Never too late to bust out

By JoAnne Young 

 

The end of the semester is nearing, and I am back in the flow of school terms and breaks, and learning from the art of hermit crabs, who find new and bigger shells as they grow.

 

I had only a vague notion when January kicked off the 2023 new year that by the end I would be finishing off my first college course in decades, in a new adventure I’m hoping will lead to a master’s degree. I couldn’t know how thrilled I would be to open that envelope and read: “The Office of Graduate Studies congratulates you on your admission to the University of Nebraska at Omaha.”

 

My journey began somewhat like that hermit crab. When I retired from journalism in 2021, it was time to crawl out of my tight-fitting shell of work and identity. It also left me feeling vulnerable to disappearing, becoming irrelevant, and bored. 

 

The pandemic still raged when I left my job, so my jump into finding my next cozy shell was delayed. It took some months, but I found a good one – a campaign worker trying to get a high-quality woman, Patty Pansing Brooks, back into government on the national level. Great haven for a year, then time to look around the beach of my life for another. 

 

Not too long into my search, I met with Professor Lisa Knopp to get a copy of her new book, “From Your Friend, Carey Dean,” about her 23-year friendship with death row inmate Carey Dean Moore, whose execution I covered extensively for the Journal Star. As we talked, she told me about the creative nonfiction program she was part of at UNO, and I took note.   

 

As my enneagram type suggests, my tendency is to be curious, creative, reflective and reserved. I had been on my way to a master’s degree in journalism in the mid 1980s when I swerved and started my newspaper career. Maybe now, it was time to turn back. This summer I started the paperwork, got accepted at UNO and reclaimed the role of college student. It took the courage to be imperfect and the willingness to do something where there are no guarantees, to stop trying to control and predict. 

 

I’m finishing up my first class, and already unexpected things have happened. I am learning that I can come out from a protective shell and take my time to look around, learn and listen, rather than skittering around trying to find new cover.

 

When I told a friend I thought I was going to take college writing classes, her question was this: after decades of being a professional writer, what is there left to learn? 

 

Oh, so much. 

 

With journalism, a writer must put herself aside and lean on the facts, feelings, opinions and actions of others. In my first class,  The Modern Familiar Essay, I have learned from other writers, from students in my class and my professor how much more interesting it is to show yourself, to reveal your imperfections, and lean into the messiness of life.  

 

In one semester I have learned from Ian Frazier about the nobility of Crazy Horse, how he remained himself from the moment of his birth to the moment he died, how he knew exactly where he wanted to live and never left, how he never surrendered, and when he fought, he fought in self-defense and took nobody with him when he died.

 

I have learned from Annie Dillard’s Living Like Weasels, the effect of looking into the eyes of a weasel, a moment that dismantles the world and plunges the weasel and the woman into a black hole of eyes. From Leslie Jamison, in The Empathy Exams, a glimpse into the job of a paid medical actor, who must feign symptoms and teach doctors in training the art of empathy. From Lisa Knopp, in My Velleity, the less common words that describe emotions; “velleity” is a wish or inclination not strong enough to lead to action, “umpty,” a feeling of being too much and all in the wrong way, “toska” – a term for a longing with nothing to long for, a vague restlessness. 

 

Possessing a wide range of words to accurately and precisely name our emotions, the writer explains, can help us to better regulate our emotions. 

 

I have thoroughly enjoyed being in class with young women and men as they start their adult journeys toward unknown horizons. I secretly love the challenges of learning new communication systems. And I am deliciously grateful for the opportunity I was granted recently to be a graduate assistant next semester and to work with UNO Professor Kay Siebler. 

 

Turns out that successful hermit crabs show some of the same traits as nontraditional students: a bit of boldness and a tendency toward exploration, a willingness to investigate strange objects, and a fighting spirit. They love their shelters, but also the company of like-minded others. 

 

Thank goodness for the growth that leads to finding a more fitting shell.

