, so we ought to just let go and focus on doing the best we can where we are.  There will be another plane of existence in which we are reunited with loved ones and experience all the joy of before and them some.  It might be Bonnie’s house; it might be something else.  With a bit of bravery, a whole lot of humor, our imaginations intact and our friends close, we are well equipped for the journey… “To infinity and beyond!” Whew. I’m spent.

Thanks, Disney Pixar, for this amazingly touching film.  It is firmly etched in the Family Hughes list of favorites.  In the interest of expanding our horizons, however, we will be studying Eastern philosophy and religion next month with “Kung Fu Panda.” Our minds are open… so are my tear ducts and a box of Kleenex!

In Clover

 

“If by some magic, autism had been eradicated from the face of the earth, then men would still be socializing in front of a wood fire at the entrance to a cave.”
― Dr. Temple Grandin 

            The above quote by Temple Grandin reverberates in my brain.  I think on it almost constantly. What genetics make some of us social communicators, and some of us solitary thinkers? Furthermore, which one am I?

            I have always wanted to be thought of as complex, and therefore categorized with “odd ducks.”  My family is full of brainiacs, and I have spent a lot of time and energy trying to convince the world (and myself) that I belong to their elite smarty-pants club instead of being lumped in with “the rest of the world.”  As a school-girl, I was picked on by typical kids-being-kids.  Although it hurt to be excluded, I told myself that I was fabulously misunderstood and they were afraid of my super power: slightly above average intelligence.  This belief was comforting and romantic.  It was full of the promise of the grown-up I would become.  I’d seen enough movies to know the one who gets bullied in school always ends up getting the best life in the end.  I was willing to wait.  I could even savor the experience.

            I remember in the sixth grade, we were given an arts-infused science project to write a poem about the solar system.  This was so my thing.  A group of pushy and rough kids were teasing me because I finished first. They asked me to read my poem to them, so they could make fun of it.  I obliged because I knew my poem was awesome and I always showed kick-ass bravery in the face of doubters.  After hearing my work, the wall of faces around my desk dissolved. Their twisted expressions popped into neutrality, like bubbles.   I had silenced their squawking, but they didn’t leave.  “How did you write that that quick?” the ringleader asked.  “I don’t know,” I answered, “The words just come to me.  I could do a gazillion more.”  “Will you do me one?” she almost panted.  Pop!  Pop… pop… popopopopopopop!  The wall of faces was now frantic.  Have you ever seen an idiot get an idea?   It hits them like a freight train, and shines like a neon sign.  I let them all ask, one by one.  Each hard little face, trying to look soft. All trying to seem friendly. All grasping for the tools to convince me to help them. Eyes darting left and right, searching their brains for words, trying desperately to string the right ones together.  In about 20 minutes, I had written science poems for almost the entire class.  I was writing one while making up another out loud, as a kid transcribed.  It was nothing.  My classmates were eating them up like piranhas, “Me next!  She’s doing mine now!” whisking the poems off my desk and scurrying off to copy them in their own hand.  Oh, I had no delusions I was making friends.  I was taking delight in this, though. I enjoyed rubbing their noses in the fact that ideas were so plentiful for me, I could afford to give them away, even to people I didn’t like.  “It’s just taking all the stuff we’ve learned, and arranging it into patterns that rhyme.  You can organize any idea into a rhyme.”  Well, I could, anyway.

            I had a quite few experiences like that as a young girl.  Sometimes I thought I had the heart of a boy.  I dreamed I was a hero, misunderstood by all the ordinary humans around me.  I had little desire to trade unicorn stickers with other girls or sit in the clover at recess, braiding each other’s hair. I dreamed up adventures.  Mostly ones that took me away.

            By the time I became a young woman, I had indeed followed my dreams far and wide.  It turns out that it was music that would be the power that allowed me my fairy-tale life.  With the help of some great teachers, Cindy Barrett of Memphis, Tennessee, and Julianne Weick of Evansville, Indiana, then Conchita Antunano of New York City, I developed a voice that gave wings to all I imagined as a child.  My evolution as an artist was tied closely to my maturation as a woman. 

            It was JT Smith, who hired me as an ingenue for the first time.  My whole life I had cast myself as a villain, or at best, the funny best friend.  Trying desperately to be the interesting one, I had shunned opportunities to be sweet.  I guess I thought I’d made this deal long ago: I will always say the wrong thing.  I will always try to steal the boyfriend.  I will always dress a little too provocatively, as long as people pay attention.  JT was the first grown man I wasn't related to, who saw me as a fresh and vulnerable young girl.  I was never this girl until the ripe old age of 23. “How should I play it in this number?” I asked on hundreds of occasions over the years I had the honor to work with JT.  He’d look at me, weary, and speak slowly, willing his direction to sink in.  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.  I picked that song for you.  Not for you to be somebody else while we listen.  It's enough for you to just be. It’s more than enough.  It's everything! Everything good comes out of you when you're not trying so hard.  Just stand there and sing.  Be your f@ck*ng self.  And for godssake don’t “do” anything.”

            (I have to weep for how I love that man.)