Five Women Giving Thanks Amidst the Mayhem

Essentially Grateful

By JoAnne Young

 Before we get too far away from the core of the pandemic, those long months that stretched into more than a couple of years, I want to thank again the essential workers that kept us afloat in those times. Doctors, nurses, respiratory therapists and legions of health professionals certainly deserve our gratitude, and continue to need our thanks.

 Many others helped us through those dark days. Grocery and restaurant workers delivered food and other needed items to our doorsteps. Journalists, writers and podcasters gave us much needed information. The people behind the scenes at Zoom and technical workers kept us connected and able to do our jobs. Teachers kept us learning. Child care providers showed up for us. Those in law enforcement and corrections worked overtime to give us order. Transportation workers helped move us along. Scientists gave us hope with vaccines and treatments so more of us could survive. Mental health providers kept us ever so slightly sane.

 This work hasn’t become less essential as our lives become more open. The people left to carry the load deserve our respect, our gratitude and our continual thanks for being those footprints in the sand that carried us.

***

Thank You – for Keeping Democracy Alive     

By Marilyn Moore

 I’m a news junkie, always have been.  I read two daily papers in print and several daily news reports that hit my email inbox.  I listen to NPR news in the morning and late afternoon and catch the 5:30 national news on a mainstream network.  Online updates fill out the day and evening.  If it’s happening, locally, nationally, or globally, I want to know about it.  “The news” is both energizing and discouraging, but I’ve decided it’s better to know than to wonder, or fear.

 My thanks go to journalists, those brave, smart, and persistent reporters, both print and broadcast, who follow the story, so they can tell the story.  From coverage of our local city council to the January 6 insurrection to the front-line reports from the battle fields in Ukraine and Gaza, we know what’s happening.  Journalists ask the questions beyond the first question, digging deep to find the “why” and the “what’s next.” 

 Journalists are protected, in this country, by the first amendment, but that doesn’t mean their job is easy.  They endure scorn and evasive answers, and sometimes physical danger, but they tell the story.  And without knowing the story, the whole story, in all its complexity, a vote is an empty gesture. 

 An informed voter and a vibrant free press are the front-line defense of democracy.  Thanks to journalists, we have a chance to keep democracy alive.

***

Thank You … for Fixing Me When I Was Broken

By Mary Kay Roth 

This week I met with my oncologist’s team for a follow-up exam. 

My cancer is gone. Officially, miraculously gone. 

I offer up hugs and tears, and whisper a prayer of gratitude to these extraordinary people who threw me a lifeline and gave me my life back.  

“Our patients come to us at their most vulnerable,” they tell me. “It’s an honor to walk through it with them. We have loved walking through this with you.”

I thank them for allowing me more sunrises and chocolate, more hugs and cups of coffee – for giving my grandchildren (Scout and Everlyn, Alera, Legacy and Lauren) more time with GranMary.

 I thank them for:

·       Their bold, unblinking honesty.

·       Holding my hand whenever I cried.

·       Listening, patiently.

·       Always remembering the name of my dog.

·       Being so damn good at their work.

·       Fixing me when I was broken.

 Finally, I head out of the exam room and pause for a moment in the continually packed front lobby.  I wonder who I’m making room for.  Because I know patients will keep coming, and my oncology team will remain steadfast in walking each of them through their journey.

 Then I turn and stroll outside, free falling into a golden autumn day.  And I go buy a cup of coffee. 

***

Grateful for the Grand-ness in Life

by Penny Costello

Green Bean Casserole. It’s a Thanksgiving staple, a tradition on so many holiday tables. In my family, one of our Thanksgiving traditions is dinner with my dear friend and Maven of Mayhem, Mary Kay Roth and her family, which have included our grandkids, Carson and Cassidy. My contribution to the table has always been green bean casserole.

As a child, I was blessed to spend a lot of time with my paternal grandmother. A ranch wife, well-versed in cooking for large gatherings, whether they be family holidays, or for branding and haying crews, she expressed love in many ways, including food. I learned so much from her about cooking, and about how to be a grandmother.

This year, we scheduled our Thanksgiving get-together on the Saturday before the actual holiday. But, COVID threw a wrench on the works for me, when I tested positive two days before. So, I would be in quarantine, and not at the table this year.