            Suffice to say that over the course of a lifetime, I have changed.   The fear of being boring has subsided over the years and I have discovered that I have my moments of being a happily ordinary human.  Connecting.  Helping.  Saying something kind.  Letting someone else win.  All of these things feel good, and as a Wife and Mom, I get to do them more and more.  I can’t make quick calculations like my Dad, I am not a great debater like my sister, or a problem solver like my Mom.  But, I have my own gifts, and I try to use them to draw people in, and not separate myself from others.  Every once in a while, though, I think of the misfit kid I was and can’t help feeling I sold her out.  I caved.  I decided to be happy.  Nice.  How uninteresting.  How boring I have become.

            Walking into work one morning, I saw a wiiiiiiiide patch of clover and thought to myself, “Oh, there’s nothing I’d like better than to plop right down in the middle of all that green and just look for a four-leafed one!” I thought of Temple Grandin.  Then I thought of the kind of girl who whiles away time, stroking greenery idly in the sun.  I shamed myself for being simple and realized I had lost any ability to group myself with those who invented the wheel or fashioned the first spear.  I was a silly social being, chattering by a cave somewhere.  What ever happened to me?

            Every morning and afternoon for weeks now, I consider that yawning stretch of clover, and look down my own nose at myself for desiring so completely to lie in it.  I look at it from outside my window and watch the wind caress it, wishing my fingers were the breeze.  Oh, how I would comb the entire patch if I could.  I’d touch every single shamrock.  I’d memorize each one.  I’d categorize them in my head, ones with two big leaves and one small; ones with one big leaf and two big; ones with a torn or chewed leaf… well, those would have to be two distinct categories I suppose.  Then the four-leafed clovers!  I’d pick those.  I’d admire them for minutes upon minutes, marveling at their perfect symmetry, their perfect, mathematical sense would calm me. I’d arrange them and press them so they were slightly askew, some with the upper-right most leaf, and some with the upper left pointing highest. Then I’d group them in fours… Wait!

            Could it be that I am driven to survey and collect these little treasures, not because I am silly and vapid, but because I am actually quirky, weird, and slightly obsessive, with a keen eye for patterns and anomalies? Yes! Yes, I am still me!  A proud geek, doing something that no one else is doing.  While everyone else is getting their Starbucks and checking their e-mail, I think I will plant myself in a big clover patch and have myself a good old search for those four lucky leaves.  When I make a little collection, I will show it off.  Someone will ask, “How did you find all of those?” And I will say, “ I don’t know.  They just came to me.  I could find a gazillion more.”

Shawty Got Lowe's

           With the promise of Spring in the air, I feel the call of the home improvement supercenter.  I have never been particularly nature-y, mind you, but there is something about smelling the mulch in the Lawn and Landscaping area… maybe it’s in the way that the nice man puts it in my car without me actually having to get my hands dirty… I love home projects, inside and outside ones, that I personally organize, but do not actually execute.

            Today’s goals include buying doors.  What does one wear to visit the Doors and Entryways section at the local Lowe’s?  I find that blue jeans are a must.  Not black jeans.  We are not a rock star.  Not today.  We are a door buyin’, regular gal.  Ponytail?  Check.  2-3 strands of hair pulled free, just to give the effect that I have been exerting myself?  Check.  (Three is better. Three is an odd number. Looks less balanced.)  I am ready to do what I do best: get some unwitting customer service person to give me a discount I don’t deserve.

            If you check out Lowes.com and sign up for their New Mover’s program, you can get a limited time coupon for 10% off any purchase of up to $5,000.00.  You don’t even really have to be moving!  I’m not.  What I am doing is “sticking it to The Man.”

            I love the people at Lowe’s; the service personnel and the customers.  I’ve never seen anyone throw a fit in Lowe’s.  There is no gloppy paint job, mismatched tile project, or unfinished water feature that can’t be fixed.  Fixing things is what these people do.  I find myself flirting shamelessly with the fat old guy in overalls in the doorknob section. I want this doorknob.  It is shiny gold, and I prefer it to be battered bronze, but they don’t make it in battered bronze.  He hands me a can of battered bronze spray paint.  It’s “gonna give me that rustic look I’m going for.” He gets me.

  

            At the end of the day, I got my doors AND my ill-gotten 10% off.  I peppered my conversation with the door installation salesman with, “since we just moved in,” and “boxes everywhere.”  He didn’t suspect a thing.  When our time ended, he told me Melvin would take care of me from now on. 

            Melvin called just like he said he would.  Like two teen-agers, we have spoken three times in three days. He said he might have to cut some of the molding around my frame.  I am scared, but I trust him.  Communication is the key in this relationship. Melvin gets me.

            Big Daddy has listened patiently to the Harry Potter-length “Saga of the Doors” for weeks now.  He gives an opinion when I really want one, and defers to me when I really need it.  He will come home from work next Thursday and make a big deal over the doors, while I beam in the middle of the living room:  “Look what I did!  And I saved 10%!!” He will tell me that he appreciates all I do to make our house beautiful while I sigh with satisfaction.  This man totally gets me!