Cassidy was really looking forward to the gathering, and to my green bean casserole. So, bless her heart, she stepped up and asked me to teach her how to make it. We connected through Facetime video chat so I could guide her through the process of putting it together, baking it, and adding the onion crisps at the right time. From all reports I’ve heard, her casserole was well-received and enjoyed by all.

I’m grateful to my grandmother who taught me so much about cooking, love, and being a Grandma. I’m grateful for the technology that enabled me to safely impart that cooking lesson to my granddaughter. And I look forward to tasting her green bean casserole in years to come, and enjoying the special flair and flavor she’ll bring to it, just as she does with pretty much everything in her life.

***

What Am I Most Thankful For?

By Mary Reiman

 YOU.

 I am thankful not because you read my blogs, but because you are my friend, and have been for many, many years. We have a shared history. You have sustained me, and I have not said thank you often enough.

 Sometimes I wake in the middle of the night and wonder if you know. You comment on my blogs with such kind words. I can only hope you are reading this now...and that you know. You have carried me through it all. You have soothed my soul. You brought joy and goodness, just when I needed it. You still do.

 Whether you were my first friend when I moved to Lincoln, there for me during my LPS years, or somewhere in-between, I am grateful for your friendship, support, love, kindness and caring spirit. Although we don’t see each other as often now, our stories, our history makes me smile. I hope you feel the same.

 It’s hard to know if I have said thank you often enough. In my head I have. But have I recently sent a text, called you, or sent you a hand-written note? Probably not.

 Please, please know I am so very thankful for YOU.

***

Tears

 

By Marilyn Moore

They come suddenly, sometimes at the sight, or sound, of something that is nearly unspeakably wondrous.  Sometimes from loss, or fear, or frustration.  Sometimes springing from great pain, or great joy.  I know that there are some experiences that almost always bring tears to my eyes: hearing “Taps” played in a cemetery, seeing a tender moment between a parent and a child, reading beloved lines of poetry, standing at the top of Flattop Mountain or seeing a sunset at the farm, hearing the choral music from Beethoven’s 9th Symphony, remembering my mom’s voice, or the feel of my dad’s wool coat.   All of those, and countless more, tears guaranteed….

But what about those moments when tears are a surprise…when you think to yourself, I wonder where that came from…and you wonder if anyone else noticed, and if they did, should you try to explain what you already know you can’t explain, or just shrug your shoulders, or lift an eyebrow, as if to say, “I don’t know….did this just happen to you, too?”  

Frederick Buechner is a favorite writer.  About those unexpected tears, he says, “Whenever you find tears in your eyes, especially unexpected tears, it is well to pay the closest attention.  They are not only telling you something about the secret of who you are, but more often than not God is speaking to you through them of the mystery of where you have come from and is summoning you to where…you should go next.”

I’ve been thinking about those unexpected tears, so I took intentional notice of those times over the past couple of weeks…where I was, what was happening, what were the words, or events, or sounds, that caused my throat to clutch and my eyes to water….

Singing an anthem, these words, “All embracing Church…by the font and meal, signed and marked and sealed…” Tears of anguish, perhaps, at all the times the Church, including the denomination of my lifelong church, has been anything but embracing.  Tears of thankfulness for those moments when the Church has indeed embraced all.  Tears of wonder, and wonderment, of “signed and marked and sealed….” Just what does this mean…..

In the movie “Coco,” on stage at the Lied with a big-sound live Mariachi band, Miguel is signing “Remember Me” to Coco, his grandmother, who is almost literally brought to life by these words and this melody….tears of joy at the power of music and the love between a boy and his grandma….

Listening to a mom describe her child’s improvement in reading after a one-semester specialized reading program, “I don’t ever hear her read one word, one sentence, or one book, without realizing all over again the power of her teacher.”  Tears of gratitude for this teacher, and for all teachers, who every single day teach a skill of value to a learner, and the impact lasts forever….

In the Big 10 documentary about Nebraska Volleyball, the video of the team walking through the tunnel to enter the stadium, where 98,000+ fans were waiting.  The camera was from behind them, and as the team approached the tunnel opening, the players reached for each other’s hands, walking hand-in-hand toward that event that was unknown, but bigger than they could have imagined.  Tears of memory, and gratitude, for the many times I’ve reached for a friend’s hand, a colleague’s hand, knowing I would not be alone with whatever was on the other side of that door….

From the play “Not Too Far Distant,” two such moments.  When George, the staff sergeant from Nebraska who is in France and Germany during WWII, reads letters from his wife, Gretchen, and writes back to her that he so appreciates her letters, “…a letter is like a little piece of home on a page.”  I remember the times when I was far from home, when phone calls were expensive and letters were the only way to communicate, how glad I was to get a letter from Mom, filled with all the ordinary news of the day, and home didn’t seem so far away….  George’s words brought those tears of loneliness, and no-longer-so-lonely, right to the surface again.  

And at the end of the play, a young man’s words, speaking to George in the latter years of his life, “Some of history is really hard to talk about, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.”  Tears of despair that we should be hearing voices in this day that want to shut down the hard-to-talk-about history, and tears of determination to not let those stories go untold.   

Listening to a non-profit board member describe the moment when the organization whose board she chairs had successfully raised the funds to complete the payment for the building they had purchased, “So I drove to the bank, and wrote the check, and paid off the mortgage!”  This is one of Lincoln’s many fine non-profits, but I think these words, and the resulting tears, were more than just this building…it’s tears of celebration of the importance of home, and sorrow that there are people who will never know that comfort of having a place to call home….

There have been other times of tears in the past two weeks, but not unexpected.  It’s Thanksgiving time, and preparation for Christmas, and hymns from those two holidays always bring tears.  We celebrated Dorothy Jo’s life, and how can you celebrate a woman who lived to be 99 with such vigor without crying both in celebration and in loss.  The news coverage daily of the damage and destruction and loss of life, first in Israel and now in Gaza, must certainly bring any person of compassion to tears.  How can we not find a better way to resolve long-standing and deeply-held conflicts….but I digress, that’s another blog, for another day…..

It's the unexpected tears that caught my attention the past couple of weeks, and still leave me wondering what they say to me about the secret of who I am, and from where I have come, and to where I might be called….  

I often say that I write to figure out what I think, and that is especially so in this case, but I’m not there yet.  It’s not finished, I’m not finished.  I invite you to join the blog, with your own stories of unexpected tears…..

Finding quiet sanctuary on a November afternoon

By Mary Kay Roth

Winds generally blow harsh atop this lonely hill, just outside of Otoe, Nebraska. But breezes seem gentler today, a whisper of breath on a November afternoon sending dry leaves skittering across graves where tombstones manage to capture them.  

Some headstones here are new and polished, glistening under the honey autumn sunshine, casting long shadows upon barren, freshly tilled dirt. Other grave markers look almost ancient, their neglected marble faces chipped and worn, their etchings grown indecipherable.   

This is my favorite time to come to the rural Otoe cemetery, a solo visit I make each year when the weather turns chill, a moment I like to think I tuck my loved ones into bed for winter.

My parents are here, alongside my older brother, Doug.  Just down the hill are my maternal grandparents and, scattered everywhere, are aunts and uncles, first and second cousins.

A silent sanctuary surrounded by farm fields on all sides, the Otoe cemetery always feels like the quietest place on earth to me, half an hour southeast of Lincoln and only scarcely connected to the world via a tenuous network of desolate gravel roads. Dandelions fill the grounds in the spring, the roar of harvest fills the air in fall. 

My mom and dad brought me here as a girl, helping decorate graves on Memorial Day – roaming the land on summer afternoons as they pulled weeds and planted perennials. And each fall, when we were finished with our labors, my mom would teach me how a cemetery tells tales.

“Listen carefully and you’ll hear the stories,” mom would counsel, treading ever so softly among the rows.