Everything I'm Not

Once in a while in a while Big Daddy makes me a Mixed CD. They are always my taste and much better than what’s on the radio.  The other day, I grabbed a Big Daddy Mix out of the console and commenced to getting my jam on.  We do like us some Kanye, so I was not surprised to hear several offerings from Mister West.  One gave me pause. The lyrics say:  “Everything I’m not made me everything I am.”  Damn.

When I first heard this song, I had just started teaching Middle School Choir.  It was not going well.  The kids didn’t get me.  Quite frankly, they didn’t like me. I am not ashamed to say I got down on my knees and prayed the Lord would  “take this cup away from me” on several occasions. Every person from whom I sought advice kept telling me to be tougher. Meaner. Harder. I tried my darndest, really, but I’m not a whistle blowing, stoic-faced punisher. The kids knew it was all a façade, and ate me alive on a daily basis.  Eventually I did have to adopt some new practices and develop a discipline plan, but I realized I gotta be me! I had to make things work as my authentic self, and the kids were just going to have to learn to trust a perky white lady who tears up when they sing.  I am now comfortable being animated and loving in front of my Li’l Waynes Mini- Nikki Minage’s in training.  I jump and “yippee!” when my students create harmony, and I throw kisses at them when they remember to enunciate. They may think I’m crazy, but never a push-over and never boring.  In fact, it's crunk up in there!  And I'm a great teacher.  Everything I’m not made me everything I am.

When I was in my late twenties, I was engaged to a guy who looked good on paper.  Ever had one of those?  Well, I thought I needed to look good on paper, too, so I stuck with him even though little by little, he chiseled away at my self-esteem.  I was a bottomless pit of forgiveness and thought that being faithful meant always coming back for more.  Well, finally he cheated, and I drew the line.  Breaking off the engagement was a struggle, because I wanted to embody the loyalty he did not.  But, I just couldn’t get over what he’d done.  I simply could not imagine looking across the dinner table at a weasel for the rest of my life. So, I don't.  Since I took up with Big Daddy, the only things I have to get over are his cursing at soccer on Saturdays, and the fact that he’s a bit of an over-tipper to service personnel. So, it is with the utmost honor and gratitude that I tell you that I am the wife of a Swell Guy.  Everything I’m not made me everything I am.

When H-Man was diagnosed with autism, I researched diets, chelation (a therapy to remove heavy metals from the body), and scrambled for a way that Big Daddy and I might possibly make H NOT autistic.  When all of those fad treatments were de-bunked, I began to focus on doing what we could to APPEAR not autistic.  When he would flap his hands and make noises in public I would hug him tightly and whisper, “You’re all right, honey, you’re all right. Be still. Hands down.  Nice hands.  No spinning.” Once, a man next to us at a fast food restaurant asked, “What’s wrong with him?”  I don’t think this man meant any harm.  He was probably just being human and thought I needed some help.  The poor guy didn’t know that my well was just about full then, and this moment made me lose my cool.  “There is absolutely NOTHING wrong with him!  He’s WONDERFUL!  He’s PERFECT!  He just doesn’t talk much and this is how he communicates that he’s excited!”  I was loud.  Louder than H-Man, on purpose.  I didn’t want everyone to look at him. I wanted them to look at me.  Let me be the one they’re staring at for a change.  I was just so tired of people noticing his differences, and it made me angry that strangers might feel sorry for me or my sweet, amazing boy when I walk the world knowing that he is beyond fabulous.  Being the Mom to any kid is a journey.  Every child has special needs of some sort.  By grace, good humor, a wonderful family, and by following my boy's lead, I have come to embrace and celebrate H-Man's differences.  He's autistic.  He is not wearing a t-shirt about it, but people can probably tell.  He's not very quiet.  He's not very still.  He may not  know when you’re talking to him, and he can’t really articulate to you there’s a stone in his shoe and that's why he's uncomfortable.  He's the one skipping backward.  (He has been able to do this as long as we remember.)  He is the one who reeeeeeeally likes the carousel.  He can be entertained by reading for a long wait at a restaurant because he likes books to the point of obsession.  ( A parent's dream!) He is the one whose shirt is still clean at the end of the day because he's careful, precise, and neat.  His face isn’t very expressive, but because of this he looks soft and angelic with a glow that makes strangers gasp, “Oh, my, he’s beautiful!” (Some stares are completely understandable).  He is gorgeous.  In every way.  Everything he's not made him everything he is.

Coming full circle is a wonderful thing.  I have found that when I listen to my instincts and accept who I am, those around me become comfortable with my various “isms.”  When I respect my own differences, I am able to project to the world that I’m worthy of respect.  I’m not saying that we should live and die by the perceptions of others, but it is a social world.  I think that connections are the reasons we were put on this planet together.  That belief is confirmed with every class that H-Man is enrolled in, any sport he tries, and anyone he meets. They are gifts to him, as he is to them.  I hope to instill in H-Man that bringing out the best in others means being yourself.  Being real.  Being every freaking thing that you are.

Listen to Kanye West - Everything I'm Not Made Me Everything I Am

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJs-KYWHOwo