Listen … to the soldiers buried here from way too many wars. To the achingly painful graves of children, spaces filled with unicorns and teddy bears. To the abandoned stones in the pauper’s section. To a farmer whose marker is trimmed with a cowboy boot – and buckles from his overalls. To a teenage boy’s grave, still bathed in bright flowers and longing, where we often saw a teenage girl, kneeling, sobbing. 

When you stand in a cemetery, something shifts inside, something grounding and true, an awareness that the disparate states of life and death cannot be detached.  It’s where time stands still, a coming together of the past and future, a reminder about the forever folly of human beings. 

Personally, I find our real world particularly harsh right now.  

But a cemetery stands sentry against the storms outside its gates, kindly guarding each soul here, each narrative. Time capsules of a community’s past, open-air museums of sorts.  

During my senior year in college, I joined another student, Rebecca Brite (now an editor in Paris), in choosing a “grave” mystery for our class project in depth reporting.  The Greenwood Cemetery in York had long lodged an inexplicable, tin painting that pictured three women – clad in clothes from the 1800s – bearing the banner, “We are waiting for Papa.” 

No one knew who they were.  But months of research unraveled the puzzle, the banner was a symbol of a man’s love for his family. James Bauer’s wife, Theresa, had died of gall bladder disease in 1895, their two daughters gone  before – Rose as a result of appendicitis and Frances after a miscarriage.  At some point after his wife’s death, James asked his brother-in-law to create a painting as a soothing reminder that he was not alone, that they were all waiting for him … in heaven.

Today an estimated 4.11 million graves lie in in the U.S. – with 20,250 registered cemeteries in the country, probably 150,000 cemeteries when you count every church, family and private plot.  

Rebecca and I had managed to find one cemetery’s untold story.  I still go looking for them everywhere. 

Above-ground stone crypts poised over the swamplands of New Orleans. The quirky, crowded cemetery in Key West – the vast somber National Arlington Cemetery in Virginia – Sleepy Hollow in upstate New York where Washington Irving is buried, and probably his Headless Horseman.  The peculiar, stacked bones in the Catacombs of Paris. The haunting funeral pyres outside the mystical city of Varanasi, India, where Hindus believe the Ganges River will free them from the cycle of rebirth. 

Back in Lincoln, blocks from my house, the wondrous Wyuka offers grave sites for everyone from the illustrious Gov. Charles Bryan to the infamous Charles Starkweather – and, inescapably, the tombstone with a photo of a melancholy little girl whose eyes follow you everywhere.

Each of these sacred spaces are meditations for me, places to catch your breath, reflect – not just about the mortality of those who are buried here, but about the richness of your own mortality, your very own story. 

These days, when I walk the Otoe cemetery with my granddaughters, I try to pass on my mother’s lessons. 

Hush, I tell them, and listen. Here’s the oldest monument in the cemetery, dating back to 1872 – and here are the folks who perished in the notorious tornado of 1913. Your uncle Doug lies in this space, right next to your great grandparents.  And over here is dear Aunt Emma, who, just before she died at 102, made a pact with my mom to go dancing together under the moonlight – far above the fields of the cemetery.    

Inevitably, of course, my girls want to know where GranMary will land.  And I tell them about the strangest Christmas present I ever received from my parents, two plots in the Otoe cemetery. 

“Why two?” I had asked my mom, confused. To which she replied, matter-of-factly: “Yes, we know you are divorced, but we will never give up hope for you.”

Surprisingly, still chuckling to this day, I’ve come to love that goofy, precious gift. Unless green burials arrive in Nebraska anytime soon, my kids know I want to be cremated.  But my daughter has asked if it would be ok to sprinkle at least some of my ashes here in Otoe. And how about a headstone?  And, mom, she continues:  "Look around the cemetery, which shades of marble stone do you like?"

I’ll let those questions wait for another day. Right now, as the sky darkens and dusk settles, I gaze out over the contours of the land and the changing seasons. 

I realize someone continues to tenderly tend the grounds here. I’m not sure who, but I send them a quiet prayer of thanks. I bid my parents and brother a peaceful winter slumber.  I remind my mom and Aunt Emma to dance under those starlit skies.

And I head for home.